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

[Stephen Hastings-King]

i'll put some comments in between your lines below.


>
> ***DRAFT OUTLINE***
>
> I. It Is Your Patriotic Duty to Consume
>
> Consumption, in the capital system, is not only a means of individuals
> reproducing themselvees, i.e. in the consumption of basic necessities;
> it is objectively necessary to the reproduction of the system.


===>capitalism encompasses a sequence of dominant arrangements.
it seems to me that the above is a consequence of fordism.  in the
regulation school versions of the story of fordism, expansion of consumer
credit was linked to progressively increasing wages guaranteed by collective
bargaining arrangements (the problem here, as with most of regulation school
work, is the tendency to treat all of a particular phase of capitalism as a
mode of production/totality that can be comprehended on the basis of making
allegory of industrial production and the socio-political relations which
enframed it--this production was itself locked into a particular
geographical configuration, which was made explicit later on obviously--but
that by the bye)

another way: the centrality of mass consumption is a function of the
emergence of mass production of consumer goods.  it was underpinned by the
expansion of consumer credit into mortgages which entailed the fashioning of
all manner of happiness production facilities within the suburban home
establishment (paradigmatically)...the argument goes that so long as this
was linked to the above, the outcome was a relatively stable variant of
capitalism.  but fordism for a variety of reasons (which move around
depending on the analyst--there's not a consensus on a set of explanations
for it) gave way to flex accumulation (sticking with the regulation school
terminology for consistency's sake) across the 1970s and then to the
shangri-la of neoliberal-land/"globalization"...castells is still the best
i've seen on this (rise of the network society)...

the line would be that there's a basic defunctionalization of the
underpinnings of this consumption-uber-alles rationality that accompanied
the transition away from fordism.  i think i'm getting ahead of myself.
back to the passage.  but the point is important--you can't really talk
about features of capitalism like consumption as if they're metaphysical.
the nouns denote relations that are framed in ways that are historically
specific (and which therefore change)...


> Thus
> Bush must admonish good Americans, in the wake of 9/11, to please go
> on consuming as usual. Underconsumption represents a danger to the
> system, especially to a system based on overproduction of goods that
> are not produced on any rational basis but only in the hopes of
> realizing a profit (i.e. according to Marx commodities exist only for
> their exchange value, not for their use value). It is imperative for
> capitalism that the commodity be consumed at some point, in order for
> capital, which has been invested in creating the commodity form, may
> again return to the form of money and thus capital. (M-C-M =
> Money-Commodity-Money).
>

ok so it turns out that, in my view, for this to work you have to be more
concrete about consumption in the contemporary phase of capitalist
devolution.
the simplest way to do it is to see in it a kind of "fordist
nostalgia"---which is a strictly ideological question (in the most marxian
sense of the term).
*that* is why the bush people's attempts to continue consumption levels at
levels entirely unhinged from the geography of production is such a problem.
there's alot that could be said about all this.  that's another problem.

what the allusion to capital seems to do is operate as a tautology.  you
start with a notion of consumption and then restate it in terms of m-c-m.


>
> II. The Curse of Consumption as (Re)Production
>
> Thus, the more one consumes commodities, the more one participates in
> the reproduction of capitalism.


this is strange.  it sounds like commodities are in themselves ideology
spores that trap unsuspecting people with lovely smells and gets those
people to play with them.  once a magic buttong gets pushed, typically by
accident i guess, the Evil Ideology Rhizome embeds itself in the skull of
the unsuspecting people.  and so on.  here it seems to me that you run into
a version of the upside and downside of the section on commodity fetishism
at the same time.


> The consumption of commodities is one
> aspect of the reproduction of everyday life under capitalism.
> Consumption of commodities, in this sense, must be understood as an
> entire system, that includes the consumption of advertising material,
> the work of choosing which commodities to buy, and the choice of a
> lifestyle or identity based on the consumption of particular kinds of
> commodities, both physical and cultural commodities (i.e. the high
> school student who identifies as "goth" or the enlightened consumer
> who buys only organic food and listens to NPR).


ok so this is more about ideological reproduction, which situates the
playing with commodities (and the identities that are offered along with
them.  the appeal of this is, i think, that people like to like things in
the way they're told they like to like them.  we're free like that, you
see.)


> Consumption, far from
> being an exercise of individual freedom, is in capitalism a duty and a
> form of unpaid work which is essential to the ongoing survival of the
> system.


this is the pivot in the argument of the whole piece, yes? i'm not sure
about whether it's best to argue the point explicitly or slide it in this
way.  i suppose it's a genre question, really--what you see this piece as
being, what you want it to do.

>
>
> III. The Reproduction of Everyday Life
>
> Understanding the productive aspect of consumption requires
> understanding the way capitalism, as a totality, reproduces itself in
> all the mundane details of everyday existence. The works of Adorno and
> Lefebvre are key here, for both wrote extensively on this very
> subject. By exploring their theories, we can deepen our understanding
> of how contemporary capitalism operates not only in the realm of
> production, but as a total system that produces and reproduces persons
> and subjectivities and not only commodities.
>

uh...as interesting as i've found these two at various times, for various
reasons, i wouldn't set them up as Magical Figures that have Worked It All
Out.
social reproduction is (again) a dynamic shaped by parameters that, again,
are historically variable.  so there's alot of work that can and should be
done on an ongoing basis in order to figure out how that reproduction both
is organized (fabrication of demand and so forth) and is ordered "from
below" (via relations that are brought into play within/across demand as
fabricated.  i'm not sure how clear this is: it's shorthand.  what it seems
to point toward is a philosophical and anthropological field of
interrogation.  at best, adorno and lefebvre show what such work might look
like.  but they didn't do it for us.  they did it in terms shaped by their
particular trajectories and situations.  it's just like that.


>
> IV. Why Buy the Cow When You Can Get the Milk for Free
>
> >From consumption, we must now return to the realm of production in its
> cultural (and immaterial) form.


frame switch into cognitive capital analysis.


> With the so called "web 2.0
> revolution," we find that consumers are, in their leisure time, also
> becoming producers. But in this case, they are performing unpaid labor
> in the service of major corporations.


i think brad brace is right about this part.


> Whereas once corporations had to
> pay workers to produce content for individuals to consume during their
> so called "free time," now consumers are producing such content
> themselves, for free! (This gives a whole new meaning to the term
> "free time").


yeah--i agree with one of the other folk here that you need to make some
separations here between whatever you take open source-ish work to be and
imply and
where you go next.  personally, i looked into the politics of this stuff
quite a while ago and found that there are a ton of what i suppose i'd call
right nietzchean types playing in this world, which make of it a kind of
corporate farm team...but that's not all that's either happening or is
possible.  either way, this is different from myspace etc.

Insofar as this production occurs on large corporate
> websites, such as MySpace and Facebook, consumer-producers are in fact
> allowing themselves to be exploited, creating capital (and surplus
> value) for the large corporations without receiving any compensation.
>

i assume you're referencing at one level or another the claims to ownership
that facebook made to the content that was posted to it, which they say
they've run away from since.

>
> V. The Struggle for Everyday Life
>
> Despite the overwhelming colonization of everyday life by the forces
> of capitalism, there are always already new possibilities for struggle
> opened up by changes in technology including the so called Web 2.0
> revolution. Especially, the same technologies used by the major
> corporations are also available to individuals and can be used in
> alternative ways; mailing lists, blogs, bulletin boards, and personal
> websites offer the possibility to produce critical thought and to act
> in non-productive ways that do not strengthen the system. Indeed,
> while overall the Facebook phenomena is an example of a new form of
> exploitation of immaterial labor, its content is ambivalent; one can
> imagine a Karl Marx or Theodor Adorno Facebook page, that uses the
> technology precisely in order to spread critical thinking that weakens
> the system, dispels ideology, and breaks through reified and false
> consciousness. One can also organize anti-capitalist and subversive
> actions more effectively using the internet, cell phones, and Web 2.0
> technologies. As long as capitalism exists there will also exist the
> possibility for anti-capitalist action, a possibility that lays the
> groundwork for future revolution.
>

on this, i dunno.  i don't see it.  it reminds me of something you'd read
about in that older collection "commodify your dissent"
but this is not easy, thinking about what revolution is at this point, what
level one can and should work on or about in order to help speed the plow.

i gotta go.

stephen

>
> ***
>
> This is obviously just an outline, and the essay itself will require
> extensive research to complete. Constructive comments would be greatly
> appreciated.
>
> David Powers
> March 5, 2009
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> microsound at microsound.org
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>
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