Vincent Mosco (1996 ; 2009 ) describes three entry points into the study of political economy: commodification, spatialisation and structuration. During the last decades, these three processes have worked to make exploitation under platform capitalism ubiquitous. In response, scholar-activists have heeded Mosco’s calls to centre class power. Through a range of qualitative approaches, researchers are developing relationships with platform workers based not in extraction but in solidarity. This article extends Mosco’s legacy, arguing that the political economy of communication provides a useable analysis of our social totality in a moment of deep crisis.
This essay discusses the work of Vincent Mosco, presenting a brief historiographic analysis of his ideas, and describing how he in turn influenced my writing (and many others) and the course of my academic career. Within the text and references, I cite core ideas and key works of Herbert Schiller, Dallas Smythe and Mosco, all of whom were leaders in the field of critical communication research, Mosco belonging to the second generation of neo-Marxist scholars in the field. I also cite my own publications that flowed from the influence of these foundational thinkers and discuss the small contributions I’ve had the honour of contributing to Professor Mosco’s own publishing oeuvre in parallel pursuit of critical analysis of communications as a system of power.
In this article, I argue that within his seminal Political Economy of Communication (2009) Vincent Mosco articulated a unique vision of praxis for the field of critical political economy of communication (CPEC). Calling it ‘everyday praxis’, I argue CPEC provides an umbrella under which everyday life and critical feminism can be brought together to offer a grounded approach to what Mosco calls the ‘unity of research and action’. From here, Mosco’s everyday praxis gives CPEC scholars the language and the normative foundations to offer interventions, suggestions and alternatives to the status quo that can lead towards a more socially just and equitable future. I argue that Mosco’s definition of praxis is particularly germane to studies of communication policy and use the example of ‘lived policy’ to illustrate how praxis can operate through an ethic of policy intervention that privileges everyday life and community voices.
This article explores how museum workers are responding to intensifying commodification, precarity and managerial control within their institutions. Drawing on interviews with museum workers across Canada and the United States, I examine the surge of unionisation, digital activism and mutual aid as strategies for building worker solidarity and collective power. Situating these developments within a political economy of communication approach, I consider the heightened vulnerability of museum labour amid post-pandemic restructuring and escalating political interference in cultural institutions.
This article proposes that the history of the Political Economy of Communication can be divided into five distinct periods. A summary of the defining features and leading thinkers of these phases is provided, together with the main contextual factors that shaped each period. Given that political economy has historically had a political stance and been a central critical approach in communication studies, its development has been clearly influenced by these changing historical conditions. The proposed chronology provides a synthesis, as opposed to an exhaustive literature review, and complements Vincent Mosco’s historical account, situating him as a key author adopting and defining the approach.
This special issue presents articles exploring the remarkable intellectual legacy of Vincent Mosco: his theoretical innovations in political economy, including his foundational role in the development of the political economy of communication; his contributions to teaching, research, mentorship and praxis; his material analysis of media labour; his identification of risks associated with digitalisation; his prescience about the implications of AI; and his focus on the need to imagine concrete utopias as ways to make a better world.
Tooze (2022) and others have argued that humanity confronts a global ‘polycrisis’ – the compounding entanglement of political, economic, ecological and technological crises across global systems. Yet leading polycrisis scholarship has largely ignored media and communication systems’ role in those crises and entanglements. This essay revisits Vincent Mosco’s metatheory, as articulated in The Political Economy of Communication (1996), arguing that it provides valuable ontological and epistemological guidance for addressing the media blindspot in polycrisis studies. Mosco’s open, processual ontology and realist, inclusive and critical epistemology can help us study and explain the mutual constitution of media and global polycrises while guiding emancipatory interventions.
In the final chapter of his last book, Vincent Mosco explored the concept of ‘utopia’, seeing it as a vital necessity for imagining alternative democratic futures. This article situates Mosco’s work within a larger body of leftist thinking, suggesting that articulating radical imaginaries beyond capitalism will remain a key aspect of his legacy as well as a necessary project for critical political economists going forward. This broader context is especially important given that the political economic tradition of communication research that Mosco did so much to establish is undergoing a generational shift, which calls for deep reflection about the field’s future trajectory.
While edtech proponents and policymakers promise that artificial intelligence (AI) will reduce teacher workloads and personalise learning, these technologies often lead to increased administrative burdens, deskilling and deepened student inequalities. How do AI myths then persist despite these failures? In this article, I examine the transformative influence of artificial AI in secondary education through the lens of Vincent Mosco’s concept of ‘myth’. I argue that AI narratives persist because AI technologies practically appeal to teachers and students by addressing their real-world anxieties and structural governments’ disinvestment. Emphasising that myths are not lies but political stories, I push for reclaiming and politicising AI myths to move beyond market-driven efficiency toward democratic and community-led educational commons.
Political economist and communications scholar Vincent (Vinny) Mosco provided mentorship to several generations of students and aspiring academics. He believed in the power of personal narratives to render complex ideas accessible so that we might better understand social processes and structures that constitute our lived realities. For some of us, his teachings would inspire dual paths of scholarship and political activism aimed at creating the conditions for progressive social and economic change. In this paper in honour of Vinny, I discuss how my former supervisor’s guidance helped me mobilise political economy to both understand and challenge institutional power.
Drawing on Vincent Mosco’s bravura blend of cultural studies and political economy, I question artificial intelligence in the context of its financial and environmental impact, which derives from injudiciously vast expenditure on data centres’ unprecedented demands for energy and water.
Inspired by Vincent Mosco’s work, this article argues that ‘agentic’ AI responds to a crisis of control in data-driven processes of commodification and spatialisation. The incorporation of interactive digital technologies into a growing range of economic processes results in cascading logics of automation that lead from automated data collection to automated sense-making to automated content creation and decision-making. These forms of automation reconfigure economic structures, resulting in ‘social recession’: the offloading of social relations onto automated processes that make it harder to recognise irreducible forms of societal interdependence while foregrounding a hyper-trophied individualism. If Mosco’s concept of ‘structuration’ provides an opening for collective participation in re-shaping power relations, social recession threatens forms of mutual recognition upon which this participation relies. The struggle of our time will be for control over the systems that promise to ‘make sense’ and then act upon the data deluge.
In his landmark book The Digital Sublime (2004), Vincent (Vinny) Mosco crafted one the earliest and most devastating demolitions of the false promises of universal betterment promoted by the major corporations that had annexed the internet in the interests of profit. His later work, To the Cloud , (2014) built on this critique with a pioneering analysis of the concentrated material and economic power coalescing around the data centres directing digital applications, underlining their escalating social costs and environmental damage. This article revisits Vinny’s writings demonstrating their continuing and essential relevance to the emerging landscape of artificial intelligence.
As a contribution to this special issue on Vincent Mosco’s contributions to current and future directions in communication studies, this article discusses how critical political economy analyses digital platforms and AI, which have become the primary actors in the cultural industries. It primarily draws on three major epistemological perspectives (humanitarianism, social totality and history) advanced and actualised by Mosco for understanding digital platforms and AI. It aims not only to offer critical reflections on how media scholars can further develop Mosco’s approaches in critical political economy but also to explore how political economists develop his perspectives in rapidly changing media environments.
Cloud trails describe a suite of pedagogical tactics derived from Vincent Mosco’s approach to the political economy of communication and more specifically his book To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World (2014). The three cloud trails introduced in this piece are: exploring Superbowl commercials; imagining possibilities for public infrastructures; and contesting the digital positivism implicit in big data predictions and notions of our smart technological futures, which now frequently include artificial intelligence (AI). This reflexive article posits that cloud trails can be used to engage Gen Z learners to critically question power relations in their digitally mediated lives.
This article examines pro-Gaza campus activism and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement as contemporary struggles over communication rights and democratic participation. Focusing on student encampments across Canadian universities in 2024, it argues that such actions function not only as political protests but as intentional communicative practices that reclaim space, visibility and collective voice. Drawing on Vincent Mosco’s political economy of communication, the article analyses how corporatisation, securitisation and institutional governance constrain student expression while privileging market and security logics. From a Mosco-inspired perspective, the encampments reveal communication as a substantive democratic right – one enacted through deliberation, dissent and collective action against concentrated institutional power.
This focused reflection responds to calls to renew Vincent Mosco’s political economy by extending his insights through the broader Labour Process Theory (LPT) tradition. While LPT in communication studies is often reduced to Braverman’s deskilling thesis, this essay argues that Friedman, Edwards, Burawoy and Davies provide additional essential concepts for analysing digital labour in the era of the cloud and generative AI. Read through Mosco’s concepts of spatialisation and the digital sublime, these contributions clarify how algorithmic workplaces and platform labour are organised through segmented regimes of control, the institutional production (and breakdown) of consent and gendered and racialised hierarchies that render key forms of maintenance and data work invisible. This article therefore offers an integrated lens for understanding how contemporary infrastructures reconfigure the boundaries of the ‘factory’ at planetary scale.
In this article, we reflect on the legacy of Vincent Mosco and the critical political economy of communications (CPEC) to argue that class remains strikingly under-acknowledged as a structuring force within academia, specifically in the field of communications. As first-generation female scholars navigating the predominantly white, male-dominated subfields of political economy, journalism, and media policy, we draw on Mosco’s self-reflective scholarship to examine the class contradictions of contemporary academic life. We advance three interconnected claims: that class and material conditions – alongside intersecting axes of marginalisation – continue to shape access to and dynamics within the academy; that mentorship grounded in class consciousness is central to sustaining critical intellectual communities; and that critical scholarship must engage with the contradictions of societies that profess equality while deepening class division. In a political moment marked by austerity, precarity and rising authoritarianism, we contend that expanding class diversity within CPEC is not merely representational but strategic – strengthening the field’s capacity to resist threats to democratic life.
This article picks up on Vincent Mosco’s concerns about the mythologies and distributional consequences of new media. It uses the phenomenon of a k-shaped economy – wherein the wealthiest strata trend upward while most people tumble downward – as a touchstone for thinking through the implications of an emergent ‘shoppable sublime’. We introduce this term, taking inspiration from Mosco’s analysis of the digital sublime, to probe the experience of existing in and through systems of mediation that combine promotional communications and commercial transactivity on an enveloping scale and at a constant pace. We consider the hype around artificial intelligence as a potent example of ‘pushbutton fantasies’ ( Mosco, 1982 ) that help manage the contradictions of a k-shaped economy. AI tools promise to further organise social conduct toward optimising the circulation of commodities and the extraction of profits from particular consumer populations and consumption processes. Across cultural and political-economic domains, we observe a spectacle of technologically powered consumerism that conjures captivating unrealities, while more and more people struggle through a cost-of-living crisis.
This article offers a feminist reading of the concepts of commodification, spatialisation and structuration laid out in Mosco (2009) . Using Generative AI as an example and a world majority perspective as a framework, this essay suggests that the myth of AI being a technology that is void of human interference has accelerated the speed at which gendered labour from the Global South is extracted. It calls for an examination of sites of labour extraction outside the Global North and an embodiment approach that takes into account the socio-material context under which technology is developed.
