{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","title":"Digital Capitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"2021022153","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","id":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","uuid":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","title":"Digital Capitalism","normalized_title":"digitalcapitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"2021022153","isbns":["2021022153","9781032119182","9781032119205","9781003222149","2405518376"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":343,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Digital%20Capitalism","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/search"},"page":{"printed_page":168,"pdf_page":182,"physical_index":182,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"3f09668de207c4f35b485fe5d43a97da67c982bdfa3530e011fbfb2e38edc285"},"chapter":"DIGITAL CAPITALISM","content":"The production workers of Facebook’s clients produce use-value and value. Their public relations and advertising employees (or the workers in the companies to which this labour is outsourced) produce value and a use-value promise as symbolic value. Facebook users produce the value and the communication of this use-value to themselves. They are productive workers. That they create value means that their labour time objectifies itself in commodities: the ad clients’ employees objectify their labour in the commodity that is marketed to Facebook users, whereas Facebook users objectify their labour in the prosumer commodity that is sold to Facebook’s clients. User labour is thereby also objectified in the commodity that is marketed and potentially sold to users themselves.\n\n6.4 Conclusion\n\nI have in this chapter revisited Smythe’s notion of the audience commodity and audience labour in light of the corporate social media industry that uses targeted advertising. A prevalent criticism is that Facebook users are not paid and therefore do not create value but only consume the value created by paid employees in companies that advertise on Facebook. I have argued against this idea that Marx has a broader notion of productive labour that is based on the notion of the Gesamtarbeiter (collective worker). On Facebook, the boundaries between production and consumption blur and consumption becomes the production of use-values both for the users (information and sociality) and advertisers (user data). Facebook users are ideological transport workers that transport advertising ideologies by their network usage to themselves.\n\nConceptualising somebody as unproductive is not just an analytical term, it is also a slur and quite emotive. Nobody wants to be called unproductive as it carries the connotation of being useless and parasitic. Saying that Facebook users do not create value and that Facebook is a rentier that consumes the value produced by wageworkers employed by other companies politically implies that users are unimportant in class struggles in the digital age. Wageworkers in the non-digital economy are seen as the true locus of power. Hence, recommended political measures to be taken focus on how to organise these workers in unions, parties, or other organisations and struggles for higher wages and better wage-labour conditions. Users and Facebook are seen as being outside the locus of class struggle or only as something that unions and parties can also use in wage-labour struggles.\n\n168\n\nTheorists","previous_page":167,"next_page":169}