Cyber-proletariat

That's odd, I finished reading it yesterday

(and not because I'm special, bought it off Amazon)

Still digesting it. Generally I liked it. It uses both an autonomist notion of class composition and a TC/Endnotes notion of 'rifts', without fully settling with either, to map the vast global digital proletariat and its segmentations by race/nationality/gender. So there's plenty on toxic microchip assembly work, Silicon Valley cleaners and security guards, microtasked content-moderators, extractive workers in DRC etc, which blows the 'we're all immaterial knowledge workers now' kinda hype out of the water very persusively.

Not sure about classing social media as unpaid labour like housework. He points out that Whatsapp was acquired by Facebook for $19bn while only having 55 employees, and that it's the activity of the user-base that gives a network its value (riffing on Metcalfe's Law). That seems plausible, yet the relation seems more one of usufruct rights in return for data ownership. That seems a novel kind of exploitation relationship and I'd have liked a more specific form-analysis than analogy to other forms of unpaid labour. I've seen it compared to feudal usufruct in land/payments in kind, but that doesn't seem quite right either. McKenzie Wark calls it 'vectoralism' (the owner of the communication vector accumulates information which they can monetise), but he juxtaposes that to capitalism, when such vectors are clearly capital imho, i.e. Facebook invests in server farms and software and coders as part of M-C-M'.

So I think he's kinda onto something here, but I wasn't fully persuaded (by him, or Wark, for that matter). I thought the autonomist analysis of Web 2.0 as recuperating the flight to peer-to-peer autonomy of earlier net culture was good, and I think the point generalises; Netflix/Spotify/Amazon Prime Instant Video as capital's response to decommodified peer-to-peer file sharing etc. That said I think he missed a trick in not noting how much social media use is itself part of a clandestine refusal of work by bored clerical strata. Major reason I pay for a smartphone is to skive at work, bypassing employer web monitoring.

Oh yeah, and it interestingly points out that the coiner of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, wrote to UAW leader Walter Reuther after WWII, warning him wholesale automation was only a matter of time, and urging the union to aquire the rights to then-nascent automation tech so that workers could control the process not be impoverished by it. I didn't realise Wiener had labour sympathies, and was under FBI surveillance. Shame he didn't have a critique of trade unions as Reuther ignored his advice.

Scanning it is exploitating my unpaid labour so I'm refusing to work. I'm sure pdfs will leak soon.

I can't remember if he actually says using social media produces value; iirc he says that the market capitalisation of firms like Whatsapp reflects the unpaid labour of the network users, not just the labour of its waged employees. I think that's true (though I'm not sure I'd characterise tweeting as 'labour' except in the most generic sense of 'conscious human activity'), but I think it probably needs to be unpacked a bit more. In terms of mainstream economic categories, you could argue social media networks are natural monopolies (which is a stronger claim than Metcalfe's Law). In Marxist terms, it seems like (very algorithmically targeted) advertising is their commodity and advertisers are their customers, with market capitalisation reflecting (expected) revenues.

I know a lot of 'digital autonomist' types reject this as not grasping the way networks are totally different to newspapers, but in form-analytic terms I can't see why. Take early Twitter - it had a huge market valuation, but that was speculating that they'd find an effective way to monetise their user-base. If the revenues don't materialise, the bubble bursts and the speculators lose out. I guess I don't see why posting to Twitter is any more 'exploitation' than wearing branded clothes is (free reputational labour, building the goodwill on the brand's balance sheet). But I digress.

(On Wiener, for context the guy was a child prodigy - BSc in maths at 14, PhD by 17. I was surprised he was vaguely leftist due to cybernetics' military origins, though I think I might have confused/conflated him with John von Neumann).

Maybe the brand thing is a bad comparison. I dunno, it just doesn't seem very helpful comparing the 'unpaid labour' of posting on facebook with the unpaid labour of housework. Like, the arrangement seems like usufruct of infrastructure in exchange for ownership of data. I'm open to that being 'exploitation of labour' in some sense, but it doesn't seem anything like either abstract labour or housework (housework's private, indirectly for capital, subject to 'the patriarchy of the wage'; social media's public, directly for capital - if we use the 'users produce the commodity data' frame, not mediated by the wage at all really...).

Like it's true that everything you do on social media enhances the data profile that allows the sale of targeted ads etc, but that's increasingly true of lots of things. Every time you use your debit/credit card, it enhances the data profile that allows the bank to detect and minimise fraud losses. Are you 'labouring for the bank' every time you buy something? If this 'big data everything' is significant, it seems to demand a specific analysis of the relationships and social forms involved.

It's a long time since I read it, but iirc Cyber-Marx was focused on 'high tech', 'the general intellect', and was quite pro late Negri (though it was published just before Empire). This book is pretty critical of Empire-era Negri, in large part by stressing how there's nothing immaterial about information technology, from coltan mines to toxic PCB assembly to the unseen proletariat in Silicon Valley and the microtasked moderators around the world. So I'd say it responds to the criticism of fetishising 'high tech' by showing how cybernetics (broadly understood) has changed class composition and the labour process, even as it drives expansion of extractive and assembly work. In this one he mentions the economic crisis puncturing the 90s/2000s tech optimism, which can be read partly as self-criticism I think, though it's mainly developed through a critique of Negri & Hardt.

Yeah I must have read it the best part of a decade ago, so I might be misremembering, or remembering it through the lens of critical reviews.

They're usually pretty harsh and hate Negri... that was the critical review I was thinking of!

So, here's what he actually says. He's riffing on the Wages for Facebook Manifesto, which I took as tongue-in-cheek. And also something I missed on first pass; at the end he starts talking about how chinese sweatshop workers are exploited making computers and western consumers are exploited using them (while rejecting 'direct equivalence') :-/

Only insofar as he says the Wages for Facebook manifesto's "echo of the autonomist feminist 'wages for housework' campaign against the unpaid contribution of domestic work to value creation is intentional and apropos." I don't think he's saying they're the same, but that they're both forms of unpaid work for capital. But yeah I struggle to see it as work too, hence I read the WFM manifesto as a provocation rather than a literal analogy.

See, while I instinctively reject the idea that pissing about on facebook or twitter is 'unpaid work', it does seem a reasonable thing to say about say, duolingo (where you learn a language by translating text). Yet in both cases, you get gratis use of a service in return for producing marketable data for the owner of the service.

That's not abstract labour (no commodity exchange between labourer and owner of the product of labour). Nor is it anything like housework. But it is plausibly a means by which people do free labour for capital (the main claim of the Wages for Facebook manifesto).

Like I said above, McKenzie Wark calls it 'vectoralism', but sees it as post-capitalist. Whereas is still seems obviously capitalist to me: the 'vectoralists' invest money (M) in coders (labour power) and energy, servers (means of production) in order to produce data (commodity) which yields more money (M'). The difference to 'normal' capitalist production is the additional step, that in order to produce the data-commodity, the non-waged labour of users is directly essential (whereas a factory worker can still make cars if his wife leaves him and he has to cook his own dinner, or if he's an enlightened factory worker whose wife works and they split the chores and childcare 50-50 or whatever - the role of unpaid reproductive labour is in reproducing the commodity labour power, not the commodity sold by the capitalist, it's indirect).

And without sounding like Negri, the 'labour' of duolingo is arguably a post-work form of labour, where use values for others (translated texts) and use value for oneself (language skills) are produced simultaneously (albeit at the moment, still via the mediation of capital). Like, I don't really find the ways it's being theorised very satisfying, but I don't think it's as inherently ridiculous as it might sound (and I think that's the main comparison with wages for housework - the incredulity the demand elicits, which may seem like common sense in 30-40 years).

True. I guess the difference, if there is one, isn't the use values so much as there's an extant allocation and incentive mechanism for the labour that isn't the wage. (Still not unique, people volunteer to do first aid at events etc, but the gamified personal development approach of duolingo is arguably a novel way to incentivise and allocate what could be rote work).