[microsound] "When Facebook Isn't Fun, or, Why iLife Isn't My Life: Immaterial Labor in the Age of Web 2.0" (Draft)

[David Powers]

Hi, Just a couple of notes:

First, yes I'm a Marxist, and my essay will indeed be taking an
explictly Marxist position. I make no apology for that. My Marxism is
however not, I hope, simply a mechanical rehashing of some dogmatic
positions. The main Marxist philosophers I intend to reference are
actually Theodor Adorno and Henri Lefebvre, who both argued for
positions substantially different than those of the more vulgar,
dogmatic Marxists.

Second, you criticize the Marxist theory based on the theory of
alienation. I DO NOT intend to use the theory of alienation in my
critique of labor. The alienation critique is a part of early, more
humanist Marx and is not central to the concept of exploitation that I
am arguing here. My concept of exploitation is simply this: workers
create value, MONETARY VALUE, through their labor, but a surplus
portion of that value goes not to them but to increase the profits of
Capital. In the case of social networking sites, more and more
consumer-producers are producing cultural content and commodities for
FREE, but someone else is making a profit off of it.

Let me be clear here--I'm NOT saying that their is no "use value" to
Facebook for the user. I'm saying the cultural content they produce
also has "exchange value" -- monetary value -- but the user does not
receive this value normally, Facebook receives all the monetary value.

Finally, in the actual, finished essay (not the draft) I definitely
want to incorporate mention of Free Cultural Works and Free Software.
I will also have to look into Andrew Feenberg if I have time. Thanks
for your thoughtful comments. And for at least engaging a Marxist view
rather than simply scoffing, even if you disagree! ;-)

~David


On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 10:02 AM, Charlie DeTar <chazen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for sending this!  It's a fun to think about.
>
> There are two aims this outline presents that I am sympathetic to:
>  * Highlighting the imbalance of contributions to web2.0 sites when
> those contributions become owned by the web2.0 corporations
>  * Searching for ways to promulgate ideas about alternative ways to view
> the world, outside a capitalist perspective; trying to break capitalist
> hegemony and understand its modes of self-perpetuation.
>
> That said, I find the over-reliance on Marxist analysis to fall a bit
> flat.  Many Marxist ideas are worth considering, and are certainly
> important from a historical perspective, but even the example of a "Karl
> Marx facebook page" reeks of ineffectual undergraduate clubs which
> rehash old ideas and dream of the proletarian revolution as they picket
> a university.  I'm skeptical of any overtly Marxist analysis finding
> traction in the Web2.0 world, thus I'm skeptical of section V in the
> outline.
>
> I don't believe this is just a problem with the fashionability (or lack
> thereof) of Marx -- I think there are theoretical problems with this as
> well.  It seems that the primary crux of this outline has to do with
> labor -- the labor people contribute to web2.0 sites.  The Marxist
> analysis would criticize capitalist labor for the alienation of workers
> from the fruits of their labor.  But you can't claim that a Facebook
> contributor is alienated from their contributions to Facebook -- the
> user will have a flashier "wall", nicer photos, more in-depth and
> possibly more meaningful relationships with friends, etc.  You can't
> pretend that these are merely workers driven into an exploitative
> relationship with a capitalist boss.  People are free to use the system
> to the extent they wish, and to stop using it at any time, and they get
> value from their use.  There may be edge cases where someone gets hurt
> by not using Facebook, but this is a stretch.
>
> It is precisely this positive value proposition that makes Facebook
> popular, and this is where it is insidious as well:  Facebook exploits
> momentum, lack of critical analysis, and an initial lack of superior
> alternatives to become hegemonic.  But I don't think this has much to do
> with labor, it seems to me that there's a deeper phenomenon of cultural
> momentum going on that might be interesting to explore.  You might find
> some ideas in the work of Andrew Feenberg here -- he's a
> Science/Technology/Society researcher/philosopher exploring the
> relationship between social and technical production.  Chapter 5 of his
> book "Questioning Technology" deals with the problems of human agency in
> a technocratically dominated world; this might be relevant.
>
> A couple of other directions that I would like to see an analysis like
> this go:  first, it ought to consider the movements for Free Cultural
> Works and Free Software.  These are astonishingly successful movements
> where, without the theoretical baggage of anti-capitalism, people are
> trying to create societal structures that promote the sharing of work in
> a way that preserves freedoms beyond those afforded by the
> Facebooks/YouTubes, and thus would eliminate the corporate control over
> peoples' production.  The definitions (see
> http://freedomdefined.org/Definition ) take into account the radically
> different nature of digital production from the agrarian production Marx
> was familiar with.
>
> Second, you might consider alternative conceptions of what labor is.  I
> found this essay on Buddhist Economics to have a refreshing alternative
> perspective on labor, which takes a holistic view on human wellness
> rather than the assumption that labor is an inherent "bad":
> http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
> Particularly where the labor you have in mind is labor undertaken during
> as recreation, it seems disingenuous to claim that the only value of the
> labor is in the commodity that is derived from it.
>
> cheers,
> Charlie
>