Late capitalism marks a
general shift, by no means total or dominant, away from industrial,
factory-based labor. We now labor to produce more than goods. We produce
affects, feelings, and communications that are circulated ad finitum through a
networked culture. Increasingly so, we are online – tapped into this network.
We share a compulsive desire to give ourselves over to the Internet. We
proliferate the production/consumption of these affects, feelings, and
communications not only to valorize ourselves, but also to be a part of the
online social factory that is responsible for this knowledge. Terranova
describes the production of knowledge in the digital economy as free labor,
which necessitates collaboration, participation, and the continuous building of
existing content. Is this what makes networks so enormously resilient and
adaptable? That content can be so swiftly restored when thousands of people,
compelled by passion, devote themselves to the Internet? And what are the risks
when passion is the glue keeping the digital economy together?
There are specific forms of
knowledge production that we intuitively understand as labor, such as web
programming, multimedia production, and digital services, mostly because these
knowledge workers are compensated for their work. But what about the forms of online
activity that are not recognized as labor by knowledge workers, e.g. blogging,
social media content? This type of labor serves to create cultural knowledge by
setting cultural standards, opinions, tastes, fashions within larger cultural
flows. It provides the “looks, styles, and sounds” that sell commodities from
clothes to video games. Businesses in fact take advantage of cultural knowledge
to know what people like, what they are thinking, and then monetize this
knowledge. Per Terranova, business valorizes knowledge, i.e. human
intelligence, as the main source of added value today. But what is interesting
is that knowledge work cannot be micro-managed in a Fordist sense. Instead,
knowledge production requires liberation from any sort of management. The
Internet liberates the structures of the work process and encourages social
collaboration by making the network a seemingly “open communications
environment.”
Is this how we are being
duped? Because we are providing free labor in an environment that is
increasingly enjoyable for ourselves? Terrenova paints the utopian vision of
sitting at home and enjoying the simple pleasures of participating on the
Internet. We get to surf the web for free, but the Internet as an industry is
still highly susceptible to cultural and capitalist hegemonies. Terranova makes
a strong point that we are producing mass intellect collectively, but being
compensated selectively [by the logic of profit]. Free labor goes
unacknowledged all the time, but do we seem to care? Being online makes you
feel passion, belong, and meaning. We rarely think about exploitation because
nothing is lost. You cannot quantify skills, knowledge, affect, or any other
immaterial component of your work. While the knowledge produced can be
appropriated, incorporated into a commodity, sold, and reintroduced into cultural
flows with new order and intensity, knowledge workers are not aware
of/concerned about this structural inequity. They do not feel the suffering of
their free labor. There is no catastrophe of the human essence.
What strikes me as important
in Terranova’s argument is that the digital economy is immanent to capital. Everything
online takes place within this terrain. We have our own desires, but capitalism
is invested in these passions and desires. Capitalism wants us to want things
though consumption and production. If the gift economy is merely an important
economic tool in the capitalist system, and free labor is driven by the
passions of the crowd, then what I am struggling with is that self-exploitation
on the part of the laborer seems to be perpetuating and driving forward this economic system. Are these conditions for better or for worse?
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