{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","uuid":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","normalized_title":"crowdsandparty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","isbns":["9781781686942","9781781686720","9781781687666"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":183,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Crowds%20and%20Party","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/search"},"page":{"printed_page":16,"pdf_page":15,"physical_index":15,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"ee7b25ffb193fd4668c24fb0063b64ce9658d962d15883c09d9190587b7c5e80"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"As Jaron Lanier notes, “We’ve decided not to pay most people for performing the new roles that are valuable in relation to the latest technologies. Ordinary people ‘share,’ while elite network presences generate unprecedented fortunes.”<sup>28</sup> This is the real face of the knowledge class, that is to say, the proletarianized people producing the information, services, relations, and networks at the core of communicative capitalism (what others sometimes refer to as the “knowledge economy” or “information society”). They make more and get less, intensifying inequality with every communicative contribution and its trace. A 2014 World Economic Forum report puts it bluntly: “the greater the role that data play in the global economy, the less the majority of individuals will be worth.”<sup>29</sup>\n\nEnda Brophy and Greig de Peuter demonstrate why, under communicative capitalism, paid, precarious, and unpaid labor should not be treated separately: these forms of labor constitute a “circuit of exploitation.”<sup>30</sup> Brophy and de Peuter use the smart-phone to draw out this labor circuit, making it legible in terms of work common to a “cybertariat.” The “circuit of exploitation” around the smartphone links extraction, assembly, and design to mobile work, support work, and e-waste. We can fill out ideas of mobile and support work by adding in content provision and use, the data and metadata contributed to communication streams and then stored, mined, auctioned, and sold. The concept of “circuits of exploitation” lets us recognize communication networks as networks of exploitation linking communicative labor across the social field. Under communicative capitalism most of us can’t avoid producing for capitalism. Our basic communicative activities are enclosed in circuits as raw materials for capital accumulation.\n\nDemographic data supports my claim that the last decade of revolts are the class struggle of those proletarianized under communicative capitalism. In an analysis of Occupy Wall Street, Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce, and Penny Lewis find that highly educated young people were overrepresented among OWS activists and supporters and that many were underemployed, indebted, or had recently lost their jobs.<sup>31</sup> A report based on data collected by Turkish security forces shows that over half the Gezi park protesters were in university or university graduates even as their incomes were in the bottom economic half.<sup>32</sup> Andre Singer, looking at the massive Brazilian protests of June 2013, likewise emphasizes the predominance of young, highly educated, and un- or underemployed adults.<sup>33</sup> More specifically, Singer notes that in protests in the eight state capitals, 43 percent of protesters had college degrees. In protests in São Paulo, nearly 80 percent had college degrees. These educational levels would suggest a middle-class revolt. But data on income and occupation point in the direction of the lower and lowermiddle class, the bottom half of society where people are more likely to work as shop assistants, drivers, waiters, receptionists, and primary school teachers than as technicians or administrators. To make sense of the disparity between high education and low incomes, Singer posits a new proletariat or precariat taking to the streets, the exploited service and knowledge workers of communicative capitalism.\n\n16","previous_page":15,"next_page":17}