To the humanism implicit in this description, the autonomists have opposed the notion of a mass intellectuality, living labor in its function as the determining articulation of the general intellect. Mass intellectuality—as an ensemble, as a social body—“is the repository of the indivisible knowledges of living subjects and of their linguistic cooperation. ... An important part of knowledge cannot be deposited in machines, but.. . it must come into being as the direct interaction of the labor force."38 As Virno emphasizes, mass intellectuality is not about the various roles of the knowledge workers, but is a “quality and a distinctive sign of the whole social labor force in the post-Fordist era."39
The pervasiveness of the collective intelligence within both the managerial literature and Marxist theory could be seen as the result of a common intuition about the quality of labor in informated societies. Knowledge labor is inherently collective; it is always the result of a collective and social production of knowledge.40 Capital's problem is how to extract as much value as possible (in the autonomists jargon, to “valorize") out of this abundant, and yet slightly intractable, terrain,
Collective knowledge work, then, is not about those who work in the knowledge industry. But it is also not about employment. The mass layoffs in the dotcom sector have not stopped Internet content from growing or its technologies from mutating. The acknowledgment of the collective aspect of labor implies a rejection of the equivalence between labor and employment, which was already stated byMarx and further emphasized by feminism and the post-Gramscian autonomy.4 Labor is not equivalent to waged labor. Such an understanding might help us to reject some of the hideous rhetoric of unemployment that turns the unemployed person into the object of much patronizing, pushing, and nudging from national governments in industrialized countries. (Accept any available work or else...) Often the unemployed are such only in name, in reality being the lifeblood of the difficult economy of under-the-table, badly paid work, some of which also goes into the new media industry.⁴2 To emphasize how labor is not equivalent to employment also means to acknowledge how important free affective and cultural labor is to the medía industry, old and new.
Ephemeral Commodities and Free Labor
There is à continuity, and a break, between older media and new media in terms of their relationship to cultural and affective labor. The continuity seems to lie in their common reliance on their public/users as productive subjects. The difference lies both in the mode of production and in the ways in which power/ knowledge works in the two types. Despite different national histories (some of which stress public service more than others), the television industry, for example, is relatively conservative: writers, producers, performers, managers, and technicians have definite roles within an industry still run by a few established players. The historical legacy of television as a technology for the construction of national identities also means that television is somehow always held more publicly accountable thanthe news media
Free Labor
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