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title: "Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory"
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# Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory
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12
Thesis on Digital Labor in an Emerging P2P Economy
Michel Bauwens
Peer-to-peer (P2P) is the ideology of the new cognitive working class. The majority of workers in Western countries are no longer involved in factory work but are either cognitive or service workers. There are strong connections between peer-to-peer values such as openness, participation, commons orientation, and the structural conditions of this new working class.
First, peer-to-peer responds to the ideal conditions for cognitive work. For cognitive work to progress, it needs participation of all those who can contribute, and the knowledge needs to be freely shared and available to all who will need the same material in the future. It is no accident that peer production was born among the developers of software code, who are uniquely dependent on access to shareable code to progress in their work.
Under structural conditions of exploitative and intellectual property-constrained wage-based knowledge work, peer production is the modality of life and work that cognitive workers aspire to and engage in whenever they can either escape voluntarily from waged labor, or are obliged to engage in because of a precarious exodus outside of wage labor in the context of conditions of temporary or permanent economic crisis.
Peer-to-peer corresponds to the objective needs of the new craft structure of cognitive labor. Cognitive workers are no longer primarily engaged in long-term factory work but have very flexible career paths, by choice or necessity, which require them to change from being wage laborers to independent freelance consultants to entrepreneurs and back again. Under conditions of chosen or forced flexibility, workers have an objective interest in being networked to gain practical experience, social and reputational capital, and access to networks of exchange and solidarity. Networked peer production is the best avenue to obtain these advantages.
Peer-to-peer, and engagement with peer production, is the objective condition of participation into networks and therefore afects and engages all network users to the degree that they are engaged in online collaboration and knowledge exchange and the eventual creation of common value through such free aggregation of efort. All work, however, has cognitive aspects, and so today all workers are exposed to networks and the peer-to-peer value system. The peer-to-peer value system and peer production as a social dynamic are therefore not constrained to full-time knowledge workers, but to the totality of the working class and working people.
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Because of the hyperproductive nature of peer production, which allows for broader participation and input, passionate engagement, and universal distribution of its benefits (conditioned by network access), it attracts the participation and engagement of capital through the activities of netarchical capitalists. Netarchical capital is that sector of capital that understands the hyperproductive nature of peer production and therefore enables and empowers social production to occur, but it is conditioned by the possibility of value extraction to the benefit of the holders of capital.
Peer production is both immanent and transcendent vis-à-vis capitalism, because it has features that strongly decommodify both labor and immaterial value and institute a field of action based on peer-to-peer dynamics and a peer-to-peer value system. Peer production functions within the cycle of accumulation of capital but also within the new cycle of the creation and accumulation of the commons. Netarchical capital uses peer production for its own accumulation of capital; peer producers naturally strive for the continued existence and protection of their commons.
The creation of commons under the rule of capital is not a zerosum game. This means that the fact or objective relation between the commons and capital does not automatically constitute a hard and fast distinction between capitalist and anticapitalist commons. Workers associated with peer production have a natural interest to maintain and expand the commons of knowledge, code, and design, and under conditions of capital, the role of wage labor and capitalist investment contributes to the sustainability of both the commons and the commoners.
However, under conditions of capitalist crisis, commoners have an objective interest in maintaining commons and conditions of participation that create maximum independence from capital and aim for its eventual replacement as the dominant system. We propose that this can happen through the creation of noncapitalist, community-supportive, benefit-driven entities that participate in market exchange without participating in capital accumulation. Benefit-driven institutions are responsible for the financial sustainability and social reproduction of the commoners as well as for the protection and strengthening of the commons.
Through the use of a new type of peer production license, commoners can freely share the commons with commons-friendly entities while charging for-profit entities that do not reciprocate to the commons, thereby creating a positive feedback loop that creates a commons-centered countereconomy. Crucial for phase transition under conditions of capitalist crisis is to combine the emergent countereconomy and its working solutions to issues of social reproduction to the broad social movements that emerge to protect the life conditions of working people.
Traditional labor and its organizations have an objective interest, under conditions of declining capitalism, to adopt the
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idea of global and shared innovation commons and thereby ally themselves with the emergence and deepening of peer production. Under conditions of social strife, capitalist corporations can be transformed into worker-owned, selfmanaged entities that create their own commons of shared knowledge, code, and design. Farmers and agricultural workers have a similar interest in the creation of shared innovation commons to transform soildepleting industrial agriculture into smart eco-agriculture based on shared innovation commons uniting farmers and agricultura knowledge workers. Commons-oriented peer production can both strengthen netarchical capital, and hence the system of capital accumulation, and the reproduction of the commons. Peer producers can benefit from corporate platforms while struggling for their own rights as the real value creators and, in conditions of social strength, could potentially take over such platforms as common or publicly owned utilities. Participants in commoner-owned for-benefit entities can significantly transcend purely competitive market dynamics while avoiding authoritarian central planning through the adoption of open-book management, adaptation to publicly available signaling, and negotiated coordination of production and distribution. This does not obviate the possible need for democratic planning through citizen participation whenever this is needed and wished for. However, it creates broad areas for mutual alignment of productive capacities. The traditional ideologies and movements of the industrial labor movement became largely associated with collective property. Peer production opens the avenue for more distributed property, whereby individuals can freely aggregate not only their immaterial productive resources but their material productive resources. Under those conditions, possible abuse of collective property is balanced by the individual freedom of forking productive resources. Peer production is vital for sustainability and biosphere-friendly production methods, as open design communities design naturally for sustainability but also transform the production process itself—for example, to ensure participation and more distributed access to productive resources. Combined with the development of more distributed machinery as well as more distributed capital allocation, peer production can lead to a new system that combines smart material relocalization with global cooperative innovation and the existence of global phyles uniting peer production entities on a global material scale. Phyles are transnational, community-supportive entities that create a new layer of postcapitalist material cooperation. Free labor is only problematic under conditions of precarity and nonreciprocal value capture by (netarchical) capital. Under conditions of social solidarity, the freely given participation to common value projects is a highly emancipatory activity.
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Because of its hyperproductive nature and inherent ecological sustainability, peer production becomes the condition for transcending capitalism. Its own logic—that is, free contributions to a commons managed by for-benefit associations and made sustainable through for-benefit entrepreneurship of the commoners themselves—creates a seed for a new social and economic form centered on the core value creation of the commons, managed and contributed to by both for-benefit associations and entrepreneurial coalitions and sustained by participatory collective services, which form the basis of a new model of the partner state, which enables and empowers social production as the core reason of its existence.
The hyperproductivity of peer production makes it conform to the dual conditions for phase transitions—that is, the crisis of the old model of production and the availability of a working alternative that can perform better while solving a number of systemic problems plaguing the current dominant form of production. The task of the movements of cognitive and other forms of labor is to create a new hegemony and a new commonsbased alliance for social change that challenges the domination of capital, the commodity form, and the biospheric destruction that is inherent to it.
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Class and Exploitation on the Internet
Christian Fuchs
The term social media has been established to characterize World Wide Web platforms such as social networking sites, blogs, wikis, and microblogs. Such platforms are among the most accessed websites in the world and include Facebook, You-Tube, Wikipedia, Blogger, Twitter, LinkedIn, and WordPress. All online platforms and media are social in the sense of providing information that is a result of social relations. The notion of sociality underlying the now frequently employed term social media is based on concepts such as communication, community, cooperation, collaboration, and sharing. All too often, the term is used without diferentiation or grounding in social theory.
This chapter challenges techno-optimistic versions of social media analysis by pointing out its limits. First, the notion of a participatory Internet is questioned by conducting an analysis of the political economy of selected corporate social media platforms. Next, an alternative theorization of social media that is based on Marx’s class theory is ofered. Finally, some thoughts about the need for an alternative Internet are presented.
Critical Internet studies is an emerging field of research. Trebor Scholz’s conference The Internet as Playground and Factory has shown how important critical thinking about the contemporary Internet is and that there is a huge interest in critical political economy and theory relating to the Internet. Today, we are experiencing times of capitalist crisis, and it is no surprise that critical studies and critical political economy are celebrating a comeback after decades of post-modern, culturalist, and neoliberal domination of academia. Questions relating to class, labor, exploitation, alienation, and ideology have become paramount. The critical analysis of social media requires a critique of both ideology and exploitation. It also calls for practical proposals. Trebor Scholz (2008) has stressed that “the suggestion of sudden newness of social media is aimed at potential investors” and that web 2.0 is therefore primarily a marketing ideology. Jodi Dean argues that the Internet and other forms of communication in “communicative capitalism [are] rooted in communication without communicability” (Dean 2004: 281). Dean suggests that the Internet becomes a technological fetish that advances postpolitics. Mark Andrejecvic (2002: 239) speaks of “the interactive capability of new media to exploit the work of being watched.” He argues that “accounts of exploitation do not necessarily denigrate the activities or the meanings they may have for those who participate in them rather than the social relations that underwrite expropriation and alienation” (Andrejevic 2011: 283). These and other contributions are characteristic of the emergence of the field of critical Internet studies.1
13
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In this chapter, we explicitly propose to re-actualize and “reload” Marxian theory. The task is to create a Marxist theory of the Internet.
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Participatory Web as Ideology
Henry Jenkins argues that, increasingly, “the Web has become a site of consumer participation” (Jenkins 2008: 137). He argues that blogs and other social media bring about a “participatory culture.” Benkler (2006), Shirky (2008), and Tapscott and Williams (2007) have made similar arguments.
Answering the question of whether the web is participatory requires an understanding of the notion of participation. In democracy theory, the term participation is mainly used and most prominently featured in participatory democracy theory (Held 2006). The earliest use of the term participatory democracy that I could trace in the literature is in an article by Staughton Lynd (1965) that describes the grassroots organization of the student movement. Two central features of participatory democracy theory are the broad understanding of democracy as encompassing areas beyond voting, such as the economy, culture, and the household, and the questioning of the compatibility of participatory democracy and capitalism.
A participatory economy requires a “change in the terms of access to capital in the direction of more nearly equal access” and “a change to more nearly equal access to the means of labor” (Macpherson 1973, 71). “Genuine democracy, and genuine liberty, both require the absence of extractive powers” (Macpherson 1973: 121). A participatory economy involves the democratizing of industrial authority structures. Consequently, an Internet platform can only be participatory if it involves participatory ownership structures. Such participatory economy is a necessary, although not a suficient, condition for participatory democracy. Further factors include participatory learning and decision making. Platforms that are not built on a participatory economy model cannot be participatory.
Can Google, YouTube, and Facebook be considered participatory? Google is a corporation that is specialized in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. It is one of the largest transnational companies in the world. Common points of criticism of Google are that the page rank algorithm is secret and that the search results are personalized, which is facilitated through close surveillance of the search behavior of users. Google also exploits and monitors users
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by selling their data to advertising clients. Half (50.12%) of all people using the Internet access Google,2 and that is roughly 1.05 billion people, or almost 15% of the world population.3 Google would not exist without these users, because its profits are based on ads targeted to searches, which means that the search process is value-generating. Google’s more than 1 billion users are, however, largely lacking financial compensation. They perform unpaid, value-generating labor.
The stratification of the visibility of Google search results becomes evident if one searches for the term political news on Google: the main search results are news sites owned almost exclusively by big corporate media companies (see Table 13.1)
Facebook is the most popular social networking service in the world.4 Some points of criticism of the service are that it has a complex and long-winded privacy policy, and it is nontransparent to users which data are collected about them and how the data are used. Facebook users are not involved in decisions. Facebook fan groups are dominated by popular culture, with politics being a sideline. Oppositional political figures are marginalized (see Table 13.2). Facebook is dominated by entertainment. Politics on Facebook is dominated by established actors. Alternative political views are marginalized, and especially critical politics is not often found on Facebook. It is a more general feature of the capitalist culture industry that focuses more on entertainment because it promises larger audiences and profits.
Owned by Google, YouTube is the third most traficked web platform in the world.5 There have been some well-known political uses of YouTube, such as the video of the death of Neda Soltani in the 2009 Iranian protests and the video of the death of Ian Tomlinson at the London anti-G20 protests. YouTube is also a known haven for videos by human rights activists that would be censored elsewhere. However, the question arises about how much visibility YouTube really provides to progressives, at least compared to the numbers of views of other material that is shared on YouTube. The list of the ten most viewed videos on You-Tube (shown in Table 13.3) exemplifies how the corporate exploiters of surplus
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value-generating labor control YouTube’s political attention economy. At first sight, YouTube’s video category “News &
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Politics,” which is one of fifteen categories, seems to be the bright political star on the YouTube firmament. A closer look, however, shows that the most viewed video in this category is one in which children sing the song “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands.”6 It is an open question whether politics really does make many people very happy today. Entertainment is sought after on YouTube and Facebook, whereas more overtly political clips are far less visible.
Based on participatory democracy theory, we argue that scholars who suggest that today’s Internet is participatory advance an ideology that simply celebrates capitalism without taking into account how capitalist interests dominate and shape the Internet. Web 2.0 is not a participatory system, and it would be better understood in terms of class, exploitation, and surplus value.
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