The implication of the notion of digital labour is that Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other online corporations that use the targeted-advertising capital accumulation model exploit users, usage of these platforms is labour-time, digital workers are part of the contemporary proletariat, value-production is not limited to factories and offices, and activities that might feel pleasurable and personal can nonetheless be forms of economic exploitation.
The Marxist notion of digital labour results in a theoretical discussion (see, e.g. Fisher and Fuchs 2015; Proffitt, Ekbia and McDowell 2015). The main criticisms can be summarised in the following ideal-type arguments:
- “Marx is a 19th-century theorist. A 19th-century theory is not fit for explaining 21st-century phenomena. Marx’s theory is outdated”;
- “Only wage workers are productive workers who are exploited by capital. Facebook users do not work and are not exploited because they do not earn a wage”;
- “Facebook users are not producers, but media consumers. Consumption does not create any value”;
- “Social media is part of the advertising economy that is situated in capitalism’s sphere of circulation, in which commodities are not produced, but sold. Circulation labour is not productive, but rather unproductive. Facebook therefore is a rent-seeking corporation that consumes the profits and value created by wage workers in other parts of the economy”;
- “The focus on the exploitation of users as unpaid trivialises much worse forms of exploitation, such as Taylorist labour and slave work”.
Such arguments tend to imply that there is no problem with Facebook and Google. Their logic is: “They do not exploit us and therefore nothing needs to be done against them”. Counter-arguments can be summarised as follows (for a detailed discussion see Fuchs 2015, chapter 5; see also Fuchs 2018):
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