The factory extends its boundaries into society and becomes what Mario Tronti (1966) has termed a social factory:
The more capitalist development proceeds, i.e. the more the production of relative surplus value asserts and extends itself, the more the cycle production – distribution – exchange – consumption closes itself inevitably, the societal relation between capitalist production and bourgeois society, between factory and society, between society and the state become more and more organic. At the highest level of capitalist development the societal relation becomes a moment of the relations of production, and the whole of society becomes cause and expression of production, i.e. the whole society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination to the whole of society. […] When the factory raises itself to the master of the whole of society – the entire societal production becomes industrial production – then the specific characteristics of the factory get lost inside of the general characteristics of society (Tronti 1966, 30–31, translation from German).
At the same time as work time and spare time get blurred in the social factory, work-related stress intensifies and property relations remain unchanged.
Facebook’s exploitation of Internet users is an aspect of this transformation. It signifies that private Internet usage, which is motivated by play, entertainment, fun, and joy – aspects of Eros – has become subsumed under capital and has become a sphere of the exploitation of labour. It produces surplus-value for capital and is exploited by the latter so that Internet corporations accumulate profit. Play and labour are today to a specific degree indistinguishable. Eros has become largely subsumed under the repressive reality principle. Play is largely commodified, free time and spaces not exploited by capital become diminished. Play is today productive, surplus-value generating labour that is exploited by capital. All human activities, and therefore also all play, tend under the contemporary conditions to become subsumed under and exploited by capital. Play as an expression of Eros is thereby destroyed, human freedom and human capacities are crippled. On Facebook, play and labour converge into play labour that is exploited for capital accumulation. Facebook therefore stands for the total commodification and exploitation of time – all human time tends to become surplus-value generating time that is exploited by capital.
Table 4.1 summarises the application of Marcuse’s theory of play, labour and pleasure to Facebook and social media.
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Critical Theory of Communication