AI, Digital Capitalism, and Infrastructural Power

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (90 minute)

Description

This panel brings together papers selected through the conference open call. It examines how transformations in digital capitalism are reshaping global inequality, state strategy, and labor relations. Bringing together research on artificial intelligence infrastructures, geopolitical risk, financial reform, platform retail, and technological industrial policy, the papers analyze how emerging technological infrastructures reorganize accumulation and power across the globe from a world-systems and political economy perspective. The panel highlights the material foundations of the digital age—AI, cloud computing, semiconductors, and platform logistics—and shows how these systems generate new forms of dependency, data extraction, and infrastructural control that intensify core–periphery dynamics. It also explores how states and firms navigate these shifting conditions, emphasizing the role of political risk, financial restructuring, and state-led development strategies in shaping labor relations, technological upgrading, and investment patterns. The panel highlights how digital infrastructures, financial reforms, and platform-based systems of circulation are becoming central mechanisms through which contemporary capitalism organizes competition, manages crisis, and reproduces global inequality.

Sub Unit

• Political Economy of the World-System Section / Political Economy of the World-System Section Open Call Paper Session

Presider

• Cam Marsinelli, University of Massachusetts-Boston

Individual Presentations

• Accumulation by Infrastructural Locking: Financialization, Infrastructural Power and the Mediation of Crisis in the AI Conjuncture - Hyeonseo Lee, SUNY-Binghamton

• Artificial Intelligence and the Reconfiguration of Global Inequality: A World-Systems Approach to the Digital South - Sung Hee Ru, Hankyong National University, South Korea

• Coordinating Realization: Labor, Consent, and the Internal Supply Chain in Platform Retail - Eileen M. Otis, Northeastern University

• Derisking Without Delegation: The Redistribution of Transitional Risk in China - Xiaoting Lu, University of Virginia

• Political risk on foreign direct investment and firm innovation: A tale of two stories in Taiwan - Hsi-Mei Chung, Department of Business Administration, I-Shou University, Taiwan; Thung-Hong Lin, Academia Sinica; Chun-Yin Lee, National Chengchi University

Session Organizer

• Cinzia D. Solari, University of Massachusetts Boston