DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY

FREE LABOR

Tiziana Terranova

The real not-capital is labor.

—Karl Marx, Grundrisse

Working in the digital media industry was never as much fun as it is made out to be. Certainly, for the workers of the best-known and most highly valued companies, work might have been a brief experience of something that did not feel like work at all.' On the other hand, even during the dot-com boom, the “netslaves" of the homonymous webzine had always been vociferous about the shamelessly exploitative nature of the job, its punishing work rhythms, and its ruthless casualization.2 They talked about “24-7 electronic sweatshops" and complained about the 90-hour week and the “moronic management of new media companies."3 Antagonism in the new media industry also affected the legions of volunteers runningwell-known sites for the Internet giants. In early 1999, 7 of the 15,000 "volunteers"of America Online rocked the info-love boat by asking the Department of Labor to investigate whether AOL owed them back wages for their years of playing chat hosts for free. They used to work long hours and love it; but they also felt the pain of being burned by digital media.

These events point to an inevitable backlash against the glamorization of digital labor, which highlighted its continuities with the modern sweatshop and the increasing degradation of knowledge work. Yet the question of labor in a digital economy as an innovative development of the familiar logic of capitalist exploitation is not so easily dismissed. The netslaves are not simply a typical form of labor on the Internet; they also embody a complex relation to labor that is widespread in late capitalist societies

In this chapter, I call this excessive activity that makes the Internet a thriving and hyperactive medium “free labor"—a feature of the cultural economy at large and an important, yet unacknowledged, source of value in advanced capitalist societies. By looking at the Internet as a specific instance of the fundamental role played by free labor, this chapter also highlights the connections between the digital economy and what the Italian autonomists have called the “social factory"

34The ShiftingSites of Labor Markets

(or "society-factory").4 The society-factorydescribes a process whereby "work processes have shifted from the factory to society, thereby setting in motion a truly complex machine."5Simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited, free labor on the net includes the activity of building websites, modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing lists, and building virtual spaces. Far from being an unreal, empty space, the Internet is animated by cultural and technical labor through and through, a continuous production of value that is completely immanent to the flows of the network society at large.

Support for this argument, however, is immediately complicated by the recent history of Anglo-American cultural theory.How should we speak of labor, especially cultural and technical labor, after the demolition job carried out by 30 years of postmodernism? The postmodern socialistfeminismof Donna Haraway's “Cyborg Manifesto"spelled out some of the reasons behind the antipathy of 1980s critical theory for Marxist analyses of labor. Haraway explicitlyrejected the humanistic tendencies of theorists who see the latter as the “pre-eminently privileged category enabling the Marxist to overcome illusion and find that point of view which is necessary for changing the world."6 Paul Gilroy similarly expressed his discontent at the inadequacy of Marxist analysis of labor to the descendants of slaves, who value artistic expression as “the means towards both individual selffashioning and communal liberation." If labor is "the humanizing activity that makes [white] man,"then, surely, thishumanizing labor does not really belong in the age of networked, posthuman intelligence.

However, the “informatics of domination"that Haraway describes in the manifestois certainly preoccupied with the relation between cybernetics, labor, and capital. In the 20 years since its publication, this triangulation has become even more evident. The expansion of the Internet has given ideological and material support to contemporary trends toward increased flexibility of the workforce, continuous reskilling, freelance work, and the diffusion of practices such as “supplementing"(bringing supplementary work home from the conventional office).8 Advertising campaigns and business manuals suggest that the Internet is not only a site of disintermediation (embodying the famous death of the middle man, from bookshops to travel agencies to computer stores), but also the means through which a flexible, collective intelligence has come into being.

This chapter does not seek to offer ajudgment on the effects of the Internet on society. What I will rather do is map the way in which the Internet connects to the autonomist social factory. Iwill look at how the “outernet"—the network of social, cultural, and economic relationships that crisscrosses and exceeds the Internet—surrounds and connects the latter to larger flows of labor, culture, and power. It is fundamental to move beyond the notion that cyberspace is about escaping reality in order to understand how the reality of the Internet is deeply connected to the development of late postindustrial societies as a whole. It is related to phenomena that have been defined as “external economies" within theoretical perspectives (such as the theory of transaction costs), suggesting that “the production of value is increasingly involving the capture of productive elements and social wealth that are outside the direct productive process." Cultural and technical work is central to the Internet but is also a widespread activity throughout advanced capitalist societies. Such labor is not exclusive to so-called knowledge workers but is a pervasive feature of the postindustrial economy. The pervasiveness of such production questions the legitimacy of a fixed distinction between production and consumption, labor and culture. It also undermines Gilroy's distinction between work as “servitude, misery and subordination" and artistic expression as the means to self-fashioning and communal liberation. The increasingly blurred territory between production and consumption, work and cultural expression, however, does not signal the recomposition of the alienated Marxist worker. The Internet does not automatically turn every user into an active producer and every worker into a creative subject. The process whereby production and consumption are reconfigured within the category of free labor signals the unfolding of another logic of value whose operations need careful analysis.10

The Digital Economy

The term digital economy emerged in the late 1990s as a way to summarize some of the processes described above. As a term, it seems to describe a formation that intersects on the one hand with the postmodern cultural economy (the media, the university, and the arts) and on the other hand with the information industry (the information and communication complex).Such an intersection of two different fields of production constitutes a challenge to a theoretical and practical engagement with the question of labor—a question that has become marginal for media studies as compared with questions of ownership (within political economy) and consumption (within cultural studies).

We will distinguish here between the New Economy—“a historical period marker [that] acknowledges its conventional association with Internet companies"and the digital economy—a less transient phenomenon based on key features of digitized information (its ease of copying and low or zero cost of sharing). In Richard Barbrook's definition, the digital economy is characterized by the emergence of new technologies (computer networks) and new types of workers (the digital artisans).12 According to Barbrook, the digital economy is a mixed economy: it includesa public element (the state's funding of the original research that produced ARPANET, the financialsupport to academicactivities that had a substantial role in shaping the culture of the Internet); a market-driven element (a latecomer that tries to appropriate the digital economy by reintroducing commodification); and a gift economy element (the true expression of the cutting edge of capitalist production that prepares its eventual overcoming into a future anarcho-communism").

What Barbrook proposed was that the vision of politicians and corporate leaders who linked the future of capitalism to the informational commodity involved a basic misunderstanding. Pointing to the world of discussion groups, mailing lists, and the distributed learning of programmers, he suggested that the Internet was far from simply being a new way to sell commodities. The predominance of relationships of collaboration across distance and exchange without money suggested that this was a practiced relationship with a viable and alternativepolitical and economic model.

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Unrestricted by physical distance, they collaborate with each other without the direct mediation of money and politics. Unconcerned about copyright, they give and receive information without thought of payment. In the absence of states or markets to mediate social bonds, network communities are instead formed through the mutual obligations created by gifts of time and ideas.13

Barbrook's vision of the informational commons was only reinforced by the subsequent explosion of peer-to-peer, file-sharingnetworks—a huge network phenomenon that had the music and film industries up in arms.

From a Marxist-Hegelian angle, Barbrook saw the high-tech gift economy as a process of overcoming capitalism from the inside. The high-tech gift economy is a pioneering moment that transcends both the purism of the New Left do-ityourself culture and the neoliberalism of the free market ideologues: “moneycommodity and gift relations are not just in conflict with each other, but also co-exist in symbiosis."14 Participants in the gift economy are not reluctant to use market resources and government funding to pursue a potlatch economy of free exchange. However, the potlatch andthe economy ultimately remain irreconcilable, and the market economy is always threatening to reprivatize the common enclaves of the gift economy.Commodification, the reimposition of a regime of property, is, in Barbrook's opinion, the main strategy through which capitalism tries to reabsorb the anarcho-communism ofthe net into its folds.

This early attempt to offer a polemical platform from which to think about the digital economy overemphasizes the autonomy of the high-tech gift economy from capitalism. The processes of exchange that characterize the Internet are not simply the reemergence of communism within the cutting edge of the economy, a repressed other that resurfaces just at the moment when communism seems defeated. It is important to remember that the gift economy, as part of a larger digital economy, is itself an important force within the reproduction of the labor force in late capitalism as a whole. The provision of free labor, as we shall see later, is a fundamental moment in the creation of value in the economy at large—beyond the digital economy of the Internet. As will be made clear, the conditions that make free labor animportant element of the digital economy are based in a difficult, experimental compromise between the historically rooted cultural and affective desire for creative production (of the kind more commonly associated with Gilroy's emphasis on “individual self-fashioning and communal liberation") and the current capitalist emphasis on knowledge as the main source of added value.

36 The ShiftingSites of LaborMarkets

The volunteers for America Online, the netslaves and the amateur web designers, did not work only because capital wanted them to, but they were acting out a desire for affective and cultural production, which was nonetheless real just because it was socially shaped. The cultural, technical, and creative work that supported the digital economy had been made possible by the development of capital beyond the early industrial and Fordist modes of production and therefore is particularly abundant in those areas where post-Fordism has been at work for a few decades. In the overdeveloped countries, the end of the factory has spelled out the obsolescence of the old working class, but it has also produced generations of workers who have been repeatedly addressed as active consumers of meaningful commodities. Free labor is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into excess productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited.

Management theory is also increasingly concerned with the question of knowledge work, that indefinable quality that is essential to the processes of stimulating innovation and achieving the goals of competitiveness. For example, Don Tapscott, in a classic example of New Economy managerial literature, The Digital Economy, wrote about a “new economy based on the networking of human intelligence.”"15 Human intelligence provides the much-needed added value, whichis essential to the economic health of the organization. Human intelligence, however, also poses a problem: it cannot be managed in quite the same way as more traditional types of labor. Knowledge workers need open organizational structures in order to produce, because the production of knowledge is rooted in collaboration; this is what Barbrook had defined as the “gift economy”:

The concept of supervision and management is changing to team-based structures. Anyone responsible for managing knowledge workers knows they cannot be “managed” in the traditional sense. Often they have specialized knowledge and skills that cannot be matched or even understood by management. A new challenge to management is first to attract and retain these assets by marketing the organization to them, and second to provide the creative and open communications environment where such workers can effectively apply and enhance their knowledge.16

For Tapscott, therefore, the digital economy magically resolves the contradictions of industrial societies, such as class struggle: whereas in the industrial economy, the “worker tried to achieve fulfillment through leisure [and].. . was alienated from the means of production which were owned and controlled by someone else, in the digital economy, the worker achieves fulfillment through work and finds in her brain her own, unalienated means of production.17 Such means of production need to be cultivated by encouraging the worker to participate in a culture of exchange whose flows are mainly kept within the company but also need to involve an “outside,"a contact with the fast-moving world of knowledge in general. The convention, the exhibition, and the conference—the more traditional ways of supporting this general exchange—are supplemented by network technologies both inside and outside the company. Although the traffic of these flows of knowledge needs to be monitored (hence, the corporate concerns about the use of intranets), the Internet effectively functions as a channel through which human intelligence renews its capacitó to produce.

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Is it possible to look beyond the totalizing hype of the managerial literature but alsobeyond some of the conceptual limits of Barbrook's gift economy model? We will look at some possible explanation for the coexistence, within the debate about the digital economy, of discourses that see it as an oppositional movement and others that see it as a functional development to new mechanisms of extraction of value. Is the end of Marxist alienation wished for by the manager guru the same thing as the gift economy heralded by leftist discourse?

We can start undoing this deadlock by subtracting the label “digital economy"from its exclusive anchorage within advanced forms of labor (we can start then by depioneering it). This chapter describes the digital economy as a specific mechanism of internal capture of larger pools of social and cultural knowledge The digital economy is an important area of experimentation with value and free cultural/affective labor. It is about specific forms of production (web design, multimedia production, digital services, and so on), but it is also about forms of labor we do not immediately recognize as such: chat, real-life stories, mailing lists, amateur newsletters, and so on. These types ofcultural andtechnical labor are not produced by capitalism in any direct, cause-and-effect fashion; that is, they have not developed simply as an answer to the economic needs of capital. However, they have developed in relation to the expansion of the cultural industries and are part of a process of economic experimentation with the creation of monetary value out of knowledge/culture/affect.

This process is different from that described by popular, left-wing wisdom about the incorporation of authentic cultural moments: it is not, then, about the bad boys of capital moving in on underground subcultures or subordinate cultures and incorporating the fruits of their production (styles, languages, music) into the media food chain. This process is usually considered the end of a particular cultural formation, or at least the end of its authentic phase. After incorporation, local cultures are picked up and distributed globally, thus contributing to cultural hybridization or cultural imperialism (depending on whom you listen to). Rather than capital incorporating from the outside the authentic fruits of the collective imagination, it seems more reasonable to think of cultural flows as originating within a field that is always and already capitalism. Incorporation is not about capital descending on authentic culture but a more immanent process of channeling collective labor (even as cultural labor) into monetary flows and its structuration within capitalist business practices.

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The ShiftingSites of Labor Markets

Subcultural movements have stuffed the pockets of multinational capitalism for decades. Nurtured by the consumption of earlier cultural moments, subcultures have provided the look, style, and sounds that sell clothes, CDs, video games, films, and advertising slots on television. This has often happened through the active participation ofsubcultural members in the production ofcultural goods (e.g., independent labels in music, small designer shops in fashion).18 This participation is, asthe wordsuggests, a voluntary phenomenon, although it is regularly accompanied by cries of “Sell-out!" The fruits of collective cultural labor have been not simply appropriated, but voluntarily channeled and controversially structured within capitalist business practices. The relation between culture, the cultural industry, and labor in these movements is much more complex than the notion of incorporation suggests. In this sense, the digital economy is not a new phenomenon but simply a new phase of this longer history of experimentation.

Knowledge Class and Immaterial Labor

Despite the numerous, more or less disingenuous endorsements of the democratic potential of the Internet, its links with capitalism have always been a bit too tight for comfort to concerned political minds. It has been very tempting to counteract the naive technological utopianism by pointing out how computer networks are the material and ideological heart of informated capital. The Internet advertised on television and portrayed by print media seems not just the latest incarnation of capital's inexhaustible search for new markets, but also a full consensus-creating machine, which socializes the mass of proletarianized knowledge workers into the economy of continuous innovation.19 After all, if we do not get online soon, the hype suggests, we will become obsolete, unnecessary, disposable. If we do, we are promised, we will become part of the “hive mind,"the immaterial economy of networked, intelligent subjects in charge of speeding up the rhythms of capital's “incessant waves of branching innovations."20 Multimedia artists, writers, journalists, software programmers, graphic designers, and activists together with small and large companies are at the core of this project. For some they are its cultural elite, for others a new form of proletarianized labor.²1Accordingly, the digital workers are described as resisting or supporting the project of capital, often in direct relation to their positions in the networked, horizontal, and yet hierarchical world of knowledge work.

Any judgment on the political potential of the Internet, then,is tiednot only to its much vauntedcapacity to allow decentralized access to information, but also to the question of who uses the Internet and how. If the decentralized structure of the net is to count for anything at all, the argument goes, then we need to know about its constituent population (hence, the endless statistics about use, income gender, and race ofInternet users—the most polled, probed, and yet opaque survey material of the world). If this population of Internet users is largely made up of knowledge workers, then it matters whether these are seen as the owners of elitist cultural and economic power or the avant-garde of new configurations of labor that do not automatically guarantee elite status.

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The question of who uses the Internet is both necessary and misleading. It is necessary because we have to ask who is participating in the digital economy before we can pass a judgment on the latter. It is misleading because it implies that all we need to know is how to locate the knowledge workers within a class, and knowing which class it is will give us an answer to the political potential of the netas a whole. If we can prove that knowledge workers are the avant-garde of labor, then the net becomes a site of resistance;²² if we can prove that knowledge workers wield the power in informated societies, then the net isan extended gated community for the middle classes.23 Even admitting that knowledge workers are indeed fragmented in terms of hierarchy and status won't help us that much; it will still lead to a simple system of categorization, where the net becomes a field of struggle between the diverse constituents of the knowledge class

The question is further complicated by the stubborn resistance of knowledge to quantification: knowledge cannot be exclusively pinned down to specific social segments.Although the shift from factory to office work, from production to services is widely acknowledged, it just isn't clear why some people qualify and some others do not.²4 The knowledge worker is a very contested sociological category.

A more interesting move, however, is possible by not looking for the knowledge class within quantifiable parameters but by concentrating instead on labor. Although the notion of class retains a material value that isindispensable to make sense of the experience of concrete historical subjects, it also has its limits: for example, it freezes the subject, just like a substance within the chemical periodical table—one is born as a certain element (working-class metal) but then might become something else (middle-class silicon)if submitted to the proper alchemical processes (education and income). Such an understanding of class also freezes out the flows of culture and money that mobilize the labor force as a whole. In terms of Internet use, it gives rise to the generalized endorsements and condemnations that I have described above and does not explain or make sense of the heterogeneity and yet commonalities of Internet users. I have therefore found it more useful to thinkin terms of what the Italian autonomists, and especially Maurizio Lazzarato, have described as “immaterial labor." For Lazzarato, the concept of immaterial labor refers to two different aspects of labor:

On the one hand, as regards the “informational content" of the commodity, it refers directly to the changes taking place in workers’ labor processes... where the skills involved in direct labor are increasingly skills involving cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal and vertical communication). On the other hand, as regards theactivitythat produces the “cultural content" of the commodity, immaterial labor involves a series of activities that are not normally recognized as "work"—in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion.25

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The ShiftingSites of Labor Markets

Immaterial labor, unlike the knowledge worker, is not completely confined to a specific class formation. Lazzarato insists that this form of labor power is not limited tohighly skilled workers but is a form of activity of every productive subject within postindustrial societies. In the highly skilled worker, these capacities are already there. However, in the young worker, the “precarious worker,"and the unemployed youth, these capacities are “virtual"—that is, they are there but are still undetermined. This means that immaterial labor is a virtuality (an undetermined capacity) that belongs to the postindustrial productive subjectivity as à whole. For example, the obsessive emphasis on education of 1990s governments can be read as an attempt to stop this virtuality from disappearing or from being channeled into places that would not be as acceptable to the current power structures. Despite all the contradictions of advanced capital and its relation to structural unemployment, postmodern governments do not like the completely unemployable. The potentialities of work must be kept alive, the unemployed must undergo continuous training in order to be both monitored and kept alive as some kind of postindustrial reserve force. Nor can they be allowed to channel their energy into the experimental, nomadic, and antiproductive lifestyles, which, in Britain, have been so savagely attacked by the Criminal Justice Act in the mid-1990s.26

However, unlike the post-Fordists, and in accordance with his autonomist origins, Lazzarato does not conceive of immaterial labor as purely functional to a new historical phase of capitalism:

The virtuality of this capacity is neither empty nor ahistoric; it is rather an opening and a potentiality, that have as their historical origins and antecedents the “struggle against work” of the Fordist worker and, in more recent times, the processes of socialization, educational formation, and cultural self-valorization.27

This dispersal of immaterial labor (as a virtuality and an actuality) problematizes the idea of the knowledge worker as a class in the industrial sense of the word. As a collective quality of the labor force, immaterial labor can be understood to pervade the social body with different degrees of intensity. This intensity is produced by the processes of “channeling of the capitalist formation which distributes value according to its logic of profit."28 If knowledge is inherently collective, it is even more so in the case of the postmodern cultural economy: music, fashion, and information are all produced collectively but are selectively compensated. Only some companies are picked up by corporate distribution chains in the case of fashion and music; only a few sites are invested in by venture capital. However, it is a form of collective cultural labor that makes these products possible even as the profit isdisproportionately appropriated by established corporations.

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42The ShiftingSites of Labor Markets

From this point ofview, the well-known notion that the Internet materializes a collective intelligence is not completely off the mark. The Internet highlights the existence of networks of immaterial labor and speeds up their accretion into a collective entity. The productive capacitiesofimmaterial labor on the Internet encompass the work of writing/reading/managing and participating in mailing lists/websites/chat lines. These activities fall outside the concept of “abstract labor," which Marx defined as the provision of time for the production of value regardless of the useful qualitiesof the product.29 They witness an investment of desire into production of the kind cultural theorists have mainly theorized in relation to consumption.

This explosion of productive activities is undermined for various commentators by the minoritarian, gendered, and raced character of the Internet population. However, we might also argue that to recognize the existence of immaterial labor as a diffuse, collective quality of postindustrial labor in its entirety does not deny the existence of hierarchies of knowledge (both technical and cultural), which prestructure (but do not determine) the nature of such activities. These hierarchies shape the degrees to which such virtualities become actualities—that is, they go from being potential to being realized as processual, constituting moments of cultural, affective, and technical production. Neither capital nor living labor want a labor force that is permanently excluded from the possibilities of immaterial labor. But this is where their desires stop from coinciding. Capital wants to retain control over the unfolding of these virtualities and the processes of valorization. The relative abundance of cultural/technical/affective production on the net, then, does not exist as a free-floating postindustrial utopia but in full, mutually constitutinginteraction with late capitalism.

CollectiveMinds

The collective nature of networked, immaterial labor was exalted by the utopian statements of the cyberlibertarians. Kevin Kelly's popular thesis in Out of Control for example, suggested that the Internet is a collective “hive mind." According to Kelly, the Internet is another manifestation of a principle of self-organization that is widespread throughout technical, natural, and social systems. The Internet is the material evidence of the existence of the self-organizing, infinitely productive activities of connected human minds.30 From a different perspective, Pierre Levy drew on cognitive anthropology and poststructuralist philosophy to argue that computers and computer networks enable the emergence of a “collective intelligence."Levy, who is inspired by early computer pioneers such as Douglas Engelbart, argues for a new humanism “that incorporates and enlargesthe scope ofself knowledge and collective thought."31 According to Levy, we are passing from a Cartesian model of thought based on the singular idea of cogito (I think) to a collective or plural cogitamus (we think).