A podcast discussing Özgür Narin's paper. 
Artificial intelligence (AI) methods are becoming increasingly widespread today. The achievements 
of AI over the past decade is closely linked to advances in data availability, processing power, and 
scientific research. In this sense, AI relies on digitalization and is built upon its development and 
infrastructural foundation. This article first distinguishes between the digital and digitalization, 
offering a periodization of the latter. Second, it examines the relationship between digitalization and 
the relations of production, exploring its contradictions and limitations. AI methods appear as the 
most advanced form of fixed capital today, carrying all the contradictions of capitalist production. 
Until the 1970s, monopolies that controlled communication, network, and information-processing 
systems served as tools of vertical centralization. However, since the 1990s, under the pressure to 
become more flexible in response to capitalist crises, capital has increasingly required flexible 
production and communication tools—advanced forms of fixed capital—that could organize 
vertically centralized yet operationally decentralized subsidiaries, subcontractors, and fragmented 
production cycles. AI and digitalization emerge precisely as such instruments of production. In this 
regard, they reflect the vertically centralized but downward-flexible structure and needs of 
contemporary corporations. Yet, these tools of production are also constrained and shaped by the 
contradictions of the relations of production. Finally, the article discusses key emerging tensions 
that will shape the coming decade, including the parameterization of society, data localization, and 
manipulation.

Digitalization Artificial Intelligence and Society Podcast

ozgur narin