Unwaged labour plays an important role in digital capitalism. Kylie Jarrett argues that Facebook users are digital workers who are unwaged just like houseworkers (see chapter 10). Jack Qiu shows that slavery is not a past form of exploitation, but continues to exist in digital capitalism. For example, slavery can be found in African mines where slaves at gunpoint extract minerals that form the physical foundation of the hardware of computing and communication equipment (see chapter 10).
13.3 Political Aspects of Digital Capitalism
Social struggles in capitalism are organised around antagonisms between digital commodities and the digital commons in the economy, digital authoritarianism and digital democracy in politics, and digital hatred/division/ideology and digital friendship in culture (see table 1.4 in chapter 1 and section 5.4.2 in chapter 5 on Henri Lefebvre).
Digital socialism begins and develops through class struggles of digital workers. If the labour movement and trade unions do not succeed in engaging and organising on issues such as digital labour, domestic labour, unpaid labour, freelance labour, crowdsourcing, platform labour, consumer labour, the labour of Internet users, privacy, digital surveillance, consumer protection, slave labour, etc., and if they do not see these issues as key to labour struggles, these movements commit suicide. In digital capitalism, strikes need to add new digital dimensions of struggles in order to be effective. Unions and labour movements should be present on social media and should mobilise and organise via social media and communicate their goals using hashtags, video platforms, social networking sites, messenger apps, blogs, memes, digital images, digital animations, etc. Digital corporations such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon accumulate capital online, which is why digital strikes against such companies should make use of user-boycotts.
13.4 Ideological Aspects of Digital Capitalism
Theodor W. Adorno’s F-scale and concept of authoritarianism help us to understand and analyse digital authoritarianism, the communication of authoritarianism on the Internet (see chapter 4). An example is the way of how Donald Trump used the social media platforms Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram (see chapter 4 on the use of Adorno use for analysing Trump and ideology online; section 3.2 in chapter 3 on Lukács) until his accounts were banned in January 2021 after his followers had stormed the US
Chapter Thirteen | Conclusion
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Ideological Aspects of Digital Capitalism