--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Digital Capitalism" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "2021022153" library_document_id: "50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed" source_sha256: "746bfc1e2253e11737253daad663d7176077b6b54343c2c35f6f132990452fbc" pdf_physical_page_count: 343 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 180 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed?start=180&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed.md?start=180&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed.md?start=170&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed.md?start=190&limit=10" --- # Digital Capitalism > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=180 | PRINTED_PAGE=166 But are Facebook users productive workers? They are certainly not less important for Facebook’s capital accumulation than its paid employees because without users Facebook would immediately stop making profits and producing commodities. Facebook’s commodity is not its platform that can be used without charges. It rather sells advertising space in combination with access to users. An algorithm selects users and allows individually targeting ads based on keywords and search criteria that Facebook’s clients identify. Facebook’s commodity is a portion/space of a user’s screen/profile that is filled with ad clients’ commodity ideologies. The commodity is presented to users and sold to ad clients either when the ad is presented (pay-perview) or when the ad is clicked (pay-per-click). The user gives attention to his/her profile, wall, and other users’ profiles and walls. For specific time periods parts of his/ her screen are filled with advertising ideologies that are with the help of algorithms targeted to his/her interests. The prosumer commodity is an ad space that is highly targeted to user activities and interests. The users’ constant online activity is necessary for running the targeting algorithms and for generating viewing possibilities and attention for ads. The ad space can therefore only exist based on user activities that are the labour that create the social media prosumer commodity. Facebook clients run ads based on specific targeting criteria, e.g. 25–35-year-old men in the USA who are interested in literature and reading. What exactly is the commodity in this example? It is the ad space that is created on a specific 25–35-year-old man’s screen interested in e.g. Shakespeare while he browses Facebook book pages or other pages. The ad is potentially presented to all Facebook users who fall into this category, which amounted to 27,172,420 on 3 June 2013. What is the value of the single ad presented to a user? It is the average labour=usage time needed for the production of the ad presentation. Let’s assume these 27,172,420 million users are on average 60 minutes per day on Facebook and in these 60 minutes 60 ads are presented to them on average. All the time they spend online is used for generating targeted ads. It is labour time that generates targeted ad presentations. We can therefore say that the value of a single ad presented to a user in this example is one minute of labour/usage/ prosumption time. 166 Theorists 4 Facebook Inc., SEC Filings, Form 10-K 2012, http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680113 000003/fb-12312012x10k.htm 5 Data source: http://www.alexa.com 6 According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm, the latest available world population count was 2 405 518 376 on June 3rd, 2013. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=181 | PRINTED_PAGE=167 So Facebook usage is labour. But is it productive labour? Marx sees transportation labour that moves a commodity in space-time from location A to location B, which takes a certain labour time x, as productive labour: What the transport industry sells is the actual change of place itself….The productive capital invested in this industry thus adds value to the products transported, partly through the value carried over from the means of transport, partly through the value added by the work of transport. (Marx 1885, 226–227) The value generated by transporting a commodity from A to B is therefore x hours. The symbolic ideology of a commodity first needs to be produced by special ad and public relations employees and is in a second step communicated to potential buyers. Advertising therefore involves production and transportation labour. Advertising production does not create a physical commodity but an ideological dimension of a commodity – a use-value promise that is attached to a commodity as meaning. Advertising transport workers do not transport a commodity in physical space from A to B, they rather organise a communication space that allows advertisers to communicate their use-value promises to potential customers. Facebook’s paid employees and users are therefore 21st-century equivalents of what Marx considered as transport workers in classical industry. They are productive workers whose activities are necessary for “transporting” use-value promises from companies to potential customers. Marx associated transport with communication as comparable forms of work. On Facebook and other social media platforms, transportation labour is communication labour. Dallas W. Smythe (1981, 4) argued that it is a specific feature of audience labour that audiences “work to market […] things to themselves”. Facebook users constantly work and constantly market things to themselves. Their usage behaviour constantly generates data that are used for targeting ads. All Facebook usage is productive labour, with the exception of those cases, where users block advertising with the help of ad block software, which probably only a minority does. Facebook usage labour adds value to the commodity that is sold by Facebook’s ad clients. Practically this means that a lot of companies want to advertise on Facebook and calculate social media advertising costs into their commodity prices. Nielsen (2013) conducted a survey among advertisers and advertising agencies. Seventy-five percent of the advertisers and 81% of the agencies that participated in the survey indicated that they buy targeted ads on social media. This shows the importance of social media for advertising today. Chapter Six | Dallas Smythe and Digital Labour 167 Digital Labour and Productive Labour ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=182 | PRINTED_PAGE=168 The production workers of Facebook’s clients produce use-value and value. Their public relations and advertising employees (or the workers in the companies to which this labour is outsourced) produce value and a use-value promise as symbolic value. Facebook users produce the value and the communication of this use-value to themselves. They are productive workers. That they create value means that their labour time objectifies itself in commodities: the ad clients’ employees objectify their labour in the commodity that is marketed to Facebook users, whereas Facebook users objectify their labour in the prosumer commodity that is sold to Facebook’s clients. User labour is thereby also objectified in the commodity that is marketed and potentially sold to users themselves. 6.4 Conclusion I have in this chapter revisited Smythe’s notion of the audience commodity and audience labour in light of the corporate social media industry that uses targeted advertising. A prevalent criticism is that Facebook users are not paid and therefore do not create value but only consume the value created by paid employees in companies that advertise on Facebook. I have argued against this idea that Marx has a broader notion of productive labour that is based on the notion of the Gesamtarbeiter (collective worker). On Facebook, the boundaries between production and consumption blur and consumption becomes the production of use-values both for the users (information and sociality) and advertisers (user data). Facebook users are ideological transport workers that transport advertising ideologies by their network usage to themselves. Conceptualising somebody as unproductive is not just an analytical term, it is also a slur and quite emotive. Nobody wants to be called unproductive as it carries the connotation of being useless and parasitic. Saying that Facebook users do not create value and that Facebook is a rentier that consumes the value produced by wageworkers employed by other companies politically implies that users are unimportant in class struggles in the digital age. Wageworkers in the non-digital economy are seen as the true locus of power. Hence, recommended political measures to be taken focus on how to organise these workers in unions, parties, or other organisations and struggles for higher wages and better wage-labour conditions. Users and Facebook are seen as being outside the locus of class struggle or only as something that unions and parties can also use in wage-labour struggles. 168 Theorists ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=183 | PRINTED_PAGE=169 Facebook users are productive transport workers who communicate advertising ideologies that make use-value promises. Their activities are productive labour. Politics for the digital age need to consider users as political subjects. Unions, organisations of the Left, and struggles are nothing that should be left to wageworkers but need to be extended to digital media users. Pirate Parties have understood this circumstance better than the orthodox wage-labour fetishistic parts of the Left, but they have not well understood that the exploitation of digital labour is connected to the commodification of the commons that include the communication commons and that as a consequence internet politics need to be connected to the critique of the political economy of capitalism as a whole. So whereas the orthodox part of the Left tends to dismiss users as politically unimportant and to neglect internet politics, Pirate Parties see users as the only political subjects. The only feasible political way forward is to create unions and organisations of users that are connected and part of a broader political Left. For doing so, the orthodox part of the Left needs to overcome its ignorance of and technophobic biases against the internet and users need to perceive themselves as being ripped off by internet companies. We need social media unions and a fusion of Pirate Parties and left-wing parties. Facebook users are productive workers means that they have the power to bring corporate social media to a standstill. If users go on strike, then Facebook immediately loses money. If Facebook’s wageworkers go on strike, the platform is still online and can be further operated for exploiting users. Users are economically powerful because they create economic value. Organising a collective Facebook strike or shifting to alternative non-commercial platforms is a refusal of digital labour. Besides unionisation and online strikes, also policy-oriented measures are feasible in order to strengthen the protection of users from capitalist exploitation. Ad block software is a tool that deactivates advertisings on the websites a user visits. It can either be used as add-on to web browsers or is automatically integrated into a browser. Using ad block software is digital class struggle: it disables Facebook and others’ monetisation of personal data by blocking targeted ads. Think of a legal requirement that makes ad block the standard option in all web browsers: users are empowered because commodification of data is not the standard but an opt-in chosen by the users if they turn off the ad blocker. A useful complementary legal measure is to require all internet platforms to deactivate targeted and other forms of advertising and to make users optin if they want to enable such mechanisms. Chapter Six | Dallas Smythe and Digital Labour 169 Conclusion ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=184 | PRINTED_PAGE=170 Class struggles need to extend from factories and offices to Google, Facebook, and Twitter. The theory of digital labour is an ally of users, whereas those approaches that want to reassure us that users are unproductive do not side with the interest of users and denigrates them as unimportant in class struggles. Representatives of the Old Left want to have their factory struggles back without realising that Facebook is a new factory. References 170 Theorists ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=185 | PRINTED_PAGE=171 Chapter Six | Dallas Smythe and Digital Labour 171 References ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=186 | PRINTED_PAGE=172 172 Theorists ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=187 | PRINTED_PAGE=173 Chapter Six | Dallas Smythe and Digital Labour 173 References ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=188 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=189 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Part III Themes 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed.md?start=190&limit=10)