Welcome

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 exploited” that is structurally linked to the operation of the advanced capitalism and is not just an instance of capitalist appropriation. Internet is a site where the new forms of labor- flexible, collective intelligence, continuous re-skilling, freelance work etc. - have come into being. Terranova’s main thesis then is to understand ‘internet’ and ‘outernet’- the network of social, cultural and economic relationships surrounding internet as part of the same network of postindustrial economy. Free labour, then becomes a site where the new logic of value re-configures the binary between producer and consumer.   

Written in 2010, after the advent of web 2.0, Hesmondhalgh is a sort of a response to Terranova’s 2000 piece. Web 2.0 was characteristically defined by its emphasis upon user-generated content. Web 2.0 is the world of Facebook, Youtube  that most of our generation grew up on. A basic question to pose is how does one understand one’s leisure activity on face book- chatting, and other social activities, as form of labour? 

Now, Hesmondhalgh resists the gesture to pair all forms of labour with exploitation (Terranova too makes this distinction). a more important question for Hesmondhalgh’s is to understand if the “people who sit at their computers modifying code are as ‘exploited’ as those in the Indonesian sweat shops? To answer this question, Hesmondhalgh goes into providing an analytical understating of the term ‘exploitation’ to say that the “explanatory power of ‘exploitation’ rests on an ethical distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of compulsion. Moving on from the ‘leftist’ critique of digital labour, Hesmondhalgh goes on to ask if unpaid labour is always a problem. In direct response to Terranova, it is argued that “those who undertook such unpaid digital labour might have gained a set of rewards for such work” i.e. it insists that we have to hold on to the value of work done for its own sake, or as ‘gift’ labour. The thesis is understandable but cannot be applied to capitalist conglomerates that came to dominate web 2.0.  However, as a response to the question posed in previous paragraph, Hesmondhalgh’s reference to a distinction between user-generated content and user-generated data seems simplistic when one understand that on sites like Facebook et al all user generated content is user generated data. If one agrees that there is no one monolithic internet existing out there, one has to think about how being on Facebook et al is different from being on 4chan et al to ground Hesmondhalgh's main thesis.  

Matthew’s paper, based on an ethnographic data on NY’s Taxi industry looks at the transformation in labour process and extracts some “essential aspects of a new regime of labour subsumption” which he argues can be used to understand changing labour processes across industries. A neoliberal crisis of 70s is characterized as a crisis in real subsumption (full control over the labor process) that made multinational capital to retreat to the formal subsumption (absolute surplus extraction but no control over labour process). However, according to Matthews this return of formal subsumption is simplistic. More than a return, the crises allowed a complex and new structure of subsumption that combined forms of both formal subsumption as well as real subsmumption. This hybrid form is termed 'nested subsumption' by Matthew. Matthew’s analysis again helps one imagine, what Anna Tsing calls, the bigness of neo liberal capital without homogenizing the process. Also, it is interesting to note the flow of information, real-time control etc made possible by new technologies etc embodied via the material reality of the GPS system as structural to the idea of the nested subsumption possible and links Matthew’s essay with the question of digital economy and free labor on the internet.  In a way, both Terranova and Matthew should be seen as a response to Hesmondhalgh which is unable to bring forth the bigness of the global capital and interconnections or to think if the negative aspects itself are structural to the whole process.