Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory

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, which is 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 efectively 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 trafic of these flows of knowledge needs to be monitored (hence, the corporate concerns about the use of intranets), the Internet efectively functions as a channel through which human intelligence renews its capacity to produce.

Is it possible to look beyond the totalizing hype of the managerial literature but also beyond 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/afective 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 of cultural and technical labor are not produced by capitalism in any direct, cause-and-efect 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/afect.

This process is diferent from that described by popular, leftwing 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.

Subcultural movements have stufed 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 of subcultural members in the production of cultural goods (e.g., independent labels in music, small designer shops in fashion).¹⁸ This participation is, as the word suggests, 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 consensuscreating 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.²¹ Accordingly, 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 tied not only to its much vaunted capacity 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 of Internet 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 avantgarde of new configurations of labor that do not automatically guarantee elite status.

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 net as 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 is an 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 ofice 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 is indispensable 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 think in 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 diferent 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 the activity that 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

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 to highly 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 a 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 diferent 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 is disproportionately appropriated by established corporations.

From this point of view, the well-known notion that the Internet materializes a collective intelligence is not completely of the mark. The Internet highlights the existence of networks of immaterial labor and speeds up their accretion into a collective entity. The productive capacities of immaterial 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 qualities of 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 difuse, 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, afective, 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/afective production on the net, then, does not exist as a free-floating postindustrial utopia but in full, mutually constituting interaction with late capitalism.

Collective Minds

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 selforganization 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 diferent 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 enlarges the scope of self 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).

What is collective intelligence? It is a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the efective mobilization of skills…. The basis and goal of collective intelligence is the mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals rather than the cult of fetishized or hypostatized communities.³²

Like Kelly, Levy frames his argument within the common rhetoric of competition and flexibility that dominates the hegemonic discourse around digitalization: “The more we are able to form intelligent communities, as open-minded, cognitive subjects capable of initiative, imagination, and rapid response, the more we will be able to ensure our success in a highly competitive environment.”³³ In Levy’s view, the digital economy highlights the impossibility of absorbing intelligence within the process of automation: unlike the first wave of cybernetics, which displaced workers from the factory, computer networks highlight the unique value of human intelligence as the true creator of value in a knowledge economy. In his opinion, since the economy is increasingly reliant on the production of creative subjectivities, this production is highly likely to engender a new humanism, a new centrality of humans’ creative potentials.

Especially in Kelly’s case, it has been easy to dismiss the notions of a hive mind and a self-organizing Internet-as-free-market as Internet gold rush rhetoric, promptly demolished by more or less unexpected events of 2001 (dot-com crash, resurgence of international terrorism and imperialism). It was dificult to avoid a feeling of irritation at such willing oblivion of the realities of working in the high-tech industries, from the poisoning world of the silicon chips factories to the electronic sweatshops of America Online, where technical work is downgraded and worker obsolescence is high.³⁴ How can we hold on to the notion that cultural production and immaterial labor are collective on the net (both inner and outer) after the belated Y2K explosion in 2001 and without subscribing to the idealistic and teleological spirit of the wired revolution?

We could start with a simple observation: the self-organizing, collective intelligence of cybercultural thought captures the existence of networked immaterial labor, but was weal in its analysis of the operations of capital overall (including the coexistence of diferent capitalist lobbies and their relation to institutional governance). Capital, after all, is the unnatural environment within which the collective intelligence materializes. The collective dimension of networked intelligence needs to be understood historically, as part of a specific momentum of capitalist development. The Italian writers who are identified with the post-Gramscian Marxism of Autonomia Operaia have consistently engaged with this relationship by focusing on the mutation undergone by labor in the aftermath of the factory. The notion of a self-organizing collective intelligence looks uncannily like one of their central concepts, the “general intellect”—a notion that the autonomists extracted out of the spirit, if not the actual wording, of Marx’s Grundrisse. The “collective intelligence” or “hive mind” captures some of the spirit of the general intellect but removes the autonomists’ critical theorization of its relation to capital.

In the autonomists’ favorite text, the Grundrisse, and especially in the “Fragment on Machines,” Marx argues (as summarized by Paolo Virno) that

knowledge—scientific knowledge in the first place, but not exclusively— tends to become precisely by virtue of its autonomy from production, nothing less than the principal productive force, thus relegating repetitive and compartmentalized labor to a residual position. Here one is dealing with knowledge …, which has become incarnate … in the automatic system of machines.³⁵

In the vivid pages of the “Fragment,” the “other” Marx of the Grundrisse (adopted by the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s against the more orthodox endorsement of Capital), describes the system of industrial machines as a horrific monster of metal and flesh:

The production process has ceased to be a labor process in the sense of a process dominated by labor as its governing unity. Labor appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living, (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism .³⁶

The Italian autonomists extracted from these pages the notion of the general intellect as “the ensemble of knowledge … which constitutes the epicenter of social production.”³⁷ Unlike Marx’s original formulation, however, the autonomists eschewed the modernist imagery of the general intellect as a hellish machine. They claimed that Marx completely identified the general intellect (or knowledge as the principal productive force) with fixed capital (the machine) and thus neglected to account for the fact that the general intellect cannot exist independently of the concrete subjects who mediate the articulation of the machines with each other. The general intellect is an articulation of fixed capital (machines) and living labor (the workers). If we see the Internet, and computer networks in general, as the latest machines—the latest manifestation of fixed capital—then it won’t be dificult to imagine the general intellect as being well and alive today.

However the autonomists did not stop at describing the general intellect as an assemblage of humans and machines at the heart of postindustrial production. If this were the case, the Marxian monster of metal and flesh would just be updated to that of a world-spanning network where computers use human beings as a way to allow the system of machinery (and therefore capitalist production) to function. The visual power of the Marxian description is updated by the cyberpunk snapshots of the immobile bodies of the hackers, electrodes like umbilical cords connecting them to the matrix, appendixes to a living, all-powerful cyberspace. Beyond the special efects bonanza, the box-ofice success of The Matrix series validates the popularity of the paranoid interpretation of this mutation.

To the humanism implicit in this description, the autonomists have opposed the notion of a mass intellectuality, living labor in its function as the determining articulation of the general intellect. Mass intellectuality—as an ensemble, as a social body—“is the repository of the indivisible knowledges of living subjects and of their linguistic cooperation…. An important part of knowledge cannot be deposited in machines, but … it must come into being as the direct interaction of the labor force.”³⁸ As Virno emphasizes, mass intellectuality is not about the various roles of the knowledge workers, but is a “quality and a distinctive sign of the whole social labor force in the post-Fordist era.”³⁹

The pervasiveness of the collective intelligence within both the managerial literature and Marxist theory could be seen as the result of a common intuition about the quality of labor in informated societies. Knowledge labor is inherently collective; it is always the result of a collective and social production of knowledge.⁴⁰ Capital’s problem is how to extract as much value as possible (in the autonomists’ jargon, to “valorize”) out of this abundant, and yet slightly intractable, terrain.