We do not have to go far to figure out why people are so willing to use such sites: they provide a ready, convenient, and entertaining way of enriching, extending, and preserving our connections with others. What requires a bit more explanation is how we might discern, in a voluntary and rewarding activity, the traces of exploitation. The result of the form of separation facilitated by Facebook is not the dispossession of users, but rather the alienability of the product of their online social activity: the fact that the fruits of this activity can become a resource whose uses range far beyond their control. Or, given that the extraction of the value of information gatheredabout users relies on the same logic of resource enclosure and the consequent asymmetry of power relations that structure the "freely"agreed-upon surrender of control over personal information, the more salient question is why should we care?
The notion of exploitation is meant to invoke questions ofsocial justice. From a Marxian-inflected critical perspective, the charge of exploitation is both a term of critique and a call to action: exploitation is, as Holmstrom puts it, “evil" because it “involves force and domination in manifold ways and because it deprives workers of control that should be theirs."19 The force is not often directly manifested in the compulsion to surrender control over one's labor power, but is built into asómmetrical social relations and manifests itself overtly when these are challenged. Likewise, the privatization and commercialization of much of the digital media infrastructure does not take place by force, but merely reproduces existing property relations by extending them into the digital realm. The background of compulsion is built into the legal structure and regulatory regimes that enable the privatization process. We might note the indirect effects of compulsion by positing that, given the choice, users are more likely to prefer not having to submit to comprehensive forms of monitoring in order to access online and networked resources, as suggested by recent surveys that indicate opposition to monitoring-based profiling and high levels of concern about online information collection.2º They do not freely choose to exchange their personal information for convenience but do so under conditions structured by the private ownership of network resources and the attendant low level of awareness about actual tracking practices. If what concerns us about workplace exploitation is both the forms of compulsion that underwrite it and the toll it takes on workers in terms of physicalimmiseration (exhaustion and worse) and loss of control over their creative activity (what Holmstrom calls alienation), do these concerns carry over into critiques of the exploitation of free labor? Here we might note a distinction free labor does not carry with it the same physical toll as some forms of workplace exploitation, not least because users can stop when they wish without threat of losing their job (at least in some contexts). However, they do lose control of aspects of their productive activity in ways that are, in the terms suggested by the critique of alienation, turned back upon them. The goal of comprehensive surveillance is t discover those levers that allow marketers to channel consumer behavior accordin to commercial imperatives—to relegate the consumer to the role of feedback mecha nism in an accelerating cycle of production and consumption. As the founder c cybernetics put it in an embittered paean to the power of feedback-based marketin
Estranged Free Labor
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