Labour and Capital in the New Millenium

Session: Digital Capitalism: Digital capitalism: ‘profitless accumulation’ and ‘free labour’ Tiziana Terranova, Free labor: producing culture for the digital economy. Social Text , 18: 33-57, 2000. David Hesmondhalgh, User-generated content, free labour and the cultural industries. Ephermera 10 (¾): 267-384, 2010. Biju Mathew, The neoliberal firm and nested subsumption: Labour process transformations in the NYC taxi industry. Urban Studies 52(11): 2051–2071, 2015. -C.A. Instead of approaching internet as a disconnected cyberspace, Terranova’s essay, written just before the dot com crash and the beginning of web 2.0, attempts to look at internet as a “specific instance of the fundamental role played by free labor” in the post Fordist advanced capitalism. This allows her to link digital economy with the concept of social factory theorized by the Italian autonomists.    Free labor is defined as something that is “simultaneously given and unwaged, enjoyed and explo