{"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":90,"pdf_page":104,"physical_index":104,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"ecb7df4fd42d34fb83f04093ac81acce067079cedeb2d15a7f6051e3a3cf66c6"},"chapter":"DIGITAL CAPITALISM","content":"The new spirit of capitalism promises to knowledge workers less alienated labour, by which they can live the life of an artist, celebrity, or journalist. A range of studies has shown that knowledge workers in media industries see their labour as highly creative, self-determined and self-fulfilling, but that it is at the same time often highly precarious<sup>5</sup> Gill (2011) summarises the results of such studies by identifying ten features of cultural and media labour: such labour is often characterised by (1) love of the work, (2) the entrepreneurial aspiration to innovate and pioneer, (3) is often short-term, precarious and insecure, (4) is characterised by low pay and (5) long hours, (6) requires that workers constantly develop their knowledge and skills, (7) is based on DIY learning and (8) informality, (9) features inequalities relating to gender, age, class, race, ethnicity and disability, and (10) deprives workers of the time and resources necessary to plan their future.\n\nCultural and media labour appears to be less reified and alienated than manual labour, but is often organised as precarious freelancing that does not provide adequate social, job, and income security. The ideology of conducting labour that is creative and innovative can reify the consciousness of cultural workers so that they do not see themselves as workers, but entrepreneurs, are hostile to unionisation, see precarity as their individual fault and not a class relation imposed by capitalism, etc. The new spirit of capitalism is a new ideology that reifies labour by creating the appearance of dealienation and at the same time imposes highly individualised working conditions that undermine social and income security. It is a new form of alienation that appears to be unalienated. Whether workers’ reaction to this new ideology is reified or non-reified consciousness, depends among several factors on the question whether they can be collectively politically organised and develop critical consciousness that lets them see through the capitalist reality behind the false appearances.\n\nEspecially young precarious workers in the cultural sector have tried to fight back against neoliberalism by reinvigorating the cooperative movement. Cultural cooperatives are self-managed companies that are collectively owned and governed by their workers (see http://cultural.coop/) (Sandoval 2016). In the realm of the Internet, there have been experiments with platform co-operatives (Scholz and Schneider 2016).\n\n90\n\nTheorists\n\n5 For an overview see the contributions in Maxwell (2016).","previous_page":89,"next_page":91}