Michel Bauwens argues that in conditions of social strife, capitalist corporations can be transformed into worker-owned, self-managed entities that create their own commons of shared knowledge, code,and design. The task ofmovements of cognitive forms of labor, he writes, is to try to create a new hegemony and a new commonsbased alliance for social change, which challenges the domination of capital.
Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle explain the current transformation of networks into autonomous political and cultural “networks of networks."Zehle and Rossiter emphasize that in order to affect politics of the universal on its computational terrain, we have to take the condition of variational territories and topologies of code seriously. Such an action intervenes on the algorithmic level, they write.
How do we carve out autonomous spacesfor creative resistance when frictionless sharing of network interaction underminesour privacy and when digital infrastructures of control invisibly capture value from all areas of our lives? Which practices and instruments provide us with true social power—the power to act collectively and form publics of common concern?
Are we willing to sit at the table and negotiate future scenarios with intermediaries, or is the end of capitalism a precondition to kick-start our actions? Christian Fuchs calls for a different world today. He demands that the communicative commons of society should not be privately owned or controlled. The commons should be available to all, without payment or other access requirements. A more pragmatic, near-future approach would be the establishment of legal jurisdiction that imposes restrictions on outsourcing services online, providing workers with some basic rights.
Digg.com's Digital Boston Tea Party or the so-called Facebook riots about the newsfeed, Beacon and the various other privacy hiccups are referenced frequently. The social web does empower consumers in their negotiation of the rules of their own consumptive activities by these “spectacles of democracy,"as I call them, but do not give license to citizens in their struggle for meaningful social change. Instead of riots, what we witness are just-in-time user feedback loops.
Apart from such rebellions, further considerations include the building of actual alternatives—technical and social infrastructures—and the possibility of refusal of or withdrawal from the Internet
There are a few nonproprietary social networking services, but at this point, they do not reach considerable membership. I hope that one day a mass exodus from Facebook will happen. The social networking service Diaspora is designed for that purpose.4 Other initiatives include the independent citizen media project Crabgrass, which is especially designed to meet the needs of bottom-up grassroots organizing.⁵ We can think of sites like Craigslist, which, despite recent controversies, is a good example of an online business that is not focused on profit maximization but rather on user satisfaction.
But the Internet is so intensely subjugated to corporate interests that even if you jump ship, if you abandon the Facebook Titanic today, chances are that you arejumping on to the next life raft that is likely just as profit oriented. Wikipedia,
Why Does Digital Labor Matter Now?
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