Many sites are not commercially controlled, but they still rely on the commercial infrastructure of the Internet—one that is likely to become even more tightly administered as the technology for inspecting data that passes through private servers and routers continues to develop. Even in the world of bits and bytes, matter still matters—as does ownership and control of material resources. It's a bitof instrumental fiction to assert along with futurists such as Esther Dyson and Alvin Toffler that,
The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth—in the form of physical resources—has been losing value and significance. The powers of mind areeverywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.18
This is the digital ideology that masks the material infrastructure that supports the production and distribution of the fruits of the “powers of mind."
A critique of the exploitation of free labor, then, would highlight the very real ways in which control ofnew productive resources is concentrated in the hands of the few, allowing them to appropriate and profit from the activity of the many who must surrender their personalinformation to secure access to the productive and informational resources of the digital era
I suspect the sticking point for Hesmondhalgh would be the first element of Wright's formula: in particular, the “material deprivation" of the many. It is certainly possible to argue that lumping together the capture of personal data with other more physically severe forms of exploitation like sweatshop labor risks sensationalizing the former and trivializing the latter. It is also possible, however, to argue that, even though the effects in terms of immiseration are vastly different, there are structural, analytic similarities and, further, that this similarity cuts across and links capitalist class relations in ways that warrant concern and intervention in the name of socialjustice. The privatization and commercialization of the Internet is a form of material deprivation and enclosure insofar as it separates users from the infrastructure that supports their communicative activities. It reinforces and reproduces the structure of social relations wherein a small group controls the productive resources used by the many and allows economic advantages to accrue from this control. The ownership class that includes the founders of Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and soon could not exist without capturing andcontrolling components of the productive infrastructure. The value that they appropriate stems in large part from their ability to capture aspects of theactivity of those who access their resources, and their ability to do so is directly related to their ownership and control of these resources. Bluntly put, the ability to exploit this activity for commercial purposes for the economic benefit of the few would disappear if these resources were commonly owned and controlled.
Estranged Free Labor
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