--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "9780415896948" library_document_id: "b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc" source_sha256: "b76b52674e699a7d7369709c46c081ad5a82cdab89f79f34ec45b40bc1d8e8d3" pdf_physical_page_count: 325 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 70 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc?start=70&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc.md?start=70&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc.md?start=60&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc.md?start=80&limit=10" --- # Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory > 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=70 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED 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 quality of the participation to the digital economy constrained by the control unilaterally exercised by web giants on the technical configurations of social 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 access and 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 income to 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 the overall economic structure that supports them. The Arab Spring and the Assemble and Occupy 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. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=71 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED 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 Text 18, 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). 2 See http://www.netslaves.com. And also Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin’s playful classification of the dot-com labor hierarchies in Netslaves: True Tales of Working the Web (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000). 3 Lisa Margonelli, “Inside AOL’s ‘Cyber-Sweatshop,’” Wired, October 1999, 138. 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 Twenty-first Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989) and Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the “Grundrisse” (New York: Autonomedia, 1991). 5 Negri, The Politics of Subversion. 6 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Rout-ledge, 1991), 159. 7 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 40. 8 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 395. 9 Antonio Negri, Guide. Cinque lezioni su Impero e dintorni (Milan: Rafaello Cortina, 2003), 209 (my translation). 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. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=72 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED 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. (Brooklyn, 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 digital artisan was an expression of a short-lived phase in the Internet labor market corresponding to a temporary shortage of skills that initially prevented a more industrial division of labor. 13 Barbrook, “The High-Tech Gift Economy,” 135. 14 Ibid., 137. 15 Don Tapscott, The Digital Economy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996), xiii. 16 Ibid., 35 (emphasis added). 17 Ibid., 48. 18 For a discussion of the independent music industry and its relation to corporate culture, see David Hesmondalgh, “Indie: The Aesthetics and Institutional Politics of a Popular Music Genre,” Cultural Studies 13 (January 1999): 34–61. Angela McRobbie has also studied a similar phenomenon in the fashion and design industry in British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry? (London: Routledge, 1998). 19 See the challenging section on work in the high-tech industry in Bosma et al., Readme! 20 Martin Kenney, “Value-Creation in the Late Twentieth Century: The Rise of the Knowledge Worker,” in Cutting Edge: Technology, Information Capitalism and Social Revolution, eds. Jim Davis, Thomas Hirsch, and Michael Stack (London: Verso, 1997), 93; also see in the same anthology Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Capitalism in the Computer Age,” 57–71. 21 See Darko Suvin, “On Gibson and Cyberpunk SF,” in Storming the Reality Studio, ed. Larry McCafery (London: Durham University Press, 1991), 349–65; and Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future: SciTech 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 middlelevel, rather than clerical, employees. Such technologies responded to a managerial need for eficient 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, “Ofice 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). ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=73 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED 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). 24 See Frank Webster, Theories of the Information Society (London: Routledge, 1995). 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. 26 The 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 efects 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., Rave Of (Rome: Castelvecchi, 1996). 27 Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” 136. 28 In the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari described the process by which capital unsettles and resettles bodies and cultures as a movement of “decoding” ruled by “axiomatization.” Decoding is the process through which older cultural limits are displaced and removed, as with older, local cultures during modernization; the flows of culture and capital unleashed by the decoding are then channeled into a process of axiomatization, an abstract moment of conversion into money and profit. The decoding forces of global capitalism have then opened up the possibilities of immaterial labor. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone, 1984); and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone, 1988). 29 See Franco Berardi (Bifo), La nefasta utopia di potere operaio (Rome: Castelvecchi/DeriveApprodi, 1998), 43. 30 See Kevin Kelly, Out of Control (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994). ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=74 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED 44 The work of Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition is mainly concerned with knowledge rather than intellectual labor but still provides a useful conceptualization of the reorganization of labor within the productive structures of late capitalism. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geof Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=75 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED 47 See Howard Rheingold, “My Experience with Electric Minds,” in Bosma et al., Readme! 147–50; also David Hudson, Rewired: A Brief (and Opinionated) Net History (Indianapolis: Macmillan Technical Publishing, 1997). The expansion of the net is based on diferent types of producers adopting diferent strategies of income generation: some might use more traditional types of financial support (grants, divisions of the public sector, in-house Internet divisions within traditional media companies, businesses’ web pages, which are paid as with traditional forms of advertising); some might generate interest in one’s page and then sell the user’s profile or advertising space (freelance web production); and some might use innovative strategies of valorization, such as various types of ecommerce. 48 See Margonelli, “Inside AOL’s ‘Cyber-Sweatshop.’” 49 Andrew Leonard, “Open Season,” Wired, May 1999, 140. Open source harks back to the specific competencies embodied by Internet users in its pre-1994 days. When most net users were computer experts, the software structure of the medium was developed by way of a continuous interaction of diferent technical skills. This tradition 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 has important responsibilities and is 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. 52 It 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, “Selling Wine 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 mailing lists, 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). ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=76 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED 54 John Horvarth, “Freeware Capitalism,” nettime, February 5, 1998. 55 Ibid. 56 Netscape started like a lot of other computer companies: its founder, Marc Andreessen, was part of the original research group that developed the structure of the World Wide Web at the CERN laboratory, in Geneva. As with many successful computer entrepreneurs, he developed the browser as an ofshoot 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 computer industry, 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 and constitutes 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. 60 Ibid. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=77 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED The Political Economy of Cosmopolis Sean Cubitt ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=78 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED 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 natural attributes 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 exclusion of 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 simple domination 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 object of 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: of people, 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. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=79 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED 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 and common ownership systems. The diference between monetizable and what de Soto calls “dead capital” is that the capital that can be monetized is alienable; it is transferrable, mobile, liquid, and so 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 efect 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 solutions are likely to succeed, however, is that the tendency of the rate of profit to fall constantly drives capital 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, it was not until the years after 2001 that business models based in 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 on Machines” in Grundrisse (1973: 690f.), 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 argues in 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? 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc.md?start=80&limit=10)