{"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":60,"pdf_page":74,"physical_index":74,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"10befb3d76c82c03e26cb5f5e1b719ac031b0732f320e9ef8e2bd43d0125754a"},"chapter":"DIGITAL CAPITALISM","content":"A key insight from Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State for understanding digital labour is that labour extends beyond the factory and the office. The political economist of communication Dallas W. Smythe (1977) stresses that audience labour is labour that produces attention for advertisements. Consumers are audience workers who create the value of the advertisement (see Fuchs 2012). Targeted-advertising–based Internet platforms such as Google and Facebook make a profit based on the analysis of users’ online behaviour, which results in the collection of big data, which allows them to target ads (see Fuchs 2017a, 2021). Users of Google and Facebook are unpaid digital workers, who produce Google and Facebook’s value. They produce social relations, content, data, and meta-data that is appropriated by Google and Facebook and used for targeting and selling ads. Audience and user labour are like housework unpaid forms of productive, value-generating labour that operate beyond wage-labour. But housework and user labour are also quite different (for a discussion of commonalities and differences of wage-labour, slave-labour, housework, and user labour, see Fuchs 2018a). Housework produces and reproduces labour power. It is reproductive labour. Audience and user labour operate as part of the entertainment as reproductive labour in the household. But the audience and user labour also operate outside the home in a variety of social spaces via the use of mobile phones, laptops, tablets, etc. They facilitate the sale of commodities and the realisation of surplus value, that is the generation of profit by commodity sale. Housework makes labour-power saleable on the labour commodity. User and audience labour contribute to the reproduction of labour-power via advertising-financed entertainment. These two forms of labour help selling goods on commodity markets by creating the value of ads.\n\nEngels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State has laid the foundation for the critical comprehension of the extension of the notion of productive labour beyond wage-labour and of the extension of the factory and the office into the household and onto the Internet.\n\n2.3.7 Section Summary\n\nDigital capitalism is based on an international division of digital labour, where a variety of workers is exploited under a variety of working conditions in different countries and working spaces so that transnational digital corporations accumulate capital. Engels in CWCE outlines concepts and analyses that can inspire digital labour analysis in the 21st century. He shows how capital uses technology as a method of relative surplus-value production. In digital capitalism, digital technologies constitute a technological paradigm that advances new forms of automation and rationalisation of labour that have resulted in significant productivity increases so that more capital can be accumulated in less time. Engels also points out the inhumane consequences of absolute surplus-value production, that is, the lengthening of the working day. In digital capitalism, absolute surplus-value production takes on the form of highly exploitative Taylorist work organisation in Chinese hardware assemblage factories owned by companies such as Foxconn or Pegatron, where workers toil long hours to produce the profits of transnational digital corporations such as Apple, Dell, or HP.\n\n60\n\nTheorists","previous_page":59,"next_page":61}