Making sense of the digital growth machine

I respond here to the ‘digital growth machine’ and its five sites of extraction, or hinterland types, as proposed by Jovanna Rosen and Luis Alvarez Leon. The five dimensions they outline cover both the domains of production and consumption. This is refreshing as contemporary scholarship too often focuses on one or the other, rarely combining the two. The five sites capture a wide array of practices defining digital capitalism. Here I raise questions about the metaphor of the ‘hinterland’ asking if it inadvertently grants a fixity to a highly unsteady and volatile field. I also ask how we might introduce organisational analysis to these discussions. I end by placing special emphasis on the task of uncovering the inner workings of the growth machine.