Brett Christophers is professor in the Department of Social and Economic Geography at Uppsala University.
Giant asset managers like BlackRock and Vanguard are increasingly but imperceptibly becoming owners of more and more aspects of our lives, from housing to roads to energy infrastructure.
Companies like Google and Facebook make money not just by predicting our behavior, but by influencing our choices. It’s an intensification of the surveillance that has always been at the heart of capitalism, not a new economic system.
Three giant financial companies control trillions of dollars in corporate stock, giving them the power to act on behalf of the capitalist class as a whole. What happens when they start to use it?