{"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":54,"pdf_page":68,"physical_index":68,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"cfe5d3b2d94e1f8e5604643bd06c05d7510b5de0e7bf718562002bb70206ac0a"},"chapter":"DIGITAL CAPITALISM","content":"The manufacturing labour that Engels analysed in the 1840s was physically highly exhausting. Programming does not require engineers to burn lots of energy. Whereas manufacturing labour feels like toil, Google labour tends to feel like play.\n\nLike at the time of Engels engineers, carpenters, joiners, bricklayers, in digital capitalism software engineers hold qualifications and produce goods that are in high demand and allow achieving relatively high wages and income. The poor workers who Engels portrays in CWCE as toiling in industries such as cotton and wool manufacturing, dress-making, etc. were compelled to work long hours by poverty wages and the “silent compulsion of economic relations” (Marx 1867, 899) of the labour market that makes them starve if they don’t sell their labour-power. Poverty wages were used as a means of coercion, as a method of absolute surplus-value production. The contemporary digital labour aristocracy also faces the silent compulsion of having to sell their wages. But these wages are very high because they work in a highly productive industry that produces a key commodity – software – that plays an influential role in almost all parts of 21st-century society. Digitalisation transforms all aspects of society, which is why software is in high demand and allows achieving high profits and commodity prices. Those who possess the key skill of knowing how to code software can therefore in turn achieve high wages. Absolute surplus-value production takes on a new form in this industry: software engineers often sign all-inclusive contracts that fix a certain wage-sum per month without extra pay for overtime. In the USA, the Fair US Labor Standards Act (Section 13 [a] 17) enables software corporations such as Google not to pay overtime if there is an hourly wage of at least US\\$ 27.63. This law legally enacts absolute surplus-value production in the US software industry.\n\nIn addition, new management methods that try to blur the distinction between labourtime/spare-time and between workspace/private spaces are often used in software corporations in order to keep the workers in the company for long hours, which makes them work overtime and to experience the long hours they spend in their employers premises not as alienation, but as play and fun. The result is that they work longer hours that are unpaid. Absolute surplus-value production in key sectors of 21st-century digital capitalism such as the software industry takes on the form of play labour.\n\nThe first, second, and third editions of my book Social Media: A Critical Introduction contains a chapter about the critique of the political economy of Google (Fuchs 2014, chapter 6; Fuchs 2017b, chapter 6; Fuchs 2021, chapter 5). For this chapter, I analysed online forums, where Google workers report on their working conditions. I updated this analysis for each edition (2014, 2017, 2021). The working conditions at Google stayed constant during this time: Google employees enjoy the content of their job, the perks such as free food and working for a high-reputation brand, but complain about the lack of work-life balance. When asked about working conditions at Google, the typical Google software engineer says that “work/life balance is nearly non-existent” and one must be prepared to “work all day and night long” (Fuchs 2021, chapter 5).\n\n54\n\nTheorists","previous_page":53,"next_page":55}