DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY

Within the economic limits of capitalist economies, then, living labor is doubly exploited. To the increasing exploitation clearly visible in the domain of waged digital work (decreasing autonomy and falling wages for increasing productivity), we have to add, then, a new kind of exploitation—that which concerns the immaterial commons of cultural and technical production. Such exploitation must be conceptualized differently than the one concerning waged work. It implies a privatization of the wealth produced byfree labor that takes theshape of an impoverishment of potential users’ appropriation of the fruits of such labor. This impoverishment can be understood in terms of the unilateral appropriation and hence accumulation of the wealth generated by users interactions (both personal data, which become property of the company, and the general activity of sharing, posting, linking, commenting, etc.) but also in the actual qualityof the participation to the digital economy constrained bythe control unilaterally exercised by web giants on the technical configurations ofsocial networking platforms. As the mechanisms of such expropriation are clearly embedded within forms of financialization that impoverish society as a whole, asking for the liberation of free labor means asking for two things: that such profits be returned to those who actually produce them—that is, to living labor—and that social networking platforms should be deprivatized—that is, that ownership of users' data should be returned to their rightful owners as the freedom to accessand modify the protocols and diagrams that structure their participation.

These seem like simple conclusions, but their consequences are far reaching. Giving free labor access to the wealth that it generates cannot mean, as Michel Bauwens has argued, paying users individually. As the wealth generated by free labor is social, so should be the mode of its return. This means investing this wealth in the reproduction of the common—that is, in new forms of welfare (from the institution of basic guaranteed incometo larger investments in housing, health, education, knowledge, technology, and so on). This implies enormous shifts not only within the specific domain of the digital economy but within the global economy as a whole, which run counter to the current trend toward austerity, reduction of the cost and rights of labor, and extreme competitiveness. Who is the subject that should carry on such struggle to reverse the tendency toward further impoverishment and exploitation? Where is the passage from the class in itself to the class for itself?

The ambiguity of the current condition is implied in the fact that the means through which such passage can be accomplished are given (with the possible exception of Anonymous) within the context of those social media technologies that today are fully privatized and embedded in the capitalist economy at large. It is within these media that we are witnessing the formation of social and political movements that question not so much the specific domain of social media use but

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the overall economic structure that supports them. The Arab Spring and the Assemble and Occupó movements are two obvious examples of this trend, but so are the innumerable initiatives and struggles that over the past decade have brought together the net, the Squares, and the Streets. It is not clear at the moment whether such struggles will manage to accumulate enough social energy not only to reverse the current trend but also to generate their own structures and political rationalities, which are truly alternative to the no-alternative diktat. The liberation of free labor, however, cannot demand anything less.

Notes

This essay has been made possible by research carried out with the support of the Virtual Society? program of the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number L132251050). I shared this grant with Sally Wyatt and Graham Thomas, Department of Innovation Studies, University of East London. The chapter has been previously published as “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy," in Social Text18, no. 2 (2000): 33–58. Reprinted by permission of Duke University Press.

1 See Andrew Ross's ethnography of New York City digital design company Razorfish, No Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

4 See Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); and Toni Negri, The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Tiventy-frst Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989) and Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the “Grundrisse" (New York: Autonomedia, 1991).

5 Negri, The Politics of Subversion.

7 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 40.

10 In discussing these developments, I will also draw on debates circulating across Internet sites such as, for example, nettime, telepolis, rhizome, and c-theory. Online debates are one of the manifestations of the surplus value engendered by the digital economy, a hyperproduction that can only be partly reabsorbed by capital.

11 Ross, No Collar, 9.

12 See Richard Barbrook, “The Digital Economy," nettime, June 17, 1997, http://www. nettime.org; Richard Barbrook, “The High-Tech Gift Economy," in Readme! Filtered by Nettime: ASCII Culture and the Revenge of Knowledge, eds. Josephine Bosma et al. (Brooklón, NY: Autonomedia, 1999), 132–8. Also see Anonymous, "The Digital Artisan Manifesto," nettime, May 15, 1997; and Andrew Ross's argument in No Collar that the

13 Barbrook, “The High-Tech Gift Economy," 135.

21 See Darko Suvin, “On Gibson and Cyberpunk SF," in Storming the Reality Studio, ed. Larry McCaffery (London: Durham UniversityPress, 1991), 349–65;and Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future: ScTech and the Dogma of Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). According to Andrew Clement information technologies were introduced as extensions of Taylorist techniques of scientific management to middle-level, rather than clerical, employees. Such technologies responded to a managerial need for efficient ways to manage intellectual labor. Clement, however, seems to connect this scientific management to the workstation, while he is ready to admit that personal computers introduce an element of autonomy much disliked by management.See Andrew Clement, “Office Automation and the Technical Control of Information Workers," in The Political Economy of Information, eds. Vincent Mosco and Janet Wasko (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).

22 Barbrook, “The High-Tech Gift Economy."

23 See Kevin Robins, “Cyberspace or the World We Live In," in Fractal Media: New Media in Social Context, ed. Jon Dovey (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996).

25 Maurizio Lazzarato, "Immaterial Labor," in Marxism beyond Marxism, eds. Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl for the Polygraph Collective (London: Routledge, 1996), 133.

26The Criminal Justice Act (CJA) was popularly perceived as an antirave legislation, and most of the campaign against it was organized around the “right to party."However, the most devastating effects of the CJA have struck the neotribal, nomadic camps, basically decimated or forced to move to Ireland in the process. See Andrea Natella and Serena Tinari, eds., RaveOff (Rome: Castelvecchi, 1996).

27 Lazzarato, "Immaterial Labor,"136.

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still survives in institutions like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which is responsible for a number of important decisions about the technical infrastructure of the net. Although the IETF is subordinated to a number of professional committees, it hasimportant responsibilitiesandis open to anybody who wants to join. The freeware movement has a long tradition, but it has also recently been divided by the polemics between the free software or “copyleft” movement and the open-source movement, which is more of a pragmatic attempt to make freeware a business proposition. See debates online at http://www.gnu.org and http://www.salonmag.com.

50 Leonard, “Open Season.”

51 Ibid., 142.

52It is an established pattern of the computer industry, in fact, that you might have to give away your product if you want to reap the benefits later on. As John Perry Barlow has remarked, “Familiarity is an important asset in the world of information. It may often be the case that the best thing you can do to raise demand for your product is to give it away." See John Perry Barlow, "SellingWine without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net,"in High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace, ed.Peter Ludlow (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

53 The technical and social structure of the net has been developed to encourage open cooperation among its participants. As an everyday activity, users are building the system together. Engaged in interactive creativity, they send e-mail, take part in electronic mailinglists, contribute to newsgroups, participate in online conferences, and produce websites. Lacking copyright protection, information can be freely adapted to suit the users' needs. Within the high-tech gift economy, people successfully work together through“an open social process involving evaluation, comparison and collaboration" (Barbrook, "The High-Tech Gift Economy," 135–6).

54 John Horvarth, "Freeware Capitalism," nettime, February 5,1998.

55Ibid.

56 Netscape started like a lot of other computer companies: its founder, Marc Andreessen, was part of the original research group that developed the structureof the World Wide Web at the CERN laboratory, in Geneva. As with manysuccessfulcomputer entrepreneurs, he developed the browser as an offshoot of the original, state-funded research and soon started his own company. Netscape was also the first company to exceed the economic processes of the computerindustry, inasmuch as it was the first successful company to set up shop on the net itself. As such, Netscape exemplifies some of the problems that even the computer industry meets on the net andconstitutes a good starting point to assess some of the common claims about the digital economy.

57 Ross, Real Love.

58 Chip Bayers, "Push Comes to Show," Wired, February 1999, 113.

59 Ibid., 156.

60Ibid.

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3

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF COSMOPOLIS

Sean Cubitt

On Political Economy

The political economy of cosmopolis, of a global polity that is not that of neoliberal globalization, has to be imagined, because this is the one way to stop it being planned. Michel Foucault (2007) made the case that the free market depends entirely on an unfree regulatory regime of property, contracts, money, law. So we should begin by reintroducing the political to the economic. The classical political philosophers—Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau—suggest that politics is a natural state for the political animal. Rancière (1999), in contrast, suggests that it is not natural at all. The state of nature might favor such naturalattributes as strength, gender, and age as criteria, but politics began when these “natural" hierarchies were challenged by those who had been left out of the account. Politics is, he argues, the struggle over inclusion in the arena of the political. In ancient times, the artisans and in modern times, the landless, slaves, prisoners, and women were governed without the possibility of governing. Today exclusionof immigrants and refugees governed by coercive actions in which they have no say (Abizadeh 2008), defines the political. As Arendt (1978) argued, the exclusion would prove definitive of the postwar politics of human rights. As Rancière has it, referencing Agamben,

either the rights of man are the rights of the citizen, that is to say the rights of those who have rights, which is a tautology; or the rights of the citizen are the rights of man. But as bare humanity has no rights, then they are the rights of those who have no rights,which is an absurdity. (Rancière 2006: 61)

More concretely, the poor may have the right to own property but have no property to own—that is, they have a right without possessing it. Rancière disagrees, however, with the analysis that says that democracy is therefore unattainable. Instead, he sees it as the grounds of politics.

This is what the democratic process implies: the action of subjects who, by working the interval between identities, reconfigure the distributions of the public and the private, the universal and the particular. Democracy can never be identified with the simpledomination of the universal (Rancière 2006: 61–2).

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.

Rancière'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.

De 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.

In 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?

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If there are grounds, network communications will provide them. Neither weightless nor immaterial, networks accumulate debt to the most important of all the nonmonetized domains: the global environment. The server industry alone already has a greater carbon footprint than the airline business (Boccaletti, Löffler, and Oppenheim 2006). Smart server design and innovations in the genera– tion and delivery of energy are partial solutions, but the fact remains: there is an environmental cost—in the extraction of materials, manufacture, distribution and retailing, use, and recycling—to computer-mediatedcommunications. The exclusion that defines democracy, and that provides information capital with its core resource, is not exclusively human. Actor-network theory notes the exclusion of the natural world from political process (Latour 2004); we cannot imagine giving a vote to the environment, or to machines. But then our ancestors couldn't imagine giving the voteto artisans or slaves, women, blacks, servants, landlesspeasants, youths, and colonized or indigenous peoples, and today we cannotimagine giving votes to migrants. The challenge, of course, is that we cannot, nor could we ever, simply assimilate these others into an unchanged system. The system must change, radically, as it opens its politicallife to the now incessant demands of the ecosphere.

Environmentalism is presented largely as a matter of behavioral change—of new criteria in consumption, fundamentally as ethics rather than politics. As in the normative practices of the professions, environmentalism is presented as code of conduct. These ostensibly ethical strictures do not provide communal grounds for action—the root meaning of the word ethics—but rules for smooth functioning. They are self-replicating systems that, far from demanding commitment to the Good, the good life, or the infinite demand of the other, ensure that no decision need ever be taken. This is the point of Derrida's challenge:

If I know, for example, what the causes and effects of what I am doing are, what the program is for what I am doing, then there is no decision; it is a question, at the moment of judgment, of applying a particular causality. .. . If I know what is to be done .. . then there is no moment of decision, simply the application of a body of knowledge, or at the very least a rule or a norm. For there to be a decision, the decision must be heterogeneous to knowledge as such. (Derrida 2001: 231-2)

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The only true action is thus one that breaks the rules. But since the rules have emerged from consensus, breaking them is unethical. The only choice is between compliance and evil—and we know from Arendt that, at least in certain circumstances, compliance may itself be evil. This is the point at which we find ethics opposed to action, ethics as the excluded other of politics defined as the realm of action. From this standpoint, we have to acknowledge the shocking inference drawn by Esposito: "Not only is there no contradiction in principle between evil and politics, but evil, as such, is from a certain point of view always political" (Esposito 1993: 183).

The evolution of new strategies, then, depends on an escape from ethics as code of conduct. The uniqueness of every situation requires consideration if it is to provide the grounds for action. Considering where we are (and what we are to do as a consequence of how we find ourselves situated) is quite different from either the application of rules or modeling possible future scenarios in which, in the long run, we are all dead. Consideration of the actual situation should therefore seek out what is unique in it: what is unforeseen, unaccounted for in the rulebook. It is on the basis of these unforeseen elements in the situation that it becomes possible to act, to change the world as given into the world as potential. The terrain of managed possibilities debarring us from action (de Carolis 1996) reveals its contradictions. The givenness of a contingent and probabilistic world becomes future-oriented capacity for bringing about genuinely new situations.

The Crowd

The entity that best expresses this new, postindividual condition is the crowd. Inherently contingent in its complexity, it is probabilistic not in the sense of statistical management, but ofvirtuality; the crowd is an organ of demand that is never complete, universal, or integral—that is, it fails to exist as a unified and coherent whole (In other words, the indeterminacy is our best hope and hence a call to arms), pitching itself instead into action, which converts the actually existing into the raw material of futurity. But the new crowd is also target of capital's latest colonization, crowdsourcing. Socíal networking commercializes the gift of labor, not as individual activity but as aberrations from the average, which can be read as tendencies and thus both governed and exploited as such. Hence, the virtual nature of the crowd, its potential or power to act, is removed by a process of forecasting how much deviance is tolerable—and profitable—in a population. This may indeed be the actuality of the process Rossiter and Zehle in this volume refer to as “a politics beyond the actionable." Disciplinary identity no longer produced the requisite unforeseen behaviors that capital requires in its endless expansion The capitalization of friendship by Facebook is a new trajectory, paralleled by the extension of prosumer status to the vast populations of the global South in schemes such as O3b (http://www.o3bnetworks.com), an alliance of search and telecom giants to build a satellite network capable of inducting the Other 3 Billion of the developing world into Internet culture. Geographical extension, sociological intension, and cultural diversity embrace difference as an engine of growth.

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The challenge, then, is to confront network activity not with negation but intensification. What is essential is not the actual, certainly not the enforced identi– ties of consumer capital and the management of the self, but precisely nonidentity: the nonidentical nature of the world to which Western thought perpetually ascribes identity. Beyond the shattering of the individual self, what remains to be thought is the nonidenticality of the crowd, or the masses, or populations. The implication of the shattered self is that the crowd is no longer conceivable in terms of a relation between individual and collective. For Laclau, any social or political group emerges neither because the group exists “naturally" (as in some descriptions of nationalism), nor as an aggregation of individuals, but as the concatenation of a more primal human condition:

The unity of the group is, in my view, the result of an articulation of demands. This articulation, however, does not correspond to a stable and positive configuration which could be grasped as a unified whole: on the contrary, since it is in the nature of all demands to present claims to a certain established order, it is in a peculiar relation with that order, being both inside and outside it. As this order cannot fully absorb the demand, it cannot constitute itself as a coherent totality. (Laclau 2005: ix)

But in the database economy, demand is always the object of management. Demand management demeans demand as engine of socialization. Even where it is most lauded as the new mode of extraction of surplus value from populations, in crowdsourcing, the crowd is treated as an emergent property of probabilities whose behaviors, however, are held to be foreseeable. In this actuarial foreknowledge, it is crucial to discern the object of biopolitical management, an object that is singular. The population managed in biopolitics is a single entity. This is the sovereign people of constitutional representative democracy, the sovereign consumer of the market economy. There is only one market in the global economy. But that entity is incomplete and contradictory: neither whole nor universal, it fails in its quest for totality.

We live, politically, in a world governed by the distinction between the rights of the citizen and the rights of man. As Anthony Downey (2009: 109) expresses it, “What if the refugee, the political prisoner, the disappeared, the victim of torture, the dispossessed are not only constitutive of modernity but its emblematic subjects?" Like Agamben (1995), who provides his premise, Downey misses a key issue—that the refugee, along with those other others, is not a subject, because she is not within the population. Assimilating the stateless and the excluded wil remove the last great barrier to cosmopolis, the last political refusal of a system which today encourages the free flow of money and goods and only restricts the free flow ofpeople.

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