{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title":"DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780415896948","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","uuid":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title":"DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY","normalized_title":"digitallabortheinternetasplaygroundandfactory","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780415896948","isbns":["9780415896948","9780415896955","9780203145791"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":267,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/DIGITAL%20LABOR%20THE%20INTERNET%20AS%20PLAYGROUND%20AND%20FACTORY","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/search"},"page":{"printed_page":59,"pdf_page":66,"physical_index":66,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"99645886557d39d08fcebf4d8546a784aaac36d4b72a91be2c63a1e5d41f04fe"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"Politics is a question of subjects and objects: the subjects of politics, who govern, and the objects, who are governed. When an objectof politics demands to be a subject, democracy arises in that demand and how it is met. The putatively universal subject of democracy is never universal, because government always means government of: ofpeople, tendencies, in fine of objects deemed incapable of governing themselves. The gap between citizen and human—between those who have rights and those who do not—produces demand: for recognition, participation, and the changes to the existing polity that implies.\n\nRancière's interest is political, but an analogous economic exclusion appears in the analysis of labor theorist Hernando de Soto (2000). De Soto agrees with Foucault that the accumulation of wealth is not the engine of capitalism. Instead, it is the infrastructure of property rights, contracts, deeds, titles, and, crucially for our discussions, intellectual property regimes, which, together, drive the system of capital. This infrastructure excludes forms of wealth—of labor and property— which cannot be monetized. The wealth of the poor specifically is excluded: the labor of women and children, domestic labor, subsistence farming, and indigenous andcommon ownership systems. The difference between monetizable and what de Soto calls “dead capital\" is that the capital that can be monetized is alienable; it is transferrable, mobile, liquid, andso also transformable. De Soto argues that were we to count in this dead labor, the world's poor would actually own the majority of the world's wealth.\n\nDe Soto proposes a market solution to effect this goal. For many reasons that cannot detain us here (but see Clastres 1987 and Barclay 2005), this is not only an unlikely but an undesirable result. One reason why such market solutionsare likely to succeed, however, is that the tendency of the rate of profit to fall constantly drivescapital into the marketization of new areas of life, each of which inevitably succumbs to the same tendency, with the results we witness today in the privatization of the public good and of the global ecology. A second reason that a market solution is unlikely is the question of whether capital in its post-Fordist, neoliberal, global phase is sustainably mobile, fluid, and transformative enough to accommodate the irruption of new modes of wealth and translate them into monetizable currents—into currency. Until the dot-com crash of 2001, the web was one of the longest-lived Temporary Autonomous Zones our generation ever knew. Capital failed to understand. Although early experimenters such as Amazon and eBay preceded and survived the crash, itwas not until the years after 2001 that business models basedin the web, rather than imported from magazine publishing and the broadcast industry, began to dominate the new medium. This would seem to demonstrate capital's ability to colonize any new public good.\n\nIn Marx's “Fragment onMachines\" in Grundrisse (1973: 690ff.), the “social\" or “general intellect\" is manifest in two processes. In one, manual skills developed over generations are ossified into machinery and turned to purposes of exploitation. In the second, capital systematizes workers' self-organization. But, as Virno arguesin A Grammar of the Multitude (2004), this innovative power to make new systems is no longer a side benefit of employing workers; it is written into our contracts. With the commercialized social web, capital has finally managed to turn subversion into profit. The battle for the Internet is not yet over, but in critical strategic and tactical fields such as codecs, HTML5 and Ipv6, capital is winning. Is this evidence of the universalization of neoliberal democracy, or are there grounds for a new politics?\n\nThe Political Economy of Cosmopolis\n\n59","previous_page":null,"next_page":60}