2000word media work

Research question: How does platforms such as LinkedIn mediate the performance of professional self-branding among Gen Z, and what does this reveal about identity construction and digital labour in platform capitalism?

– Use Marxist and Schumpeter’s theories

– Use at least 8 of the sources provided and additional references (academic and reliable)

– Include literature review

– Find a contemporary case study, issue, debate, development, or news report, to use

– Harvard referencing style

– No AI

Article

Digital work: Self-branding
and social capital in the
freelance knowledge

economy

Alessandro Gandini
Middlesex University, UK

Abstract
Existing research shows that self-branding in the knowledge economy is a key promotional device
for the pursuit of self-realization in a context that reifies entrepreneurialism as the main ideological
stance. However, there is still reluctance to fully acknowledge the processes of sociality that
constitute self-branding practice. While the relationship between branding and the affective
dynamics of social production of value fostered by the diffusion of Web 2.0 is widely acknowledged
in the literature, there still seems to be a lack of understanding of the extent to which self-branding
relates to social relationships in the production of socialized value for individuals. The study of self-
branding practices across digital freelance professions in the knowledge economy reveals how
social media has come to represent a working tool that serves the curation of a professional image
and the management of social relationships via the enactment of performative practices of sociality,
which exist around a shared notion of reputation as value. Here, self-branding becomes an
investment in social relationships with expected return for the acquisition of a reputation. This
substantially equates self-branding with what social theory calls social capital, being instrumental to
secure employment in the freelance-based labour market of the digital knowledge economy.

Keywords
Digital media, digital work, freelance, knowledge work, reputation, self-branding, social capital

Introduction

The notions of personal and self-branding over the past few decades have become central concepts

in the knowledge economy, indicating those processes of marketization of the self for the

Corresponding author:

Alessandro Gandini, Department of Media, Middlesex University, The Burroughs, Hendon, London, NW4 4BT,

UK.

Email: a.gandini@mdx.ac.uk

Marketing Theory
2016, Vol. 16(1) 123–141

ª The Author(s) 2015
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empowerment and professional success of the individual. Existing marketing research acknowl-

edges that self-branding in the knowledge economy is a device for self-promotion for the pursuit of

self-realization in a context that reifies entrepreneurialism as the main ideological stance and

criticizes how this becomes as an explicit form of labour in post-Fordist capitalism (Hearn, 2008).

However, there still seems to be a reluctance to fully acknowledge the extent to which self-

branding relates to social relationships in the production of social value for individuals.

The relationship between branding and value is widely acknowledged in the literature. Brands

are commonly defined as cultural, ideological and sociological objects which do not only

mediate cultural meaning but operate as ideological referents that shape cultural rituals within

societal dynamics (Schroder, 2009). With the diffusion of Web 2.0 and an ever-more partici-

patory culture, branding got subsumed into a dynamic of social production of value relying

extensively on affect (Arvidsson, 2011). How this applies to personal branding remains, how-

ever, somewhat overlooked. In particular, current marketing research fails to fully acknowledge

the processes of sociality that constitute self-branding and how these construct value for

knowledge workers. While consumer research has seen a relatively recent narrative turn

acknowledging how identity is discursively produced in the form of an identity work that

accompanies current understandings of consumption (Parsons, 2010), and there is abundant

literature on consumer work, ‘prosumption’ and how the immaterial labour of consumers con-

tributes to the value of a market offering (Cova and Dalli, 2009; Dujarier, 2014), the idea of self-

branding as the construction of a public and social identity remains poorly understood in relation

to contemporary processes of socialization of value, and particularly to how this relates to the

marketization – and the management – of social relationships across professional contexts that

make intensive use of social networking sites.

This article aims to fill this gap by looking at social media usage for self-branding purposes

among freelance knowledge workers in two different European urban contexts, London and Milan.

Knowledge work today is converging towards a digital and freelance-based economy (Cappelli

and Keller, 2013) where social media has come to represent a working tool that serves the curation

of a professional image and the management of social relationships for purposes of professional

success and career progression. The study of self-branding practices in this context shows how

social media activity is made of what may be seen as performative practices of sociality that exist

around a shared notion of reputation as the cultural conception of value. Thus, is here argued, self-

branding becomes a form of ‘digital work’ as an investment in social relationships with an

expected return, which points at the acquisition of a reputation. This substantially equates self-

branding with what social theory calls ‘social capital’ (Granovetter, 1973, 1985; Lin, 1999,

2002) as to indicate the determinant element for successful job search and the production of

socialized value across the freelance-based labour market of the digital knowledge economy.

The approach adopted in this article aligns with those believing that social theory-informed

critiques of marketing processes have the potential to generate valuable advances in marketing

theory (Østergaard and Fitchett, 2012). Self-branding as here evidenced combines the curation of

an online branded persona with the strategic management of social relationships, pointing at the

acquisition of a reputational capital which may be mobilized and accessed by professionals

embedded within a network of personal contacts (Granovetter, 1973, 1985). Reputation represents

the form taken by social capital within digitalized environments, where social interaction most

often occurs at a distance and with a lesser extent of co-presence and proximity, being an

instrumental feature in securing employment in a freelance-based economy as it represents the

indigenous, cultural conception of value shared by participants in this labour market.

124 Marketing Theory 16(1)

The use of social media serves the aim of engineering the construction of a reputation through

the use of personal branding techniques. This enables new forms of managerially steered sociality

that are based upon the fact that digital technologies and social media allow reputation to become

tangible via a number of different – and more or less reliable – indicators, rendering it the most

important asset for the individual brand. I will henceforth conceptualize this socio-economic

context as a reputation economy (Hearn, 2010), as it is reputation that permits the allocation of

unequal informational resources in this individualized labour market by functioning as the inter-

mediary that transforms social relationships into value.

Self-branding and the rise of a freelance economy

The notion of personal or self-branding became popular in the late 1990s evolving out of self-help

and self-improvement methods that could be managed for corporate success (Peters, 1999). This

was originally conceived as a process of self-packaging of identity substantially delinked from

skills, motivations and interests and centred on the crafting of a unique and authentic image to be

sold on the labour market (Fisher-Roffer, 2000; Lair et al., 2005; Peters, 1999). Self-branding got

rapidly involved in the dialectic between production and consumption over the Internet (Moor,

2003), quickly converging towards a broader dimension that markets the branding of reflexivity

skills for the purpose of creating a brand promise (McNally and Speak, 2002; Wee and Brooks,

2010).

This article builds upon this premise to embrace Hearn’s critical approach of the branded self

(2008, 2010, 2011) that considers the reflexive project of the self a distinct form of labour under

post-Fordist capitalism (Hearn, 2008). Hearn sustains that when promotionalism, intended as the

winning of attention or emotion, comes to be the dominant mode of communication over the past

few decades (Wernick, 1991), the construction of a branded persona becomes necessary practice in

contemporary marketing regimes and represents a distinct kind of labour that involves an out-

wardly directed process of self-construction (Hearn, 2008). This, she argues, is particularly central

in the context of the knowledge economy, which fully embodies the ethos of post-Fordist capit-

alism by reifying an ideological representation of entrepreneurship in a socio-economic dynamic

where social relationships are central to value production. This brings to what she calls the

‘socialized worker’, drawing from the lexicon of the Italian Autonomist Marxists, as the product of

the reflexive project of the self as a process of immaterial labour heavily reliant on the valorization

of subjectivity (Hearn, 2011).

This nonetheless suggests two still unexplored implications. In a broader perspective, the

marketing literature acknowledges the relationship between branding and value in the form of

a social production of value relying extensively on affect, where value is not so much

produced through proprietary resources and via commodity exchange; rather, it unfolds from

the periphery and boundaries of organizational practice, where surplus can increasingly be

found in non-measurable intangible assets among which branding remains central (Arvidsson,

2011). However, despite a significant body of critical media research examining online

practices of affectivity and celebrity construction through networked and affective publics

(Boyd, 2006, 2011; Papacharissi, 2015; Marwick, 2013; Marwick and Boyd, 2011), the extent

to which social media, where the self is the device around which not just individual but

social activity revolves for a variety of purposes that mix play and work (Hogan, 2010; Uski

and Lampinen, 2014), intervenes in contemporary practices of professional self-branding still

remains overlooked.

Gandini 125

A second perspective concerns what self-branding practice is, for a knowledge industry that

converges towards a digital and freelance-based economy based on a socialized worker; a worker

for whom, centrally, value consists in the marketing of an entrepreneurial ethos (Bandinelli and

Arvidsson, 2012) in a context where social relationships historically represent the main sources for

the procurement of employment opportunities (Grugulis and Stoyanova, 2011, 2012; Lee 2011).

The combination of these aspects determines that, in studying the relationship between branding

and socially produced value at the level of the individual, we should no longer limit self-branding

to a simple device for self-realization but also see it as strategic work pointing at the acquisition of

economic return via the management of social relationships – which is actually what social theory

calls social capital (Granovetter, 1973, 1985; Lin, 1999, 2002).

The reason of this claim resides in the fact that the digital knowledge economy is now con-

stituted of various forms of online interaction that enable new practices of sociality based on

publicity and affect, which intermediate branding and value via a shared notion of reputation. This

idea is based upon Wittel’s (2001) notion of the diffusion of a network sociality that indicates the

proliferation of non-communitarian modalities of network interaction over the Internet that are

peculiar to urban post-industrial milieus, where networking stands out as the main social practice

of value production. Self-branding in the digital knowledge economy does exactly this, by

enabling new practices of sociality that do not remain limited to the branding of the self but act as

marketing work that combines networking with the management of social relationships. This

renders self-branding contiguous to the definition of social capital brought along by Lin (1999,

2002) as an investment in social relationships with an expected return, in a context where job

search heavily relies on networks of contacts as outlined in the classic study of strong and weak ties

by Granovetter (1973, 1985).

The equating of self-branding practice to the construction of social capital is ever more central

for the understanding of self-marketing in the contemporary digital knowledge economy. Beals

(2008), echoing the pioneering essay by Malone and Laubacher (1998), shows how marketing

oneself is essential in a context increasingly made up of ‘businesses of one’ and an entrepreneu-

rially oriented, growingly freelance workforce professionally active online. Alternatives to the

archetypal model of full-time regular employment now seem to be prevalent and wide-ranging in

the knowledge economy, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom. A recent survey

conducted by the Freelancers Union in partnership with Elance-oDesk, a major digital marketplace

for contractors and freelancers worldwide, shows how 53 million Americans were generating some

or their entire income earned in 2013 from freelancing, making up 34% of the entire American

workforce. The report argues that ‘the way we work is changing’ and ‘gone are the days of the

traditional 9-to-5. We’re entering a new era of work – project-based, independent, exciting,

potentially risky, and rich with opportunities’ (Horowitz and Rosati, 2014). A typology of free-

lance professions is drawn here, distinguishing between: (a) independent contractors, meaning

traditional freelancers; (b) ‘moonlighters’, meaning professionals with a day job doing freelance

work in the evening or spare time; (c) ‘diversified workers’, who are professionals with multiple

sources of income earned from a mix of freelance and dependent, often part time, work; (d)

temporary workers, who are individuals with a single employer, contract or job with a temporary

status, employed as freelancers and (e) freelance business owners, who are self-employed entre-

preneurs with one to five employees who consider themselves as freelance professionals (Horowitz

and Rosati, 2014).

In the United Kingdom, D’Arcy and Gardiner (2014) reveal a similar picture, with the number

of self-employed growing from 650,000 to 4,500,000 in the past 5 years. It is estimated that the

126 Marketing Theory 16(1)

freelance economy is worth £21 billion to the UK economy in added value (IPSE, 2011). At a

European level, data show how freelancing is efficiently resilient to the economic crisis as it

remained steady at around 15% of the overall employment figures despite the rise of unemploy-

ment rates (EEOR, 2010). Freelancing also seemingly emerges as a favourable option to live off in

crisis times, being sometimes a forced condition fostered by necessity or as a consequence of

downsizing (Lopez-Jimenez, 2013) but also increasingly often a strategic switch. The overall

tendency seems to be that of looking towards freelancing with increasing interest, as 45% of

European working citizens declare thinking positively of the idea of a freelance career (EEOR,

2010).

The rise of a freelance workforce is arguably the consequence of a long-term neo-liberal

push for project-based employment and budget shrinking that is incidentally justified by

the actual nature of the tasks requested in the job market, as work is essentially organized

around projects for which organizational arrangements and budgets vary from time to time

(Christopherson, 2002, 2008). Employment in the knowledge economy historically consists of

portfolio careers (Platman, 2004) where ‘you are as good as your last job’ (Blair, 2001), and a

successful job search depends upon the worker’s capacity to manage one’s own personal

networks of contacts. This is entertained via recursive networking practices for the acquisition

of social capital to keep the flow of work alive in an increasingly freelance-based environ-

ment, where relationships need to be constantly refreshed and maintained (Grugulis and

Stoyanova, 2011, 2012; Randle et al., 2015). Lee (2011) underlines how such practices also

enable exclusionary dynamics that favour individuals with high levels of cultural and social

capital over others. However, there is scarce acknowledgement on this side of the fact that

social capital actually consists in the construction of a branded persona. Professions in the

knowledge economy are connoted by an eminently entrepreneurial trait (Dex et al., 2000),

which represents an ideological stance that promotes the image of cultural professionals as

new economic pioneers (McRobbie, 2004).

This overall entrepreneurial ideology, however, conflicts with the actual working condi-

tions that permeate the knowledge and creative industries. Phenomena of low-paid or unpaid

labour (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2013) are frequently reported as epitomes of a context,

where the elements of passion and ‘coolness’ give meaning to jobs and often cover for long

hours of work, anxiety and stress, alienation and unfair pay (Arvidsson et al., 2010; Ross

2009). This stream of research is substantially based on ideas coming from the Autonomist

Marxist literature, as it sustains that the central element in this process is the valorization of

subjectivity, which configures a socialized dimension of labour that Gill and Pratt (2008)

define as a ‘social factory’.

These processes of socialized value production focused on identity and the self are propelled

even further by social media activity. Digital media has come to be used as a professional tool in a

managerial logic that is instrumentally pointed towards the curation of a professional image,

the cultivation of social relationships and the construction of a professional reputation, which

seems to be an increasingly determinant aspect for professional success and career progres-

sion in a fragmented and highly individualized labour market (Randle et al., 2015). The

junction of these instances detaches contemporary self-branding from the original corporate

notion of the late 1990s to embrace a networked and socialized perspective; one that seems to

be epitomized by freelance workers in the digital knowledge economy, who embody an

entrepreneurial ethos and transform this into value through socially produced networked

branding techniques.

Gandini 127

Research design and methods

The empirical research took place in the cities of London and Milan, both internationally

recognized hubs for the knowledge and creative economy (Musterd and Murie, 2010). It is

made up of N ¼ 80 interviews (38 in London, 42 in Milan) with a broad range of multiskilled

professionals including illustrators, communication designers, audiovisual producers, media

workers, digital consultants, and strategists, all working on a freelance basis in different

sectors of the knowledge and creative industries. The choice of London was determined by its

status as a city which was widely studied in the past decade, not only as the centre of the

media and creative industries in the United Kingdom (DCMS, 1998) but also as the hallmark

of the narrative, brought along in the early 2000s, which particularly incentivized entrepre-

neurial activity by culture professionals (McRobbie, 2002, 2004). Also, as previously

observed, a recent significant rise in freelancing can be witnessed in the British economy

(D’Arcy and Gardiner, 2014) thus providing a further element of interest for the purpose of

this work.

Alternatively, the choice of Milan represents an attempt to examine a context that is not

frequently studied at the international level, one which presents significant elements of

interest for the case in point. Milan, popularly known as the economic capital of Italy, is

paradigmatic for a country which presents a diffusion of self-employment and small and

medium enterprises (SMEs) that is largely above the European average, especially within

design and fashion, which are strongly at the heart of the Italian industrial structure (Barbieri,

1999; EEOR, 2010). Italian independent workers file under the name ‘partite IVA’, a term

that indicates both the tax code used to send invoices during self-employment and a regis-

tration code for self-employed status. The number of self-employed individuals in Italy is

significantly high (around 25%) if compared to the EU average (17%). This number com-

prises a variety of independent workers but also ‘bogus’ self-employment, for which figures

are still difficult to collect, hidden among the different types of atypical contracts in force in

the current labour market (EEOR, 2010; Ranci, 2012).

The logic of this research was to undertake a qualitative network analysis, using snowball

sampling to access and immerse into the professional social networks of the interviewees. Despite

being affected by known shortcomings, particularly a potential homophily bias – which was

limited, adopting what Stuart and Sorenson (2007) suggest, by establishing a bond of trust between

the researcher and the interviewee in order to know as much as possible of the dimensions along

which actors prefer to match with others in the networks considered – snowball sampling is fre-

quently used in social network analysis (Carrington et al., 2005), as it is particularly useful for the

study of social capital across highly relational environments and to also provide a certain degree of

randomness (Biernacki and Waldorf, 1981).

Anonymity was granted to participants in all phases of the research. Starting from five

informants who acted as gatekeepers, interviewees were required to provide names of their

own professional contacts; specifically, those whom the interviewee considered high ranking

in their professional domain as well as whom the interviewee would seek out for career

advice. The interview setting consented to deeply make sense of the qualitative dimension of

social networking in a freelance environment, pointing towards an understanding of the

cultural meanings of professional networks and contacts. The response rate and participation

acceptance were approximately 50% of the overall 163 people contacted for the purposes of

the research.

128 Marketing Theory 16(1)

Digital work: Self-branding as social capital

Yeah, I mean, I am a brand, you know . . . . (Digital strategist, 41, London,

female)

The study involved 38 freelance, London-based professionals within the age range 28–60 with a

perfect gender balance (19 men and 19 women). Among them, 29 of 38 participants have a pro-

fessional Twitter account, 36 of 38 have a LinkedIn profile, 5 of whom have more than 500 con-

nections and 9 of 38 interviewees have a professional blog. In Milan, the sample is made of 42

freelancers within an age range 24–55, with 25 men and 17 women. Among them, 30 of 42 parti-

cipants have a Twitter account largely used for professional reasons, 38 of 42 have a LinkedIn

account, 12 of whom have more than 500 connections and 17 of 42 have a professional blog.

In the Milanese network, all interviewees apart from one are Italian. In London, there is a more

diverse mix of geographical origins, with 21 participants of British provenience and 17 participants

from other areas of Europe, the United States, Australia and China. Almost all interviewees in both

contexts attained an academic degree related to their working discipline, obtained in the fields of

design, arts, media and communication, and would be largely considered to have a middle-class

background, with some also having a history of entrepreneurship within the family. An average

gross annual income of £38,257 is reported in London, while in Milan income is reported at an

average €32,487. In both cases, these amounts are almost equally distributed between age groups

and genders but also still very much polarized, with a few earning considerably well and many

struggling at the lower end of the scale, often leaning on familial support or previous savings.

Nonetheless, although income is admittedly unstable for the majority of participants, economic

compensation does not seem to be a distinctive priority, rather a basic need, as they consider

irregular revenues somewhat normal:

Income kind of varies a lot . . . The really difficult thing, which I think a lot of freelancers find

themselves in, is how much to charge for your own time. What do I charge? I mean, I want to be

respected in the field, I think I’m a professional in the field . . . And you can get free jobs like a gate to

have other jobs in in the future. (Arts professional, 34, London, male)

The use of digital platforms for these professionals constitutes a widely diffused and almost

totalizing self-branding activity. The large majority of interviewees believe social media activity

is very important or important for their professional success, while only a minority considers social

media practice as scarcely useful or useless. Twitter and LinkedIn are the most utilized platforms,

while Facebook (though with some exceptions) is largely perceived as a private social network.

Frequency of usage varies significantly, from more than one posting of content a day to no less

than one posting a week. Overall, social media is approached, managed and utilized as a shop win-

dow that serves to find or be found, being visible on a 24/7 basis. Social media presence is instru-

mental for searchability and is detrimental for credibility when absent:

LinkedIn is like the professional Facebook, isn’t it? It’s Facebook for professional people. I think it’s

ok, I think it’s useful if you look for a full time job, and for looking for information about what people

do. That’s what I do, if I meet somebody I’ll look at their LinkedIn profile. People all the time contact

me on LinkedIn for work . . . People I’ve never met. (Copywriter, 53, London, male)

–

Social media is fundamental, not simply for direct advantages, I don’t generally get work directly

from Facebook or LinkedIn . . . But it’s true that if I have to meet someone, I will look at the social

Gandini 129

networks. Maybe we are meeting because someone recommended you, or I met you somewhere, but

social media is a portfolio and I want to know how you work. Through social media I look for

information and I use it as a shop window, also on my side. If I have to work with you and I can’t find

you, I won’t hire you. (Communication consultant, 24, Milan, male)

Among those who do not have an established social media presence, a minority in the sample,

there is a general understanding of the growing relevance of such instruments, paired up with a vague

concern for privacy issues. Essentially, those who do not use social media enact a strictly dualistic

separation between offline and online contacts – considered as separate environments. On the

contrary, those with an established social media presence adopt a strategic approach to digital

resources. For the majority of interviewees, there is no distinction between offline and online con-

tacts. A clear sense of continuity and interdependence emerges between the offline and the online

realms from a professional perspective, inasmuch as both lead into job opportunities and the fuelling

of word-of-mouth – which is the central aim, whatever the means through which this is pursued.

The self-branding activity perpetrated by freelancers is instrumentally pointed at the acquisition

of a reputation in the industry. This is done via a set of practices of sociality whereby the branding

of one’s professional identity and public image cannot but take place in a social realm, made of an

interdependent relationship between offline and online networking. The observation of the par-

ticipants’ professional activity evidences how these recurrent practices have an eminently per-

formative nature, as these essentially consist in a constant production of content that presupposes a

conception of the digital arena as a sort of performance space for the enactment of a branded

identity – aiming, ultimately, at social recognition. Their self is first and foremost public as it

represents a visible display of a juxtaposition of professional skills and personal taste, the rationale

of which echoes the work of a curator in an art gallery, or a visual merchandiser that chooses which

products best represent the brand. However, this public self is inevitably and decisively also a

social one, since this display also involves one’s connections and networks. The ultimate outcome

is the construction of a reputational capital, which leads to capitalization in terms of job oppor-

tunities and revenues across a network of social relationships. This is regularly pursued via the use

of common marketing techniques, such as storytelling, pointing at creating engagement with the

self-brand to fuel the construction of connections that can then function as a capital, which may be

mobilized or accessed when needed:

What the Web consents to do to a professional with something to tell, is that by simply writing what

you know you can reach a visibility and a popularity that is simply impossible otherwise. The blog is

useful for more in-depth discourses . . . it gives you the chance to express what you mean. Twitter is

more a copywriter kind of thing, whilst LinkedIn is more enclosed, too serious . . . Good for ‘‘suit and

tie’’ consultants. (Communication professional, 43, Milan, female)

The production of a coherent public and social self via what were defined as performative prac-

tices of sociality is a branding activity delinked from the establishing of communitarian relations,

conducted via a curatorial logic which points at authenticity. The management of the content

posted and the networking activity are perceived as two equally fundamental aspects in the market-

ability of a digital worker for the acquisition of a reputational capital. The activity within the online

sphere is performative since it is not just an act that communicates, as it is one that defines a social

identity that links into value. Therefore, it has to be frequent and recurrent, without significant

gaps, breaks or interruptions. This brings visibility and recognition and connects directly to offline

interaction. Below are a couple of examples of these practices in the words of a London-based

130 Marketing Theory 16(1)

designer and a Milanese copywriter, who reveal how visibility and socialization are bound together

in a socially oriented, self-branding activity:

I do use social media to sort of make people aware that you are there, you are working, you are active

( . . . ) Sometimes people see I’m at (X) by checking in on location, and then phone me to have lunch,

and I might get a job from that. (Designer, 43, London, male)

–

LinkedIn to me is very important as you can show how much you are into a sector, for instance,

someone who goes into my profile can see who I know. There you can find names that can make you

say ‘‘Oh, he’s really into this sector’’. And then, second step, maybe I go to some of my contacts ‘‘ . . .

So you know about this guy? Have you worked with him?’’. It’s all a big phonebook. If my contacts are

qualified, you can see that. (Copywriter, 48, Milan, male)

This curatorial nature of self-branding serves the construction of a productive network of con-

tacts both offline and online; that is, what leads to jobs and employment chances. In London, this is

almost compulsively reiterated as the ideological pursuit of two commonsensical statements: ‘it is

all about who you know’ and ‘you are as good as your last job’ (Blair, 2001), both of which are

mantras for freelance knowledge professionals. In Milan, conversely, there is often a recurrent dis-

course giving a negative connotation to these concepts, being associated to clientelism. Profes-

sional relations and social capital, especially in Milan, are regularly perceived as exclusionary

networks and lobbying, as the participation with non-professional informal networks allows parti-

cipants to access otherwise unavailable information and opportunities:

Non-professional networks matter a lot in the way you can get in touch with people, confidential

information, events, opportunities . . . (Journalist, 30, Milan, male)

Most participants in both contexts claim that, despite the centrality of this self-branding activity

in their work practice, skills and talent are actually what counts more, being related to their actual

job capacities. Yet, this study seems to show exactly the opposite, that is, a somewhat secondary

importance of human and cultural capital as significant elements for employability. Interviewees

in both samples possess the same broad sets of skills, and the large majority of interviewees have

an academic degree that is related to their professional environment. This confirms Christopher-

son’s (2008) argument of knowledge and creative workers possessing a multifunctional set of

skills that are substantially similar among their peer group. Also, there are no significant differ-

ences in terms of earnings among the different educational categories; in other words, it may be

said that having a degree does not automatically imply being better off in this labour market.

Participants implicitly seem to confirm this when they describe how CV circulation is substan-

tially useless, since the CV as traditionally conceived is generally discarded as something that

does not provide significantly rich information to potential clients in the industry. If what makes

a difference is one’s reputation, the education title and skills therefore seem to be merely entry

tickets, and one’s professional success appears to be ultimately related to the capacity to connect

self-branding practice to the construction of a reputational capital and the management of this

asset over the professional network:

[The] creative world works through personal relationships, and to a certain extent it has to do with your

CV. But the most of it is what job is this person doing here and now and what they would be interested

to do in the other job. In other sectors the whole CV matters. (Creative manager, 45, London, female)

Gandini 131

–

If you are a freelancer your education title does not matter much, whereas if you want to compete for

a permanent job it matters more. Some of my colleagues did not even finish university, and they can

easily live out of their freelance work. For firms, however, it matters, it is an old requisite for

recruitment. (Designer, 27, Milan, male)

The digital space functions for digital professionals as a milieu to support and fuel this self-

branding work and the circulation of word of mouth and recommendations subsume these infor-

mation networks both offline and online, with no distinction or difference. The importance of this

multiple dynamic of interaction is substantially taken for granted by most participants and trans-

lates into a shared recognition of reputation as value. The acquisition of a reputational capital is

perceived as directly linked to professional success:

Social media pays back in terms of awareness to people that you’re out there, [with] visibility, cred-

ibility and people having an understanding of what is it that you’re doing. People found me on the

Internet, looked at my profile on LinkedIn and then sort of feel the deal to phone me and ask to do

something. (Brand consultant, 40 London, male)

–

Using social media well means a lot. Many people find you through these tools, it’s an online and an

offline word-of-mouth but these two things are correlated and they reciprocally fuel each other. (Digital

consultant, 44, Milan, Male)

This connects to what seems to be the most problematic aspect that centrally pertains to these

scenes. Self-branding, as seen, is considered work by digital professionals but is largely an unre-

munerated part of their work. It is, nevertheless, mandatory practice in securing employment. In

various accounts in the literature, especially those directly making use of the Autonomist lexicon,

the notions of precarity and exploitation are often directly put in relation to such digital media

activity via the concept of free labour (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2013; Terranova, 2000). How-

ever, as noted in the first interview quoted in this article, free jobs appear to be gates towards other

employment. As a result, controversially, most participants do not perceive this practice of free

labour as exploitation – rather, as an ‘investment’:

In my experience, it was always the case (of being noticed, nda) only because of someone who knew

me for things I had done in the past, as of word-of-mouth. So I would suggest everyone to do something

wonderful, for free, immediately. That’s the best investment. (Media professional/journalist, 36, Milan,

female)

This, I would argue, is an inevitable turnaround in the extent to which self-branding in the digi-

tal knowledge economy equates to the construction of social capital. The performance of a certain

amount of free and unpaid labour is perceived not just as a natural element in the freelance scene

but an eminently strategic and managerial device to start the loop of self-branding, visibility and

reputation construction across a network of social relations. If this, on the one hand, confirms the

strong link between self-branding and labour sustained by Hearn (2008), it also, more problema-

tically, delinks from a simple narrative of exploitation to put the word investment – in self-

branding, in social relations, in time and free work – at the core of the self-entrepreneurial ethos

defining freelancers, particularly in their start-up phase. Most of them, in terms of identity, are in

fact explicitly reluctant to self-define as workers but tend to prefer definitions connoting them as

132 Marketing Theory 16(1)

self-employed entrepreneurs who, in relation to free labour, invest into unpaid work for the stra-

tegic pursuit of social relations that lead into expected economic returns – which is, incidentally,

Nan Lin’s definition of social capital (1999, 2002).

This notion of free labour as investment is believed by participants to be extremely functional to

the acquisition of a reputation among one’s professional network of contacts. Acquiring a repu-

tation seems to be the most decisive stance, as reputation seems to be the form taken by social

capital across such a digitally mediated labour market where the possibility of meeting in person

and engaging into face-to-face interaction is strongly reduced. This fosters those networking

dynamics that are connected to employability, given that only the individual’s embeddedness in a

network of productive professional connections (Granovetter, 1973, 1985) and the capacity to

demonstrate such embeddedness via this digital work lead into job opportunities. Working for free

is part of this process, as one of the many practices used to pursue this aim:

I did some jobs for free because I think strategically it was a good idea to do. It was a strategic job. (Arts

consultant, 35, London, male)

–

At the beginning I worked a lot for free. It is difficult to show you can do something, without doing

it. Now you can publish your own work, you can demonstrate this capacity to all those who may be

interested. It’s like living a public portfolio. (Communication professional, 43, Milan, female)

This does not undermine the controversial nature of this conception of free labour as investment

– actually, the opposite. Some participants are well aware of the contradictory aspects of their

entrepreneurial ethos. However, even the most critical accounts claim that the entrepreneurial ele-

ment is primary, as this London-based videographer evidences:

People think that you will be paid by status, they say ‘‘I’m working in London’’, for free, and I say no,

you are a slave in London, let’s be honest. They’re not working in the strict sense. I’m not here to make

money, but I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t making money. If you have to work six months for free, better

you work six months for free for you and not for someone else, if you have ideas . . . This is the new

working class, you see what I mean? (Videographer, 38, London, male)

Another aspect that seems to be striking in this context is the uncommon nuance given to com-

petition for jobs. Self-branding is not simply performed for self-realization, or to stand out among

competitors, but explicitly points at collaboration, interaction and networking with contacts widely

recognized as influential by peers in the industry. The reason lies in a basic network process: the

digital and freelance knowledge economy is a small world. Competition seems to be found much

more between closed circles rather than within them in an individual dog-eat-dog dynamic, given

that ultimately there is no work without social connections. ‘Collaborative’ for freelancers outper-

forms ‘competitive’ since reputation is their most valuable asset, and jobs come from recommen-

dations, referrals and word of mouth. It is not strategically as rewarding in the long term to be

competitive and selfish, as it is to be collaborative and social:

Because it’s so competitive, it’s also down to your reputation, and the people you’ve worked with. The

circuit is so small: in design everyone knows each other, of course you have the top 10 per cent, the top

5 per cent, they all know each other. The people you’ve worked with form more established companies.

Your portfolio is the most important thing, getting your work seen, and your reputation as a person to

actually work with, are you a good person to work with? Aren’t you a good person to work with? You

Gandini 133

might be very good, but if you’re lacking social skills, it’s your problem. If you’re selfish it’s your

problem. Reputation spreads quite fast. (Graphic designer, 38, London, male)

These accounts show how the practices of presentation of the self within the online sphere for

digital freelancers in the knowledge economy are not merely for exhibition or representational

(Hogan, 2010); on the contrary, there is a performative and productive element that emerges out

of forms of sociality that directly connect them to socialized value production and the construction

of social capital. This has huge implications for an understanding of the branding of the individual

in the ever nearer relation to immaterial labour practices (Hearn, 2008). In the following section, I

will discuss these instances more closely.

Within a reputation economy

The study of self-branding and freelancing in the knowledge economy in London and Milan shows

a contradictory landscape with significant elements of novelty. In both London and Milan, self-

branding is pervasive and almost mandatory. There is a shared understanding of the curatorial

management of social media presence and social relationships for the purpose of a greater repu-

tation, as well as the awareness that this practice boosts employability as it is articulated in the form

of an investment in social relationships with expected return. This points directly at notions of

social capital for job search that are common in social theory. Such a process seems to be more

visible and acknowledged in London and less visible – but equally significant – in Milan. This

difference may be due to the fact that freelancing, although very diffused, is still somehow per-

ceived in Milan as a second best option, with networking and embeddedness often negatively

associated to clientelism. As suggested by an interviewee, freelancers in Milan are still often

perceived as ‘children of a lesser God’ (Journalist, 30, Milan, male).

Yet, the evidence here suggests also that the construction of a branded persona is not simply an

explicit form of labour (Hearn, 2008: 197) but a more complex set of social practices – that I have

labelled as performative practices of sociality – which entail the production and the display of a

public and social self across social network sites. These negotiations are necessary to establish

professionally as a freelancer to build reputation and status (Hearn 2008, 2010; Marwick, 2013). It

may be argued that self-branding practice directly links to processes of socialized value production

in the digital knowledge industries, as the social construction of a branded persona via identity

work (Schoneboom, 2011). I have called this process digital work since it sits in interdependent

relationship with networking as a value production device enacted through forms of sociality that

transform personal branding into the main regime of immaterial production.

Drawing again from Hearn (2010), I call the broader scenario where these networked branding

techniques exist a ‘reputation economy’ (Botsman, 2012; Hearn, 2010). The acquisition of

reputational capital appears in fact to be the main element for employability as reputation emerges

to be the cultural conception of value indigenously shared by operators within this professional

context. Hearn (2010) theorized the existence of a digital reputation economy that links self-

branding to reputation as an asset. This is clearly evidenced here inasmuch as reputation repre-

sents the element that connects the offline and online domains, rendering self-branding a process of

social capital construction managerially conceived that uses reputation to allocate unequal

resources. The employability of knowledge professionals in the digital age seems to be inextricably

bound to (and, to some extent, depend upon) the acquisition of a reputational capital across the

personal network of professional contacts. Reputation, once an intangible asset with unquantifiable

proxies and valuation, is now increasingly tangible, visible and to some extent also measurable via

134 Marketing Theory 16(1)

the activity of individual users on social media platforms. This measurability extends its effects

over the whole labour market.

As physical face-to-face interaction diminishes its importance and gets together with digital

interaction that is demonstrated by a lesser extent of co-presence and proximity, reputation seems

to be the form taken by social capital in the network sociality (Wittel, 2001), as the asset that

manages to secure a bond of trust by way of the mosaic of public information commonly available

around a branded individual (Marwick et al., 2010). The recognition of self-branding practice as

the process of construction of social capital is functional to the existence of a reputation economy,

as reputation often substitutes for face-to-face trust building. As Boyd and Ellison (2007) noted,

although exceptions exist, digitally mediated social relations largely support existing offline social

relations, to some extent mirroring the everyday networking experience, and producing some

different sort of social capital (Ellison et al., 2007) here identified in reputation – that becomes

algorithmically calculated by Online Reputation Systems that regulate interaction over digital

marketplaces such as Elance-oDesk and similar others. This poses consistent issues in terms of

reliability and the establishment of what may be seen as an algocratic culture of interaction towards

which we should maintain a critical reading. Despite some, such as Schaefer (2012), sustain that

these dynamics provide a democratization of social influence, there is enough on the other hand to

see a rather serious potential for distortion.

Digital freelance professionals are in fact induced into what seems to be a significant example

of emotional labour (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2008, 2013; Hochschild, 1979, 2001) as of par-

ticipating in a labour market where value is increasingly socialized and produced via network-

based arrangements that require a significant extent of subjectivity. Still, the relationship

between digital activity on social network sites and the affective dimensions of labour remains

problematic – and the issue of free labour demonstrates this clearly (Terranova, 2000). This,

ultimately, is a quite controversial aspect that emerges from this account. Is self-branding a form of

free labour? For the participants in this study, it is not so much free labour as exploitation as it is a

useful and potentially profitable form of investment – in social relationships, in time and free work

– strategically pursued for self-branding purposes. The notion of free labour as investment here

given renders a process of self-exploitation or false consciousness around the production of sub-

jectivity by freelancers – yet, it coherently goes hand in hand with a managerial concept of self-

branding as social capital. In fact, the distance between this concept and the positions of the

Autonomists, I would argue, is just as apparent; the justification of this statement lies in the broader

framework, where both the Autonomist readings of knowledge work and the present account on

self-branding intervene.

What I mean here is that, incidentally, the rise of self-branding actually occurred more or less

simultaneously with the proliferation of ideas of a rising ‘creative class’ (Florida, 2002) that

promised an age of economic prosperity and development through the valorization of individual

talent and entrepreneurial creativity. Arguably, it can now be witnessed how such a claim is a case

of an unfulfilled promise. Contemporary digital freelance professionals in the knowledge economy

are what remains of that idea, being the product of an entrepreneurial ethos combined with

extensive precarity, low-paid or unpaid jobs, devaluation of work and of free labour (Hesmond-

halgh and Baker, 2013). However, as argued by Brouillette (2014), actually Florida and the

Autonomists substantially agree on the fact that, over the past few decades, knowledge work has

become comparable to artists’ work. This is a positive innovation for Florida, who envisaged that

the fostering of entrepreneurship, talent, creativity and empowerment will bring the renewed

success of post-industrial capitalism – and it is obviously negative for the Autonomists, who

Gandini 135

highlight how the (arguably present) controversial aspects listed above are the symptoms of the

forthcoming demise of late capitalism.

Indeed, Brouillette argues, both accounts share the assumption that creativity and capital have

now merged in the production of symbolic content that is economically dominant – and that this is

an inescapable condition. The study of self-branding on social media by digital knowledge pro-

fessionals confirms the centrality of such immaterial and affective labour regimes but also shows

how these translates into performative practices of sociality, which convert identity work into

social production of value and reputational capital. In other words, it may be argued here that the

notions of free labour and investment are not purely oppositional but actually represent two sides

of the same thing – that is, the evolution of networked techniques of branding of the individual

pointing at social production of value across a network sociality, more or less enthusiastically

embraced.

The aesthetic curation of the self across social media arguably demonstrates the validity of the

critique to the valorization of subjectivity promoted by the Autonomists and particularly that

aspect of virtuosity related to work highlighted by Virno (2004). However, these dynamics might

now be read as the grammar of an unavoidable and compulsory work of reputation construction

based on new forms of sociality fostered by the digital intermediation. The metaphor of the

investment supports what McRobbie (2002, 2004) has described as the marriage between

counterculture and the financial economy realized through the narrative of self-realization.

Ultimately, as in the example of ‘changemakers’ brought forward by Bandinelli and Arvids-

son (2012), the entrepreneurial ethos of digital workers seems to be just another symptom of the

real subsumption of the neo-liberal entrepreneurial rationale that manifests its surprising survival

(Crouch, 2011) within those new models of work that should declare its aftermath – and which

actually produce phenomena of compulsory sociality that are typical of neo-liberalism (Gregg,

2011). Critical accounts of free labour, precarity and neo-liberalism today probably need to

acknowledge this compulsory aspect more comprehensively to build a critique that does not end

within individual issues, such as precarious income or free labour, but peculiarly stresses the

invisibility and the taken for grantedness of those in the mindset of workers, which is due to an

entrepreneurial ethos that self-realizes via a rhetoric of compulsory and inevitably positive

innovation.

Conclusion: The socialization of the enterprise

Freelancers today are commonly assumed to be among the new economic protagonists at the

forefront of the developments in knowledge work in the 21st century. This article has proposed an

exploration of the role of the social in the study of the networked branding practices of the self as

these are enacted by this specific segment of the professional sphere, which has seemingly

internalized the characteristics of the market to perform a digital work of identity production that

extends also offline in a continuum. These practices seem to be no longer mere promotional

devices perpetrated for self-realization or to outperform competitors as in the early days of cor-

porate self-branding but present an eminently social element. The productive identity work for the

creation of a professional self in the digital economy cannot but be a social process embedded in a

web of ties where collaboration mingles with competition and cooperation in a unique domain. For

such reasons, it may be argued this process outlines what seems to be a ‘socialization of the

enterprise’, rather than a social factory (Gill and Pratt, 2008), meaning the transformation of an

entire labour market in an entrepreneurial, venture scene (Neff, 2012).

136 Marketing Theory 16(1)

If a freelance economy is arguably rising, as sustained already in the late 1990s (Malone and

Laubacher, 1998), to become the central employment regime in a post-crisis knowledge industry

moving from mass production to production by the masses (Rifkin, 2014), yet any enthusiasm

regarding this is probably premature, given the number of critical implications such transformation

brings – some of those also witnessed here. Actually, a freelance economy centred on the net-

worked branding of the individual via performative forms of sociality, despite the emphasis on

collaboration, remains an essentially neo-liberal one. There seems to be no demise of neo-

liberalism when its own assumptions – entrepreneurialism, individualism and flexibility – are

also the flagships of today’s sharing economy, which presupposes a new era of collaboration and

impact in a start-up ecology (Botsman and Rogers, 2011).

The evidence presented here shows how the significance of knowledge work today departs from

notions of skills and human capital in favour of forms of production based on the marketization of

different sorts of intangible assets – but leaves unquestioned the importance of class background.

Although this scenario is arguably the outcome of a long-term process of casualization and pre-

carisation of middle-class corporate full-time employment, the issue of class was not directly at the

centre of this work. We know how important class origins are to get jobs and access to those weak

ties that constitute the core of Granovetter’s work (1973, 1985) and the preoccupations around

clientelism encountered in the Milanese context still partially reflect this instance. However, the

assumption of a broad middle-class background does not sufficiently explain whether any class

difference may apply to determine a discrepancy in the processes of reputation construction. It

would be interesting to see future sociological and marketing research questioning the acquisition

of reputational capital from a class perspective; not only to see if class and reputation as here

defined are somewhat related but also to enquire about the extent to which the fragmentation of the

middle class might eventually find a way to a potential recomposition.

In this sense, recent accounts of different sorts (Mosco and McKercher, 2009; Standing, 2011)

have sustained the potential rise of a new social class around precarity and freelance work.

Although fascinating, at present these accounts fail to recognize how much digital freelancers are

particularly reluctant, broadly speaking, to be associated with precarity. Despite often struggling

with their income, freelancers are more inclined to see themselves as entrepreneurs and creatives,

innovators and ‘changemakers’ – rather than a precarious, freelance working class that opposes

capitalism and its latest advancements. The rise of freelancers actually represents one among these

advancements. It seems difficult, although perhaps desirable, to see these singularities coalesce

around a critical stance in the near future. The construction of an entrepreneurial subjectivity and

its translation into a market subject that completely embodies the logic of venture labour and

individualization of risk permeating the first wave of Internet start-ups (Neff, 2012), transforming

exploitation in investment and false consciousness in self-branding, is a success that perhaps even

the most audacious supporter of neo-liberalism could not almost dare to dream.

Acknowledgements

My deepest thanks go to Adam Arvidsson, James Fitchett and James Graham for their support at

different stages in the writing process. I am also particularly grateful to the three anonymous

reviewers, who offered helpful suggestions and advice in the various revisions of this paper.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,

and/or publication of this

article.

Gandini 137

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this

article.

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Musterd, S. and Murie, A. (2010) Making Competitive Cities. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Neff, G. (2012) Venture Labor. Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Østergaard, P. and Fitchett, J. (2012) ‘Relationship Marketing and the Order of Simulation’, Marketing

Theory 12(3): 233–49.

Papacharissi, Z. (2015) Affective Publics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Parsons, E. (2010) ‘Markets, Identities and the Discourses of Antique Dealing’, Marketing Theory 10(3):

283–98.

Peters, T. (1999) The Brand Called You. New York: Random House.

Platman, K. (2004) ‘‘Portfolio Careers’ and the Search for Flexibility in Later Life’, Work, Employment &

Society 18(3): 573–99.

Ranci, C. (2012) Partite Iva. Il Lavoro Autonomo Nella Crisi Italiana. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Randle, K., Forson, C. and Calveley, M. (2015) ‘Towards a Bourdieusian Analysis of the Social Composition

of the UK Film and Television Workforce’, Work, Employment & Society 29(4): 590–606.

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the Eclipse of Capitalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Influence Marketing. New York: McGraw-Hill.

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140 Marketing Theory 16(1)

http://ssrn.com/abstract=1588163

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Alessandro Gandini is a lecturer in the Media Department, Middlesex University, London, and is research

active at the Centre for Digital Ethnography, University of Milan. His research interests include the transfor-

mations of work in digital society, the intermediation of digital technologies within the processes of value

production and distribution and the research approaches to study digital environments and interaction.

Address: Middlesex University, Media Department, The Burroughs, Hendon, London, NW4 4BT, UK.

[email: a.gandini@mdx.ac.uk]

Gandini 141

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Cultural Studies Review
volume 11 number 2 September 2005

http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/csrj/index
pp. 57–63

 Franco Berardi 2005

ISSN 1837-8692

What does Cognitariat Mean?

Work, Desire and Depression

FRANCO BERARDI (BIFO)

In
order
to
understand
the
meaning
of
the
notions
of
cognitive
labour
and
cognitariat,
it
is

necessary
to
analyse
not
only
the
transformations
that
have
taken
place
in
the
work
process
but

also
what
is
happening
in
the
psychic
and
desiring
dimension
of
post-‐industrial
society.
What
is
at

stake
in
the
social
definition
of
cognitive
labour
is
the
body,
sexuality,
perishable
physicality
and

the
unconscious.
Cognitariat
is
the
social
corporeality
of
cognitive
labour.
In
his
most
celebrated

book
Cyberculture,
Pierre
Lévy
proposes
the
notion
of
collective
intelligence.1
But
the
social

existence
of
cognitive
workers
cannot
be
reduced
to
intelligence:
in
their
existential
concreteness,

the
cognitarians
are
also
body,
in
other
words
nerves
that
stiffen
in
the
constant
strain
of

attention,
eyes
that
get
tired
staring
at
a
screen.
Collective
intelligence
neither
reduces
nor

resolves
the
social
existence
of
the
bodies
that
produce
this
intelligence,
the
concrete
bodies
of
the

male
and
female
cognitarians.

—DIGITAL LABOUR AND ABSTRACTION

What
does
it
mean
to
work
today?
Work
is
tending
to
assume
a
uniform
physical
character:
we
sit

down
in
front
of
a
screen,
move
our
fingers
on
the
keyboard
and
type.
But
at
the
same
time,
work

is
a
lot
more
diversified
in
the
contents
it
elaborates.
The
architect,
the
travel
agent,
the

VOLUME11 NUMBER2 SEP2005
58

programmer
and
the
lawyer
carry
out
the
same
physical
gestures,
but
could
never
exchange
jobs

because
each
of
them
performs
a
specific,
local
task,
one
that
is
not
communicable
to
someone

who
has
not
followed
their
particular
educational
cursus
or
to
someone
who
is
not
familiar
with

that
complex
content
of
knowledges.

Mechanical
industrial
labour
was
characterised
by
the
traits
of
substantial
interchangeability

and
depersonalisation
and
as
a
consequence
was
perceived
as
something
extraneous,
a
task
that

was
performed
solely
because
one
received
a
salary
in
exchange.
Dependent
salaried
work
was
a

pure
service
of
time.

Digital
technologies
open
up
an
entirely
new
vista
for
work.
In
the
first
place,
they
modify
the

relationship
between
conception
and
execution,
then
the
relationship
between
the
intellectual

content
of
work
and
its
manual
execution.
Manual
labour
tends
to
be
carried
out
by
automatically

controlled
machine-‐assemblages,
while
the
innovative
labour
that
produces
the
greater
part
of

value
is
to
be
found
in
cognitive
labour.
The
material
to
be
transformed
is
simulated
by
digital

sequences.
The
content
of
labour
becomes
mental,
but
at
the
same
time
the
limits
of
productive

work
become
uncertain.
The
very
notion
of
productivity
becomes
imprecise:
the
relationship

between
time
and
the
quantity
of
value
produced
becomes
difficult
to
stabilise,
because
not
all
the

hours
of
a
cognitive
labourer
are
equal
in
terms
of
productivity.

The
Marxian
notion
of
abstract
labour
needs
to
be
redefined.
What
does
‘abstract
labour’

mean
in
the
language
of
Marx?
It
signifies
an
extortion
of
time,
without
regard
for
its
quality,

without
relation
to
the
specific
and
concrete
utility
of
the
objects
it
creates.
Industrial
labour

tended
towards
abstraction
because
its
concrete
utility
was
entirely
irrelevant
with
respect
to
its

function
of
economic
valorisation.

Can
we
say
that
this
progressive
reduction
to
abstraction
continues
to
operate
in
the
era
of

infoproduction?
In
a
certain
sense
yes;
indeed,
in
a
certain
sense
we
can
say
that
this
tendency
is

amplified
to
the
highest
degree,
because
every
residue
of
materiality
and
concreteness
disappears

from
the
labouring
operation,
and
only
the
symbolic
abstractions
remain,
bits,
digits
and

differences
of
information,
on
which
productive
activity
acts.
We
can
say
that
the
digitalisation
of

the
work
process
has
made
all
kinds
of
work
equal
from
the
physical
and
ergonomic
point
of
view.

We
all
do
the
same
thing:
we
sit
down
in
front
of
a
screen
and
tap
on
the
keys
of
a
keyboard,
and

the
automatic
machines
transform
our
activity
into
a
television
script,
a
surgical
operation
or
a

car.
From
a
physical
point
of
view
there
is
no
difference
between
a
travel
agent,
a
machine

operator
in
the
petrochemical
sector,
or
a
detective
novelist,
when
they
are
carrying
out
their

work.

Franco Berardi— What does Cognitariat Mean?
59

And
yet
at
the
same
time,
work
has
become
part
of
a
mental
process,
the
elaboration
of
signs

dense
with
knowledge.
It
has
become
a
lot
more
specific,
a
lot
more
specialised:
the
lawyer
and

the
architect,
the
IT
technician
and
the
supermarket
employee,
are
positioned
in
front
of
the
same

screen
and
tap
on
the
same
keys,
but
the
one
could
never
take
the
position
of
the
other
because

the
content
of
their
elaborative
activity
is
irreducibly
different
and
untranslatable.

A
chemical
worker
and
a
metal
mechanics
worker
are
engaged
in
labour
that
is
totally

different
from
the
physical
point
of
view,
but
a
metal
mechanics
worker
can
acquire
the

operational
knowledge
for
performing
the
job
of
the
chemical
worker
in
a
few
days,
and
vice

versa.
The
more
industrial
labour
is
simplified,
the
more
interchangeable
it
becomes.
In
front
of

the
computer
and
connected
to
the
same
universal
machine
of
elaboration
and
communication,

human
terminals
all
carry
out
the
same
physical
movements,
but
the
simpler
their
work
becomes

from
the
physical
point
of
view,
the
less
interchangeable
become
their
bodies
of
knowledge,
their

capacities
and
their
services.

Digitalised
labour
manipulates
absolutely
abstract
signs,
but
its
recombinant
functioning
is

all
the
more
specific,
all
the
more
personalised
and
therefore
less
and
less
interchangeable.
As
a

consequence,
high
tech
workers
tend
to
consider
their
work
as
the
most
important,
most

singularised
and
most
personalised
part
of
their
life—the
exact
opposite
of
the
industrial
worker’s

situation,
for
whom
the
eight
hours
of
salaried
service
were
a
sort
of
temporary
death
from
which

one
awoke
only
when
the
stop-‐work
siren
went
off.

—ENTERPRISE AND DESIRE

Only
if
we
take
this
into
account
can
we
explain
why,
over
the
last
two
decades,
disaffection
and

absenteeism
have
become
totally
marginal
phenomena,
whereas
they
were
endemic
in
the
late

industrial
period.
The
studies
carried
out
by
Juliet
Schorr
(The
Overworked
American)
show
that
in

the
1980s
(and
even
more
so
in
the
1990s)
the
average
working
time
increased
considerably.
On

average,
every
worker
in
the
USA
dedicated
148
more
hours
to
work
in
1996
than
his
or
her

colleague
in
1973.
The
percentage
of
people
who
work
more
than
49
hours
a
week
increased
from

13
per
cent
in
1976
to
almost
19
per
cent
in
1998
according
to
the
US
Bureau
of
Labour
Statistics.

As
for
managers,
the
percentage
went
up
from
40
to
45
per
cent.2

How
can
the
conversion
of
workers
from
disaffection
to
adherence
be
explained?
Certainly
it

can
be
explained
by
the
political
defeat
that
the
working
class
suffered
after
the
end
of
the

seventies—a
consequence
of
technological
restructuring,
the
resulting
unemployment
and
the

violent
repression
of
working
class
avant-‐gardes.
But
this
is
not
enough.
In
order
to
fully

VOLUME11 NUMBER2 SEP2005
60

understand
the
psychosocial
change
of
attitude
towards
work,
we
need
to
take
into
account
a

decisive
cultural
mutation
that
is
linked
with
the
displacement
of
the
social
centre
of
gravity
from

the
sphere
of
industrial
labour
to
the
sphere
of
cognitive
labour.

Unlike
the
industrial
labourer,
the
cognitive
labourer
considers
work
as
the
most
important

part
of
his
or
her
life,
no
longer
opposes
the
lengthening
of
the
working
day,
and
indeed
tends
to

lengthen
work-‐time
of
his
or
her
own
accord.
And
this
happens
for
diverse
reasons:
above
all,

over
the
last
decades
the
urban
social
community
has
become
progressively
less
interesting
and

has
been
reduced
to
a
dead
wrapping
of
relations
without
humanity
or
pleasure.
Sexuality
and

conviviality
have
been
progressively
transformed
into
standardised,
regulated
mechanisms,
and

the
singular
pleasure
of
the
body
has
been
progressively
replaced
by
the
anxiety-‐ridden
need
for

identity.
As
Mike
Davies
shows
in
books
such
as
City
of
Quartz
and
Ecology
of
Fear,
the
quality
of

existence
has
deteriorated
from
the
affective
and
psychical
point
of
view
as
a
consequence
of
the

rarefaction
of
community
ties
and
their
security-‐driven
sterilisation.3

It
seems
that
in
human
relations,
in
daily
life,
in
affective
communication,
one
finds
less
and

less
pleasure
and
less
and
less
reassurance.
A
consequence
of
this
dis-‐eroticisation
of
daily
life
is

the
investment
of
desire
in
work,
understood
as
the
sole
space
of
narcissistic
reaffirmation
for
an

individuality
used
to
seeing
the
other
according
to
the
rules
of
competition,
that
is,
as
a
danger,
an

impoverishment,
a
limitation,
rather
than
a
source
of
experience,
pleasure
and
enrichment.

The
effect
that
has
taken
hold
of
daily
life
during
the
last
decades
is
that
of
a
generalised
de-‐
solidarisation.
The
imperative
of
competition
has
become
dominant
in
work,
communication
and

culture,
through
a
systematic
transformation
of
the
other
into
a
competitor
and
thus
an
enemy.

The
principle
of
war
has
taken
the
commanding
position
in
social
life,
in
every
instance
of
daily

life
and
in
every
aspect
of
relationships.
What
is
also
decisive
is
the
drastic
worsening
of
the

conditions
of
social
protection
provoked
by
twenty
years
of
deregulation
and
dismantling
of
the

public
structures
of
assistance.

The
more
time
we
dedicate
to
acquiring
the
means
of
consumption,
the
less
time
remains
for

us
to
enjoy
the
actual
world.
The
more
we
invest
our
nervous
energies
in
acquiring
the
power
to

acquire,
the
less
we
can
invest
them
in
enjoyment.
It
is
around
this
problem—completely

neglected
by
economic
discourse—that
the
question
of
happiness
and
unhappiness
is
played
out

in
hypercapitalist
society.
In
order
to
have
more
economic
power
(more
money,
more
credit),
we

need
to
dedicate
more
and
more
time
to
socially
ratified
work.
But
this
means
we
have
to
reduce

the
time
of
enjoyment
and
of
experience;
in
short,
we
have
to
reduce
life.

Franco Berardi— What does Cognitariat Mean?
61

Wealth
defined
as
enjoyment
diminishes
in
proportion
to
the
increase
of
wealth
as
economic

accumulation,
for
the
simple
reason
that
mental
time
is
dedicated
to
accumulating
rather
than

enjoying.
Conversely
wealth
understood
as
economic
accumulation
increases
when
the
dispersed

pleasure
of
enjoyment
is
reduced.
And
the
two
possibilities
conspire
to
produce
the
same
effect:

the
expansion
of
the
economic
sphere
coincides
with
a
reduction
of
the
erotic
sphere.
When

things,
bodies
and
signs
enter
into
and
become
part
of
the
semiotic
model
of
the
economy,
the

experience
of
wealth
can
only
be
actualised
in
a
mediated,
reflexive,
deferred
way.
Wealth
no

longer
consists
in
the
enjoyment
of
the
time
of
things,
bodies
and
signs,
but
the
accelerated
and

expansive
production
of
their
lack,
transformed
into
an
exchange
value,
transformed
into
anxiety.

At
this
point
it
becomes
possible
to
understand
why
work
has
acquired
a
central
position
in
social

affectivity:
the
liberal
offensive
has
so
devastated
sociality
that
workers
are
obliged
to
accept
the

primordial
bribe—work
whenever
and
as
much
as
the
boss
wants
or
sink
into
poverty.
Moreover,

the
impoverishment
of
the
social
dimension
and
the
dis-‐eroticisation
of
experience
have
made

daily
life
so
sad
that
work
ends
up
seeming
like
the
only
tolerable
condition.
We
reconcile

ourselves
with
work
because
economic
survival
is
becoming
more
difficult
and
metropolitan
life
is

becoming
so
sad
that
we
might
as
well
exchange
it
for
money.

—PANIC-DEPRESSIVE SYNDROME AND COMPETITION

In
his
book
called
La
fatigue
d’être
soi
[The
Fatigue
of
Being
Oneself],
Alain
Ehrenberg
describes

depression
as
a
pathology
with
a
strong
social
content,
linked
in
particular
to
a
situation

characterised
by
competitiveness.

Depression
began
to
assert
itself
when
the
disciplinary
model
of
managing
behaviour,
the
rules
of

authority
and
the
respect
for
taboos
that
assigned
a
destiny
to
social
classes
and
sexes,
gave
way

to
norms
that
incite
everyone
to
individual
initiative,
exhorting
them
to
become
themselves.

Because
of
this
new
normativity,
the
entire
responsibility
for
our
lives
is
located
inside
each
of
us.

Depression
thus
presents
itself
as
a
sickness
of
responsibility
in
which
the
feeling
of
insufficiency

dominates.
The
depressive
is
not
up
to
the
mark,
is
tired
of
having
to
become
his
or
herself.4

Depression
is
intimately
linked
to
the
ideology
of
self-‐fulfilment
and
the
happiness
imperative.

And
depression
is
also
a
way
of
identifying,
in
the
language
of
psychopathology,
a
kind
of

behaviour
that
wasn’t
clearly
identifiable
as
pathological
outside
of
the
competitive,
productivist

and
individualistic
context.
According
to
Ehrenberg:

VOLUME11 NUMBER2 SEP2005
62

Depression
enters
into
a
problematic
where
what
dominates
is
not
so
much
emotional
pain
as

inhibition,
slowing
down
and
asthenia:
the
ancient
sad
passion
is
transformed
into
an
obstacle
to

action
in
a
context
where
individual
initiative
becomes
the
measure
of
the
person.5

Competitiveness
involves
a
high-‐risk
narcissistic
stimulation
because
naturally,
in
a
competitive

situation
(like
that
of
the
capitalist
economy
in
general,
but
in
a
particularly
accentuated
way,
like

that
of
the
new
economy),
the
contenders
are
many
and
the
elect
are
few,
while
the
social
norm

doesn’t
recognise
the
possibility
of
failure
since
this
is
identified
as
a
psychopathological
category.

There
is
no
competition
without
defeat,
without
failure,
but
the
social
norm
cannot
recognise
the

normality
of
failure
without
putting
into
doubt
its
ideological
foundations,
without
putting
into

doubt
its
economic
efficiency.

The
use
of
psychostimulant
or
anti-‐depressive
substances
is
naturally
the
other
face
of
the

new
economy.
How
many
workers
of
the
new
economy
survive
without
Prozac,
without
Zoloft
or

without
cocaine?
The
habituation
to
psychotropic
substances,
those
that
can
be
bought
in
a

pharmacy
and
those
that
can
be
bought
on
the
black
market,
is
a
structural
element
of
the

psychopathogenic
economy.
When
the
fundamental
psychological
imperative
of
social
interaction

is
that
of
economic
competition,
the
conditions
of
mass
depression
are
being
created.
This
is

effectively
what
is
happening
before
our
very
eyes.

Social
psychologists
observe
that
panic
and
depression
have
become
endemic
over
the
last

few
decades.
Panic
is
a
syndrome
that
psychologists
know
little
about
because
it
seems
that
in
the

past
crises
of
this
sort
were
quite
rare.
The
panic
syndrome
has
only
recently
been
diagnosed
as
a

specific
phenomenon
and
it
is
with
great
difficulty
that
its
physical
and
psychic
causes
are
being

identified.
It
is
with
even
greater
difficulty
that
an
adequate
therapy
for
this
syndrome
is
being

identified.
I
don’t
claim
to
provide
an
explanation,
much
less
a
solution,
for
the
pathological

problem
represented
by
this
syndrome.
I
restrict
myself
to
a
few
reflections
on
what
panic

signifies.
Panic
is
the
feeling
we
experience
when,
confronted
with
the
infinity
of
nature,
we
feel

overwhelmed,
incapable
of
accepting
into
our
consciousness
the
infinite
array
of
stimuli
that
the

world
arouses
in
us.
The
etymology,
in
effect,
comes
from
the
Greek
word
signifying
‘everything

that
exists’
(pan),
and
the
divinity
who
went
by
this
name
made
his
presence
felt
as
the
bearer
of
a

sublime
madness,
as
James
Hillman
writes
in
his
‘Essay
on
Pan’.6
But
in
the
social
context
of

competitive
society,
where
all
energies
are
mobilised
towards
a
position
of
supremacy,
and
in
the

technological
context
of
constant
acceleration
of
the
rhythms
of
the
global
machine,
panic

becomes
a
social
effect
of
the
constant
expansion
of
cyberspace
with
respect
to
the
limited

performance
capacities
of
the
individual
brain
and
with
respect
to
cybertime.

Franco Berardi— What does Cognitariat Mean?
63

The
infinite
vastness
of
the
infosphere
surpasses
the
performance
capacities
of
the
human

organism
as
much
as
sublime
nature
surpasses
the
Greek
man’s
capacities
for
feeling
when
the

god
Pan
appears
on
the
horizon.
The
infinite
speed
of
expansion
of
cyberspace,
the
infinite
speed

of
exposure
to
signals
that
the
organism
perceives
as
vital
to
survival,
subjects
it
to
a
perceptive,

cognitive
and
psychic
stress
that
culminates
in
a
dangerous
acceleration
of
all
vital
functions,

breathing
and
the
heart
beat,
to
the
point
of
collapse.

Thus
what
is
at
stake
here
is
not
an
individual
psychopathology
but
the
individual

manifestation
of
a
widespread
social
psychopathology.

—

Translated
by
Melinda
Cooper.

Franco
Berardi
(Bifo)
is
a
philosopher
and
political
activist.
Co-‐founder
of
Rekombinant

,
a
web
environment
of
informal
communication,
and
media
and
political

activism,
he
is
also
the
author
of
numerous
books.
His
most
recent
work,
Il
sapiente,
il
guerriero,
il

mercante,
is
currently
being
translated
into
English.

—NOTES
1
Pierre
Lévy,
Cyberculture,
trans.
Robert
Bononno,
University
of
Minnesota
Press,
Minneapolis,
2001.

2
Juliet
Schor,
The
Overworked
American:
The
Unexpected
Decline
of
Leisure,
Basic
Books,
New
York,
1991.

3
Mike
Davies,
City
of
Quartz:
Excavating
the
Future
in
Los
Angeles,
Verso,
London,
1990;
Ecology
of
Fear:
Los
Angeles
and

the
Imagination
of
Disaster,
Metropolitan
Books,
New
York,
1998.

4
Alain
Ehrenberg,
La
fatigue
d’être
soi,
Odile
Jacob,
Paris,
1998,
p.
10.

5
Ehrenberg,
p.
18

6
James
Hillman,
‘An
Essay
on
Pan:
Serving
as
a
Psychological
Introduction
to
Roscher’s
Ephialtes’,
in
Wilhelm
Roscher,

Pan
and
the
Nightmare,
Spring
Publications,
New
York,
1972.

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Sally PattenSally PattenSally PattenSally PattenSally Patten and Jane Lindhe

May 2, 2018 – 12.15am

Back in the BSM (before social media) days, to land a promotion, an

employee often waited to be asked by senior management. Getting a job

in a different company meant sifting through job advertisements or

staying close to recruitment companies.

“A lot of people have had a full career but have never had to think about

what sets them apart,” says Irene McConnell, who specialises in

executive branding.

The reach of professional networking site LinkedInLinkedInLinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn means that

companies and recruiters have an enormous talent pool from which to

choose. In March 2018, LinkedIn had 4.3 million monthly active users in

Australia, and 467 million registered users worldwide, according to

Vivid SocialVivid SocialVivid SocialVivid SocialVivid Social – Social Media Agency.

Work & Careers Management BOSS Print article

BrandMe: how to take your personal
branding to a new level beyond LinkedIn
In a series of articles, we look at how business professionals can stand out from the crowd.

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As the recruitment pool expands, the challenge is for executives is to get

themselves noticed, McConnell says. “People find it difficult to stand out.

But you need to stand out and have a value proposition.”

In other words, executives need a personal brand and a strategy for

getting their brand out in an ever-expanding marketplace. It’s all about

creating a BrandMe.

“People find it difficult to stand out. But you need to stand out and have a value proposition,” says Irene
McConnell, executive branding specialist.

It is not just executives who are looking to develop and market their

personal brand. Companies are getting in on the act too.

Julissa Shrewsbury, a corporate personal brand specialist and director

of New Work Consulting, points to a rise in the number of companies

looking to develop the personal brands of staff, particularly frontline

staff, C-suiters and directors. Staff can be helped to develop a personal

brand in the context of the organisation’s values and purpose.

Value proposition

Another group of businesspeople looking to promote themselves are

those who have traded in corporate life for the big wide world of

consultancy. Invariably they need to establish themselves as thought

leaders in a particular field. In a crowded marketplace, people

increasingly want to know about a person’s values and passions before

they commit to becoming a client or partner.

McConnell says the first task for executives is to pinpoint exactly what

they are trying to achieve with a personal brand and who they are

aiming to target. Executives who are looking for a new job need to be

clear about what that job looks like and think about their value

proposition to a potential employer.

“Our view is that you need to understand why you are doing it. There is

a lot of content out there. Your brand needs to be engaging to your

market,” says McConnell, who is managing director of Arielle Careers.

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Shrewsbury says executives looking for, say, company board roles need

to display a well-rounded public profile, which could be enhanced by

volunteer work or sitting on not-for-profit boards. “These will help

demonstrate how you are engaged in the community. If people are

aware of it, it’s a win-win.”

With a target audience in mind, the next step is to create a résumé,

LinkedIn profile and elevator pitch that align.

LinkedIn remains the favourite social media tool for people who are

developing their careers, since most first contacts are in cyberspace

rather than face-to-face. It is also a useful way to expand networks.

Target audience

Academic Ron BurtRon BurtRon BurtRon BurtRon Burt, professor of sociology and strategy at the

University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, has spent his career

studying how networks create competitive advantages. He notes that

while successful people are often more intelligent than average, it is

their networking ability and “social capital” that are the most important

elements of their success. (Social capital loosely refers to the goodwill

and positive reputation that flows to a person through their

relationships.)

But gone are the days when executives could rely on using key words to

get themselves noticed on the networking site, McConnell says. Words

such as “passion” and “leadership” no longer serve as a point of

difference because everyone is using them. According to LinkedIn, the

most overused words in Australian profiles are experienced, specialise,

passionate, skilled, leadership, motivated, expert, strategic, successful

and creative.

McConnell says executives instead need to fashion their public profile in

such a way that it demonstrates they have the skills and experience to

With a target audience in mind, the next step is to create a resume, LinkedIn profile and elevator pitch that
align with it. Tanya Lake

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solve a problem possessed by the target audience, such as recruiters,

future employers or potential clients.

Conference panels

Apart from LinkedIn, other personal branding tools include books,

YouTube videos, podcasts, speaking engagements, appearances on

panels and roundtables, building a personal website and TEDxTEDxTEDxTEDxTEDx talks.

Individuals need to figure out what works best for them. Carolyn Tate

has written five books, including her latest, The Purpose Project, and

says it is possible to make money out of the exercise. But, she warns, it’s

not for everyone. “A book is not the only way to get your voice out there.

People think they should be writing, but they might be better at videos,

podcasts or webinars,” Tate says.

“If you are building a brand, conference panels are a really good way of

doing that,” says Véronique Henrisson, a producer at Informa Australia,

a Sydney-based company that organises conferences for The Australian

Financial Review.

Henrisson says she fields many calls from consultants who want to get

themselves in front of big audiences. Unsurprisingly, she finds a lot of

subject experts for conference panels through LinkedIn. She might

notice that someone has posted an interesting article or blog, or that

one of her LinkedIn followers has shared or liked an interesting article,

and she will contact the author.

“You need to get your ideas out there,” Henrisson says.

Once they have been asked to take part in a panel, it is critical that the

executive shares their expertise and contributes to the conversation,

she says.

As the recruitment pool expands thanks to social media, the challenge is for executives is to get
themselves noticed. Erin Jonasson

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“You have got to add to the dialogue. Don’t be self-promoting. It will go

down like a lead balloon,” she says.

Back in the corporate world, Shrewsbury points to increasing interest

from companies wanting to train customer-facing and senior executives

in how to represent the company, and to work on how they are

perceived by others. Ideally it’s a win-win. Executives should be in a

better position to meet their key performance indicators, while helping

to build their careers.

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Sally PattenSally PattenSally PattenSally PattenSally Patten edits BOSS, and writes about workplace issues. She was the financial services

editor and personal finance editor of the AFR, The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. She

edited business news for The Times of London. Connect with Sally on TwitterTwitterTwitterTwitterTwitter. Email Sally at

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Verified: Self-presentation, identity management,
and selfhood in the age of big data

Alison Hearn

To cite this article: Alison Hearn (2017) Verified: Self-presentation, identity management,
and selfhood in the age of big data, Popular Communication, 15:2, 62-77, DOI:
10.1080/15405702.2016.1269909

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Verified: Self-presentation, identity management, and
selfhood in the age of big data
Alison Hearn

University of Western Ontario

ABSTRACT
What new styles of selfhood and self-presentation, forms of social
status, and arbiters of “authenticity” are being authorized and propa-
gated in the wake of big data and affective capitalism? How are they
functioning, for whom, and to what end? This article takes up these
questions via an examination of a sought-after user identity badge, the
Twitter verification checkmark, figuring it as both an affective lure that
incentivizes specific styles of self-presentation and a disciplinary means
through which capitalist logics work to condition and subsume the
significance of the millions of forms of self-presentation generated
daily. Beneath the promise of democratized access to social status
and fame, the business practices of the social platforms in and through
which we self-present draw us into privatized strategies of social
sorting, identity management, and control. To conclude, the article
will posit a new “ideal type” of selfhood for the big data age.

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our
police to see that our papers are in order. (Michel Foucault, 1989, The Archaeology of Knowledge)

Over the past 200 years at least, in North America and Europe specifically, forms of
selfhood and modes of self-presentation have become increasingly and complicatedly
conditioned by the advances of capitalism and its ever-evolving search for new forms of
value and profit. Capital is a social relation after all, and subjectivity is both imminent to
and constitutive of its operations. And, as cultural historian Warren Sussman argues,
“changes in culture do mean changes in modal types of character and … social structures
do generate their own symbols” (Sussman, 1984, p. 285); our dominant concepts about
who we are, how we present ourselves, what we value, and how we might relate to each
other have always existed in tension with the economic, cultural, technological, and
aesthetic forms and codes available to us.

How, then, might we understand contemporary forms of self-presentation and selfhood
in the wake of society’s recent “datalogical turn” (Clough, Gregory, Haber, & Scannell,
2015)? It is now axiomatic that we live in a world characterized by a capitalist mode of
production predicated on the generation of vast amounts of random data via ubiquitous
computing of all kinds, from which saleable units of meaning—or “capta”—are mined
through forms of machine learning (Kitchin & Dodge, 2011). These developments, in
turn, have produced new strategies for forecasting, targeting, and decision making in a

CONTACT Alison Hearn ahearn2@uwo.ca Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western
Ontario, London, ON, N6A 3K7, Canada.

POPULAR COMMUNICATION
2017, VOL. 15, NO. 2, 62–77
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2016.1269909

growing range of economic, cultural, and political realms, effectively working to govern,
predict, “and thereby modulate … emergent forms of sociality” (Clough et al., 2015,
p. 153). This new digital “affective” capitalism purloins our desires, emotions, and forms
of expressivity and turns them into commodities and assets. Affective capitalism is, quite
literally, run on the fuel of individual feeling and self-expression taking place online; self-
presentation is now a crucial part of the economic infrastructure (Andrejevic, 2011;
Hearn, 2010).

What new styles of selfhood and self-presentation, ideas about our interiority, forms of
social status, and arbiters of “authenticity” are being generated, propagated, and author-
ized in the wake of big data and the rise of affective capitalism? How are they functioning,
for whom, and to what end? And what can these emergent “truths” about the self tell us,
in turn, about the almost entirely opaque systems of machine-learning, algorithmic social
sorting, and capital accumulation that lie beneath them?

This article takes up the issues of selfhood and self-presentation in the era of affective
capitalism by first tracing some “ideal types” of selfhood posited by a variety of postwar
critics, and then briefly describing the contemporary political economic context within
which current forms of self-presentation are generated, defined, and circulated. It then
examines what many might consider a prosaic example of these processes—the Twitter
verification checkmark. The article figures the verification checkmark as both an affective
lure that summons and incentivizes specific styles of self-presentation, and a portal
through which we can follow capitalist logics as they work to condition and, ultimately,
subsume the impact and significance of the millions of forms of self-presentation gener-
ated online daily. The article goes on to explore new technologies of identity management
that work to conflate digital citizenship with financial citizenship, linking everyday forms
of self-presentation with the structural logics of capitalist accumulation. Beneath the gauzy
promises of democratized access to sociality, meaning, fame, and reputation, the business
practices of the social platforms in and through which we self-present draw us all into
privatized corporate strategies of social sorting, identity management, and control. These
developments are symptomatic of what Byung-Chul Han (2015) calls a “transparency”
society, in which “the capitalist economy subjects everything to compulsory exhibition”
and the work of self-presentation, “the staging of display, alone generates value” (p. 11).
To conclude, the article posits a new “ideal type” of selfhood for the big data age.

The ideal type

As Max Weber (2003) has famously argued, the proposition of an ideal type—of indivi-
dual, concept, or practice—is a crucial sociological method. For Weber, an ideal type is “a
complex of elements associated in historical reality which we unite into a conceptual
whole from the standpoint of their cultural significance” (p. 47). The ideal type is never
found in a “pure” state out in the world; instead, it is a fiction, a unified, analytical
abstraction that “must be gradually put together out of individual parts which are taken
from historical reality to make it up” (p. 47). As a practice of sociology, the positing of an
ideal type necessarily involves “the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view”
(Weber, 1949, p. 90), and, as a result, recognizes the inherent subjectivity of all knowledge
and the subsequent duty of sociologists to “stand up” for their own ideals (Weber, 1949,
p. 58). Following Weber, members of the Frankfurt School developed the method of the

POPULAR COMMUNICATION 63

ideal type in the service of trenchant cultural criticism, using posits like “one-dimensional
man” (Marcuse, 1991) and “the authoritarian personality” (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik,
Levinson, & Sanford, 1993) in order to enact a critique, or the “public sphere” (Habermas,
1991) in order to assert a normative goal (Holmes, 2002). In these cases, the generation of
an ideal type was explicitly intended to facilitate a diagnosis of the operations and costs of
capitalism writ large.

Following from the work of Weber and members of the Frankfurt School, many
notable critics throughout the 20th century have proposed “ideal types” in order to
“show the links between the major articulations of power and the more-or-less trivial
aesthetics of everyday life” (Holmes, 2002). In this way, they worked to assess and
understand the social, political, and cultural effects of life under consumer capitalism.
Psychologist and critic Philip Cushman (1990), for example, contends that the burgeoning
consumer landscape post World War II brought us an “empty self” who must perpetually
consume in order to be effectively organized and identified, but who can never be entirely
satiated. Anthony Giddens (1991) characterizes selfhood as a “reflexive project” involving
the self-conscious development of a coherent narrative of self; in the wake of our
disembeddedness from traditional centers of authority, this reflexive project of self-
making is the only remaining continuity, or through-line, in our lives. Zygmunt
Baumann (2001) concurs: “It is me, my living body or that living body which is me,
which seems to be the sole constant ingredient of the admittedly unstable, always until
further notice composition of the world around me” (p. 22). With these thinkers, the
postwar self is figured as an insatiable, self-involved, consuming machine.

In The Birth of Biopolitics (2008), Michel Foucault traces a shift in the figure of “homo
economicus” from “a partner in exchange” under Keynesian liberalism to an “entrepre-
neur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer,
being for himself the source of (his) earnings” (p. 226) under neoliberalism. For Foucault,
neoliberal society figures consumption itself as an “enterprise activity,” a form of produc-
tion serving to satisfy the demands of all of us as “human capital” (p. 226). Paul Du Gay
(1996) develops these insights, noting the rise of an “enterprise culture” in the workplace,
which regards “certain enterprising qualities—such as self-reliance, personal responsibil-
ity, boldness and a willingness to take risks … as human virtues” (p. 60); here, workers are
increasingly expected to be “entrepreneurs of the self” (p. 70), engaged in the “continuous
business of living to make adequate provision for the preservation, reproduction, and
reconstruction of (their) own human capital” (Gordon, 1991, p. 44).

Eva Illouz (2007) traces the ways in which Freudianism, as it was disseminated in
scientific discourse and popular culture in the early part of the 20th century, resulted in
new kinds of identity symbols and new emotional styles of selfhood predicated on the
outward struggle for personal authenticity and truth. Focusing specifically on the impact
of popular psychology on workplace management practices, Illouz notes the rise of a new
“communicative ethic … involving emotional and linguistic self-management” (p. 21) to
the top of the list of required workplace skills. These conditions herald a “realignment of
emotional cultures” and signal the entrenchment of emotional capitalism, which “has
affect at the very heart of its transactions” (p. 23). Under these conditions, the economic
self becomes emotional and personal emotions are “more closely harnessed to instru-
mental action” (p. 23).

64 A. HEARN

The dominance of emotion over logic and reason in public life is an outcome of the
intensification of advertising and marketing post war, which has produced what Andrew
Wernick (1991) calls a promotional culture. For Wernick, the logics of promotionalism
have saturated our lives, creating a condition where the manipulation of affective flows
and the governance of attention have come to displace expertise, experience, or fact. In
this context, the self, increasingly subject to the logics of promotion, becomes a “com-
modity sign,” extending and doubling its role as repository of labor power, functioning
both as a worker and as a bearer of a promotional message about work and social value in
general. Wernick describes it this way: “a subject that promotes itself, constructs itself for
others in line with the competitive imaging needs of the market. Just like any other
artificially imaged commodity, then, the resultant construct is a persona produced for
public consumption” (p. 192).

In the early 2000s, against the backdrop of neoliberal economic conditions of crisis,
austerity, unemployment, and persistent precarity, critic Brian Holmes (2002), drawing
from the work of Paolo Virno, Francois Lyotard, and others, identifies the rise of the
flexible personality—an individual cynically and opportunistically ready to adapt his or
her capacities and turn on a dime in order to secure a living. For Holmes, the flexible
personality is the result of capitalism’s appropriation of the artistic and political revolu-
tionary energies of the 1960s, and now functions as “a form of governmentality … and
‘soft coercion.’” Following from this, and given the proliferation of new technologies and
social media platforms throughout the 2000s, I, along with many other critics, have traced
the emergence of the ubiquitously connected self-brander (Banet-Weiser, 2012; Hearn,
2008, 2010; Senft, 2013). Since “I” am the only reliable constant in my working life, “I”
should work hard to sell my special something to the world via the technological
affordances made available to me. Self-branding is “a form of affective labor that is
purposefully undertaken by individuals in order to garner attention, reputation and,
potentially, profit” (Hearn, 2010, p. 427).

This very brief summary of some of the ideal types of “selfhood” critics have proposed
over the past 60 years highlights the ways in which our ideas about our selves and our
styles of self-presentation are conditioned by market forces and changes in the forms and
structure of work. As Brian Holmes (2002) argues, we must never lose sight of the
“hardened political and economic frames” within which dominant ideas about the “self”
and modes of self-presentation emerge. Currently, these frames and contexts include the
dominance of global transnational finance capital, the growth of precarious work and
immaterial labor, the “sharing economy,” unpaid internships, and, of course, the intensi-
fication of ubiquitous computing, social media platforms, and big data analytics.

Contemporary frames and contexts of self-presentation

The past four decades have seen manufacturing and production in most sectors of the
economy stagnate or decline, while the financial sector has grown dramatically. The
growth of the financial industries has also resulted in a more general diffusion of their
logics, discourses, and practices across the economy and culture at large. These processes
of “financialization” have been fueled by state deregulation of labor codes and financial
markets, which have allowed nonfinancial industries to take on characteristics of financial
institutions, banks to focus less on private lending and more on trading, thereby

POPULAR COMMUNICATION 65

transforming their debtors into sources of profit and encouraging individuals and families
to become increasingly indebted in order to access life necessities such as education and
health care (Lapavitsas, 2013, p. 3–4). Undergirded as it is by entrenched power elites who
espouse neoliberal governmental ideologies protecting free markets and free trade, finan-
cialization represents a shift in emphasis from the sphere of production to “the ballooning
sphere of circulation” (p. 3)—resulting in a condition Costas Lapavitsas (2013) calls
“profiting without producing” (p. 323). In spite of the global economic crisis of 2008,
then, “the influence of capital markets, their intermediaries and processes in contemporary
economic and political life”’ (Pike & Pollard, 2010, p. 30) continues to grow, as practices
of financial speculation, including “venture capital buyouts, public-private finance initia-
tives, international ratings agencies and bond markets” come to set “the conditions of
development for both nonfinance capital and state services” (Gilligan & Vischmidt, 2015,
p. 613).

The shift from production to circulation signaled by the rise of financialization, and
dramatic technological developments and the concomitant growth and clout of technology
industries, have led to major changes in the labor market. As production has decreased,
the service economy has grown, and forms of “immaterial labor” that produce an
“immaterial” product, such as a line of computer code, a sexual experience, or a pleasant
dining experience, have become dominant (Lazzarato, 1996). As Illouz (2007), duGay
(1996), Maurizio Lazzarato (1996) and others have noted, workers are now required to put
their “soul” to work (Berardi, 2009) in order to generate good experiences, communicate,
innovate, and create. In the context of these qualitative changes in the nature of work, we
also have seen the rise of the “sharing” economy, which ostensibly involves the collabora-
tion of people and businesses in “sharing” and distributing goods, services, or the abilities
of individuals. While “sharing” connotes equity and cooperation, many “sharing” inter-
mediaries that provide the platforms in and through which the sharing takes place, such as
Uber or AirBnB, make a tidy profit at the expense of those who offer their goods or
services (Asher-Schapiro, 2014; Gilligan and Vishmidt, 2015). We have also seen the
development of the “gig economy” or “permalancing” (Sundararajan, 2015), which
involves the entrenchment of short-term, precarious, subcontracted jobs, and the normal-
ization of unpaid internships for young adults looking to break into the job market.

While proponents celebrate the flexibility and autonomy inherent in these new working
conditions, critics suggest that they are endangering the life chances of an entire generation of
workers, weakening labor protections and driving down wages. No matter how one defines
the problems or opportunities behind these new labor market conditions, it is clear that the
highly individualized, entrepreneurial spirit at work, first described by Foucault, has become
the new normal, as workers are increasingly compelled to navigate the uncertainties and
perpetual crises of global finance capitalism on their own and at their own peril.

Technological developments in ubiquitous computing, social media, and big data, of
course, are deeply intertwined with broader economic processes of financialization and
labor market transformations. Not only are financial markets now driven by high-
frequency trading, which generates complex algorithms that exploit miniscule price dis-
crepancies to buy and sell in fractions of a second (Levenson and Bennet, 2014), a whole
new set of businesses have been generated in the wake of big data. Indeed, when the
World Economic Forum declared data “a new class of economic asset, like currency or
gold” (Lohr, 2012) in 2012, it was only beginning to envision the ways in which processes

66 A. HEARN

of data analytics would profoundly change the operations of a wide range of industries,
from retail, to entertainment, manufacturing, health care, and beyond.

With the amount of data generated daily now averaging 2.5 quintillion bites (IBM,
2016), data industries specializing in analytics, database management, and data storage,
security, and access have been growing steadily. And since much of the lucrative raw
material for the generation of meaningful data is human sociality and feeling expressed
via forms of self-presentation online, industries specializing in mining, selling, and
shaping those feelings and opinions have been growing apace. As Joe Turow (2011)
describes, new data exchange companies, such as eXelate and Blue Kai, use cookies to
track information about consumers as they move across the Web. The data is then
parsed into information about consumers’ intent and ability to purchase, effectively
sorting individuals into categories of those whose attention matters and those who are
considered “waste” (p. 88). In what can only be described as the apotheosis of
personalized, just-in-time marketing, advertisers then engage in “real time bidding”
for the attention of individuals at “virtually the moment they load the page of the site
they’re visiting” (p. 79). Social media “intelligence” services, such as Sysomos or
Radian6, offer to find the profit in our sociality by tracking, analyzing, and “optimiz-
ing” a company’s reputation for a fee. And more recently, businesses like Klout and
Peerindex claim to provide an “objective” measure of users’ social media reputation
and “influence” in the form of a numeric score out of 100 in exchange for access to
users’ social media activity. These companies monetize themselves by working with
brands and retailers to offer “perks” in the form of goods or services to their users for
attaining higher scores and becoming more “influential.” While these sites promise
enhanced social media status in the form of a high score, in effect they are simply a
form of target marketing, working to identify opportunities for further value creation
both for themselves and their corporate clients. The incentive of the personal score, of
course, also helps to generate more valuable personal data that can be captured, mined,
and sold.

Social media influence measurement systems are emblematic of the rise of the so-called
“reputation” economy online (Klein, 2013; Schwabel, 2011). On websites such as YouTube
and Instagram it is now entirely commonplace for individuals to monetize themselves by
working to develop legions of followers or subscribers—no need for television networks or
other cultural intermediaries. Indeed, in the context of an exhausted neoliberal political
economic system marked by perpetual crisis and austerity, where traditional jobs are dis-
appearing and there is growing employment precarity, achieving a reputation for having a
reputation has come to seem a reasonable life goal for many people. The acquisition of a good
“reputation” has also come to play a central role in the “sharing economy” via reviews and
recommendations, even as what constitutes a “good reputation” is defined and delimited in
advance by the platforms that supposedly facilitate the “sharing” (Hearn, 2010). Against the
backdrop of global finance capital, proliferating social media platforms, mobile technologies,
and big data analytics, then, forms of self-presentation and the data they generate have come
to function as a new form of currency and, more generally, value. But what is the link between
the pursuit of monetizable online social status and reputation and the business practices of the
platforms and affordances that make that pursuit possible. Who really benefits from the
exchange of personal data for social status?

POPULAR COMMUNICATION 67

The Twitter verification checkmark

The issues of self-presentation, reputation seeking, and capital value extraction can be
elucidated further through an examination of perhaps the most sought-after online user
status badge of all—the Twitter verification checkmark. The verb “verify” generally means
to “confirm,” “support,” or “substantiate” the truth or authenticity of some event, thing, or
person. In rare instances of usage, however, “verify” can also mean “to ‘cause’ to appear
truthful or authentic” (“Verify,” 2002). Following from these definitions, two inflections of the
term “verified” are considered here. The first understands verification as an affirmative
authentication and approval of identity around which users’ desires and affective investments
circulate. The second inflection positions verification as a disciplinary mode of regulation
enacted by a private or state institution that claims authorization over legible and/or “authen-
tic” forms of identity but that, in effect, “causes” legitimate forms of identity to appear.

Affective investment and social sorting

Twitter launched its user accounts verification program in beta form in the summer of 2009
after receiving several complaints about impersonation from high profile users such as Kanye
West (Rao, 2009); it has since verified approximately 187,000 accounts (Kapko, 2016).
Twitter’s verification program is intended to “let people know that an account of public
interest is authentic” (Twitter, 2016), generally defining accounts held by artists, musicians,
celebrities, politicians, and journalists as constitutive of the “public interest.” Twitter also
makes it clear that the verification of an account does not imply endorsement of the verified
party (Twitter, 2016). The benefits of holding a verified account include access to additional
filters in the notifications section, access to Twitter analytics, and the ability to opt out of group
messages (Tsukayama, 2016). The other obvious benefit is that verified accounts tend to show
up more frequently in Internet searches, potentially increasing visibility, reach, and user
engagement for verified customers. Most significantly, for many people, the verification
checkmark is considered a status symbol, signifying social influence and personal clout
(Dash, 2013).

Twitter insists that its verification process is conducted by people, not machines, does
not rely on number of followers or tweet counts, and that the criteria for deciding who
gets verified are constantly updated (Dash, 2013). Until recently, Twitter did not accept
verification requests from users; it simply bestowed verification when it saw fit. Even with
the recent change allowing users to apply for verification, Twitter still has the final say,
reserving the right to turn down requests without explanation (Tsukayama, 2016). Beyond
its promise to verify those accounts it deems to be in the public interest, the reasons
behind Twitter’s decisions to verify remain entirely opaque. Indeed, while the Internet is
full of blogs and websites with instructions about how to get verified, most of them are
hoax sites or generally state the same thing: There is no way to game the system, the whole
process is completely black boxed. In the words of blogger Anil Dash (2013), the
verification process is “straight up an old boys club,” with Twitter employees deciding,
with no accountability, who gets in.

It is likely this “don’t ask for it, we will give it to you when we decide you deserve it”
process that has generated such widespread affective investment in the truth and power
behind the check mark, and such excitement when a person gets verified. A search of

68 A. HEARN

YouTube reveals dozens of videos portraying user reactions to receiving the Twitter
verification checkmark. Vlogger Matthew Santora (2014) proclaims, “I’m gonna try not
to freak out, but I got Twitter verified today! I have been waiting to get verified on Twitter
longer than any other social network.” Gamer FaZe Rug (2015) can’t believe his luck,
shouting, “Oh my God, this is awesome! This is so sick! I can’t believe it! Last night I was
feeling like complete shit … and then I wake up and I’m verified!” Rachel Vlogs (2016)
bounces in her chair singing, “I’m verified! That’s awesome! Thank all you guys who
follow me!” and rapper Jae Lyrix (2012) says humbly, “I’ve been verified on Twitter. It’s a
blessing. To me it’s just a stepping-stone to all the other things I want to do in life. I didn’t
expect to get verified so quick but, you know, through God all things are possible.”

When users are contacted for verification, they are told they are three quick steps away
from earning their verification badge. The site then takes them through a short quiz
predicated on helping them learn “how to tweet effectively.” The lessons include learning
how to double follower rates by live tweeting events, engaging more followers by asking
them questions and inviting them to a live question-and-answer period, and increasing
likes, retweets, and favorites by including visuals and photos. Finally, Twitter encourages
the user to like and follow other verified accounts in order to increase their own
“truthworthiness.” At the end of the quiz, Twitter asks newly verified users to provide
their phone number “in case there is a security issue” (Dash, 2013).

Certainly, the responses to Twitter verification documented on YouTube indicate the
degree of affective investment many people place in achieving the checkmark. Like Klout,
Peerindex, and other social influence scoring metrics, the Twitter verification checkmark
promises the glamour of elite access and social mobility, and legitimates attention-getting
forms of self-presentation as the means to achieve social recognition and, potentially,
profit; by getting verified, Twitter implies that new worlds of reputational capital will open
up to its users. The exhortations to learn how to “tweet effectively” in order to receive
verification, however, clearly expose the promotional, self-serving logics of Twitter itself.

In reality, the verification process works to instantiate a new kind of social sorting, or
social class, predicated entirely on a form of “reputation” that Twitter itself defines,
attributes, and then validates in an opaque, unaccountable manner. In this way, Twitter
installs itself as a powerful arbiter of social status and value in a promotional culture and a
“gig economy” where influence and high visibility are increasingly central to job stability
and monetary success. As it comes to challenge more traditional forms of identity author-
ization, such as passports or medical certificates, however, it must be noted that the check-
mark is far from an innocent indicator of a user’s “actual” identity or influence; rather, it is a
careful construction with an entirely instrumental purpose. It functions as a “free lunch
inducement” (Smythe, 1977) that works to push users into revealing more about themselves
and generating more data grist for the mill of the “capta” miners. The message to those who
seek out and attain the verification checkmark is clear: Build an effective self-brand, cultivate
a following and a reputation, and, most importantly, always be communicating.

The exchange of constant self-presentation and communication for perceived social
relevance and status does not come without a cost, however. Indeed, the request for a
phone number and personal details as a part of the verification process provides a portal
into the hidden abode of value production on Twitter, and gives us insight into the more
disciplinary and regulatory implications of the term “verification.”

POPULAR COMMUNICATION 69

Digits, user identity management, and mobile payment

When Jack Dorsey conceived Twitter in 2006, he saw it primarily as a “social utility”
intended to allow users to exchange messages on their mobile phones (El Akkad, 2014, p.
B8). As a result, Twitter initially focused on amassing users via its microblogging service
(Smith, 2009). It has since gone on to try several different revenue models, including
selling Google and Microsoft the rights to include its posts in their search functions and
growing its advertising arm through the development of sponsored content, “Promoted
Tweets,” and “Promoted Trends” (Van Dijck, 2011). In spite of these efforts, however,
Twitter has continued to suffer from a “corporate lack of existential clarity” (Kiss, 2015),
and has seen its user numbers and engagement levels remain stagnant since it went public
in 2013. This, of course, has meant problems for its advertising revenue and stock
valuation.

In the face of these problems, Twitter has shifted its focus from being a microblogging
provider toward becoming a “mobile services” company, seeking to join Apple, Facebook,
Google, and Amazon in the race to generate and capture “the corporate world’s most
valuable commodity”—user data (El Akkad, 2014). One of the ways Twitter is doing this is
by targeting app developers via a software development kit called Fabric. Fabric consists of
a set of developer tools that includes crash reporting, beta testing, a mechanism to
monetize advertising, and, most crucially, a way to streamline user login (Lachlan,
2014). By targeting developers with Fabric, Twitter can embed and extend its codes and
services into the larger Web, thereby gaining access to the personal data of Web users
beyond its subscribers.

One of the central features of Fabric is a user identity management platform, or mode
of “user onboarding,” called Digits. Digits allows users to sign into the app with their
phone number rather than a user name and password. The service then sends a text
message to the phone number to confirm identity, and from there the user has easy access
to the other apps and sites subscribed to the service (El Akkad, 2014, p. B8). App
developers who use Digits no longer have to manage individual relationships with
different mobile carriers, and users no longer have to remember a series of different
passwords and user names; with Digits, user identification is reduced simply to their SIM
card. Twitter, in turn, gets access to the user data generated by a “whole ecosystem of apps
that aren’t made by twitter, don’t necessarily run the company’s core micro-blogging
service, but still use twitter-developed code” (El Akkad, 2014, p. B8). Access to this very
large pool of data allows twitter to fine-tune the targeting algorithms for its own advertis-
ing business and to sell the data it collects to a range of other companies. For example, in a
potent marriage of data with “capta” technologies, in 2014 Twitter entered into partner-
ship with IBM, marrying its data firehouse of over 6,000 tweets a second to IBM’s Watson
data analytics computing capacity. IBM is promising to use the data to enhance its
business analytics and a range of other ventures, such as talent management and product
development (IBM, 2014). Meanwhile, the data-licensing arm of Twitter’s business grew
48% in the first quarter of 2016 to $70 million (Flynn, 2016).

For many prominent new technology companies, including Facebook, Google, and now
Twitter, processes of identity management and security are central to their capital accu-
mulation strategies. Insofar as data is currency and each individual user is the source of
that currency—a veritable “data geyser” (El Akkad, 2014, p. B8)—then creating the

70 A. HEARN

conditions for frictionless and easy movement and transferability of individual users
across platforms, devices, and apps is crucially important. The easier it is for users to
watch, chat, shop, and post seamlessly across apps and platforms, the more data are
generated and the more they can be mined to enhance in-house advertising and sold to
companies like IBM. All of these companies are now vying to be the chosen middleman
that can facilitate users’ easy movement across the Web.

A major impetus behind the race to streamline and standardize user logins and modes
of identity verification is the recent growth in mobile payment and transaction systems.
Mobile payment systems (MPS) eliminate the need for cash, debit or credit cards, or any
kind of identification for that matter, putting the mobile phone, its infrastructure, hard-
ware, and user identity software at the center of all forms of market exchange. With MPS,
users can pay for goods and services with their phones via SMS message, charge an item to
their mobile phone accounts, use a QR code, or any number of online wallets, such as
Amazon Payments or Google Wallet (Knoll, 2012). Mobile pay systems have been growing
steadily in North America for the past few years, with use expected to grow 210% in 2016
to a total of $27.05 billion in sales (Emarketer, 2015).

In processes of mobile payment, and, indeed, all forms of e-commerce, payment and
transaction components, specifically user identity verification, have been circulatory choke
points. But with Twitter’s proposal to reduce users to their mobile phone number or SIM
card, what telecomm insiders call the “last mile”—“usually the most costly and technically
challenging” final stretch in the process of virtual exchange, “linking the backhaul infra-
structure” with the front-end user/consumer (Manzerolle & Kjosen, 2014, p. 161)—is
rendered smooth and easily navigable. This, along with the fact that it has always focused
on mobile computing, gives Twitter a small edge in the user identity management race (El
Akkad, 2014, p. B8).

Twitter’s entry into the identity management and verification market is evidence of a
major convergence now taking place between banks and financial institutions and the
telecomm, new media, and retail giants. While large retailers are launching their own
consumer banks, payment services, and credit cards, telecomm operators are acquiring
bank licenses, and banks are partnering with telecomm operators and, in some cases,
acquiring their own telecomm licenses to provide financial services over mobile networks
(Hernaes, 2015). This trend is specifically prominent in the Global South where major
industry consortia are looking to harness these practices as a way to gain access to the
worlds’ 2 billion “unbanked” or “underbanked” populations—those poor or marginalized
people who do not have access to traditional banking processes (Hernaes, 2016). M-PESA
in Kenya, a subsidiary of mobile telecomm giant Vodaphone, offers bill payment services,
loan disbursement and repayment, and links to other banking products as well as its own
debit card (Masinde, 2016). And Telenor Telecomm Group, which operates in Pakistan
among other places, not only offers mobile payment and transaction services, but life
insurance as well (Bhasin, 2016).

Industry convergence moved a step further into the data generation market recently, when,
in an effort to enhance security, Telenor introduced a program to tie individual users to their
SIM cards by fingerprinting them. This effort has resulted in an extremely valuable database
including the personal information, SIM cards, and fingerprints of 50 to 60 million people;
thus, “while Google and Facebook have to guess who you are, Telenor… is becoming a central
repository for names, addresses, finances, and in the near term … health and education

POPULAR COMMUNICATION 71

records as well” (Shahani, 2016). As a result, in Asia at least, Telenor has positioned itself as a
powerful gatekeeper of user identification, rivaling the efforts of national governments to track
and manage their populations.1

As Rachel O’Dwyer (2015) argues, industry convergence between financial services and
telecomm, and the identity management techniques at their center, “expand[s] already
existing forms of financial enclosure from the first world to the world’s poorest commu-
nities” (p. 238). By turning social agents into economic agents, these privatized mobile
payment systems displace already existing networks of sociality and trust around processes
of exchange, “undermining the social capital that existed prior to mobile remittances, such
as face to face microfinance institutions and informal and episodic networks between
friends and families” (p. 239). So, while advocates might argue that the deployment of
mobile banking for “underbanked” populations is socially inclusive and community-
building (Hernaes, 2016), it is more likely that these processes weaken the social institu-
tions and practices that have traditionally shaped dominant forms of self-presentation and
generated trust and reputation.

As money is virtualized and consumer transactions are datafied, and given that these
processes are enclosed and privatized, we will inevitably see new forms of governmentality
emerge. Indeed, the conflation of digital inclusion with financial inclusion is now driving
several nascent attempts to generate secure global, borderless identity systems. The United
Nations has identified a goal to provide a “legal identity” for the entire world population by
2030, and the World Bank launched the Identity for Development Program (ID4D) in 2014,
stating that “21st century digital technologies, including biometrics … are providing a
unique opportunity … to build a robust and efficient identification system at a scale
previously not achievable” (World Bank, 2016, p. 2). In the private sector, Facebook,
Bitcoin, and Deloitte, among others, are working to develop secure frictionless digital
identities that will move beyond third-party identity management with the use of blockchain
technologies (Hernaes, 2016). As Kate Crawford (2013) reminds us, however, the processes
of machine learning and data analytics that undergird forms of identity management have
already existing social assumptions, biases, and inequities baked into them; given this and
the developments described in the preceding paragraphs, it will most certainly be the poor,
indebted, and marginalized who will pay the heaviest price for their “digital and financial
inclusion” with increased levels of surveillance, monitoring, and government control.

The anticipatory, speculative self

How then might we configure the role of self-presentation and an ideal type of selfhood in
the era of big data and affective capitalism? As we have seen, with the development of
ecommerce and mobile payment, the market is no longer a delimited set of places in the
material world, but is now an ever-expanding field of virtual points for commodity

1It should be noted that while Apple, Samsung, and other mobile phones now have Touch ID,
user fingerprints are encrypted and stored on the hardware of the phone itself. Apple, for
example, promises that none of the apps operating on the phone or even its own operating
system can access a user’s fingerprint. This may change soon, however, as Apple filed a patent
in 2015 to enable storage of user fingerprints in the cloud, ostensibly to enable users to sync
their fingerprints across devices (see Beres, 2015; Steinberg, 2013).

72 A. HEARN

exchange (Manzerolle & Kjosen, 2014, p. 147). Under these conditions, value generation
lies in removing any and all impediments to the circulation of commodities, consumers,
forms of self-presentation and expressivity, and their product, data. Here, individuals “are
cast as quasi-automatic relays of a ceaseless information flow” (Terranova, 2013), or
figured as mere data outputs working to ensure “the often serendipitous reunion of
commodities and money” (Manzerolle & Kjosen, 2014, p. 133). The grease behind this
constant data generation is provided by free-lunch inducements like the Twitter verifica-
tion checkmark, whose promise of social status and high visibility encourages users to
perpetually work at posting and crafting themselves online. Under current volatile eco-
nomic conditions, however, this kind of attention seeking and identity building is no
longer voluntary so much as it is “enforced—a survival discipline for disinvested popula-
tions” (Gilligan & Vischmidt, 2015, p. 613). As Maurizio Lazzarato (2011) argues, today’s
crisis-ridden neoliberal capitalism “combines ‘work on the self’ and labor in its classical
sense,” noting that “the modern notion of ‘economy’ covers both economic production
and the production of subjectivity” (p. 11).

It is also crucial to bear in mind that while our forms of self-expression and social
connections are absorbed as natural resource by companies like Twitter and rendered into
capta by places like IBM, the capta abstractions and categories produced develop alongside
us, and ultimately are projected back onto us, enframing us in what John Cheney Lippold
(2011) has called an “algorithmic identity—an identity formation that works through
mathematical algorithms to infer categories of identity on otherwise anonymous beings”
(p. 165). These algorithmic categories, which are defined by the interests of those author-
izing the analytics in the first place, ensure an ongoing, modulating form of (primarily
corporate) control. The implications for processes of self-presentation are clear; as
Cheney-Lippold argues, “the automated categorization practices and the advertisements
and content targeted to those categorizations effectively situate and define how we create
and manage our own identities” (p. 177).

While algorithms work to infer who and what we will be or want in the future from
our past actions, the predictive capacity of machine-learning and data analytics in
general play a central role in what Adams, Murphy, and Clarke (2009) have called
“regimes of anticipation.” Increasingly, fields such as biomedicine, finance, marketing,
and social media all involve the constant striving to “optimize” humans via the
imposition of some kind of predictable “pre-constituted future” based on a range of
probabilistic outcomes (p. 247). The practices of “speculative forecasting” that char-
acterize these fields encourage us to “inhabit degrees and kinds of uncertainty—
adjusting ourselves to routinized likelihoods, hedged bets and probable outcomes”
(p. 247). Anticipation, then, becomes a generalized affective condition that gives rise
to modes of subjectivity that are constantly shuttling back and forth between “the is
and the ought, consummately modern yet augmented by anticipation in ways that
undermine the certainties on which modernity thrives” (p. 255). Fueled by the rise of
predictive data analytics, informed by the logics of finance capital and the labor
transformations that have developed in its wake, and conditioned by the speculative
practices of online attention brokers, then, we could argue that these regimes give rise
to a “speculative” subject of big data. This form of subjectivity is focused not on
holistic forms of self-representation or self-knowledge, or even self-interest, but rather
on the maintenance of always malleable sets of anticipatory and liquid capacities,

POPULAR COMMUNICATION 73

intended to act as a hedge against the high risk, unpredictable (presumably algorith-
mically computed) forms of appreciation and depreciation generated from elsewhere.

And so, we can posit a move from the “flexible personality” of the late 1990s and the
“self-brander” of the 2000s, to the “anticipatory, speculative self” of 2016. Here, the pursuit
of meaningful individual identity, autonomous forms of self-presentation, and processes
of self-valorization have come to function in an entirely different register; their actual
intent, content, or outcome matter little—what matters is that they are pursued, and
ceaselessly, relentlessly so. “Verified” not by the state, or the police, or even our social
networks, but by privately owned telecom and technology industries and financial institu-
tions, spurred on to assiduously self-present by the hyperpersonalized affective lures and
bribes like the Twitter checkmark, we are inserted into the global flows of capital in all our
specificity and yet simultaneously stripped of our meaningful identities, reduced to our
SIM card. Mirroring the speculative logics of finance capitalism, the speculative self’s value
is predicated entirely on externally generated predictions about our future potential
“optimization.” To borrow a term introduced by Nick Dyer-Witheford (2001), under
these conditions, we become quantified, global value subjects, and increasingly indebted
ones at that.

What does the emergence of this anticipatory, speculative type of selfhood imply for the
future of collectivity and the commons? How is it possible to develop a politics, or notion
of the polis, from disaggregated, instrumentalized “dividuals” (Cheney-Lippold, 2011),
whose gestures of sociality and senses of self are prefigured in advance by the logics of
digital finance capital? To be sure, it seems a daunting task. But the hope here lies in the
always incomplete and unstable nature of capitalist appropriation and its modes of
subjection, and in the thoroughly intractable mystery of reflexive, critical human con-
sciousness, which, in the end, these developments both exploit and enable.

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POPULAR COMMUNICATION 77

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Abstract

The ideal type

Contemporary frames and contexts of self-presentation

The Twitter verification checkmark

Affective investment and social sorting

Digits, user identity management, and mobile payment

The anticipatory, speculative self

References

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Digital Marx: Toward a Political Economy of Distributed
Media

Andreas Wittel

Nottingham Trent University, School of Arts and Humanities, Nottingham, United Kingdom,
andreas.wittel@gmail.com,
http://www.ntu.ac.uk/apps/Profiles/70220-2-2/Dr_Andreas_Wittel.aspx

Abstract: This is the claim: In the age of mass media the political economy of media has engaged with Marxist concepts in
a rather limited way. In the age of digital media Marxist theory could and should be applied in a much broader sense to this
field of research. The article will provide a rationale for this claim with a two step approach. The first step is to produce
evidence for the claim that political economy of mass media engaged with Marxist theory in a rather limited way. It is also to
explain the logic behind this limited engagement. The second step – which really is the core objective of this article – is an
exploration of key concepts of Marx’s political economy – such as labour, value, property and struggle – and a brief outline of
their relevance for a critical analysis of digital media. These concepts are particularly relevant for a deeper understanding of
phenomena such as non-market production, peer production, and the digital commons, and for interventions in debates on
free culture, intellectual property, and free labour.

Keywords: Marx, labour, value, property, struggle, political economy of media, digital, distributed media, mass media,
internet, network

1. Introduction
This is the claim: In the age of mass media the political economy of media has engaged with
Marxist concepts in a rather limited way. In the age of digital media Marxist theory could and should
be applied in a much broader sense to this field of research. For Marxist theorists this development
is to be applauded, as it allows a broader inclusion and appropriation of his concepts. The article
will provide a rationale for this claim with a two step approach.

The first step is to produce evidence for the claim that political economy of mass media
engaged with Marxist theory in a rather limited way. It is also to explain the logic behind this limited
engagement and to explain why digital media – or better: digital things – open up new and
promising possibilities to incorporate a broader range of central Marxist concepts for an analysis of
both, digital media (specifically) and (more generally) capitalism in the information age.

The second step – which really is the core objective of this article – is an exploration of key
concepts of Marx’s political economy – such as labour, value, property and struggle – and a brief
outline of their relevance for a critical analysis of digital media or digital things. These key concepts
are particularly relevant for a deeper understanding of phenomena such as non-market production,
peer production, and the digital commons, and for interventions in debates on free culture,
intellectual property, and free labour.

Part of this article is a critical inspection of the free labour concept, which was highly productive
for an illumination of new developments in the social web but which suffers from a lack of analytical
rigour and conflates a number of rather different practices. One of the key challenges in digital
capitalism is the need to rethink labour for those human activities that blossom outside wage-based
relations and other forms of commodified labour. In order to take the debate on free labour forward,
I want to argue that we need to discuss labour. In order to think about labour we need to think
about property, value and the value theory of labour.

Many of the conclusions I draw on in this article can only be achieved through struggle. A very
brief remark on struggle points towards the relationship between digital media and social
movements. In the digital age the political economy of media can occupy new territory with an
inspection of direct action and its various forms of mediation.

2. The Political Economy of Mass Media
The political economy of media has been constituted as an academic field in the age of mass
media, which are characterised by linear forms and one-way flows of communication, where
content is being distributed from a small number of producers to a large number of recipients.

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Outlining the key issues, questions, debates and findings of an academic field in a few
paragraphs is always a difficult undertaking that leads to oversimplifications, questionable
generalisations, and the privileging of a coherent narrative at the expense of a more nuanced
perspective. This is also true for the field of political economy of media and communication. It is
quite surprising however that there does exist a rather broad consensus of what this field is about.
Comparing a number of introductions to this field (Mosco 1996; Devereux 2003; McQuail 2005;
Durham and Kellner 2006; Laughey 2009; Burton 2010) it becomes rather obvious that there is not
much disagreement about key issues, questions and findings that have been produced in the
political economy of media and communication.

It starts with the observation that media institutions have increasingly become privatised and
turned into businesses. This is seen as problematic as media industries are seen as not just any
industry. To understand the unusual character of the media industries one has to examine the dual
nature of the content being produced, which is simultaneously a commodity and a public good. It is
a private good – a commodity – as media industries are using their products for the accumulation
of profit. At the same time this content is a public good as it constitutes to some degree the public
sphere. So on the one hand media institutions have a social, cultural, and political function, on the
other hand they are driven by economic interests. It is this dual nature of media content which
makes the assumption that media are an independent force, naturally safeguarding democracy and
the public interest rather questionable. Equally doubtful is the assumption that mass media just
mirror public opinion.

The political economy of media is based on the premise that media are powerful, that they are
able to influence public opinion and shape public discourse. Therefore it is crucial to focus on the
production of media content within a wider political and economic context. It is this focus on
materiality and the political, economical, and technological conditions in which media content is
being produced that distinguishes the political economy of media from other academic fields such
as the more affirmative strands within cultural studies and audience studies, which generally locate
power and control not with media institutions but with an active audience as the true producer of
meaning.1 The political economy of media is as much social analysis as media and communication
analysis.

This field is mainly concerned with the following issues: Firstly with an understanding of the
media market. How do media companies produce income and generate profits? Secondly with an
inspection of questions of ownership of media organisations (public, commercial, and private non-
profit organisations) and an analysis of the implications of ownership structures with respect to
media products (obviously this is especially relevant for the production of news). Thirdly the field is
concerned with changing dynamics of the media sector, in particular with developments such as
internationalisation of media industries, concentration and conglomeration of media organisations,
and diversification of media products. This leads into debates on cultural imperialism and media
imperialism. The fourth issue is about media regulation, media policy, and media governance,
originally on a national level but increasingly with a global perspective. It is important to note that
these areas of inquiry are closely connected, in fact they overlap considerably.

In order to introduce the key claims of political economy of media in the shortest possible way, I
will refer to a summary box in Denis McQuail (2005,100). According to him, these are the core
findings:

• Economic control and logic are determinant
• Media structure tends towards concentration
• Global integration of media develops
• Contents and audiences are commodified
• Diversity decreases
• Opposition and alternative voices are marginalised
• Public interest in communication is subordinate to private interests

Raymond Williams who is usually not portrayed as someone who is part of the inner circle of politi-
cal economy of media was in fact among the first to develop such an approach. In an essay on the
growth of the newspaper industry in England he starts with the observation that “there is still a quite

1 For an analysis of the tensions between cultural studies and political economy see Kellner 1995 and Wittel 2004,

for an analysis of the disagreements between political economy of media and active audience studies see Schiller 1989,
135-157).

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widespread failure to co-ordinate the history of the press with the economic and social history with-
in which it must necessarily be interpreted” (Williams 1961, 194). He sets out to develop such a
perspective, studying empirically a period of 170 years. His findings are highly sceptical:

“These figures do not support the idea of a steady if slow development of a better
press. The market is being steadily specialised, in direct relation to advertising
income, and the popular magazine for all kinds of reader is being steadily driven This
does not even begin to look like the developing press of an educated democracy.
Instead it looks like an increasingly organised market in communications, with the
‘masses’ formula as the dominant social principle and with the varied functions of the
press increasingly limited to finding a ‘selling point’.” (Williams 1961, 234)

If we juxtapose this passage with the key claims in McQuail’s summary box it becomes clear that
Williams anticipated many of the themes and results that will be debated within this field over the
next five decades. The quoted summary in his study is like a microcosm of the field.

3. Marx and the Political Economy of Mass Media
The theoretical roots of political economy of media – at least their critical tradition (which is all I am
concerned with) – are usually located in Marxism. After all and as the name already indicates, this
field within media studies explores communication from a political economy perspective. So how
much engagement with Marx do we get in this academic field? The short answer: there is some
engagement but it is fairly limited. In order to support this claim with some evidence I will check a
number of texts that are generally considered to be important contributions.2

The first and rather surprising insight is that a considerable number of books (Herman and
Chomsky 1988; Schiller 1989; Curran 1991; Herman and McChesney 1997; Curran and Seaton
1997; Grossberg et al 1998; Curran 2000, Nicols and McChesney 2006) have either no reference
at all or less than a handful of references to Marx or Marxism. In the latter case these references
function usually as signposts (such as to distinguish Marxists from liberal traditions of political
economy). They do not engage with Marxist theory in a more profound manner.

Nevertheless they are all rooted in Marxist theory, or to be more precise, in one particular part
of Marxist theory. They are all directly linked to the base and superstructure model. According to
Marx human society consists of two parts, a base and a superstructure. The material base consists
of the forces and relations of production, the superstructure refers to the non-material realm, to
culture, religion, ideas, values and norms. The relationship between base and superstructure is
reciprocal, however in the last instance the base determines the superstructure. This model has
been developed in various writings of Marx and Engels, perhaps most famously in the preface to A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Marx 1977) and in the German Ideology (Marx
and Engels 1974).

“The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social,
political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their
existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” (Marx
1977)

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which
is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at
the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally
speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to
it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant
material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence
of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of
its dominance […] Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the

2 To keep this analysis simple, I will ignore here German Marxist media theory (Brecht, Krakauer, Benjamin,

Adorno, Enzensberger) at the beginning of the mass media age, a line of thought which – perhaps wrongly – is usually not
included in the field of political economy of media. The texts I have chosen to consider are certainly not extensive, they are
also not representative in any way, but they do provide a solid indication on the relation between this field and Marxist
theory.

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extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole
range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and
regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are
the ruling ideas of the epoch.” (Marx and Engels 1974, 64f.).

The texts mentioned above directly or indirectly apply the base and superstructure model to the
media industry, which like no other industrial sector contributes to the production of the
superstructure. However they apply this model in various ways and there is considerable
disagreement about what some see as a deterministic model with a linear, non-dialectical, and
reductionist perspective.

Durham and Kellner observe that “the focus in US-based political economy of communication
tends to emphasize the economic side of the equation with focus on ownership, corporatization,
and consumption, while in Britain there has been a spotlighting of the political dimension, with
emphasis on public sector broadcasting, the importance of state-supported and regulated
communication, and the politics of broadcasting.” (Durham and Kellner 2006, 197) I would take this
observation one step further: The US-based work on political economy of media is generally more
in line with the base and superstructure model, whereas the research in Britain is slightly more
critical of a material or economic reductionism. I would also suggest that these different positions
are related to the media landscape in both countries, a free-market media landscape in the US and
Britain still relying on a strong representation of public-sector broadcasting. It is no coincidence that
the propaganda model (Herman and Chomsky 1988) has been developed in the US. Neither is it
surprising that it is a US study that diagnoses a complete and systematic failure of critical
journalism on the reporting of the Iraq war, and claims that the US media bring about a “destruction
of democracy” that “a highly concentrated profit-driven media system…makes it rational to gut
journalism and irrational to provide the content a free society so desperately requires.” (Nichols and
McChesney 2005, ix) Similar claims could not be found in British research with its rather critical
position towards the base and superstructure model. Curran for example observes that “a sea
change has occurred in the field”, which is mostly about the “repudiation of the totalising
explanatory frameworks of Marxism” (Curran 1990, 157f.).

So far I have only referred to those texts with either no reference at all to Marxist theory or with
only few references which then usually function like signposts. There are however texts that
engage with Marx and in particular with his base and superstructure model in a more profound
way. Mosco (1996) who provides perhaps the most detailed analysis of the literature in this field
starts his books with an introduction to Marxist political economy. Murdock (1982) focuses in
particular on the base and superstructure model and compares it with a more praxis-oriented
perspective. Williams (1958, 265-284) engages in great detail with this model and argues that it is
more complex than usually acknowledged (e.g. that this relation is reciprocal rather than a one way
street). “The basic question, as it has normally been put, is whether the economic element is in fact
determining. I have followed the controversies on this, but it seems to me that it is, ultimately, an
unanswerable question.” (Williams 1958, 280). Like Williams, Nicholas Garnham (1990) also
counters charges of economic reductionism. He insists that Marx’s model offers an adequate
foundation for an understanding of the political economy of mass media. He moves away from a
deterministic view of the relation between base and superstructure towards a model that is more
anchored in reciprocity and a dialectic relation.

Let us conclude: Apart from some rare exceptions – most notably Dallas Smythe who will be
discussed later – political economy of mass media incorporates Marxist theory in a rather limited
way. This academic field refers predominantly to Marx’s concept of base and superstructure (either
directly or indirectly) to make claims about the relationship between ownership of means of
production (and concentration of ownership, media conglomerates etc.) and questions of media
content, ideology, manipulation, power and democracy.

To avoid any misunderstandings: This is not meant as a critique of political economists of mass
media. I do not see this limited appropriation of Marxist concepts as a failure of this academic field.
My point is very different. I want to argue that this limited appropriation made complete sense in the
age of mass media. It has a logic to it that lies very much in mass media technologies. This will be
discussed in more detail in the following section. It should also be noted, very much in line with my
argument, that over the last decade, which marks the transition from mass media to distributed
media, Marx has been rediscovered by political economists. Even more so, he has been

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rediscovered in ways that are not just rehearsals of the base and superstructure debate.3

4. Digital Technologies
What is the logic behind this rather restricted appropriation of Marxist theory? One might point out –
referring again to the base and superstructure argument – that Marx was obviously more interested
in the former and has thus neglected an analysis of the latter; that Marx did not have a lot to say
about media and communication. No doubt this is a persuasive argument. However this would not
explain why in the age of digital media, so my claim, Marxist concepts could and should be applied
in a much broader sense by political economists of communication.

We will probably get closer to an answer if we turn our attention to media technologies. In the
age of mass media these technologies – the means of production – were expensive. Most people
could not afford the ownership of all those assets necessary for print media or broadcast media. As
a consequence there were only a limited number of media organisations which produced and
disseminated media content to a huge number of consumers/recipients. Thus mass media are
characterised by a small number of content producers and a large audience. For societies that
perceive themselves as liberal democracies this is a rather problematic starting point. In fact no
other issue about mass media is as problematic as the ownership of means of production and
processes of media concentration, the ownership of media technologies and media organisations
in the hands of increasingly fewer ‘media moguls’. The limited appropriation of Marxist theory in the
age of mass media results from a very specific historic reality, from historically unique concerns
that were generated by mass media technologies.

Digital technologies have brought about a fundamentally different media landscape, where
mass media are not the only show in town any more. They have been given company by
distributed media and increasingly they seem to be replaced by this new kid on the block.
Distributed media operate with a very different organisational logic. Whereas mass media are
hierarchical, linear, with a control centre and one-way flow of media content from few producers to
many recipients, distributed media are networked, non-linear, with multi-directional and reciprocal
flows of media content from many producers to many consumers.

The terms distributed media and digital media are similar but not identical. I use the term
distributed media to put an emphasis on the social organisation of media (even though this term
also refers to Internet technologies), while the term digital media is used to refer to technology only.
It is important to stress however that the social can never be fully separated from the technological.
Every medium is simultaneously technological and social. Technological structures and relations
between human beings are interlocked and mutually constitutive.

The logic of distributed media is profoundly shaped by the qualities and capabilities of digital
technologies, which are superior to mass media technologies (say the printing press) in that they
are much cheaper and much more efficient in a number of ways: (1) They can re-mediate older
media forms such as text, sound, image and moving images as digital code; (2) they can integrate
communication and information, or communication media (the letter, the telephone) with mass
media (radio, television, newspaper); (3) digital objects can endlessly be reproduced at minimum
costs; (4) they don’t carry any weight, thus they can be distributed at the speed of light.

These phenomenological qualities of digital technologies, which rely largely on a distinction
between bits and atoms, I want to argue, have profound implications for the social. Firstly the
number of media producers increases dramatically in the digital age. Now everybody with access
to a mobile phone or a laptop and access to a network is a potential producer of media content.
Secondly digital technologies enable new social forms of media production and media distribution,
for example large scale ‘sharing’ of media content4 and large scale forms of collaboration and peer
production such as open source code. Thirdly, as the number of media producers increases media
themselves are becoming ubiquitous in that all aspects of the social world and our lives become
mediated, from the global and public to the most intimate aspects of our existence (Livingstone
2009). Fourthly and perhaps most importantly digital technologies are not just media technologies.
They are built into all productive processes (Castells 1996). The digital economy now is not just the

3 Perhaps the first thorough appropriation of Marx’s concepts for distributed media has been produced by Nick

Dyer-Witheford (1999). He analyses how the information age, “far from transcending the historic conflict between capital and
its laboring subjects constitutes the latest battleground in their encounter” (Dyer-Witheford 1999, 2). Since then other books
have emerged with an explicit Marxist approach to theorise the internet, e.g. Wayne 2003; Huws and Leys 2003; Stallabrass
2003; Wark 2004; Terranova 2004; Artz, Macek and Cloud 2006; Jhally 2006; Fuchs 2008; Mosco, McKercher, and Huws
2010; Kleiner 2010; Fuchs 2011, Fuchs et al. 2012).

4 For a critical analysis of sharing in the digital age see Wittel 2011.

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ITC economy any more, it is simply the economy full stop. As a consequence of this process the
digital does not just refer to the realm of media, but to new forms of production based on ICTs, and
possibly (depending on the success of future struggles) to a new mode of production, to a
‘commons-based peer production’ (Benkler 2006). For this reason a political economy of digital
media really is a political economy of digital things. It is this opening up of media from few
professionals to many amateurs and from the state and markets to non-markets, and the blurring of
boundaries between media industries and other industrial sectors, that suggest the possibility of a
broader engagement with Marxist theory. In the digital age indeed all aspects of Marx’s political
economy become relevant for critical media theory.

A quick comment on technological determinism. This phenomenological analysis of digital
things and their implications is not, in my view, an example of technological determinism. I do not
want to suggest that all explanatory power lies with technologies and people are mere bystanders
reacting to them. However I am also not very sympathetic to arguments on the opposite end that
position all aspects of agency with people. Social determinism is as dangerous as technological
determinism. My argument, which is broadly in line with Marx’s thinking, is that technologies open
up new possibilities for social production and social organisation. They do not determine in any way
the future of capitalism, which of course will solely be shaped by the struggles of the oppressed.

It is perhaps due to a rather strong aversion against technological determinism within the field of
political economy of mass media that commentators have been a bit slow to acknowledge the
profound difference between mass media and distributed media. Different responses and
strategies have been employed to demonstrate that the new – meaning the so-called digital
revolution – is highly overvalued. The first type of response (e.g. Murdock 2004) rejects any re-
evaluation and argues that the digital age is not significantly different from the age of mass media
and that historical continuities are more important than differences. Rather than falling for ‘digital
possibilities’ political economists should study ‘market realities’. The information society does not
really exist, it is only ‘presumed’. (Murdock and Golding 2001). The second type of response, the
sitting-on-the fence approach (e.g. Curran and Seaton 2003, 235-293), is more cautious. It consists
of a hesitation to take position and to make claims about changes with respect to digital
technologies. A third type of response ( e.g. Mosco 2004) consists of the deconstruction of this
discourse, in particular of claims made by Internet-philiacs.

Indeed it would be naïve to ignore continuities. Equally dangerous however is a position that
argues for business as usual. Let us explain this with an example. The issue of ownership of
means of production, which largely dominated the discourse of political economy of mass media,
will not lose any relevance in the age of distributed media. On the contrary, it will become an even
more important topic as new concerns are emerging. However this issue needs to be re-
conceptualised in two significant ways. Firstly: In the age of mass media the issue of ownership of
means of production was only relevant with respect to media content. In the age of distributed
media the issue of ownership of means of production is relevant with respect to media content, but
also with respect to connectivity. This is not just about ideology and the manipulation of messages
any more (base and superstructure), but also about the ownership of infrastructures, of networks
and platforms that allow users to socialise, communicate, and collaborate. This is not just about
meaning and representation, it is about the control of people’s online interactions, it is ultimately
about privileging certain forms of sociality and subjectivity. The second reason for a re-
conceptualisation lies in the notion of ‘means of production’. In the age of distributed media the
means of production have become more democratic. Users with access to a computer and access
to the Internet (which is more than one billion people) and some basic computer skills have the
means necessary to produce media content. What they don not have however are the means of
distribution and the means of online storage of media content. The means of distribution and the
means of storage lie in the hands of few media conglomerates. They control the flows of
information. They belong to what Wark describes as the vectoral class. “The vectoral class is
driving the world to the brink of disaster, but it also opens up the world to the resources for
overcoming its own destructive tendencies.” (Wark 2004, 025) The analysis of this class struggle
between capital and labouring subjects about the future framing of the Internet is also one of the
key objectives of Dyer-Witheford (1999). To summarise this paragraph: With respect to means of
production we can see important historical continuities but also some remarkable shifts.

Dmytri Kleiner starts his book with a bang: “What is possible in the information age is in direct
conflict with what is permissible […] The non-hierarchical relations made possible by a peer
network such as the internet are contradictory with capitalism’s need for enclosure and control. It is
a battle to the death; either the Internet as we know it must go, or capitalism as we know it must

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go.” (Kleiner 2010, 7)
Of course this is a mildly exaggerated view. There is not just war going on, we can also see the

development of new forms of co-operation and new models and arrangements between both sides.
Still, I like this quote a lot as it is a pointed and condensed outline of the responsibility of political
economy in the age of digital media and distributed networks. There is a technology that opens up
new productive forces; there is a political-economic system with established relations of production.
There is struggle between those who want to conserve existing relations of production and those
who attempt to overcome them. And there is an indication of how to create a better world. Could
the Internet in its more uncontrolled form teach us how to think about society at large?

We are already in the middle of Marx’s political economy. In the following parts I want to discuss
how some core concepts of his political economy become relevant for an analysis of media in the
digital age. I will focus on four central terms, on labour, value, property, and struggle. Among these
four concepts the notion of labour will be explored in more detail.

5. Labour
Throughout the last century labour has been analysed in the western hemisphere as wage labour
only. Apart from the writings of very few Marxist theorists such as André Gorz (1999), alternatives
to wage labour have hardly entered public discourse. It was a common perception that there was
just no alternative to wage labour. Obviously this theoretical orientation was a reflection of an
economic reality characterised largely by wage labour as the dominant form of production. This is
how media production was organised in the age of mass media. No matter whether media
institutions were public institutions or private companies, these institutions had employees who
have received a wage in return for their work.

The contemporary media ecosystem looks profoundly different. Media content now is not only
produced by employees working in and for companies, it is also created by the free labour of those
who engage in peer production (the dissemination of content) and ‘commons-based peer
production’, a term coined by Yochai Benkler (2002) to describe a new model of socio-economic
production, in which large numbers of people work towards common goals without financial
compensation for contributors. Media content now is not just produced for markets and paying
audiences, there is also a rather significant non-market dimension to media production. This is a
new situation. In fact the media and creative industries are at the moment the only industrial sector
that is confronted with competition from free labour and non-market production.

The emergence of non-market production started in the 1980s with the open-source movement
but has accelerated on an astonishing scale during the last decade with the social web. It has
spread from the peer production of software and code to text, sound, images, and moving images.
These digital commons are software commons, news commons, information commons, knowledge
commons, education commons, art commons, and cultural commons.

Undeniably the digital whirlwind has created havoc in the creative industries. Newspaper
journalism is in decline and struggling to find new business models. The title of a collection of
essays on the collapse of journalism in the United States – “Will the last reporter please turn out
the lights” (McChesney and Pickard 2011) – is an indication of the severity of this development.
The music, film and publishing industries are also hit hard and are turning increasingly to legal
enforcements of copyright infringement and to political lobbying for tighter regulations of the
Internet (e.g. ACTA, SOPA, PIPA).

Many of the implications of this new media ecosystem however are not clear at all. Will this co-
existence of corporate labour and free labour in the digital commons remain exclusively in the
media industries and creative industries or will it spread to other industrial sectors as well? What
are the relations between the media and creative industries and the digital commons? Are we in
the middle of an ‘immaterial civil war’ (Pasquinelli 2007)? Or is such a perspective too one-
dimensional as we can also see a number of collaborations between both sides, for example the
corporate funding of open source software production? What are the long-term implications of this
for the labour market in the media industries? It is likely that the rationalisation of media and
cultural production due to digital technologies will lead to a shrinking of the market. But if it does,
how dramatically will it shrink? Finally what does this mean for the rate of productivity in the media
industries? Does capital profit from an exploitation of free labour or will the competition from the
new kid on the block lead to a decline of productivity in the industry?

In order to better understand this new media ecology we need to focus on the concept of free
labour. The first thing to note is that, while this term has recently been employed by Marxist

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theorists, Marx himself does not use the term free labour. Marx, partly in the tradition of classical
political economy in the 18th and 19th century, partly developing a critique of this tradition,
distinguishes between productive and unproductive labour. These are not neutral terms, they
depend on class positions and they depend on specific types of society (feudal, capitalist etc.) and
their specific relations of production. In capitalism productive labour is labour that is productive for
capital. It produces commodities, exchange value, and profit (surplus value). Unproductive labour
does not produce surplus value. To give an example: A person employed in a private household to
perform tasks such as cooking and cleaning does not produce a commodity. While his or her
labour-power is sold as a commodity, the product of this labour-power is not. Therefore this is
unproductive labour. A cook working in as an employee in a restaurant however produces
commodities, he or she produces meals that are sold to customers. Therefore this is productive
labour. So productive and unproductive labour are not distinguished with respect to what people do
(in both cases they cook), but with respect to their relation to capital and the commodity form.
Applying the free labour of digital commoners to this concept it is obvious that according to Marx
free labour is unproductive. Not very surprising this concept has received much criticism from
Marxist feminists in the 1980s who argued that domestic labour, usually performed by women,
would indeed create surplus value as this arrangement makes it possible to reduce wages even
more for those who do not perform domestic labour. In my view this is a strong argument. Even
more so it poses a real challenge to Marx’s theory of surplus value.

Also relevant for the free labour concept is Marx distinction between labour and labour-process.
Let us begin with labour:

“Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate,
and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-
actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her
own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of
his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own
wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time
changes his own nature.” (Capital Vol. 1, 177).

Labour is not merely an economic but a human activity. It is a universal category of human
existence and it is independent of any specific economic or social forms. Labour is what keeps us
alive and what makes us develop. This is a rather broad concept. Labour can be equated with
action or with praxis. Labour is what we do.

In stark contrast to labour, his concept of labour-process refers to specific historic modes of
production and to specific historic societies and economies. With this historical approach he wants
to demonstrate that the labour-process, the specific organisation of work, is not inevitable. Existing
labour-processes can always be overcome. Marx is particularly interested in the difference
between a feudal and a capitalist labour-process. In capitalism the labour-process is based on
wage-labour, on the fact that the worker sells his labour-power as a commodity to the capitalist.
Comparing the feudal labour-process with the capitalist labour-process Marx highlights two things:

“First, the labourer works under the control of the capitalist to whom his labour
belongs; the capitalist taking good care that the work is done in a proper manner,
and that the means of production are used with intelligence, so that there is no
unnecessary waste of raw material, and no wear and tear of the implements
beyond what is necessarily caused by the work. Secondly, the product is the
property of the capitalist and not that of the labourer, its immediate producer.
Suppose that a capitalist pays for a day’s labour-power at its value; then the right
to use that power for a day belongs to him, just as much as the right to use any
other commodity, such as a horse that he has hired for the day […] The labour-
process is a process between things that the capitalist has purchased, things that
have become his property.” (Capital Vol. 1, 184f.)

Here Marx has identified two forms of alienation that did not exist in feudalism or in any other mode
of production before capitalism. The first form of alienation refers to the product of the worker’s own
work and the inability to use the product of this own work for his or her living. The second form of
alienation refers to the inability to organise the process of work, which lies exclusively in the hands
of the capitalist who owns the means of production. Let us apply again the concept of free labour to

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Marx distinction between labour and labour-process. Free labour then is always labour in the
general sense of Marx concept. However the term does not refer to a specific historical labour-
process. In a strictly Marxist framework the concept of free labour would only make sense if it
would become the dominant mode of production and supersede wage labour the same way that
wage labour has superseded the labour of feudal serfs and pre-feudal slaves. We will revisit this
issue in more detail.

The free labour debate is mostly initiated by autonomist Marxists close to the Italian operaismo
school. It is connected to the writings of Maurizio Lazzarato and Michael Hart and Antonio Negri on
immaterial labour, which is situated with the turn towards a Postfordist mode of production and its
related processes such as the transformations in the organisation of work (the organisation of the
labour process), the production of subjectivity and social relations in work environments, and bio-
political capitalism where capital ultimately captures life. This means that immaterial labour, which
is both intellectual labour and affective labour, involves a number of activities that would not be
considered work in Fordist work environments.

“It is not simply that intellectual labor has become subjected to the norms of
capitalist production. What has happened is that a new ‘mass intellectuality’ has
come into being, created out of a combination of the demands of capitalist
production and the forms of ‘self-valorization’ that the struggle against work has
produced.” (Lazzarato 1998)

The concept of immaterial labour is inspired by a few pages in the Grundrisse, where Marx (1973)
writes about wealth creation and the production of value which is increasingly independent of
labour.

“(T)he creation of wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount
of labour employed […] but depends rather on the general state of science and on
the progress of technology […] Labour no longer appears so much to be included
within the production process; rather the human being comes to relate more as
watchman and regulator to the production process itself […] He steps to the side of
the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is
neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he
works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his
understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a
social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which
appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth.” (Marx 1973,
704f.).

As Gorz has pointed out, Marx’s language is a bit unstable and fluctuates between a number of
terms. What comes to replace labour is variably ‘the general intellect’, ‘the general state of science
and technology’, ‘general social knowledge’, ‘the social individual’, and the ‘general powers of the
human head’ (Gorz 2010, 2). The core claim made by Marx is very clear however: At some stage in
the development of capitalism knowledge, technology, and the general intellect firstly become
somehow decoupled from labour and secondly replace labour as the source for the creation of
value. It is not hard to see why these pages in the Grundrisse become so crucial for the concept of
immaterial labour. However these observations in the Grundrisse sit uneasy with the Marx of
Capital Vol. 1, who develops the labour theory of value and categorically insists that labour is the
only source for the creation of exchange value.

Tiziana Terranova (2004) is perhaps the first theorist who thoroughly engaged with the concept
of free labour. In an essay, which was first published in 2000, before the arrival of the social web,
before Wikipedia and social media platforms, she conceptualises free labour as the “excessive
activity that makes the Internet a thriving and hyperactive medium” (Terranova 2004, 73). This
includes “the activity of building web sites, modifying software packages, reading and participating
in mailing lists and building virtual spaces” (Terranova 2004, 74). Consistent with the operaismo
discourse on immaterial labour, she situates the emergence of free labour with Postfordism. “Free
labour is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into excess
productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamefully
exploited” (Terranova 2004, 78).

With this definition we have three features of free labour that are characteristic for most

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commentators in this debate. Free labour is firstly unpaid labour. It is free in the sense of free beer;
it is voluntarily given. Secondly it is free in the sense of freedom. It is more autonomous and less
alienating than wage labour. It is not a factory but a playground. Thus it can be enjoyed. Thirdly it is
exploited by capital.

This dialectic between autonomy and exploitation is reflected in most accounts of free labour,
however with different interpretation of this tension. Terranova is careful to avoid strong
judgements and speaks of a ‘complex relation to labour’ (Terranova 2004, 73). Mark Andrejevic
has explored the notion of free labour in a number of studies on reality TV (Andrejevic 2008),
YouTube (Andrejevic 2009) and Facebook (Andrejevic 2011). These are all commodified spaces
and the core argument in each of these cases is a critique of accounts within media studies that
celebrate participation and user generated content as an indication of a process of democratisation
and an empowerment of users. He argues instead that the free labour invested in these
commodified spaces is being exploited by capital. In his studies, the liberating, empowering and
emancipatory potentials are clearly overshadowed by the negative dimensions of monetised
communities. Matteo Pasquinelli (2008) goes one step further and critically engages with free
labour and the commons. Obviously the commons is not captured or enclosed by capital, otherwise
it would cease to be a commons. The various digital commons are not commodified spaces. Still
Pasquinelli does not see any positive aspects about the digital commons. They are bad and dark
spaces, as they are exploited by capital. This is a deeply asymmetrical relationship. Using Michel
Serres’ conceptual figure of the parasite and George Bataille’s thoughts on excess, he writes about
the ‘bestiary of the commons’, where capital behaves like vampires and sucks all the blood of the
surplus energies of free labourers who seem to be too naïve to understand what is going on.

I have noted earlier that Dallas Smythe, one of the founding fathers of Canadian political
economy of media, is one of the very few theorists in this field who does not merely engage with
the base and superstructure concept but with other aspects of Marx’s work. In fact he employs
Marx’s concept of labour-power. Smythe argues that media audiences are a commodity. They are
made a commodity by media producers. The activity of watching television connects media
audiences to advertisers. Thus media audiences perform labour. Even though Smythe did not use
the term free labour he could be described as the founding father of the free labour debate. Like
Andrejevic, Smythe studies media audiences in commodified environments. For Smythe this is a
tragedy with three players: the two bad guys are media producers and advertisers; the victims are
audiences. Media producers construct audiences. They also sell time to advertisers. Therefore they
deliver audiences for advertisers. His argument why audiences perform labour is developed as
follows: In modern capitalism there is no time left that it not work time. Capitalism makes “a
mockery of free time and leisure” (Smythe 1977, 47). He explains how this observation relates to
Marx’s theory of labour power (labour power refers to the capacity to work).

“Under capitalism your labor power becomes a personal possession. It seems that
you can do what you want with it. If you work at a job where you are paid, you sell
it. Away from the job, it seems that your work is something you do not sell. But
there is a common misunderstanding at this point. At the job you are not paid for all
the labor time you do sell (otherwise interest, profits, and management salaries
could not be paid). And away from the job your labor time is sold (through the
audience commodity), although you do not sell it. What is produced at the job
where you are paid are commodities…What is produced by you away from the job
is your labor power for tomorrow and for the next generation: ability to work and to
live.” (Smythe 1977, 48)

This is certainly an innovative argument and Smythe deserves much credit for what was in the
1970s a rather unusual approach to media audiences. For two reasons however his argument is
rather problematic. Firstly it is totalising as all time in the life of humans is work for a capitalist
system, sometimes paid (‘at the job’) and sometimes unpaid (‘away from the job’). This means that
all reproductive time is time spent for work (‘24 hours a day’). This is a much bigger claim than the
claim of audience labour. For Smythe every single activity in our life becomes work for the capitalist
system. This is maximum alienation and there is no way out. The second problem with this
perspective is that it is based on a misinterpretation of Marx’s concept of labour. Marx’s distinction
between concrete and abstract labour, between labour in productive use and labour power (the
capacity to work) refers only to wage-based labour. It does not make much sense to use the
concept of labour power for reproductive activities. The concept of labour power makes only sense

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in a context where labour power can be sold by the worker. This is precisely what distinguishes
capitalism from other economic systems such as slavery or feudalism. Smythe’s attempt to
circumvent this problem by declaring that “away from the job your labor time is sold…although you
do not sell it” is in my view an ‘interpretation’ of Marxist analysis that really goes against the
fundamental ideas of Marx’s theory of labour power.

David Hesmondhalgh has recently developed a critique of the free labour concept. He points
out two things. Firstly he critically interrogates “the frequent pairing of the term with the concept of
exploitation” which he sees as both, “unconvincing and rather incoherent” (Hesmondhalgh 2010,
276). Sometimes exploitation would refer to alienation, sometimes to ideology and manipulation,
and in other cases to the fact that free labour is being captured and used by capital. However none
of these things would really be about exploitation. I fully agree with this critique and would only add
that according to the Marx of Capital vol. 1 the exploitation of free labour is impossible. Exploitation
refers to the surplus value that capitalists make from wage labour. Surplus value is the value
created by workers in excess of their own labour-cost. It is the basis for profit and capital
accumulation. For Marx of Capital vol. 1 the idea that surplus value can be created outside the
wage-relationship is nonsensical.

Secondly, Hesmondhalgh asks what political demands might flow from critiques of free labour.
He points out that unpaid labour has always existed, using examples such as domestic labour and
voluntary community labour (coaching football), and insists on the importance of prioritisation.
Under what conditions, he asks, might we object to such unpaid labour, and on what grounds?
Which forms of labour are particularly unjust? He also argues that throughout history most cultural
production has been unpaid. Finally he points to the fact that those who undertake unpaid digital
labour might gain other rewards, such as job satisfaction and recognition by peers.

It is indeed very important to question the claim that the emergence of free labour is somehow
linked to Postfordism and to point out that unpaid labour has existed throughout the history of
capitalism. It has existed as subsistence work (or domestic labour) and in the form of non-
monetised activities, for example voluntary community work or mutual babysitting in the
neighbourhood. However Hesmondhalgh is conflating the labour of an unpaid community football
coach with the labour of users of profit-driven social media platforms. The former unpaid labour is
labour in a non-commercial and thus non-profit environment. The latter is labour in a commercial
environment that sells virtual or immaterial spaces to advertisers. This is an important distinction.
Interestingly this is a distinction which remains rather nebulous within the free labour debate. Let us
go back to the three authors I discussed earlier. For Terranova free labour refers to “the activity of
building web sites, modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing lists and
building virtual spaces”; she does not make a distinction between the commercial and the non-
commercial, between capital and commons (Terranova 2004, 74). Andrejevic writes only about free
labour with respect to advertising spaces and profit-making. Pasquinelli writes only about free-
labour and the exploitation of free labour with respect to the commons, with respect to digital sites
that are non-profit sites.

All this is rather confusing. It is as confusing as Smythe’s contradictory position: On the one
hand he claims that exploitation happens 24 hours a day, that there is no time in our life that is not
being exploited by capital, on the other hand he refers merely to those moments and spaces
outside work that are advertised spaces and moments. All this is not just confusing, it is highly
unsatisfactory with respect to exploitation, profit, and surplus-value, in short: with respect to the
question of value. Clearly value can come from both, unpaid and paid labour. What is not clear at
all however is the origin of exchange value and thus surplus value. Even Marx is sending different
messages. In Capital vol. 1 surplus value can only derive from wage labour, in Grundrisse Marx
suggests that technology and the general intellect can also be exploited by capital. I find it difficult
too to come up with a clear position how surplus value is being generated. In the next sub-chapter
on value I will argue that what is valuable and why certain things are valuable is always a
subjective category. Therefore it is impossible to decide where objectified value (exchange value,
surplus value) really comes from.

Hesmondhalgh also addresses the question of political demands that could emerge in an age
where wage labour co-exists with free labour. Again this is a very important point. However I would
formulate this task in a different way. Let us go back to Marx’s distinction between capitalist wage-
based labour and his general take on labour (meaning: independent of particular historic economic
modes of production) as a “process in which both man and Nature participate”, as something that
transforms both the environment and human beings, as an activity that is not just an economic but
a human activity. Labour in this sense can broadly be equated with practice or activity. It seems

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that this is a very contemporary definition of labour. Marx’s general definition of labour corresponds
very much with the points made by Lazzarato, Hardt and Negri, and other scholars associated with
the operaismo school. All we need to do is to exchange the term practice for life. In bio-political
capitalism work is life, work is our thoughts, our affects, our relationships, our subjectivities. It is
becoming increasingly futile to distinguish work from leisure, communication, creativity, and play.

What does this mean politically? In the digital age free labour and wage-based labour co-exist.
This could be seen either as a broadly acceptable situation or it could be perceived, as I do, as
utterly unjust and ultimately intolerable. This opens up two paths for critique. The first path is a
critique of free labour and the political demand, as Hesmondhalgh indicates, would result in calls to
integrate free labour in the wage-based system. However this is a dangerous road, as it would lead
to an even more commodified world where every single human activity becomes measured in
terms of exchange value. It should not become a political project to make the wage-based system
and its insane measurements of value even stronger. The second path of critique would turn in the
opposite direction. This would be a critique of the wage-labour economy itself. The search for
alternatives to wage-labour has recently gained momentum. Demands for a minimum wage for
every citizen are probably the most prominent model being discussed which could replace wage
labour. The work of André Gorz is perhaps the most developed contribution to an outline of work
“beyond the wage-based society” (Gorz 1999). Needless to say this is a radical approach, even
utopian, with not much hope for realisation. On the other hand these are times that might need
some radical rethinking of how we work, relate, create and live.

Undoubtedly the ‘free labour’ concept has proven to be highly productive for an illumination of
new developments in the social web. It is one of the key challenges in digital capitalism to rethink
labour for those human activities that blossom outside wage-based relations. However the concept
of labour in ‘free labour’ suffers from a severe lack of analytical rigour. It conflates a number of
rather different practices. Is the downloading of a song comparable with chatting to friends on a
social networking platform? Are both activities comparable to either the reading of a mailing list
post or the production of a Wikipedia entry? All these activities come under the label of free labour
but surely they are very different things. Is watching a television series on a private channel the
same as watching a series on a public TV channel that does not run commercials? Is there a
difference between the free labour of commercial networking sites such as Twitter, Google+, and
Facebook and users of open-source networking sites such as Diaspora? Why do we talk about free
labour with respect to a post on a mailing list but not with respect to a material letter in an envelope
and a stamp on it, that we send to friend? Would we, communicating on the phone, provide free
labour for telecom companies? After all, the only difference between telecom companies and social
media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter lies in a slightly different business model. Telecom
companies so not use advertisers, so they need to charge customers for their service, whereas
social media platform providers get their revenue from advertisers and are therefore able to offer
their services for free.

Even more problematic is perhaps the use of the free labour concept for activities that are in
fact not really based on free labour in the first place. It is usually assumed that free labour is labour
which is not financially compensated. Things are more complicated however. The digital commons
is created through a variety of forms of labour with respect to financial compensation. Let us look at
the production of open source code. There is a growing tendency towards the funding of open-
source projects by companies. Furthermore it is important to point out that an open-source
software developer is usually not a shopkeeper during the day who starts producing code in her
spare time. The overwhelming majority of open-source programmers are employed programmers,
they are working for software companies. Often open source code is produced anyway but then
made available to the open source community (Weber 2004). So the labour that goes into the
development of open source software is often indirectly paid for. A similar argument could be made
for the knowledge commons. A Wikipedia entry on, say ‘modernity’ is likely to be written by a
specialist on this topic, a philosopher perhaps, likely by someone who is employed by a university.

This is the reason why some areas within the digital commons have developed with mind-
blowing speed, whereas other areas remain largely underdeveloped. The open-source commons
and the knowledge commons are spearheading the digital commons for a good reason, as those
who invest in building it often do get an income for their work. Other areas, for example the
education commons5 and the arts commons stand in rather stark contrast to open-source and the

5 I have written elsewhere (Wittel 2012) about contemporary attempts to create, as a result of the neo-liberal

destruction of public universities and as a response to this, autonomous universities and autonomous cells of higher
education. For this analysis I have made a conceptual distinction between a knowledge commons (e.g. sites such as

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knowledge commons. They remain largely underdeveloped as labour invested here is not paid for
by other parties. These commons grow indeed with unpaid labour only, they rely on the passion,
the love, and the enthusiasm by those who contribute and invest in it without any financial
compensation.

Postscript: A critique of free labour is important. A critique of the critique of free labour is equally
important. However let us not get anal about this. If labour is life and labour is practice it will be
difficult to develop a concept of free labour that is less nebulous than the concept of labour itself.
This would turn out to be a futile enterprise, directing energies towards a project that is bound to
fail. The true value of the free labour debate lies in the articulation not of a conceptual but a social
problem. This social problem will only cease to exist when both, wage-based labour and free labour
become just labour again, which will only be decided by the outcome of class struggle.

6. Value
In order to understand labour in its full complexity we have to turn towards value. Like labour, value
is a vast area of social research. It is a term with many meanings and perspectives, a term that
triggered numerous debates and it is easy to get distracted and lose sight of what matters most.
So, what is valuable about value for the political economy of media? This is the first question that
needs to be addressed. The second question refers to Marx and to the value that his concept of
value has to offer for a better understanding of our contemporary media and communications
ecosystem.

Economic anthropologist David Graeber (2001) distinguishes between three streams of thought
with respect to value. Firstly there are values in the sociological sense. These are conceptions of
what is ultimately good, proper, or desirable in human life. Secondly there is value in the economic
sense. This is the degree to which objects are desired and how this desire is measured in
quantitative terms. Thirdly there is value in the linguistic sense, which goes back to de Saussure’s
structural linguistics, where value is seen as meaningful difference. This is a concept that puts
words (or things) in relation to other things. The value of some things can only be established in
contrast to or in comparison with other things.

Within political economy of mass media the concept of value has received the same marginal
attention as the concept of labour. In fact, as labour and value are so closely interrelated in Marxist
theory, the same body of literature that is interested in labour is also interested in value.6 One can
only speculate why explorations on value have been largely ignored. My own explanation for this
omission is rather simple: In a very general way and as a starting point mass media were perceived
as valuable as a public good, as an independent force to safeguard democracy. However due to
the increasing privatisation of mass media organisations and the economic interests of their owners
the value of mass media as public good was under constant threat. Thus political economy of mass
media never focuses on the potential value of mass media but on its opposite, on the dangers that
economic interests and political regulation pose for democratic societies. Such a perspective made
perfect sense. After all, political economy of mass media stands in the tradition of critical theory. It
would have been odd indeed to praise media conglomerates and media moguls for their
contributions to a shining public sphere.

If we apply Graeber’s typology of value to the political economy of mass media we get a result
that is very similar to the claim just made, but it is also a bit more nuanced. It is safe to say that
there never was a concern about value in the economic sense; there were no attempts to measure
the value of media products or media organisations in a quantitative way. It is also safe to say that
the sociological dimension of value as values has not been explored in any meaningful way. This
would have meant an engagement with the socially desirable values of media and communication.
This would have been a debate about the utopian aspects of media and communication, how
media should be organised, how they should work, what they should be. However an argument

Wikipedia) and an education commons. This distinction is much about labour and free labour. The knowledge commons
grows with the growth of knowledge. It grows naturally; it just has to be uploaded to the Internet. In stark contrast, an
education commons requires extra labour (real voluntary labour) that is not financially supported.

6 It is not a coincidence that literature which incorporates concepts of labour and value is usually concerned with

advertising. It is advertising which has inspired Smythe (1977) to develop the concept of the audience commodity. Most
notably we find debates on value in the so called ‘blindspot’ debate (Murdock 1978; Smythe 1978; Livant 1979), which was
triggered by Smythe’s (1977) claim that TV audiences provide free labour for advertisers and for media producers. Value is
also central to the work of Sut Jhally (1990), who makes a very similar argument about the advertising industry and about
the labour of media audiences as Smythe (1977).

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could be made that the political economy of mass media has something to say about value in the
linguistic sense of de Saussure’s structuralism, about the meaningful difference between
comparable forms of media production and media organisation, notably about the difference
between publicly and privately owned media organisation. Without referring to the notion of value
explicitly, the British tradition of political economy of mass media does compare public media
organisations with commercial media organisations and the result of this comparison is a positive
assessment of state owned media organisations such as the BBC.

What is the relevance of these streams of thought for the age of distributed media? So far there
are no signs that value in the economic sense is becoming an issue for intense debate. Indeed the
measurement of value in calculable and quantifiable units would always have been a rather
questionable objective for political economists of media in the first place. With the growing
importance of immaterial labour this would turn into more than just a questionable objective – it
would be a mad and utterly futile project. It has become increasingly obvious that the value of
intellectual and affective things is beyond measure. “What has irreversibly changed however, from
the times of the predominance of the classical theory of value, involves the possibility of developing
the theory of value in terms of economic order, or rather, the possibility of considering value as a
measure of concrete labor.” (Negri 1999, 77f.) Negri suggests instead to transform the theory of
value from above to a theory of value “from below, from the basis of life” (Negri 1999, 78). Drawing
on the work of Spinoza, Negri sees value as the power to act. We could add this to Graeber’s
typology as a fourth way to think about value: value is what empowers people to act.

In the age of distributed media, I would argue, debates on value in the sociological sense are
blossoming. These are debates about the digital commons, about free labour and free culture,
about openness, contribution, and sharing, about attention, about scarcity and abundance, about
the gift economy, about property and access, about co-operation and collaboration as opposed to
competition, about anonymous speech and anonymous action, about surveillance, privacy and
transparency, about the value of experts and amateurs, about the internet and democracy, about
people and technology, about media and political action, about capitalism and exit strategies.
These are attempts to make judgements about what is good and desirable.

I hope my argument comes across: In the age of mass media the value of media to safeguard
democracy was under threat. In the age of distributed media this value is still under threat. But this
is not the end of the story. Now questions on power, ideology, and manipulation (which of course
will remain highly relevant) are being supplemented by new questions on agency, empowerment,
potency, and possibilities. In the age of mass media there was not much discussion that connected
media and inquiries on what is important about life. In the age of distributed media these debates
are in full swing.

Can Marx’s concept of value contribute to these debates? Let us rehearse quickly: In the labour
theory of value (as outlined in Capital vol. 1) Marx rejects claims by liberal political economists that
the value of commodities should be defined by markets, by people exchanging money and
commodities. This liberal perspective oscillates between a position where value is either somehow
intrinsic to commodities or it is defined by the desire of those who want to purchase a commodity.
Marx argues that value emerges from the amount of labour (and the amount of time) that has been
invested in the production of a commodity. The exchange of money and commodities hides the fact
that it is the production of the commodity that gives it its value. From this dictum that value is the
socially necessary labour-time embodied in a commodity Marx develops his concept of surplus
value. Surplus value then refers to the difference between the cost of the labour power (the wages)
and the value of labour that is congealed in commodities. Surplus value or profit is the difference
between what the worker creates and what he or she receives in return. If value is created through
labour, surplus value is created through the exploitation of labour.

Even within Marxist theory his labour theory of value has been subject to much controversy. For
Slavoj Žižek it is “usually considered the weakest link in the chain of Marx’s theory” (Žižek 2011,
205). Drawing on the work of Moishe Postone, Žižek argues that Marx’s labour theory of value is
not a trans-historical theory, but a theory of value in a capitalist society only. This poses an
important question. How relevant is Marx’s theory for our contemporary media ecosystem that is
partly capitalist, partly publicly funded, and partly a digital commons? Does it make sense to apply
his theory to what is sometimes called a ‘gift economy’ (Barbrook 1999) and sometimes an
‘economy of contributions’ (Siefkes 2007). And if so, how would this be possible? Let us consider
for example a gift economy. Does it really help in a gift economy to locate the source of value
specific objects in the production of these objects at the expense of the relationship between those
who exchange objects as gifts? Such an approach would not make much sense. There is a need to

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broaden the horizon for theories of value that are exclusively developed for an understanding of
capitalist economies only. The obvious place to find inspiration is the anthropological literature on
value.

Graeber has produced an excellent review of the anthropological literature on value. He is
searching for a concept that could overcome the dichotomy of gifts and commodities that could
bridge a Maussean approach and a Marxist approach to value. He is especially impressed with the
concept of value developed by Nancy Munn who has done extensive fieldwork in Melanesia. For
Munn, value emerges in action. It is the process by which a person’s capacity to act is transformed
into concrete activity. Value is ultimately about the power to create social relationships.

“Rather than having to choose between the desirability of objects and the
importance of human relations one can now see both as refractions of the same
thing. Commodities have to be produced (and yes, they have to be moved around,
exchanged, consumed…), social relations have to be created and maintained; all of
this requires an investment of human time and energy, intelligence, concern […]
Framing things this way of course evokes the specter of Marx […] We are clearly
dealing with something along the lines of a labor theory of value. But only if we
define ‘labor’ much more broadly.” (Graeber 2001, 45)

One might add that such a concept of labour is pretty much identical with Marx general definition of
labour as practice. And it is identical with what Negri and Spinoza describe as the power to act.

All this is theory and it might be hard to come up with a rationale as to why political economy of
media needs to engage with value theory in the first place. In fact this is not the point I want to
make. I do think however, that Marx’s labour theory of value (understanding labour in this broad
meaning of the term) would open up new paths for empirical research. If it makes sense to see
value as the power to act and to see it as the power to create social relations, if value is about how
people give meaning to their own actions, then a political economy of communication, a political
economy of distributed media would be in a perfect position to redefine what political economy
means and to establish what Negri (1999) calls a political economy from below. This would be
research on value that is focused not on structures but on subjectivities and their desires to create,
to connect, to communicate, to share, to work together and to give meaning to all these things.

7. Property
In the age of mass media property has always been significant with respect to the ownership of the
means of production. However an interest on property in terms of media content was rather limited.
Ronald Bettig (1996) is perhaps overly careful to say that the area of intellectual property and
copyright in particular has been “relatively unexplored”. He is one of very few political economists
who examined the property of media content. Interestingly this is a study just at the beginning of
the digital turn.

Bettig is interested in the difference between the normative principles of intellectual property
and the actually existing system. The central normative justification for intellectual property is built
on the assumption that the creators of intellectual and artistic work need an incentive to be
creative. The copyright is meant to give the creator exclusive rights to exploit their work, which in
turn will provide an income for the creator and motivate her to produce new work. However the
actual copyright system does not operate according to this ideal. Most artistic and intellectual work
relies on a process of production, reproduction, and distribution that involves many people and
expensive technology. According to Bettig “ownership of copyright increasingly rests with the
capitalists who have the machinery and capital to manufacture and distribute” (Bettig 1996, 8) the
works.

“Precisely because the capitalist class owns the means of communication, it is able
to extract the artistic and intellectual labor of actual creators of media messages.
For to get ‘published’, in the broad sense, actual creators must transfer their rights
to ownership in their work to those who have the means of disseminating it.” (Bettig
1996, 35)

This is a very correct analysis for the age of mass media that does not leave much room for hope.
Still he states with astonishing foresight that “the enclosure of the intellectual and artistic commons

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is not inevitable or necessary, even though the emphasis on the logic of capital makes it seem as if
it is.” (Bettig 1996, 5). Bettig must have felt that times they are changing. In the mid 1990s when his
book was published sharing cultures and the digital commons were largely restricted to the open
source movement. There was no file-sharing software such as Napster, no legal experiments with
copyright such as the Creative Commons, there was no social web. In the age of mass media the
expansionary logic of capital has not left much room for an intellectual and artistic commons. An
overwhelming part of media content was not common property but captured by capital. In this
respect Bettig’s statement has some prophetic qualities. By now it has become very clear that the
enclosure of the intellectual and artistic commons is not inevitable at all. In fact this is the “battle to
the death” which Kleiner refers to, the battle between artistic and intellectual labour and those who
want to rescue the digital commons on one side of the battlefield and capital and those who aim for
enclosure on the other side.

Bettig has developed a convincing argument with much empirical backup as to why the
copyright arrangements – as legitimate as they are in an ideal normative sense – have not really
supported the creators of intellectual and artistic work, but those who control the communication
flows. With the digital turn this rather problematic arrangement is becoming even worse. As all
digital objects can be reproduced endlessly and distributed with minimum additional costs they
count as non-rival goods. In fact most intellectual property is non-rival, meaning they can be used
by one person without preventing other people from using the same goods. Digital objects however
are not only non-rival; they are also abundant by nature. Therefore all attempts to rescue the idea
of copyright via digital rights are absurd in the sense that they create artificial scarcity. They turn
objects that are abundant into legally scarce goods. To put it ironically: In the digital age only the
creation of artificial scarcity can feed capitalist accumulation. It is exactly because digital things are
not just non-rival but also abundant that the issue of intellectual property has moved from a
sideshow to centre stage.

It is impossible to summarise the free culture debate in a few lines. I still want to make a few
remarks, only to situate the key positions with respect to Marx. The first thing to note is that there is
a relatively straightforward line between critical political economists and liberal political economists
such as Yochai Benkler (2006) and Lawrence Lessig (2004). The latter celebrate free culture
without giving up on the legitimacy of intellectual property. They merely suggest modifications to
copyright law. They also applaud the digital commons as a progressive development without being
overly concerned about the free labour that goes into the building of the digital commons. For
Benkler (2006, 3) commons-based peer production enhances individual freedom and autonomy.
This is where critical political economists take a different position. For them free labour is a problem
that needs to be addressed.

The debates within the camp of critical political economists of digital media are not so clear-cut.
While both positions exist, a passionate defence of free culture (e.g. Cory Doctorow 2008 or Kevin
Carson 2011) and a passionate concern about free labour and the exploitation of this free labour by
capital (Pasquinelli 2008; Kleiner 2010), in most accounts we find a general acknowledgement of
this dilemma, a dilemma that is hard to crack, with many commentators sitting on the fence. One
way out of the free culture dilemma resulted in the search for new models to guarantee the creators
of artistic or intellectual work some income (e.g. Peter Sunde’s ‘Flattr’ or Dmytri Kleiner’s
‘copyfarleft’ and ‘venture communism’ suggestions).

Apart from some rare exceptions (notably Wark 2004 and Kleiner 2010), these debates
circumvent however a discussion on property itself. Even those who passionately defend free
culture support their position with rather pragmatic arguments, for example with the claim that free
culture ultimately stimulates creative production and innovation, whereas copyright brings about a
reduction of creative and innovative work. While these are important arguments I do find it
astonishing that a fundamental critique of intellectual property itself has so far not been put on the
table. Badiou asks a good rhetorical question: Why do we “keep tight controls on all forms of
property in order to ensure the survival of the powerful?” (Badiou 2010, 5)

This is where Marx could come in rather handy. The first thing we can learn from Marx is that
property is not a natural right. It is a historic product. Property relations are subject to specific
historic conditions.

“The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour of
bourgeois property. The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of
property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois
private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of

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producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonism, on the
exploitation of the many by the few. In this sense, the theory of the Communists
may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”
(Communist Manifesto, 68)

The second thing to note is that Marx’s perspective on property is innovative and very distinct from
liberal political theorists, as he does not focus on the relationship between a person and an object.
Instead Marx conceptualises property as a relation that one person establishes to other people with
respect to commodities. So fundamentally property relations are an expression of social relations.
In capitalism property is based on the antagonism between capital and wage-labour. Is it is based
on the accumulation of profit on the side of those who own the means of production.

“Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the
isolated, independent laboring-individual with the conditions of his labor, is
supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the
nominally free labor of others, i.e., on wage-labor. The capitalist mode of
appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist
private property.” (Capital vol. 1, 762-63)

As such capitalist private property is not so much about the ownership of things, but about the right
to exclude others from using them. Dismantling the widespread myth that private property is justly
earned by those who are intelligent and willing to work hard while the rest are ‘lazy rascals’, Marx
comes up with an alternative explanation on the origin of property:

“Such insipid childishness is every day preached to us in defence of property […] In
actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly
force, play the greater part.” (Capital vol. 1, 713-14).

Why does this quote resonate so well in a time when capitalism is facing its first global crisis?The
third and for our purposes more important observation is Marx’s distinction between private and
personal property. In capitalism, private property is bad, it is not only the result of alienated labour
(wage-labour) but worse, is it also the means that makes alienated labour possible in the first place
and the means to maintain this unjust relation between capital and labour. Private property is
productive property. It is property that is crucial for capitalist production. It is property that can be
used for the creation of surplus value. It might be a bit simplistic but in general Marx equates
private property with privately owned means of production. This is very different from personal
property or property for consumption (for reproduction, for subsistence), which should not be
socialised as there is no need for doing so. Unproductive property or property based on needs is
rather harmless after all.

“When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all
members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social
property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its
class character […] The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e.
that quantum of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely requisite to keep the
labourer in bare existence as a labourer […] We by no means intend to abolish this
personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for
the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus
wherewith to command the labour of others.” (Communist Manifesto, 68f.)

No doubt intellectual property is not personal but private property. No doubt these are productive
commodities. They produce surplus value and also lay the foundation for future commodities that
produce even more surplus value. Information produces more information, news produces more
news, knowledge produces more knowledge, and art produces more art. Therefore intellectual
property is an invention that in capitalism does not protect the creators of these immaterial objects.
Instead it helps capitalist accumulation. Bettig has supported this claim in great detail with rich
empirical evidence.

In my view the debate between those who support free culture and those who are concerned
about the exploitative nature of free labour got stuck. Both positions should be supported from a

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Marxist point of view. They contradict each other but they do so in perfect harmony with what Marx
sees as internal contradictions of capitalism. Furthermore, the development of new business
models for intellectual and artistic workers does not look promising, neither theoretically nor
practically. It all boils down to the simple fact that capitalists are not willing to support free labour for
altruistic reasons and those who are exploited earn just enough to maintain their own subsistence.

The only way out of this dilemma is a debate on the legitimacy of private property itself.
Property relations reflect social relations. Now we can close the circle. It will bring us back to value,
to value in the sociological sense (what we appreciate about life) and to the fourth approach to
value, the one that builds on Spinoza’s theory of affect, to value as the power to act. It will also
bring us back to labour. If free culture is good for society (which is a claim that never has been
seriously contested) then society must find a way to support the creators of free culture. Society
must find a way to support their unpaid contributions, their gifts to humanity. It is as simple as that.
A global basic income is not the only possible solution to this problem, but it could be a good
starting point.

A related debate that should be triggered from the free-labour-free-culture-dilemma refers to the
division of labour. In a communist society “there are no painters; at most there are people who,
among other things, also paint.” (Literature and Art, 76)

If people use their power to act against the capitalist property regime, they will engage in
struggle:

“The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour,
into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more
protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private
property, already practically resting on socialised production, into socialised
property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by
a few usurpers, in the latter we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the
mass of the people.” (Capital vol. 1: 764)

Marx was perhaps a bit overly optimistic about this struggle. Then again, this optimism and the
hope that goes with it are very much needed.

8. Struggle
There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war,
and we’re winning. (Warren Buffett 2011)

In the age of mass media political economists of communication have applied Marxist theory in a
rather limited way. In the age of digital and distributed media, so my main argument, political
economy of communication can apply Marx’s concepts in a broader way. I have used some key
concepts of his political economy – in particular the concepts of labour, value, and property, which
are all interlinked – to demonstrate their relevance for an analysis of our contemporary media
ecology, which consists of an interesting mix of the state, the market, and the commons. Another
concept which is obviously at the very heart of Marx’s political economy is class struggle. Digital
and distributed media have opened up new possibilities for resistance and for the construction of
alternatives to capitalism. None of these possibilities can be achieved without more fundamental
changes enforced by the struggle of the oppressed.

Like labour, value and property, the concept of class struggle has featured within the political
economy of mass media, but only at the margins (e.g. Mattelart and Siegelaub 1979). It never has
been a key concept. Moreover, Dyer-Witheford is right to state that “while there are some studies of
working class battles over digital machines and electronic media from a class struggle position,
these have usually not offered any theoretical perspectives beyond…neo-Luddism.” (Dyer-
Witheford 1999, 64)

A theorisation of media and struggle is among the most important tasks for political economists
of distributed media. How can we conceptualise class struggle in the 21st century, as there are so
many practices associated with it? These are practices which refer to the agency of workers who
resist exploitation at each point in the value chain, something political economists have recently
addressed in detailed accounts (Huws and Leys 2003; Qui 2009; Mosco, McKercher and Huws
2010). Struggle in the information age also refers to hacktivism and forms of resistance employed
by loosely connected cyber ‘groups’ such as ‘Anonymous’. Thirdly struggle refers to all those

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energies that are invested in the digital commons and the building of alternative goods and
structures. Finally it refers to social movements. 2011 was the year of the first global uprising.
While the specific relationship between social media and social movements does need to be
studied in more detail, we can safely claim that social media can empower social movements and
political activists. In the digital age the connection between media and struggle is complex but
strong. Political economists of distributed media are expanding their research beyond a focus on
media organisations or media industries; they are also studying what is happening in cyberspace;
and they are studying what is happening in the real streets and squares.

Marx is back indeed and this time it’s personal.

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About the Author

Andreas Wittel
is a Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University (UK) and is currently interested in the interface between digital media
and critical theory.

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DOI: 10.1177/0486613416666565

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Article

Technology and Economic
Development: The Schumpeterian
Legacy

Rinaldo Evangelista1

Abstract
The main argument put forward in the paper is that the recent neo-Schumpeterian literature,
while providing fundamental contributions to our understanding of innovation, has contributed
to the emergence of an optimistic reading of the relationship between technology, economy,
and society, with technology able to guarantee strong economic growth and social welfare. It is
also argued that such an “optimistic bias” has been associated with a dominant supply-side and
micro-based view of the technology–economy relationships.

JEL Classification: B52; O10; O30

Keywords
technology, innovation, Schumpeter, development, crisis

1. Introduction

In this contribution, we argue that the last economic crisis, along with shaking the dominant
neoliberal economic thinking and policy framework, challenges also the widespread (both within
and outside orthodox economics) optimistic view of the role technology plays in our economies
and societies. More specifically, the somewhat provocative argument put forward in this paper is
that such an optimistic stand also permeates the neo-Schumpeterian literature, that is, that broad
stream of research that originated in the 1970s and 1980s, having as its main research objective
the investigation of the nature, the determinants, and the economic effects of technological
change and innovation. Despite being constituted by a rather heterogeneous set of research
streams (Fagerberg 2013; Winter 2014), all in all this body of literature tends to convey an opti-
mistic scenario of the economic and social effects of technology, with the latter being able to
guarantee strong economic growth, job creation, and (implicitly) social welfare. As is argued in
the following sections, this view on the socially progressive virtues that technology plays in capi-
talist economies is confirmed by the fact that in the neo-Schumpeterian literature (with only few

1University of Camerino, Piazza Cavour, Italy

Date received: October 27, 2015
Date accepted: June 6, 2016

Corresponding Author:
Rinaldo Evangelista, University of Camerino, 62032 Camerino, Piazza Cavour 19, Italy.
Email: rinaldo.evangelista@unicam.it

666565 RRPXXX10.1177/0486613416666565Review of Radical Political EconomicsEvangelista
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Evangelista 137

exceptions), technology is rarely associated with macroeconomic “market failures” such as sys-
temic crises, structural unemployment, and the growth of social and economic inequalities.

The paper is structured as follows: in the next section, the flourishing of the neo-Schumpeterian
literature is put into historical context and the main areas of theorizing and empirical investiga-
tions of this new research field are sketched out. Section 3, along with recognizing the great
merits of the neo-Schumpeterian approach, highlights two dominant methodological and concep-
tual traits of this stream of literature, which, to our view, make the latter insufficiently equipped
to deal with the potentially contradictory relationships between technology, economic develop-
ment, and social welfare in market (capitalist) economies, with contradictions emerging espe-
cially in periods of prolonged structural crisis. In particular, the focus is on the progressive shift
of the bulk of the neo-Schumpeterian literature toward a micro-based and supply-side view of the
relationship between technology and economy, a shift that has contributed to favoring an acritical
(and optimistic) representation of the economic and social effects of technology. Section 4 argues
that such a “double shift” is well reflected in the marginalization of “heterodox” topics, such as
the controversial relationship between technology, employment, and, more broadly, socioeco-
nomic development.

2. Main Research Avenues in the Neo-Schumpeterian
Literature and Three Emerging Trends

Over the last three decades, the fundamental role played by technological change and innovation
for economic growth and competitiveness has been increasingly recognized both on a theoretical
and empirical ground. It does not come as a surprise that, in this context, Joseph Schumpeter has
been rediscovered as a cultural reference point for a new field of research specifically dealing
with the “economics of technology and innovation.” The holistic methodological approach of
Schumpeter; his out-of-equilibrium, dynamic, historical, and institutional view of economic pro-
cesses; his interest in the role of innovation seen as the engine of competition, structural change,
and growth—all have represented strong sources of attraction and inspiration for a new genera-
tion of economists and scholars, located first outside, and later on also within, mainstream eco-
nomics.1 The acceleration of the rate of technological and scientific change, along with the
paradigmatic change brought about by the emergence and diffusion of Information and
Communications Technologies (ICT) in the 1970s and 1980s, have also significantly contributed
to the emergence of a “Schumpeterian renaissance” (Freeman 2007) and to the flourishing and
consolidation of a new discipline variously labeled as “Economics of technological change,”
“Economics of innovation,” “Schumpeterian economics,” or “Evolutionary economics” (Dogson
and Rothwell 1994; Dosi et al. 1988; Fagerberg, Mowery, and Nelson 2005; Hall and Rosenberg
2010; Stoneman 1995). For the sake of simplicity, and without any presumption of being exhaus-
tive, in this paper, we label this rapidly growing research area and related literature as “neo-
Schumpeterian,” focusing in particular on that branch dealing with the analysis of the nature, the
determinant, and effects of technological change and innovation (Winter 2014).

The neo-Schumpeterian literature has had the fundamental merit of bringing back (after Marx
and Schumpeter) technology and innovation to the center of economic theory and analysis. This
stream of literature has in fact filled an important gap in economic theory, providing for the first

1Over the last two decades, starting with the contribution of Lucas and Romer, there have been various
attempts at introducing Schumpeterian elements into neoclassical models of economic growth, in partic-
ular, making innovation and technological change endogenous factors (Aghion and Howitt 1992, 1998;
Lucas 1988; Romer 1990, 1994). However, the fundamental conceptual and methodological structure of
these models has not significantly changed, remaining strongly anchored in methodological individualism
and trusting the functioning of “Say’s law” and the equilibrium properties of markets (Castellacci 2007;
Verspagen 2005).

138 Review of Radical Political Economics 50(1)

time a systematic array of analyses, theories, and evidence about a complex and multiform phe-
nomenon such as technological change. This line of research was opened up in the 1970s by the
pioneering contributions of Christopher Freeman, Nathan Rosenberg, Richard Nelson, and Sidney
Winter, followed by other influential scholars on both sides of the Atlantic ocean and by the setting
up of research institutes, such as the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) in the United Kingdom
and the Maastricht Economic Research on Innovation and Technology (MERIT) in the Netherlands
(Fagerberg, Fosaas, and Sapprasert 2012; Fagerberg and Verspagen 2009).

Over the last few decades, this research area has expanded at an exponential rate, consolidat-
ing itself as a new autonomous discipline around a visible and highly interconnected college of
scholars located outside, or at the very margin, of mainstream economics’ departments (Fagerberg
and Verspagen 2009). The research topics investigated have also progressively broadened. In
synthesis, the scholars active in this new field of research have devoted their efforts mainly to (1)
exploring the “black box” of technology, investigating sources, procedures, purposes of innova-
tion activities; (2) collecting data on science, technology, and innovation and identifying appro-
priate indicators to be used for empirical research and policy purposes; (3) investigating the
effects technology and innovation exert on the key economic performance variables at any pos-
sible level of aggregation; and (4) drawing from all these theoretical empirical contributions
evidences and stylized facts, hints, and lessons to guide policy action (Fagerberg 2013).

The neo-Schumpeterian literature resumes from Schumpeter the idea that technology and
innovation are the distinctive and most important dimensions of the competition process and
entrepreneurship; that is, they are the real fuel of economic and structural change, i.e., the process
fueling the birth (death) of firms, the emergence (decline) of markets and industries, and the
growth performance of economies at large. However, the Schumpeterian “process of creative
destruction” has been conceptualized and analyzed in very different ways, namely, at different
levels of analysis (micro, meso, macro); within different time scale frameworks (short- vs. long-
term processes of technological and economic change); and putting the emphasis on different
types of actors and institutions (entrepreneurs, firms, industries, national innovation systems).2

Drawing from previous surveys (Castellacci 2007; Fagerberg 2003), and with a certain degree
of schematization, four major strands of neo-Schumpeterian literature can be identified, each one
starting from (and further developing) the contributions and ideas contained in Schumpeter’s
works.

The literature on long waves, inspired by Schumpeter’s book Business Cycles, reproposes a
technological interpretation of the long-term cyclical patterns of capitalism. These studies and
contributions have in fact further developed the Schumpeterian idea regarding the existence of a
strong nexus between the cyclical trend of economic systems and the discontinuous nature of
technological change. The underlying idea is that innovation, far from being a linear and smooth
process, occurs in swarms. Capitalism evolves through upswing and downswing stages, with the
length and intensity of the upswing stages of development depending on the level of radicalness
and pervasiveness of technological change. Radical innovations and technological changes are
able to sustain phases of long-term economic growth, which are followed by stagnation periods
due to the exhaustion of the dominant technological paradigm. Issues that have been lively
debated in this stream of literature have to do with the degree of endogeneity/exogeneity of tech-
nological change with respect to the dynamics of the business cycle as well as with the role
played by demand- or supply-side forces in explaining the dynamics of innovation (Coombs,

2This clearly emerges looking at the tables of contents of the main handbooks of technological change and
innovation published over the last three decades (Dogson and Rothwell 1994; Dosi et al. 1988; Fagerberg,
Mowery, and Nelson 2005; Hall and Rosenberg 2010; Hanusch and Pyka 2007; Stoneman 1995), as well
as by recent reviews of the state of the art of the neo-Schumpeterian literature (Dosi 2013; Fagerberg 2013;
Fagerberg, Fosaas, and Sapprasert 2012; Foster 2011; Winter 2014).

Evangelista 139

Saviotti, and Walsh 1987; Dosi 1982; Mowery and Rosenberg 1979).3 Freeman and Perez (1988),
Freeman and Louçã (2001), and Perez (2002) have tried to provide a more holistic, complex, and
less deterministic interpretation of the relationship between economic cycles and technological
change, associating the upswing stage of long waves not only to the emergence of a new set of
pervasive technologies but also to the necessary changes in the economic, cultural, social, and
institutional context. In this perspective, the historical growth phases experienced by capitalist
economies in the course of the last two hundred years are interpreted as the result of the emer-
gence and consolidation of different “techno-economic paradigms” (Freeman and Louçã 2001;
Perez 2010).

Studies following the so-called technology-gap approach have moved from the necessity of
explaining the lack of economic and technological convergence between more advanced and
backward countries as well as factors facilitating catching-up and following-behind processes
(Fagerberg 1994; Fagerberg et al. 2007). For the scholars following this approach, the lack of
technological convergence has to do with the same nature of technology and innovation. The lat-
ter, far from having a public good nature, are depicted as being partly appropriable, difficult to
adopt and transfer to the economic, cultural, and institutional contexts different from those in
which they were first generated and exploited. Innovation processes are, therefore, seen as char-
acterized by high levels of cumulativeness and irreversibility, giving the development-growth
phenomenon a path-dependent character.

Another important strand of neo-Schumpeterian literature is the one that has highlighted the sys-
temic nature of technological change, the importance of the linkages and interactions between the
different actors involved in the process of innovation and diffusion, and more broadly the important
role played by several types of institutions. In this perspective, the innovation process is not seen as
the mere sum of individual firms’ behaviors and strategies but as the outcome of the systemic interac-
tions, technological interdependencies, and knowledge flows taking place within and between firms,
industries, and between the latter and the other scientific and technological (public and private)
institutions. This literature has highlighted the presence of different types of National Systems of
Innovation (NSI), each one rooted in different—historically determined—industrial structures, and
cultural and institutional contexts (Edquist 1997; Freeman 1987, 1995; Nelson 1993).

A fourth, and nowadays largely dominant, neo-Schumpeterian stream is the one inspired by
the seminal contribution of Nelson and Winter (1982), interpreting the innovative behaviors of
firms, the dynamics of industries, and economic growth as a result of an evolutionary (continu-
ous) process of variety generation (innovation) and market selection. For the sake of simplicity,
we label this fourth strand of literature as evolutionary. As discussed at more length in the follow-
ing section, while the first three streams of the neo-Schumpeterian literature privilege a macro
and institutional perspective on the effects exerted by technology on the economy and society,
the evolutionary stream is explicitly micro-founded and very much focused on looking inside the
“black box” of innovation and the innovative behaviors of firms. There is no need to say that the
microeconomic foundations of evolutionary economics are antithetic to the neoclassical ones. In
particular, the evolutionary school rejects the ideas of equilibrium-maximizing behaviors, repre-
sentative agents, full rationality of economic agents, and the public nature of technology (i.e.,
assimilation of technology to pure information; Dosi 1988). In this approach, a clear understand-
ing and specification of the behaviors of firms, operating in competitive contexts, characterized
by technological rivalry and uncertainty, is considered absolutely vital to explain the aggregate
properties of industries and economic systems. Using Dosi’s (2013: 111) words, “An evolution-
ary perspective attempts to understand a wide set of economic phenomena—from microeco-
nomic behaviour to features of industrial structures and dynamics, and the properties of aggregate
growth and development—as outcome of far-from-equilibrium interactions among

3See Archibugi and Filippetti (2011a) for a more recent review of this literature.

140 Review of Radical Political Economics 50(1)

heterogeneous agents, characterized by endogenous preferences, ‘bounded rational’ but capable
of learning, adapting, and innovating with respect to their understanding of the world in which
they operate, the technology they master, their organizational forms, and their behavioral reper-
toires.” In fact, the explicit and most ambitious challenge of Nelson and Winter’s (1982: 206)
model consists precisely in building an out-of-equilibrium narrative and micro-based modeling
of economic growth and change— a perspective and a model able to “. . . provide an analysis that
at least comes close to matching the power of neoclassical theory to predict and illuminate the
macroeconomic patterns of growth.”

The heterogeneity of neo-Schumpeterian approaches and perspectives briefly sketched above
is not surprising, especially taking into account the eclectic profile of Schumpeter and the wide
spectrum of his theoretical interests, as reflected in his three major contributions (i.e., The Theory
of Economic Development [1912] 1934; Business Cycles 1939; Capitalism, Socialism and
Democracy 1942). Along with stressing the richness of the theoretical developments originated
from Schumpeter’s works, an important point we want to make in this contribution has to do with
the specific long-term trajectory shown by neo-Schumpeterian studies. Three broad trends can in
fact be identified. The first trend consists of having progressively shifted the focus of the analysis
of the technology–economy relationships from a macro- to a microeconomic level, and from a
long-run to a more short-run perspective. In fact, macroeconomic or macroinstitutional themes,
issues, and perspectives dealt with by at least two of the three streams of neo-Schumpeterian
literature listed above (i.e., long waves and NSI) have been progressively marginalized in the
most recent evolutionary contributions. The second trend consists of a progressive reinforce-
ment—in line with the theoretical framework of Nelson and Winter’s approach—of a supply-side
view of the relationship between the generation, diffusion, and use of technology and the main
economic phenomena, with the role of demand largely neglected (a shift only weakly reversed in
the last decade). The third trend (in our opinion, linked to the previous two trends) is the emer-
gence of an unproblematic and optimistic view of the economic and social role technology plays
in market economies. These trends are discussed and elaborated at length in the following
section.

3. Toward a Supply-Side, Micro-Founded, and Optimistic
View of Technology

When compared with the post-Keynesian view, the neo-Schumpeterian literature (and, in par-
ticular, the evolutionary stream) looks at the relationships between technology and the economy
from a somewhat different perspective. The main differences have to do with, on one hand, the
relative importance given, respectively, to demand- and supply-side drivers of growth and, on the
other hand, with the importance attached to the micro- and the macro-level sources of economic
change. In fact, since its origin, the neo-Schumpeterian literature has shown little interest in the
traditional macro-level variables and functional relationships taken into account in the post-
Keynesian tradition, with the latter revolving around the dynamic interplay between investment,
capital accumulation, productivity growth, income distribution, and aggregate demand (Kaldor
1961; Kalecki 1954). It is, however, in the last two decades that the emphasis has clearly shifted
toward a fully supply-side view of the dynamics of macroeconomic forces, with a key role played
by intangible investments (Evangelista 1999), and with technology seen as the ultimate driver of
all sorts of economic performance variables. In particular, technology is seen as the factor
explaining economic growth (as in the case of the 1982 Nelson and Winter model), and the
observed cross-country disparities in productivity growth and international competitiveness (as
in the case of the technology-gap approach). More significantly, the role of demand, and its rela-
tionship with the rate and direction of technological change, has been largely neglected by virtu-
ally all neo-Schumpeterian literature, and in particular by the evolutionary stream. As explicitly

Evangelista 141

stated by Dosi, Fagiolo, and Roventini “. . . evolutionary models, as pioneered by Nelson and
Winter (1982), are driven by a Schumpeterian core with endogenous innovation, but do largely
neglect too any demand-related driver of macroeconomic activity” (Dosi, Fagiolo, and Roventini
2010: 1749). In fact, in most of the theoretical and empirical neo-Schumpeterian literature, eco-
nomic growth (associated with the process of creative destruction) is (often implicitly) seen as
automatically expanded by technology through the emergence of new markets, new industries,
and products. Furthermore, in this innovation-driven perspective, the “growth issue” has been
progressively reduced to a “competitiveness matter” with GDP, as well as employment growth,
made dependent on the specific capabilities of economies, industries, and firms to increase their
market shares within the broad (increasingly global in scale) process of creative destruction. This
competition-based view of economic growth is in turn connected by neo-Schumpeterian scholars
to the idiosyncratic and tacit nature of technological knowledge and the path-dependent and
cumulative nature of innovation. These features of technological change are able to explain why
economies, as well as regions, industries, and firms, differ from each other in their technological
capabilities and economic performances. If economic growth is made dependent on competitive-
ness and on the possibility of building long-lasting absolute technological advantages, it comes
as no surprise that (aggregate) demand becomes a less relevant factor, and the growth process can
be depicted and modeled in a fully supply-side (Schumpeterian) fashion.

The supply-side bias of modern evolutionary economics is well reflected in the evocative and
provocative title given to the 2001 special issue of the Journal of Evolutionary Economics:
“Economic growth—What happened on the demand side?” (Witt 2001a). Since then, the “issue
of demand” has regained some space in the neo-Schumpeterian literature, although the bulk of
theoretical and empirical contributions has continued to privilege a supply-side perspective.4
Furthermore, when the role of demand is taken into consideration, this is done most of the time
in a microeconomic fashion, that is, taking into account the knowledge-related and psychological
factors associated with consumers’ behaviors. Demand constraints are mainly seen as the result
of possible mismatches between the generation of new varieties of products and the actual pace
at which consumers are able to change their consumption patterns (Loasby 2001; McMeekin et al.
2011; Metcalfe 2001; Witt 2001b) or consumers’ “satiation” (Andersen 2001).

The supply-side view of the evolutionary approach is deeply micro-founded, being analyti-
cally centered on a set of specific assumptions regarding the innovative behaviors of firms. As
explicitly stated by Nelson and Winter (1982: 229), “The question of the nature of ‘search’ pro-
cesses would appear to be among the most important for those trying to understand economic
growth, and the evolutionary theory has the advantage of posing the question explicitly.” The
1982 Nelson and Winter model (a major source of inspiration for the bulk of the following evo-
lutionary literature) is particularly exemplificative of this perspective.5 In this model (in particu-
lar, the one presented in chapter 9), the aggregate growth properties of economic systems are
conceptualized and modeled starting from the behavioral choices and organizational routines put
in place by heterogeneous agents possessing different technological capabilities and dealing with
innovation in a technological context characterized by bounded rationality and substantial uncer-
tainty. The parameter determining the long-run growth performances of the economy are (with

4The role of demand in the process of innovation and economic growth is explicitly taken into account by
(among others) the following contributions: Verspagen (2002); Dosi, Fagiolo, and Roventini (2006, 2010)
try to integrate the Schumpeterian and Keynesian perspective on technology and economic change; Saviotti
(2001) and Saviotti and Pyka (2013) investigate the intertwined dynamic linkages between supply and
demand forces and their combined effect on economic growth using a Pasinetti-type structural approach;
for an insightful long-run view of the role of demand in the process of economic development, structural,
and technological change (Transformational Growth), see Gualerzi (2010). An attempt of integrating a
Keynesian (demand-driven) and a Marxian (profit-driven) perspective on business cycles is contained in
Dosi, Sodini, and Virgillito (2015).

142 Review of Radical Political Economics 50(1)

the exception of the cost of capital) fully supply side and micro-based, that is, driven by the level
of “technological opportunity” (“the ease of major innovation”) and by the specific strategic
choices made by firms regarding innovation (the emphasis on imitation vis-à-vis true innovation,
the labor-saving bias of innovation search).6 Differently from the post-Keynesian (Kaleckian)
tradition, and from Marx’s perspective, the pace and type of technological change are not sup-
posed to have an influence on aggregate demand. In other words, output growth and productivity
advancements are the result of a positive sum competitive process of creative destruction.
Although the potential labor-saving/capital-deepening orientation of firms’ innovation activities
is explicitly acknowledged in Nelson and Winter’s model, there is no analytical treatment of the
macroeconomic implication of such a bias, and in particular of its potential effects on aggregate
demand (via changes in income shares); in addition, there is no consideration of the macroeco-
nomic effects that the lack of an ex ante coordination of investment and activities might produce,
favoring the potential phenomena of overcapacity, overproduction (of final goods and capital
assets), excess of savings, and, therefore, structural supply–demand mismatches (and social wel-
fare losses). A set of microeconomic assumptions on firms’ behaviors reinforces this supply-side
view of the 1982 Nelson and Winter model: firms are supposed to always use their production
capacity and no slow-down or shut-down decision is allowed for. All net firms’ profits are sup-
posed to be reinvested (above a 16 percent return to capital threshold), and the resulting increase
of production capacity and the productivity gains always find a corresponding demand. It could,
therefore, be argued that Nelson and Winter’s model, and most of the other evolutionary contri-
butions following this tradition, are conceptually and analytically designed (starting from the
micro-foundations discussed above) to explain economic growth rather than economic crisis, and
tend to relegate the occurrence of structural recessions to exogenous events.7

In the supply-side and entrepreneurial view of the technology–economy relationships charac-
terizing the evolutionary approach, the micro-level mechanisms governing the fabric of innovation
processes (the “opening-up of the black box of technology”) have become a key area of investi-
gation and theoretical concern. This explains why the analytical and empirical focus of neo-
Schumpeterian studies has progressively shifted from a macro to a micro level.8 The exploration
of the sources, procedures, and effects of innovation at micro and industry level has been consid-
ered of crucial importance, to further qualify the specific behaviors and mechanisms governing
the processes of variety generation and market selection, to enrich the microeconomic theoretical

5More recent evolutionary contributions that have started to conceptualize and model economic growth
as the outcome of (micro-based) self-organization and competitive processes include Metcalfe, Foster,
and Ramlogan (2006); Saviotti and Pyka (2004, 2008); Cantner and Krüger (2008); and Silverberg and
Verspagen (2005).
6Evolutionary models propose a micro-foundation of the dynamics of economic systems that departs
from the one (implicitly) envisaged in other heterodox schools, and in particular in the Marxian and post-
Keynesian approaches. More specifically, evolutionary scholars tend to downplay the importance of the
specific social relationships characterizing the “capitalist mode of production,” and the implications that
such specificity has on the microeconomic rationale driving firms’ (investment and innovation) behaviors.
In Marx’s view, for instance, technological rivalry generates not only micro-level variety but also (and more
importantly) historical trends such as the increasing organic composition, and concentration and centraliza-
tion of capital. These trends and forces have a clear technological connotation but are not seen as primarily
driven by technology. On the contrary, in the evolutionary approach, technology is depicted as (so to speak)
a “socially neutral force” with firms’ innovation activities becoming the absolute deus ex machina of eco-
nomic change.
7This is somewhat confirmed by the way in which Nelson and Winter qualify their own (1982) model. In
commenting on the capability of the model to replicate via simulation the growth pattern of the US economy
during the period 1909–1949, Nelson and Winter (1982: 220) explicitly state that “… The real period in
question involved episodes of economic depression and war, and while these episodes might be considered
as historical random events, the simulation model is not prepared to deal with them realistically.”

Evangelista 143

foundations (and empirical support) of the evolutionary models of competition, economic
growth, and industrial dynamics (Dosi 1988; Dosi and Nelson 2010). The heterogeneous nature
of innovation and its role in fueling economic change has consequently become the main core of
neo-Schumpeterian studies (Evangelista and Mastrostefano 2006).

The areas explored by this literature are very large and the contributions provided by this new
research stream to our understanding of innovation, firms’ behaviors, and industrial dynamics
can hardly be underestimated (Dosi 2013; Winter 2014). However, an argument can definitely be
made on the fact that the dominant supply-side perspective and the microeconomic focus adopted
by the bulk of these studies have also contributed to the emergence of an optimistic vision of the
role that technology plays in the economy and society, with innovation playing a sort of thauma-
turgic role, being able to explain almost everything: the performance of firms, industries, regions,
and countries as well as the destiny of individuals and workers.9 Somehow synthesizing the argu-
ments developed throughout this section, it is possible to argue that the (unconditional) positive
and socially progressive role played by technology in our economies and societies portrayed in
the neo-Schumpeterian literature is in turn based on two basic assumptions:

1. The first one is the existence of a strong (Schumpeterian) nexus between technology,
growth, and employment, with the positive economic effect of technology being insepa-
rably linked to the capacity of firms, industries, and economies in winning the competi-
tive race relying upon their superior technological capabilities.

2. The second (often implicit) one is that technological competition always consists of a
positive economic and social sum game; furthermore, it is assumed that this was true in
the past, holds in the present, and will continue to be true also in the future, independently
from the macroeconomic conditions in which the process of creative destruction takes
place, the specific techno-economic regime, and the broad social and institutional context
in which technological activities are carried out.

An important point we want to make is that the combination of these two assumptions has
contributed to conveying a rather simplified picture of the social and economic perspectives
linked to the advancements of technologies and their socioeconomic use and impact in the con-
text of market (capitalist) economies. More specifically, while assumption 1 above is based on
reasonable theoretical bases and sound empirical evidences, as far as assumption 2 is concerned,
one finds very few theoretical arguments and limited empirical support.10 The opinion of the
author of this contribution is that assumption 2 is often the result of an implicit transposition at a
macroeconomic level of relationships and mechanisms operating at a microeconomic level. In
fact, while at a microeconomic level, the existence of a positive association between innovation,
economic, and employment growth can be assumed on logical grounds, the existence of a mac-
roeconomic “positive sum game” outcome of the innovation-driven competitive process cannot
be taken for granted. One could argue that most of the neo-Schumpeterian literature somehow

8The microeconomic shift of innovation studies is clearly visible looking at the index of the main hand-
books of technological change and innovation published over the last two decades where the macroeco-
nomic analyses of the determinants and effects of technological change, especially in a long-run perspective,
find only a limited space (Dogson and Rothwell 1994; Fagerberg et al. 2005; Hall and Rosenberg 2010;
Stoneman 1995).
9This has also favored a sort of techno-centrism and an auto-referential character of this discipline. As
indicated by Bart Verspagen “… evolutionary economics so far by and large lacks a clear theory of other
economic phenomena than technological change, e.g., the interaction between trade and growth, or the
theory of labour or financial markets” (Verspagen 2002: 3).
10The existence of a positive association between innovation and economic performance—at firm and
industry levels, is supported by a large amount of empirical research (see Cohen 2010 for a review of this
literature).

144 Review of Radical Political Economics 50(1)

conveys the idea that “technological change creates its own demand” with positive net effects on
employment and social welfare. This could be (by and large) accepted at the microeconomic
level, and in particular assuming either a highly elastic demand (faced by each individual firm)
or that successful innovative firms (and most dynamic industries) are not likely to suffer from
demand constraints, growing at the expense of competitors (i.e., through market stealing).
However, at a more aggregate level (at an industry and, even more, at a macroeconomic level),
the net outcome of the process of creative destruction is more uncertain. It depends on the rele-
vance of the destructive part of the competition process (at industry level) and (at a macro level)
on the rate and direction of technological change, on the specific social and institutional context
in which the new technologies are used, on the impact they have on interrelated aspects, such as
the amount and quality of jobs, on how productivity gains are distributed, and eventually on
aggregate demand. Most of the neo-Schumpeterian literature (with the only—partial—exception
of studies on long waves) does not take into account the relevance and complexity of these link-
ages. In particular, the macroeconomic demand (and income distribution) conditions necessary
to absorb the increased levels of output (process innovations) or the new commodities (product
innovations) are usually not considered or incorporated in the analysis (relevant exceptions are
reported in footnote 1). Crucial macroeconomic issues and relationships addressed in the hetero-
dox field of economics (especially in Marx’s writings and in the post-Keynesian tradition), and
concerning the possible mismatch between interrelated phenomena such as the dynamics of
investment and technology, the corresponding changes in supply forces (productivity), changes
in income distribution, and demand conditions (Courvisanos 2012), are not addressed.11 These
mismatches are at the basis of possible or potential phenomena of overcapacity, underconsump-
tion, misallocation and waste of resources (human, tangible, and intangible), and static and
dynamic efficiency losses—all aspects largely neglected by the neo-Schumpeterian literature,
which are discussed at more length in the next section.

4. Heterodox Themes Marginalized in the
Neo-Schumpeterian Research Agenda

The methodological and theoretical traits of the neo-Schumpeterian literature highlighted in the
previous section have led to the marginalization of broad macroeconomic and socially relevant
themes concerning the role and socioeconomic impact of technological change. In what follows,
we discuss, in a rather sketched and unsystematic fashion, four of such neglected themes, as they
are exemplificative of the change of perspective of this stream of literature when compared with
the other major heterodox schools, both in the classical tradition and in the post-Keynesian one.

4.1. Technology and employment

This is a topic and a social issue placed at the center of theorizing since the beginning of the
political economy discipline. Surprisingly enough, after the pioneering contributions of early
neo-Schumpeterian scholars such as Freeman, Clark, and Soete (Freeman, Clark, and Soete
1982; Freeman and Soete 1994), this theme has been progressively marginalized by the follow-
ing neo-Schumpeterian literature.12 Putting the matter in a crude way, one could argue that the
main reason for this disinterest is the (implicit) belief that technology is potentially able to foster
economic growth at a pace sufficient enough to secure full employment. Of course, the existence
of labor displacing effects of innovation is not ruled out, but for most of the existing literature

11On the similarities and differences between a Schumpeterian, a classical, and a Marxian approach to the
role of innovation in the process of economic change, see Kurz (2008).

Evangelista 145

(both mainstream and neo-Schumpeterian), this phenomenon affects mainly low-skilled jobs
while the overall employment impact of technological change is deemed to be positive. However,
given the difficulty of modeling and estimating the net long-term aggregate effect of technological
change on employment, there is no empirical evidence supporting this optimistic view (Vivarelli
2013). The functioning and strength of the so-called compensation mechanisms (in charge of off-
setting the direct displacing effects of technological change) crucially rely upon rather axiomatic
assumptions such as the existence of perfect competitive markets, a perfect substitutability of
production inputs, and the validity of Say’s law, which guarantees that changes in supply condi-
tions (i.e., productivity growth and the supply of new products) always generate concomitant
(market clearing) changes in demand (Vivarelli 1995; Vivarelli and Pianta 2000). The net aggre-
gate employment impact of technological change becomes even more difficult to assess in the case
of ICT. This is because of the pervasiveness of these technologies and their widespread use in a
large variety of economic and social domains (Evangelista, Guerrieri, and Meliciani 2014). In the
light of all this, the still dominant—within the neo-Schumpeterian literature—optimistic view on
the relationship between technological change and employment, as well as the little attention
given to this crucial and socially relevant theme, is somehow surprising.

4.2. Technology and socioeconomic progress

The intertwined relationships between technological change and the long-term transformation of
economic and social conditions is another broad theme present in the early neo-Schumpeterian
agenda (especially in the literature on long waves), and one marginalized by the most recent neo-
Schumpeterian research. The effects of technology on the economy and society have in fact been
investigated more and more in an acritical way, shifting the focus from the technology-development
issue, to a mere quantification of the effects of technology on GDP and productivity growth, or
on international competitiveness. This technology-based perspective of economic growth reveals
all its limits in interpreting what might be regarded as one of the major macroeconomic para-
doxes materialized over the last decades: the mismatch between, on one hand, the strong oppor-
tunities offered by the technological achievements reached in the last few decades and, on the
other hand, the parallel increase of economic and social inequalities, the permanence of a large
amount of unsatisfied social and human needs, the unsustainable pressure that our economic
model puts on natural resources and on the natural environment (Pagano and Rossi 2011). The
remarkable technological achievements obtained in the last few decades have been paralleled by
relatively poor macroeconomic and (more broadly) social outcomes (Gordon 2012; Gualerzi
2010). In fact, in the last three decades, the world economy has grown at a pace that is substan-
tially lower than (roughly half) the one experienced during the first two second postwar decades,
and this despite the fact that we have witnessed what has been labeled as the third (ICT-related)
industrial and technological revolution (Dosi and Galambos 2013). An interpretation of this para-
dox proposed by neo-Schumpeterian scholars such as Freeman and Perez (Freeman and Louçã
2001; Freeman and Perez 1988) has consisted in highlighting the inertia and the limited capacity
of the broad socio-institutional system (skill endowments, educational system, labor practices
and organizations, consumption patterns, political and social institutions at large) to keep up with
the paradigmatic nature of the ICT revolution (the so-called mismatch hypothesis). The same
type of argument has been put forward by Paul David in connection with the “general purpose”
nature of ICT (GPT; Bresnahan 2010; David 1991; David and Wright 1999). Using David and
Wright’s (1999: 16) words “… an extended phase of transition may be required to fully accom-
modate and hence elaborate a technological and organizational regime built around a general

12The works of Vivarelli and Pianta represent in this respect relevant exceptions (Pianta 2005; Vivarelli
1995; Vivarelli and Pianta 2000).

146 Review of Radical Political Economics 50(1)

purpose digital computing engine.” There is no doubt that these are rather powerful arguments
highlighting the presence of socioeconomic and institutional inertial factors characterizing tran-
sition phases between different techno-economic paradigms and GPT. However, this line of argu-
ment has been losing its explicative power when we consider the amount of time that has passed
since ICT first appeared, and taking into account the pervasive role these technologies nowadays
play in our economies and societies.

4.3. Technology and income distribution

This is another central theme among classical economists and in Marx’s writings, an issue dealt
with (often implicitly) by post-Keynesian scholars, but a topic surprisingly expelled by the neo-
Schumpeterian research agenda. In the perspective of classical economists as well as in the views
of Kalecki, the rate and direction of technological change are heavily influenced by the social and
economic relationships shaping the structure and functioning of capitalism (Courvisanos 2009,
2012). In particular for Marx and Kalecki, technological change in capitalist economies has an
ultimate (overall and long-term) capital-deepening and labor-saving nature, and this has obvious
effects on income distribution, and consequently on the composition and volume of aggregate
demand. Overproduction, high unemployment, underconsumption, skewed income distribution,
and insufficient demand are strictly interconnected phenomena rooted in the contradictory and
cyclical nature of capital accumulation. In this perspective, technological change simply ampli-
fies the contradictory nature of this process, fueling the contradiction between the incessant
development of production forces (labor productivity) and the socially constrained nature of
“distribution relationships.” Both Marx and Kalecki make this point clear by stressing the struc-
tural asymmetry between capital accumulation and demand, with the latter constrained by an
insufficient dynamics of wages (Sebastiani 1989). For both Marx and Kalecki, this asymmetry is
at the core of the contradictory and cyclical nature of capitalist development. According to Marx
(1981: 353), “. . . the more productivity develops, the more it comes into conflict with the narrow
basis on which the relations of consumption rests.” Kalecki ([1935] 1971: 32) expresses a similar
point, stating that the most remarkable paradox of the capitalist system has to do with the fact that
“. . . the expansion of the capital equipment, i.e. the increase in the national wealth, contains the
seed of depression in the course of which the additional wealth proves to be only potential in
character.” Despite the fact that some of these views have been criticized as encompassing a
certain degree of socioeconomic determinism, there is no doubt that they highlight an important
issue and, namely, the one concerning the role that capitalist social relationships play in shaping
the rate and direction of technological change as well as its economic and social impact.

In the neo-Schumpeterian literature (as well as in Schumpeter’s works) the role that technol-
ogy and innovation play within a socioeconomic context characterized by potentially conflictual
capital-labor relationships is clearly underplayed, and there is little concern on the specific influ-
ence that such an institutional setting can exert on the “distribution outcome” of technological
change (T. Smith 2010). In fact, in the neo-Schumpeterian literature (as well as in Schumpeter’s
perspective), technological change ceases to have a dominant labor-saving nature. The process of
creative destruction is in fact conceived as associated first of all with the introduction of new
products and the rise of new industries. Underlying this view, there is the idea that productivity
gains obtained via technological change are so large and widespread that “income distribution”
becomes a marginal issue, or a matter that has little to do with the rate and direction of techno-
logical change. As already pointed out, the distributional effects of technological change have
been mainly connected to the skill-biased nature of new technologies (in particular ICT), with the
latter leading to an increasing income polarization between skilled and unskilled workers. A key issue
that has not been investigated both by the economic mainstream and by the neo-Schumpeterian
literature is the extent to which the long-term changes in (functional) income distribution—in

Evangelista 147

favor of capital—observed in most industrialized countries are related to the nature of the new
technological regime or the way ICT is used in both manufacturing and service industries. This
could be an interesting area of investigation, taking into account that there are studies and statisti-
cal evidence showing that the capital/labor ratio has continued to increase over the last two
decades, both in manufacturing and service industries (Basu and Vasudevan 2013), and that most
innovative industries are capital intensive (Evangelista 1999).

4.4. Technology and the dynamic efficiency of markets

A common trait of most of the heterodox economic schools consists of acknowledging the intrin-
sic instability of capitalism and recognizing that the unconstrained functioning of markets does not
guarantee full employment and a socially acceptable allocation of resources. Although the “market
failure” concept has been first introduced and theoretically treated by neoclassical economists—
also with reference to the public good nature of knowledge and innovation (Arrow 1962)—its
relevance has been clearly downplayed by mainstream economics. The neo-Schumpeterian
approach has corrected the public good view of technology and innovation, emphasizing the tacit
component and the sticky nature of most technological knowledge developed and used by firms
(Metcalfe 1995). The analysis of the factors enhancing or hampering innovation processes has
also been broadened, shifting the focus from traditional market failures to “systemic failures,”
namely, those referring to the structure and functioning of innovation systems, that is, to the
mechanisms facilitating or hampering the complex and cumulative nature of innovation and
learning processes, the circulation and sharing of knowledge, and the connectivity between firms
and institutions (Lundvall and Borras 2005). This has represented a substantial theoretical
advancement that has opened up new perspectives on the role and scope of science and technol-
ogy policies (Chaminade and Edquist 2006; K. Smith 2000). However, in the current neo-Schum-
peterian literature, the extent to which the modus operandi of market economies is able to assure
long-term dynamic efficiency and a socially desirable (labor and environment friendly) path of
development remains a neglected issue (Frigato and Santos-Arteaga 2012).13 Addressing this
type of issue would require enlarging even further the concept of “systemic failure,” adopting a
historical and macroinstitutional view, a perspective raising both old and new questions regard-
ing the modus operandi and “social performance” of current capitalist economies, and the role
that technological change plays in this institutional context.14 This is the perspective one can find
once again in both Marxian and Kalecki writings, in Schumpeter’s late work Capitalism,
Socialism and Democracy, as well as in the works of heterodox institutional scholars following
the Veblen–Kapp tradition (Kapp 1950, 1969; Ramazzotti, Frigato, and Elsner 2012). Most of the
current debate within and outside neo-Schumpeterian economics tends, on the contrary, to uncrit-
ically assume an optimistic view of the economic and socially progressive role that technology
plays in our economies and societies (Soete 2013), based on the belief that an economic system
driven by profit-seeking private incentives and free worldwide competition represents the best
institutional context in which technologies can be developed and used for social purposes. More
specifically, there seems to be little concern about the “net world-wide effect” of the current
process of creative destruction, and about the fact that, especially in periods of prolonged eco-
nomic crises and stagnant demand, the “destruction part” of the competition process could

13For a discussion—in a Schumpeterian perspective—on the issue regarding the environmental sustainabil-
ity of the current patterns of energy consumption, see Dosi and Grazzi (2009).
14This issue is partly addressed by a series of contributions speculating on the “welfare implications” of a
Schumpeterian evolutionary model of competition and economic change (Schubert 2012, 2013; Witt 2013).
These studies indicate, on one hand, that traditional (neoclassical) welfare economics is unsuited to assess-
ing the welfare properties of dynamic, out-of-equilibrium, innovation-driven economic systems and, on the
other hand, that also evolutionary economics has still rather weak, or not straightforward, normative bases.

148 Review of Radical Political Economics 50(1)

prevail upon the “creative accumulation” one (Archibugi and Filippetti 2011a, 2011b; Komlos
2014).15 Similarly, there seems to be little theoretical concern regarding the long-term effects
produced by the changes taking place in most advanced countries in the funding and orientation
of science and technology systems, and in particular in the overwhelming share of total research
and development (R&D) activities carried out by private corporations, in the privatization and
liberalization of sectors characterized by dynamic efficiency and strong externalities, the pro-
market orientation of public research, and the short-term rationale dominating financial markets,
managerial strategies, and investment activities (Mazzucato 2013).

5. Final Remarks

In this contribution, we have highlighted the dominant optimistic view of the relationship between
technology, economy, and society that permeates not only mainstream economics but also a good
deal of the neo-Schumpeterian literature. This positive view clashes with one of the main para-
doxes of our times, that is, the sharp contrast between the acceleration of the rate of scientific and
technological change experienced over the last few decades and the limited capabilities of our
socioeconomic systems to exploit these technological achievements to answer human needs and
secure a path of sustainable development. This paradox emerges even more sharply, taking into
account the prophecy contained in John Maynard Keynes famous 1930 essay titled “Economic
Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” In that essay, Keynes explicitly forecasted that—thanks to
the opportunities offered by technological change—within around one hundred years’ time, “. . .
for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem: how
to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and
compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well” (Keynes 1931:
367). As poignantly stated by Giorgio Lunghini, eighty years after Keynes’s speech, humankind
has not significantly moved in that direction, as the combination of high rates of unemployment
and the presence of a large amount of unsatisfied needs demonstrates, and this despite the fact
that the technological premises to answer these needs do exist (Lunghini 2012).

Explaining this paradox and understanding its deep economic, social, and institutional roots
would require, first and foremost, an acknowledgment of the complex, nonlinear, and potentially
contradictory nature of the relationships between technological progress, economic growth, and
human-social development, especially in the context of market-based economies, and more specifi-
cally in current global, unregulated financial capitalism. The main argument put forward in this
paper is that the recent neo-Schumpeterian literature has not addressed, both on theoretical and
empirical grounds, this broad macroinstitutional issue. It has contributed to reinforcing an uncritical
and optimistic reading of the relationship between technology, economy, and society, with technol-
ogy being able to guarantee strong economic (GDP) growth and (implicitly) social welfare.

This approach has become dominant also in the policy debate. The latter is often characterized
by the reiteration of repetitive refrains on the need to enhance the technological capacities of
firms, industries, countries, as well as on the urgency of orientating public research toward the
requests and needs of the business sector. Technology is also seen as the main recipe to tackling
the current economic crisis, the lack of growth, and the high unemployment rates most European
countries are experiencing today. Underlying this optimistic view on the role technology plays in
the economy, there is an unlimited faith in the economic and socially progressive nature of the
Schumpeterian process of creative destruction driven by market forces, as well as the idea that
the economic problems of any country, region, or industry can be solved through a “technological
jump ahead,” or by getting closer to the technological frontier.

15Regarding the need of taking into due account both sides of the effects of the innovation process (destruc-
tion along with creation), see also Buenstorf et al. (2013).

Evangelista 149

The dominating optimistic and simplified view of the economic and social effects of technol-
ogy finds a parallel in the expulsion from the current neo-Schumpeterian research agenda of
broad and socially relevant themes on which old heterodox schools used to debate and confront
each other, such as the complex relationship between technological change, employment, income
distribution and labor conditions, and, more broadly, social welfare. This has contributed to
impoverishing the theoretical debate, determining a diminished capacity of exploring the com-
plex and nonlinear relationships between technological progress, economic change, and societal
development. The final message of this paper is that it would be nowadays very important and
useful to go back to these themes and approaches, reinterpreting and actualizing them, taking into
account the new economic, societal, and environmental challenges that the structure and modus
operandi of contemporary capitalism raises. This would require reopening the ground for an
open-minded cultural debate on the long-term options regarding the social and institutional
mechanisms governing the pace and direction of technological change, going much beyond the
boundaries of the traditional literature on market failures or the “systemic failure” concept taken
into account by the neo-Schumpeterian literature. On a more operational ground, there is the
urgency of reframing the analysis of the technology–economy relationship in a proper macroeco-
nomic and institutional framework in which the dynamic interaction between changes in technol-
ogy, income distribution, employment, and demand is put at the center of the theoretical and
empirical agenda.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publi-
cation of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Author Biography

Rinaldo Evangelista, PhD, is Associate Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Camerino
(IT). His main research activities are focused on the areas of economics of technological change, and on the
analysis of the nature and impact of innovation in manufacturing and service industries.

The real not-capital is labor.
—Karl Marx, Grundrisse

Working in the digital media industry is not as much fun as it is made out
to be. The “NetSlaves” of the eponymous Webzine are becoming increas-
ingly vociferous about the shamelessly exploitative nature of the job, its
punishing work rhythms, and its ruthless casualization (www.dis-
obey.com/netslaves). They talk about “24–7 electronic sweatshops” and
complain about the ninety-hour weeks and the “moronic management of
new media companies.” In early 1999, seven of the fifteen thousand “vol-
unteers” of America Online (AOL) rocked the info-loveboat by asking the
Department of Labor to investigate whether AOL owes them back wages
for the years of playing chathosts for free.1 They used to work long hours
and love it; now they are starting to feel the pain of being burned by dig-
ital media.

These events point to a necessary backlash against the glamorization
of digital labor, which highlights its continuities with the modern sweat-
shop and points to the increasing degradation of knowledge work. Yet the
question of labor in a “digital economy” is not so easily dismissed as an
innovative development of the familiar logic of capitalist exploitation. The
NetSlaves are not simply a typical form of labor on the Internet; they
also embody a complex relation to labor that is widespread in late capital-
ist societies.

In this essay I understand this relationship as a provision of “free
labor,” a trait of the cultural economy at large, and an important, and yet
undervalued, force in advanced capitalist societies. By looking at the Inter-
net as a specific instance of the fundamental role played by free labor, this
essay also tries to highlight the connections between the “digital economy”
and what the Italian autonomists have called the “social factory.” The
“social factory” describes a process whereby “work processes have shifted
from the factory to society, thereby setting in motion a truly complex
machine.”2 Simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and
exploited, free labor on the Net includes the activity of building Web sites,
modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing lists,
and building virtual spaces on MUDs and MOOs. Far from being an

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“unreal,” empty space, the Internet is animated by cultural and technical
labor through and through, a continuous production of value that is com-
pletely immanent to the flows of the network society at large.

Support for this argument, however, is immediately complicated by
the recent history of critical theory. How to speak of labor, especially cul-
tural and technical labor, after the demolition job carried out by thirty
years of postmodernism? The postmodern socialist feminism of Donna
Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” spelled out some of the reasons behind
the antipathy of 1980s critical theory for Marxist analyses of labor. Har-
away explicitly rejected the humanistic tendencies of theorists who see
labor as the “pre-eminently privileged category enabling the Marxist to
overcome illusion and find that point of view which is necessary for
changing the world.”3 Paul Gilroy similarly expressed his discontent at the
inadequacy of Marxist analyses of labor to describe the culture of the
descendants of slaves, who value artistic expression as “the means towards
both individual self-fashioning and communal liberation.”4 If labor is “the
humanizing activity that makes [white] man,” then, surely, humanizing
labor does not really belong in the age of networked, posthuman intelli-
gence.

However, the “informatics of domination” that Haraway describes in
the “Manifesto” is certainly preoccupied with the relation between cyber-
netics, labor, and capital. In the fifteen years since its publication, this tri-
angulation has become even more evident. The expansion of the Internet
has given ideological and material support to contemporary trends toward
increased flexibility of the workforce, continuous reskilling, freelance
work, and the diffusion of practices such as “supplementing” (bringing
supplementary work home from the conventional office).5 Advertising
campaigns and business manuals suggest that the Internet is not only a
site of disintermediation (embodying the famous death of the middle man,
from bookshops to travel agencies to computer stores), but also the means
through which a flexible, collective intelligence has come into being.

This essay does not seek to offer a judgment on the “effects” of the
Internet, but rather to map the way in which the Internet connects to the
autonomist “social factory.” I am concerned with how the “outernet”–—
the network of social, cultural, and economic relationships that criss-
crosses and exceeds the Internet–—surrounds and connects the latter to
larger flows of labor, culture, and power. It is fundamental to move
beyond the notion that cyberspace is about escaping reality in order to
understand how the reality of the Internet is deeply connected to the
development of late postindustrial societies as a whole.

Cultural and technical work is central to the Internet but is also a
widespread activity throughout advanced capitalist societies. I argue that

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2. Terranova 4/24/00 11:22 AM Page 34

such labor is not exclusive to the so-called knowledge workers, but is a
pervasive feature of the postindustrial economy. The pervasiveness of
such production questions the legitimacy of a fixed distinction between
production and consumption, labor and culture. It also undermines
Gilroy’s distinction between work as “servitude, misery and subordina-
tion” and artistic expression as the means to self-fashioning and commu-
nal liberation. The increasingly blurred territory between production and
consumption, work and cultural expression, however, does not signal the
recomposition of the alienated Marxist worker. The Internet does not
automatically turn every user into an active producer, and every worker
into a creative subject. The process whereby production and consumption
are reconfigured within the category of free labor signals the unfolding of
a different (rather than completely new) logic of value, whose operations
need careful analysis.6

The Digital Economy

The term digital economy has recently emerged as a way to summarize
some of the processes described above. As a term, it seems to describe a
formation that intersects on the one hand with the postmodern cultural
economy (the media, the university, and the arts) and on the other hand
with the information industry (the information and communication com-
plex). Such an intersection of two different fields of production consti-
tutes a challenge to a theoretical and practical engagement with the ques-
tion of labor, a question that has become marginal for media studies as
compared with questions of ownership (within political economy) and
consumption (within cultural studies).

In Richard Barbrook’s definition, the digital economy is characterized
by the emergence of new technologies (computer networks) and new
types of workers (the digital artisans).7 According to Barbrook, the digital
economy is a mixed economy: it includes a public element (the state’s
funding of the original research that produced Arpanet, the financial sup-
port to academic activities that had a substantial role in shaping the cul-
ture of the Internet); a market-driven element (a latecomer that tries to
appropriate the digital economy by reintroducing commodification); and
a gift economy element, the true expression of the cutting edge of capi-
talist production that prepares its eventual overcoming into a future “anar-
cho-communism”:

Within the developed world, most politicians and corporate leaders believe
that the future of capitalism lies in the commodification of information. . . .

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Yet at the “cutting-edge” of the emerging information society, money-com-
modity relations play a secondary role to those created by a really existing
form of anarcho-communism. For most of its users, the net is somewhere to
work, play, love, learn and discuss with other people. . . . Unrestricted by
physical distance, they collaborate with each other without the direct media-
tion of money and politics. Unconcerned about copyright, they give and
receive information without thought of payment. In the absence of states or
markets to mediate social bonds, network communities are instead formed
through the mutual obligations created by gifts of time and ideas.8

From a Marxist-Hegelian angle, Barbrook sees the high-tech gift economy
as a process of overcoming capitalism from the inside. The high-tech gift
economy is a pioneering moment that transcends both the purism of the
New Left do-it-yourself culture and the neoliberalism of the free market
ideologues: “money-commodity and gift relations are not just in conflict
with each other, but also co-exist in symbiosis.”9 Participants in the gift
economy are not reluctant to use market resources and government fund-
ing to pursue a potlatch economy of free exchange. However, the potlatch
and the economy ultimately remain irreconcilable, and the market econ-
omy is always threatening to reprivatize the common enclaves of the gift
economy. Commodification, the reimposition of a regime of property, is,
in Barbrook’s opinion, the main strategy through which capitalism tries to
reabsorb the anarcho-communism of the Net into its folds.

I believe that Barbrook overemphasizes the autonomy of the high-
tech gift economy from capitalism. The processes of exchange that char-
acterize the Internet are not simply the reemergence of communism
within the cutting edge of the economy, a repressed other that resurfaces
just at the moment when communism seems defeated. It is important to
remember that the gift economy, as part of a larger digital economy, is
itself an important force within the reproduction of the labor force in late
capitalism as a whole. The provision of “free labor,” as we will see later, is
a fundamental moment in the creation of value in the digital economies.
As will be made clear, the conditions that make free labor an important
element of the digital economy are based in a difficult, experimental com-
promise between the historically rooted cultural and affective desire for
creative production (of the kind more commonly associated with Gilroy’s
emphasis on “individual self-fashioning and communal liberation”) and
the current capitalist emphasis on knowledge as the main source of value-
added.

The volunteers for America Online, the NetSlaves, and the amateur
Web designers are not working only because capital wants them to; they
are acting out a desire for affective and cultural production that is

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nonetheless real just because it is socially shaped. The cultural, technical,
and creative work that supports the digital economy has been made pos-
sible by the development of capital beyond the early industrial and Fordist
modes of production and therefore is particularly abundant in those areas
where post-Fordism has been at work for a few decades. In the overdevel-
oped countries, the end of the factory has spelled out the obsolescence of
the old working class, but it has also produced generations of workers who
have been repeatedly addressed as active consumers of meaningful com-
modities. Free labor is the moment where this knowledgeable consump-
tion of culture is translated into productive activities that are pleasurably
embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited.

Management theory is also increasingly concerned with the question
of knowledge work, that indefinable quality that is essential to the
processes of stimulating innovation and achieving the goals of competi-
tiveness. For example, Don Tapscott, in a classic example of managerial
literature, The Digital Economy, describes the digital economy as a “new
economy based on the networking of human intelligence.”10 Human intel-
ligence provides the much needed value-added, which is essential to the
economic health of the organization. Human intelligence, however, also
poses a problem: it cannot be managed in quite the same way as more tra-
ditional types of labor. Knowledge workers need open organizational
structures to produce, because the production of knowledge is rooted in
collaboration, that is, in what Barbrook defined as the “gift economy”:

The concept of supervision and management is changing to team-based
structures. Anyone responsible for managing knowledge workers knows they
cannot be “managed” in the traditional sense. Often they have specialized
knowledge and skills that cannot be matched or even understood by man-
agement. A new challenge to management is first to attract and retain these
assets by marketing the organization to them, and second to provide the cre-
ative and open communications environment where such workers can effectively
apply and enhance their knowledge.11

For Tapscott, therefore, the digital economy magically resolves the
contradictions of industrial societies, such as class struggle: while in the
industrial economy the “worker tried to achieve fulfillment through leisure
[and] . . . was alienated from the means of production which were owned
and controlled by someone else,” in the digital economy the worker
achieves fulfillment through work and finds in her brain her own, unalien-
ated means of production.12 Such means of production need to be culti-
vated by encouraging the worker to participate in a culture of exchange,
whose flows are mainly kept within the company but also need to involve
an “outside,” a contact with the fast-moving world of knowledge in gen-

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eral. The convention, the exhibition, and the conference—the more tradi-
tional ways of supporting this general exchange—are supplemented by
network technologies both inside and outside the company. Although the
traffic of these flows of knowledge needs to be monitored (hence the cor-
porate concerns about the use of intranets), the Internet effectively func-
tions as a channel through which “human intelligence” renews its capac-
ity to produce.

This essay looks beyond the totalizing hype of the managerial litera-
ture but also beyond some of the conceptual limits of Barbrook’s work. It
looks at some possible explanation for the coexistence, within the debate
about the digital economy, of discourses that see it as an oppositional
movement and others that see it as a functional development to new
mechanisms of extraction of value. Is the end of Marxist alienation wished
for by the manager guru the same thing as the gift economy heralded by
leftist discourse?

We can start undoing this deadlock by subtracting the label digital
economy from its exclusive anchorage within advanced forms of labor (we
can start then by depioneering it). This essay describes the digital econ-
omy as a specific mechanism of internal “capture” of larger pools of social
and cultural knowledge. The digital economy is an important area of
experimentation with value and free cultural/affective labor. It is about
specific forms of production (Web design, multimedia production, digital
services, and so on), but is also about forms of labor we do not immedi-
ately recognize as such: chat, real-life stories, mailing lists, amateur
newsletters, and so on. These types of cultural and technical labor are not
produced by capitalism in any direct, cause-and-effect fashion; that is,
they have not developed simply as an answer to the economic needs of
capital. However, they have developed in relation to the expansion of the
cultural industries and are part of a process of economic experimentation
with the creation of monetary value out of knowledge/culture/affect.

This process is different from that described by popular, left-wing
wisdom about the incorporation of authentic cultural moments: it is not,
then, about the bad boys of capital moving in on underground subcul-
tures/subordinate cultures and “incorporating” the fruits of their produc-
tion (styles, languages, music) into the media food chain. This process is
usually considered the end of a particular cultural formation, or at least
the end of its “authentic” phase. After incorporation, local cultures are
picked up and distributed globally, thus contributing to cultural hybridiza-
tion or cultural imperialism (depending on whom you listen to).

Rather than capital “incorporating” from the outside the authentic
fruits of the collective imagination, it seems more reasonable to think of
cultural flows as originating within a field that is always and already capi-

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2. Terranova 4/24/00 11:22 AM Page 38

talism. Incorporation is not about capital descending on authentic culture
but a more immanent process of channeling collective labor (even as cul-
tural labor) into monetary flows and its structuration within capitalist
business practices.

Subcultural movements have stuffed the pockets of multinational cap-
italism for decades. Nurtured by the consumption of earlier cultural
moments, subcultures have provided the look, style, and sounds that sell
clothes, CDs, video games, films, and advertising slots on television. This
has often happened through the active participation of subcultural mem-
bers in the production of cultural goods (e.g., independent labels in
music, small designer shops in fashion).13 This participation is, as the
word suggests, a voluntary phenomenon, although it is regularly accom-
panied by cries of sellouts. The fruit of collective cultural labor has been
not simply appropriated, but voluntarily channeled and controversially
structured within capitalist business practices. The relation between cul-
ture, the cultural industry, and labor in these movements is much more
complex than the notion of incorporation suggests. In this sense, the dig-
ital economy is not a new phenomenon but simply a new phase of this
longer history of experimentation.

Knowledge Class and Immaterial Labor

In spite of the numerous, more or less disingenuous endorsements of the
democratic potential of the Internet, the links between it and capitalism
look a bit too tight for comfort to concerned political minds. It has been
very tempting to counteract the naive technological utopianism by point-
ing out how computer networks are the material and ideological heart of
informated capital. The Internet advertised on television and portrayed by
print media seems not just the latest incarnation of capital’s inexhaustible
search for new markets, but also a full consensus-creating machine, which
socializes the mass of proletarianized knowledge workers into the econ-
omy of continuous innovation.14 After all, if we do not get on-line soon,
the hype suggests, we will become obsolete, unnecessary, disposable. If we
do, we are promised, we will become part of the “hive mind,” the imma-
terial economy of networked, intelligent subjects in charge of speeding up
the rhythms of capital’s “incessant waves of branching innovations.”15

Multimedia artists, writers, journalists, software programmers, graphic
designers, and activists together with small and large companies are at the
core of this project. For some they are its cultural elite, for others a new
form of proletarianized labor.16 Accordingly, the digital workers are
described as resisting or supporting the project of capital, often in direct

If the population

of Internet users

is largely made

up of “knowledge

workers,” then it

matters whether

these are seen as

the owners of

elitist cultural and

economic power

or the avant-

garde of new

configurations of

labor that do not

automatically

guarantee elite

status.

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relation to their positions in the networked, horizontal, and yet hierarchi-
cal world of knowledge work.

Any judgment on the political potential of the Internet, then, is tied
not only to its much vaunted capacity to allow decentralized access to
information but also to the question of who uses the Internet and how. If
the decentralized structure of the Net is to count for anything at all, the
argument goes, then we need to know about its constituent population
(hence the endless statistics about use, income, gender, and race of Inter-
net users, the most polled, probed, and yet opaque survey material of the
world). If this population of Internet users is largely made up of “knowl-
edge workers,” then it matters whether these are seen as the owners of elit-
ist cultural and economic power or the avant-garde of new configurations
of labor that do not automatically guarantee elite status.

As I argue in this essay, this is a necessary question and yet a mis-
leading one. It is necessary because we have to ask who is participating in
the digital economy before we can pass a judgment on it. It is misleading
because it implies that all we need to know is how to locate the knowledge
workers within a “class,” and knowing which class it is will give us an
answer to the political potential of the Net as a whole. If we can prove that
knowledge workers are the avant-garde of labor, then the Net becomes a
site of resistance;17 if we can prove that knowledge workers wield the
power in informated societies, then the Net is an extended gated commu-
nity for the middle classes.18 Even admitting that knowledge workers are
indeed fragmented in terms of hierarchy and status won’t help us that
much; it will still lead to a simple system of categorization, where the Net
becomes a field of struggle between the diverse constituents of the knowl-
edge class.

The question is further complicated by the stubborn resistance of
“knowledge” to quantification: knowledge cannot be exclusively pinned
down to specific social segments. Although the shift from factory to office
work, from production to services is widely acknowledged, it just isn’t
clear why some people qualify and some others do not.19 The “knowledge
worker” is a very contested sociological category.

A more interesting move, however, is possible by not looking for the
knowledge class within quantifiable parameters and concentrating instead
on “labor.” Although the notion of class retains a material value that is
indispensable to make sense of the experience of concrete historical sub-
jects, it also has its limits: for example, it “freezes” the subject, just like a
substance within the chemical periodical table, where one is born as a cer-
tain element (working-class metal) but then might become something else
(middle-class silicon) if submitted to the proper alchemical processes
(education and income). Such an understanding of class also freezes out

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the flows of culture and money that mobilize the labor force as a whole. In
terms of Internet use, it gives rise to the generalized endorsements and
condemnations that I have described above and does not explain or make
sense of the heterogeneity and yet commonalities of Internet users. I have
therefore found it more useful to think in terms of what the Italian auton-
omists, and especially Maurizio Lazzarato, have described as immaterial
labor. For Lazzarato the concept of immaterial labor refers to two different
aspects of labor:

On the one hand, as regards the “informational content” of the commodity,
it refers directly to the changes taking place in workers’ labor processes . . .
where the skills involved in direct labor are increasingly skills involving
cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal and vertical communica-
tion). On the other hand, as regards the activity that produces the “cultural
content” of the commodity, immaterial labor involves a series of activities
that are not normally recognized as “work”—in other words, the kinds of
activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fash-
ions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion.20

Immaterial labor, unlike the knowledge worker, is not completely con-
fined to a specific class formation. Lazzarato insists that this form of labor
power is not limited to highly skilled workers but is a form of activity of
every productive subject within postindustrial societies. In the highly
skilled worker, these capacities are already there. However, in the young
worker, the “precarious worker,” and the unemployed youth, these capac-
ities are “virtual,” that is they are there but are still undetermined. This
means that immaterial labor is a virtuality (an undetermined capacity) that
belongs to the postindustrial productive subjectivity as a whole. For exam-
ple, the obsessive emphasis on education of 1990s governments can be
read as an attempt to stop this virtuality from disappearing or from being
channeled into places that would not be as acceptable to the current
power structures. In spite of all the contradictions of advanced capital
and its relation to structural unemployment, postmodern governments do
not like the completely unemployable. The potentialities of work must be
kept alive, the unemployed must undergo continuous training in order
both to be monitored and kept alive as some kind of postindustrial reserve
force. Nor can they be allowed to channel their energy into the experi-
mental, nomadic, and antiproductive life-styles which in Britain have been
so savagely attacked by the Criminal Justice Act in the mid-1990s.21

However, unlike the post-Fordists, and in accordance with his auton-
omist origins, Lazzarato does not conceive of immaterial labor as purely
functional to a new historical phase of capitalism:

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The virtuality of this capacity is neither empty nor ahistoric; it is rather an
opening and a potentiality, that have as their historical origins and
antecedents the “struggle against work” of the Fordist worker and, in more
recent times, the processes of socialization, educational formation, and cul-
tural self-valorization.22

This dispersal of immaterial labor (as a virtuality and an actuality) prob-
lematizes the idea of the “knowledge worker” as a class in the “industrial”
sense of the word. As a collective quality of the labor force, immaterial
labor can be understood to pervade the social body with different degrees
of intensity. This intensity is produced by the processes of “channeling” a
characteristic of the capitalist formation which distributes value according
to its logic of profit.23 If knowledge is inherently collective, it is even more
so in the case of the postmodern cultural economy: music, fashion, and
information are all produced collectively but are selectively compensated.
Only some companies are picked up by corporate distribution chains in
the case of fashion and music; only a few sites are invested in by venture
capital. However, it is a form of collective cultural labor that makes these
products possible even as the profit is disproportionately appropriated by
established corporations.

From this point of view, the well-known notion that the Internet mate-
rializes a “collective intelligence” is not completely off the mark. The
Internet highlights the existence of networks of immaterial labor and
speeds up their accretion into a collective entity. The productive capacities
of immaterial labor on the Internet encompass the work of writing/read-
ing/managing and participating in mailing lists/Web sites/chatlines. These
activities fall outside the concept of “abstract labor,” which Marx defined
as the provision of time for the production of value regardless of the use-
ful qualities of the product.24 They witness an investment of desire into
production of the kind cultural theorists have mainly theorized in relation
to consumption.

This explosion of productive activities is undermined for various
commentators by the minoritarian, gendered, and raced character of the
Internet population. However, we might also argue that to recognize the
existence of immaterial labor as a diffuse, collective quality of postindus-
trial labor in its entirety does not deny the existence of hierarchies of
knowledge (both technical and cultural) which prestructure (but do not
determine) the nature of such activities. These hierarchies shape the
degrees to which such virtualities become actualities; that is, they go from
being potential to being realized as processual, constituting moments of
cultural, affective, and technical production. Neither capital nor living
labor want a labor force that is permanently excluded from the possibili-

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ties of immaterial labor. But this is where their desires stop from coincid-
ing. Capital wants to retain control over the unfolding of these virtualities
and the processes of valorization. The relative abundance of cultural/tech-
nical/affective production on the Net, then, does not exist as a free-float-
ing postindustrial utopia but in full, mutually constituting interaction with
late capitalism, especially in its manifestation as global-venture capital.

Collective Minds

The collective nature of networked, immaterial labor has been simplified
by the utopian statements of the cyberlibertarians. Kevin Kelly’s popular
thesis in Out of Control, for example, is that the Internet is a collective
“hive mind.” According to Kelly, the Internet is another manifestation of
a principle of self-organization that is widespread throughout technical,
natural, and social systems. The Internet is the material evidence of the
existence of the self-organizing, infinitely productive activities of con-
nected human minds.25 From a different perspective Pierre Levy draws on
cognitive anthropology and poststructuralist philosophy to argue that
computers and computer networks are sites that enable the emergence of
a “collective intelligence.” According to Eugene Provenzo, Levy, who is
inspired by early computer pioneers such as Douglas Engelbart, argues
for a new humanism “that incorporates and enlarges the scope of self-
knowledge and collective thought.”26 According to Levy, we are passing
from a Cartesian model of thought based on the singular idea of cogito (I
think) to a collective or plural cogitamus (we think).

What is collective intelligence? It is a form of universally distributed intelli-
gence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the
effective mobilization of skills. . . . The basis and goal of collective intelli-
gence is the mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals rather than
the cult of fetishized or hypostatized communities.27

Like Kelly, Levy frames his argument within the common rhetoric of
competition and flexibility that dominates the hegemonic discourse
around digitalization: “The more we are able to form intelligent commu-
nities, as open-minded, cognitive subjects capable of initiative, imagina-
tion, and rapid response, the more we will be able to ensure our success in
a highly competitive environment.”28 In Levy’s view, the digital economy
highlights the impossibility of absorbing intelligence within the process of
automation: unlike the first wave of cybernetics, which displaced workers
from the factory, computer networks highlight the unique value of human

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intelligence as the true creator of value in a knowledge economy. In his
opinion, since the economy is increasingly reliant on the production of
creative subjectivities, this production is highly likely to engender a new
humanism, a new centrality of man’s [sic] creative potentials.

Especially in Kelly’s case, it has been easy to dismiss the notions of a
“hive mind” and a self-organizing Internet-as-free-market as euphoric
capitalist mumbo jumbo. One cannot help being deeply irritated by the
blindness of the digital capitalist to the realities of working in the high-tech
industries, from the poisoning world of the silicon chips factories to the
electronic sweatshops of America Online, where technical work is down-
graded and worker obsolescence is high.29 How can we hold on to the
notion that cultural production and immaterial labor are collective on the
Net (both inner and outer) without subscribing to the idealistic cyberdrool
of the digerati?

We could start with a simple observation: the self-organizing, collec-
tive intelligence of cybercultural thought captures the existence of net-
worked immaterial labor, but also neutralizes the operations of capital.
Capital, after all, is the unnatural environment within which the collective
intelligence materializes. The collective dimension of networked intelli-
gence needs to be understood historically, as part of a specific momentum
of capitalist development. The Italian writers who are identified with the
post-Gramscian Marxism of autonomia have consistently engaged with
this relationship by focusing on the mutation undergone by labor in the
aftermath of the factory. The notion of a self-organizing “collective intel-
ligence” looks uncannily like one of their central concepts, the “general
intellect,” a notion that the autonomists “extracted” out of the spirit, if
not the actual wording, of Marx’s Grundrisse. The “collective intelli-
gence” or “hive mind” captures some of the spirit of the “general intel-
lect,” but removes the autonomists’ critical theorization of its relation to
capital.

In the autonomists’ favorite text, the Grundrisse, and especially in the
“Fragment on Machines,” Marx argues that “knowledge—scientific
knowledge in the first place, but not exclusively—tends to become pre-
cisely by virtue of its autonomy from production, nothing less than the
principal productive force, thus relegating repetitive and compartmental-
ized labor to a residual position. Here one is dealing with knowledge . . .
which has become incarnate . . . in the automatic system of machines.”30

In the vivid pages of the “Fragment,” the “other” Marx of the Grundrisse
(adopted by the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s against the
more orthodox endorsement of Capital), describes the system of indus-
trial machines as a horrific monster of metal and flesh:

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The production process has ceased to be a labor process in the sense of a
process dominated by labor as its governing unity. Labor appears, rather,
merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at
numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total
process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose
unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living, (active)
machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty
organism.31

The Italian autonomists extracted from these pages the notion of the
“general intellect” as “the ensemble of knowledge . . . which constitute[s]
the epicenter of social production.”32 Unlike Marx’s original formulation,
however, the autonomists eschewed the modernist imagery of the general
intellect as a hellish machine. They claimed that Marx completely identi-
fied the general intellect (or knowledge as the principal productive force)
with fixed capital (the machine) and thus neglected to account for the fact
that the general intellect cannot exist independently of the concrete sub-
jects who mediate the articulation of the machines with each other. The
general intellect is an articulation of fixed capital (machines) and living
labor (the workers). If we see the Internet, and computer networks in
general, as the latest machines—the latest manifestation of fixed capital—
then it won’t be difficult to imagine the general intellect as being well and
alive today.

The autonomists, however, did not stop at describing the general
intellect as an assemblage of humans and machines at the heart of postin-
dustrial production. If this were the case, the Marxian monster of metal
and flesh would just be updated to that of a world-spanning network where
computers use human beings as a way to allow the system of machinery
(and therefore capitalist production) to function. The visual power of the
Marxian description is updated by the cyberpunk snapshots of the immo-
bile bodies of the hackers, electrodes like umbilical cords connecting them
to the matrix, appendixes to a living, all-powerful cyberspace. Beyond the
special effects bonanza, the box-office success of The Matrix validates the
popularity of the paranoid interpretation of this mutation.

To the humanism implicit in this description, the autonomists have
opposed the notion of a “mass intellectuality,” living labor in its function
as the determining articulation of the general intellect. Mass intellectual-
ity—as an ensemble, as a social body—“is the repository of the indivisible
knowledges of living subjects and of their linguistic cooperation. . . . An
important part of knowledge cannot be deposited in machines, but . . . it
must come into being as the direct interaction of the labor force.”33 As
Virno emphasizes, mass intellectuality is not about the various roles of the

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knowledge workers, but is a “quality and a distinctive sign of the whole
social labor force in the post-Fordist era.”34

The pervasiveness of the collective intelligence within both the man-
agerial literature and Marxist theory could be seen as the result of a com-
mon intuition about the quality of labor in informated societies. Knowl-
edge labor is inherently collective, it is always the result of a collective and
social production of knowledge.35 Capital’s problem is how to extract as
much value as possible (in the autonomists’ jargon, to “valorize”) out of
this abundant, and yet slightly intractable, terrain.

Collective knowledge work, then, is not about those who work in the
knowledge industry. But it is also not about employment. The acknowl-
edgment of the collective aspect of labor implies a rejection of the equiv-
alence between labor and employment, which was already stated by Marx
and further emphasized by feminism and the post-Gramscian autonomy.36

Labor is not equivalent to waged labor. Such an understanding might
help us to reject some of the hideous rhetoric of unemployment which
turns the unemployed person into the object of much patronizing, push-
ing, and nudging from national governments in industrialized countries.
(Accept any available work or else. . . .) Often the unemployed are such
only in name, in reality being the life-blood of the difficult economy of
“under-the-table,” badly paid work, some of which also goes into the new
media industry.37 To emphasize how labor is not equivalent to employ-
ment also means to acknowledge how important free affective and cultural
labor is to the media industry, old and new.

Ephemeral Commodities and Free Labor

There is a continuity, and a break, between older media and new media in
terms of their relationship to cultural and affective labor. The continuity
seems to lie in their common reliance on their public/users as productive
subjects. The difference lies both in the mode of production and in the
ways in which power/knowledge works in the two types. In spite of differ-
ent national histories (some of which stress public service more than oth-
ers), the television industry, for example, is relatively conservative: writers,
producers, performers, managers, and technicians have definite roles
within an industry still run by a few established players. The historical
legacy of television as a technology for the construction of national iden-
tities also means that television is somehow always held more publicly
accountable.

This does not mean that old media do not draw on free labor, on the
contrary. Television and print media, for example, make abundant use of

In spite of the

volatile nature of

the Internet

economy (which

yesterday was

about community,

today is about

portals, and

tomorrow who

knows what), the

notion of users’

labor maintains

an ideological

and material

centrality that

runs consistently

throughout the

turbulent succes-

sion of Internet

fads.

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the free labor of their audiences/readers, but they also tend to structure
the latter’s contribution much more strictly, both in terms of economic
organization and moralistic judgment. The price to pay for all those real-
life TV experiences is usually a heavy dose of moralistic scaremongering:
criminals are running amok on the freeways and must be stopped by
tough police action; wild teenagers lack self-esteem and need tough love.
If this does not happen on the Internet, why is it then that the Internet is
not the happy island of decentered, dispersed, and pleasurable cultural
production that its apologists claimed?

The most obvious answer to such questions came spontaneously to
the early Internet users who blamed it on the commercialization of the
Internet. E-commerce and the progressive privatization were blamed for
disrupting the free economy of the Internet, an economy of exchange
that Richard Barbrook described as a “gift economy.”38 Indeed maybe
the Internet could have been a different place than what it is now. How-
ever, it is almost unthinkable that capitalism could stay forever outside of
the network, a mode of communication that is fundamental to its own
organizational structure.

The outcome of the explicit interface between capital and the Internet
is a digital economy that manifests all the signs of an acceleration of the
capitalist logic of production. It might be that the Internet has not stabi-
lized yet, but it seems undeniable that the digital economy is the fastest
and most visible zone of production within late capitalist societies. New
products and new trends succeed each other at anxiety-inducing pace.
After all, this is a business where you need to replace your
equipment/knowledges and possibly staff every year or so.

At some point, the speed of the digital economy, its accelerated
rhythms of obsolescence, and its reliance on (mostly) “immaterial” prod-
ucts seemed to fit in with the postmodern intuition about the changed sta-
tus of the commodities whose essence was said to be meaning (or lack of)
rather than labor (as if the two could be separable).39 The recurrent com-
plaint that the Internet contributes to the disappearance of reality is then
based both in humanistic concerns about “real life” and in the postmodern
nihilism of the recombinant commodity.40 Hyperreality confirms the
humanist nightmare of a society without humanity, the culmination of a
progressive taking over of the realm of representation. Commodities on
the Net are not material and are excessive (there is too much of it, too
many Web sites, too much clutter and noise) with relation to the limits of
“real” social needs.

It is possible, however, that the disappearance of the commodity is not
a material disappearance but its visible subordination to the quality of
labor behind it. In this sense the commodity does not disappear as such;

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rather, it becomes increasingly ephemeral, its duration becomes com-
pressed, and it becomes more of a process than a finished product. The
role of continuous, creative, innovative labor as the ground of market
value is crucial to the digital economy. The process of valorization (the
production of monetary value) happens by foregrounding the quality of
the labor that literally animates the commodity.

In my opinion, the digital economy challenges the postmodern
assumption that labor disappears while the commodity takes on and dis-
solves all meaning. In particular, the Internet is about the extraction of
value out of continuous, updateable work, and it is extremely labor inten-
sive. It is not enough to produce a good Web site, you need to update it
continuously to maintain interest in it and fight off obsolescence. Further-
more, you need updateable equipment (the general intellect is always an
assemblage of humans and their machines), in its turn propelled by the
intense collective labor of programmers, designers, and workers. It is as if
the acceleration of production has pushed to the point where commodities,
literally, turn into translucent objects. Commodities do not so much dis-
appear as become more transparent, showing throughout their reliance on
the labor that produces and sustains them. It is the labor of the designers
and programmers that shows through a successful Web site, and it is the
spectacle of that labor changing its product that keeps the users coming
back. The commodity, then, is only as good as the labor that goes into it.

As a consequence, the sustainability of the Internet as a medium
depends on massive amounts of labor (which is not equivalent to employ-
ment, as we said), only some of which is hypercompensated by the capri-
cious logic of venture capitalism. Of the incredible amount of labor that
sustains the Internet as a whole (from mailing list traffic to Web sites to
infrastructural questions), we can guess that a substantial amount of it is
still “free labor.”

Free labor, however, is not necessarily exploited labor. Within the
early virtual communities, we are told, labor was really free: the labor of
building a community was not compensated by great financial rewards (it
was therefore “free,” unpaid), but it was also willingly conceded in
exchange for the pleasures of communication and exchange (it was there-
fore “free,” pleasurable, not imposed). In answer to members’ requests,
information was quickly posted and shared with a lack of mediation that
the early Netizens did not fail to appreciate. Howard Rheingold’s book,
somehow unfairly accused of middle-class complacency, is the most well-
known account of the good old times of the old Internet, before the Net-
tourist overcame the Net-pioneer.41

The free labor that sustains the Internet is acknowledged within many
different sections of the digital literature. In spite of the volatile nature of

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the Internet economy (which yesterday was about community, today is
about portals, and tomorrow who knows what), the notion of users’ labor
maintains an ideological and material centrality that runs consistently
throughout the turbulent succession of Internet fads. Commentators who
would normally disagree, such as Howard Rheingold and Richard Hud-
son, concur on one thing: the best Web site, the best way to stay visible
and thriving on the Web, is to turn your site into a space that is not only
accessed, but somehow built by its users.42 Users keep a site alive through
their labor, the cumulative hours of accessing the site (thus generating
advertising), writing messages, participating in conversations, and some-
times making the jump to collaborators. Out of the fifteen thousand vol-
unteers that keep AOL running, only a handful turned against it, while
the others stayed on. Such a feature seems endemic to the Internet in
ways that can be worked on by commercialization, but not substantially
altered. The “open source” movement, which relies on the free labor of
Internet tinkers, is further evidence of this structural trend within the
digital economy.

It is an interesting feature of the Internet debate (and evidence, some-
how, of its masculine bias) that users’ labor has attracted more attention in
the case of the open source movement than in that of mailing lists and
Web sites. This betrays the persistence of an attachment to masculine
understandings of labor within the digital economy: writing an operating
system is still more worthy of attention than just chatting for free for
AOL. This in spite of the fact that in 1996 at the peak of the volunteer
moment, over thirty thousand “community leaders” were helping AOL to
generate at least $7 million a month.43 Still, the open source movement
has drawn much more positive attention than the more diffuse user labor
described above. It is worth exploring not because I believe that it will out-
last “portals” or “virtual communities” as the latest buzzword, but
because of the debates it has provoked and its relation to the digital econ-
omy at large.

The open source movement is a variation of the old tradition of
shareware and freeware software which substantially contributed to the
technical development of the Internet. Freeware software is freely distrib-
uted and does not even request a reward from its users. Shareware soft-
ware is distributed freely, but implies a “moral” obligation for the user to
forward a small sum to the producer in order to sustain the shareware
movement as an alternative economic model to the copyrighted software
of giants such as Microsoft. Open source “refers to a model of software
development in which the underlying code of a program—the source
code, a.k.a. the crown jewels—is by definition made freely available to the
general public for modification, alteration, and endless redistribution.”44

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Far from being an idealistic, minoritarian practice, the open source
movement has attracted much media and financial attention. Apache, an
open source Web server, is the “Web-server program of choice for more
than half of all publicly accessible Web servers.”45 In 1999, open source
conventions are anxiously attended by venture capitalists, who have been
informed by the digerati that the open source movement is a necessity
“because you must go open-source to get access to the benefits of the
open-source development community—the near-instantaneous bug-fixes,
the distributed intellectual resources of the Net, the increasingly large
open-source code base.”46 Open source companies such as Cygnus have
convinced the market that you do not need to be proprietary about source
codes to make a profit: the code might be free, but tech support, packag-
ing, installation software, regular upgrades, office applications, and hard-
ware are not.

In 1998, when Netscape went “open source” and invited the com-
puter tinkers and hobbyists to look at the code of its new browser, fix the
bugs, improve the package, and redistribute it, specialized mailing lists
exchanged opinions about its implications.47 Netscape’s move rekindled
the debate about the peculiar nature of the digital economy. Was it to be
read as being in the tradition of the Internet “gift economy”? Or was dig-
ital capital hijacking the open source movement exactly against that tradi-
tion? Richard Barbrook saluted Netscape’s move as a sign of the power
intrinsic in the architecture of the medium:

The technical and social structure of the Net has been developed to encour-
age open cooperation among its participants. As an everyday activity, users
are building the system together. Engaged in “interactive creativity,” they
send emails, take part in listservers, contribute to newsgroups, participate
within on-line conferences and produce Websites. . . . Lacking copyright
protection, information can be freely adapted to suit the users’ needs. Within
the hi-tech gift economy, people successfully work together through “ . . . an
open social process involving evaluation, comparison and collaboration.”48

John Horvarth, however, did not share this opinion. The “free stuff”
offered around the Net, he argued, “is either a product that gets you
hooked on to another one or makes you just consume more time on the
net. After all, the goal of the access people and telecoms is to have users
spend as much time on the net as possible, regardless of what they are
doing. The objective is to have you consume bandwidth.”49 Far from
proving the persistence of the Internet gift economy, Horvarth claimed,
Netscape’s move is a direct threat to those independent producers for
whom shareware and freeware have been a way of surviving exactly those
“big boys” that Netscape represents:

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Freeware and shareware are the means by which small producers, many of
them individuals, were able to offset somewhat the bulldozing effects of the
big boys. And now the bulldozers are headed straight for this arena.

As for Netscrape [sic], such a move makes good business sense and
spells trouble for workers in the field of software development. The company
had a poor last quarter in 1997 and was already hinting at job cuts. Well,
what better way to shed staff by having your product taken further by the
freeware people, having code-dabbling hobbyists fix and further develop
your product? The question for Netscrape now is how to tame the freeware
beast so that profits are secured.50

Although it is tempting to stake the evidence of Netscape’s layoffs
against the optimism of Barbrook’s gift economy, there might be more
productive ways of looking at the increasingly tight relationship between
an “idealistic” movement such as open source and the current venture
mania for open source companies.51 Rather than representing a moment
of incorporation of a previously authentic moment, the open source ques-
tion demonstrates the overreliance of the digital economy as such on free
labor, both in the sense of not financially rewarded and willingly given.
This includes AOL community leaders, the open source programmers,
the amateur Web designers, mailing list editors, and the NetSlaves willing
to “work for cappuccinos” just for the excitement and the dubious
promises of digital work.52

Such a reliance, almost a dependency, is part of larger mechanisms of
capitalist extraction of value which are fundamental to late capitalism as a
whole. That is, such processes are not created outside capital and then
reappropriated by capital, but are the results of a complex history where
the relation between labor and capital is mutually constitutive, entangled
and crucially forged during the crisis of Fordism. Free labor is a desire of
labor immanent to late capitalism, and late capitalism is the field that both
sustains free labor and exhausts it. It exhausts it by subtracting selectively
but widely the means through which that labor can reproduce itself: from
the burnout syndromes of Internet start-ups to underretribution and
exploitation in the cultural economy at large. Late capitalism does not
appropriate anything: it nurtures, exploits, and exhausts its labor force
and its cultural and affective production. In this sense, it is technically
impossible to separate neatly the digital economy of the Net from the larger
network economy of late capitalism. Especially since 1994, the Internet is
always and simultaneously a gift economy and an advanced capitalist econ-
omy. The mistake of the neoliberalists (as exemplified by the Wired group),
is to mistake this coexistence for a benign, unproblematic equivalence.

As I stated before, these processes are far from being confined to the
most self-conscious laborers of the digital economy. They are part of a

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diffuse cultural economy which operates throughout the Internet and
beyond. The passage from the pioneeristic days of the Internet to its
“venture” days does not seem to have affected these mechanisms, only
intensified them and connected them to financial capital. Nowhere is
this more evident than in the recent development of the World Wide
Web.

Enter the New Web

In the winter of 1999, in what sounds like another of its resounding,
short-lived claims, Wired magazine announces that the old Web is dead:
“The Old Web was a place where the unemployed, the dreamy, and the
iconoclastic went to reinvent themselves. . . The New Web isn’t about
dabbling in what you don’t know and failing—it’s about preparing seri-
ously for the day when television and Web content are delivered over the
same digital networks.”53

The new Web is made of the big players, but also of new ways to
make the audience work. In the “new Web,” after the pioneering days,
television and the Web converge in the one thing they have in common:
their reliance on their audiences/users as providers of the cultural labor
that goes under the label of “real-life stories.” Gerry Laybourne, executive
of the Web-based media company Oxygen, thinks of a hypothetical show
called What Are They Thinking? a reality-based sketch comedy based on
stories posted on the Web, because “funny things happen in our lives
everyday.”54 As Bayers also adds, “until it’s produced, the line separating
that concept from more puerile fare dismissed by Gerry, like America’s
Funniest, is hard to see.”55

The difference between the puerile fare of America’s Funniest and
user-based content seems to lie not so much in the more serious nature of
the “new Web” as compared to the vilified output of television’s “people
shows” (a term that includes docusoaps, docudramas, and talk shows).
From an abstract point of view there is no difference between the ways in
which people shows rely on the inventiveness of their audiences and the
Web site reliance on users’ input. People shows rely on the activity (even
amidst the most shocking sleaze) of their audience and willing participants
to a much larger extent than any other television programs. In a sense,
they manage the impossible, creating monetary value out of the most
reluctant members of the postmodern cultural economy: those who do not
produce marketable style, who are not qualified enough to enter the fast
world of the knowledge economy, are converted into monetary value
through their capacity to perform their misery.

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When compared to the cultural and affective production on the Inter-
net, people shows also seem to embody a different logic of relation
between capitalism (the media conglomerates that produce and distribute
such shows) and its labor force—–the beguiled, dysfunctional citizens of
the underdeveloped North. Within people’s shows, the valorization of the
audience as labor and spectacle always happens somehow within a
power/knowledge nexus that does not allow the immediate valorization of
the talk show participants: you cannot just put a Jerry Springer guest on
TV on her own to tell her story with no mediation (indeed, that would
look too much like the discredited access slots of public service broad-
casting). Between the talk show guest and the apparatus of valorization
intervenes a series of knowledges that normalize the dysfunctional subjects
through a moral or therapeutic discourse and a more traditional institu-
tional organization of production. So after the performance, the guest
must be advised, patronized, questioned, and often bullied by the audi-
ence and the host, all in the name of a perfunctory, normalizing morality.

People shows also belong to a different economy of scale: although
there are more and more of them, they are still relatively few when com-
pared to the millions of pages on the Web. It is as if the centralized organi-
zation of the traditional media does not let them turn people’s productions
into pure monetary value. People shows must have morals, even as those
morals are shattered by the overflowing performances of their subjects.

Within the Internet, however, this process of channeling and adjudi-
cating (responsibilities, duties, and rights) is dispersed to the point where
practically anything is tolerated (sadomasochism, bestiality, fetishism, and
plain nerdism are not targeted, at least within the Internet, as sites that
need to be disciplined or explained away). The qualitative difference
between people’s shows and a successful Web site, then, does not lie in the
latter’s democratic tendency as opposed to the former’s exploitative
nature. It lies in the operation, within people’s shows, of moral discursive
mechanisms of territorialization, the application of a morality that the
“excessive” abundance of material on the Internet renders redundant and
even more irrelevant. The digital economy cares only tangentially about
morality. What it really cares about is an abundance of production, an
immediate interface with cultural and technical labor whose result is a
diffuse, nondialectical contradiction.

Conclusion

My hypothesis that free labor is structural to the late capitalist cultural
economy is not meant to offer the reader a totalizing understanding of the

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cultural economy of new and old media. However, it does originate from
a need to think beyond the categories that structure much Net debate
these days, a process necessarily entailing a good deal of abstraction.

In particular, I have started from the opposition between the Internet
as capital and the Internet as the anticapital. This opposition is much
more challenging than the easy technophobia/technophilia debate. The
question is not so much whether to love or hate technology, but an
attempt to understand whether the Internet embodies a continuation of
capital or a break with it. As I have argued in this essay, it does neither. It
is rather a mutation that is totally immanent to late capitalism, not so
much a break as an intensification, and therefore a mutation, of a wide-
spread cultural and economic logic.

In this context, it is not enough just to demystify the Internet as the
latest capitalist machination against labor. I have tried to map a different
route, an immanent, flat, and yet power-sensitive model of the relationship
between labor, politics, and culture. Obviously I owe much of the inspira-
tion for this model to the French/Italian connection, to that line of thought
formed by the exchanges between the Foucault/Deleuze/Guattari axis and
the Italian Autonomy (Antonio Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno,
Franco Berardi), a field of exchanges formed through political struggle,
exile, and political prosecution right at the heart of the postindustrial soci-
ety (Italy after all has provided the model of a post-Fordist economy for
the influential flexible specialization school). On the other hand, it has
been within a praxis informed by the cybernetic intelligence of English-
speaking mailing lists and Web sites that this line of thought has acquired
its concrete materiality.

This return to immanence, that is, to a flattening out of social, cul-
tural, and political connections, has important consequences for me. As
Negri, Haraway, and Deleuze and Guattari have consistently argued, the
demolition of the modernist ontology of the Cartesian subject does not
have to produce the relativism of the most cynical examples of postmod-
ern theory. The loss of transcendence, of external principles which orga-
nize the social world from the outside, does not have to end up in nihilism,
a loss of strategies for dealing with power.

Such strategies cannot be conjured by critical theory. As the spectac-
ular failure of the Italian Autonomy reveals,56 the purpose of critical the-
ory is not to elaborate strategies that then can be used to direct social
change. On the contrary, as the tradition of cultural studies has less
explicitly argued, it is about working on what already exists, on the lines
established by a cultural and material activity that is already happening. In
this sense this essay does not so much propose a theory as it identifies a
tendency that already exists in the Internet literature and on-line

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exchanges. This tendency is not the truth of the digital economy; it is nec-
essarily partial just as it tries to hold to the need for an overall perspective
on an immensely complex range of cultural and economic phenomena.
Rather than retracing the holy truths of Marxism on the changing body of
late capital, free labor embraces some crucial contradictions without
lamenting, celebrating, denying, or synthesizing a complex condition. It is,
then, not so much about truth-values as about relevance, the capacity to
capture a moment and contribute to the ongoing constitution of a nonuni-
fied collective intelligence outside and in between the blind alleys of the
silicon age.

Notes

This essay has been made possible by research carried out with the support of
the “Virtual Society?” program of the Economic and Social Research Council
(ESRC) (grant no. L132251050). I share this grant with Sally Wyatt and Gra-
ham Thomas, Department of Innovation Studies, University of East London.

1. Lisa Margonelli, “Inside AOL’s ‘Cyber-Sweatshop,’” Wired, October
1999, 138.

2. See Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential
Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); and Toni Negri,
The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge:
Polity, 1989) and Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the “Grundrisse” (New York:
Autonomedia, 1991). The quote is from Negri, Politics of Subversion, 92.

3. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
(London: Routledge, 1991), 159.

4. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Lon-
don and New York: Verso, 1993), 40.

5. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge, Mass.:
Blackwell, 1996), 395.

6. In discussing these developments, I will also draw on debates circulating
across Internet sites. On-line debates in, for example, nettime, telepolis, rhizome
and c-theory, are one of the manifestations of the surplus value engendered by
the digital economy, a hyper-production that can only be partly reabsorbed by
capital.

7. See Richard Barbrook, “The Digital Economy,” (posted to nettime on 17
June 1997; also at www.nettime.org; “The High-Tech Gift Economy,” in Readme!
Filtered by Nettime: ASCII Culture and the Revenge of Knowledge, ed. Josephine
Bosma et al. (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 1999), 132–38. Also see Anony-
mous, “The Digital Artisan Manifesto” (posted to nettime on 15 May 1997).

8. Barbrook, “The High-Tech Gift Economy,” 135.
9. Ibid., 137
10. Don Tapscott, The Digital Economy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996),

xiii.
11. Ibid., 35; emphasis added.

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2. Terranova 4/24/00 11:22 AM Page 55

12. Ibid., 48.
13. For a discussion of the independent music industry and its relation to

corporate culture see David Hesmondalgh, “Indie: The Aesthetics and Institu-
tional Politics of a Popular Music Genre,” Cultural Studies 13 (January 1999):
34–61. Angela McRobbie has also studied a similar phenomenon in the fashion
and design industry in British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry? (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1998).

14. See the challenging section on work in the high-tech industry in Bosma
et al., Readme!

15. Martin Kenney, “Value-Creation in the Late Twentieth Century: The
Rise of the Knowledge Worker,” in Cutting Edge: Technology, Information Capital-
ism and Social Revolution, ed. Jim Davis, Thomas Hirsch, and Michael Stack
(London: Verso, 1997), 93; also see in the same anthology Tessa Morris-Suzuki,
“Capitalism in the Computer Age,” 57–71.

16. See Darko Suvin, “On Gibson and Cyberpunk SF,” in Storming the Real-
ity Studio, ed. Larry McCaffery (London: Durham University Press, 1991),
349–65; and Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future: Sci-
Tech and the Dogma of Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
According to Andrew Clement, information technologies were introduced as
extensions of Taylorist techniques of scientific management to middle-level,
rather than clerical, employees. Such technologies responded to a managerial
need for efficient ways to manage intellectual labor. Clement, however, seems to
connect this scientific management to the workstation, while he is ready to admit
that personal computers introduce an element of autonomy much disliked by
management. See Andrew Clement, “Office Automation and the Technical Con-
trol of Information Workers,” in The Political Economy of Information, ed. Vincent
Mosco and Janet Wasko (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.

17. Barbrook, “The High-Tech Gift Economy.”
18. See Kevin Robins, “Cyberspace or the World We Live In,” in Fractal

Media: New Media in Social Context, ed. Jon Dovey (London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1996).

19. See Frank Webster, Theories of the Information Society (London and New
York: Routledge, 1995).

20. Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Marxism beyond Marxism,
ed. Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl for the Polygraph col-
lective (London: Routledge, 1996), 133.

21. The Criminal Justice Act (CJA) was popularly perceived as an antirave
legislation, and most of the campaign against it was organized around the “right
to party.” However, the most devastating effects of the CJA have struck the
neotribal, nomadic camps, basically decimated or forced to move to Ireland in the
process. See Andrea Natella and Serena Tinari, eds., Rave Off (Rome: Castelvec-
chi, 1996).

22. Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” 136.
23. In the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and

Félix Guattari described the process by which capital unsettles and resettles bod-
ies and cultures as a movement of “decoding” ruled by “axiomatisation.” Decod-
ing is the process through which older cultural limits are displaced and removed
as with older, local cultures during modernization; the flows of culture and capi-
tal unleashed by the decoding are then channeled into a process of axiomatiza-

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2. Terranova 4/24/00 11:22 AM Page 56

tion, an abstract moment of conversion into money and profit. The decoding
forces of global capitalism have then opened up the possibilities of immaterial
labor. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schiz-
ophrenia (London: Athlone, 1984); and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (London: Athlone, 1988).

24. See Franco Berardi (Bifo), La nefasta utopia di potere operaio (Rome:
Castelvecchi/DeriveApprodi, 1998), 43.

25. See Kevin Kelly, Out of Control (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley,
1994).

26. Eugene Provenzo, foreword to Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence:
Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace (New York: Plenum, 1995), viii.

27. Levy, Collective Intelligence, 13.
28. Ibid., 1.
29. See Little Red Henski, “Insider Report from UUNET” in Bosma et al.,

Readme! 189–91.
30. Paolo Virno, “Notes on the General Intellect,” in Marxism beyond Marx-

ism, 266.
31. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973), 693.
32. Paolo Virno, “Notes on the General Intellect,” in Marxism beyond Marx-

ism, 266.
33. Ibid., 270.
34. Ibid., 271.
35. See Lazzarato, “New Forms of Production,” in Bosma et al., Readme!

159–66; and Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Robots and Capitalism,” in Cutting Edge,
13–27.

36. See Toni Negri, “Back to the Future,” in Bosma et al., Readme! 181–86;
and Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, Women.

37. Andrew Ross, Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice (London: Rout-
ledge, 1998).

38. See Barbrook, “The High-Tech Gift Economy.”
39. The work of Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition is

mainly concerned with knowledge, rather than intellectual labor, but still provides
a useful conceptualization of the reorganization of labor within the productive
structures of late capitalism. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condi-
tion: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

40. See Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein, Data Trash: The Theory of
the Virtual Class (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994).

41. See Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the
Electronic Frontier (New York: Harper Perennials, 1994).

42. See Howard Rheingold, “My Experience with Electric Minds,” in Bosma
et al., Readme! 147–50; also David Hudson, Rewired: A Brief (and Opinionated)
Net History (Indianapolis: Macmillan Technical Publishing, 1997). The expan-
sion of the Net is based on different types of producers adopting different strate-
gies of income generation: some might use more traditional types of financial
support (grants, divisions of the public sector, in-house Internet divisions within
traditional media companies, businesses’ Web pages which are paid as with tradi-
tional forms of advertising); some might generate interest in one’s page and then
sell the user’s profile or advertising space (freelance Web production); or some

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2. Terranova 4/24/00 11:22 AM Page 57

might use innovative strategies of valorization, such as various types of e-com-
merce.

43. See Margonelli, “Inside AOL’s ‘Cyber-Sweatshop.’”
44. Andrew Leonard, “Open Season,” in Wired, May 1999, 140. Open

source harks back to the specific competencies embodied by Internet users in its
pre-1994 days. When most Net users were computer experts, the software struc-
ture of the medium was developed by way of a continuous interaction of different
technical skills. This tradition still survives in institutions like the Internet Engi-
neering Task Force (IETF), which is responsible for a number of important deci-
sions about the technical infrastructure of the Net. Although the IETF is subor-
dinated to a number of professional committees, it has important responsibilities
and is also open to anybody who wants to join. The freeware movement has a
long tradition, but it has also recently been divided by the polemics between the
free software or “copyleft” movement and the open source movement, which is
more of a pragmatic attempt to make freeware a business proposition. See
debates on-line at www.gnu.org and www.salonmag.com.

45. Leonard, “Open Season.”
46. Ibid., 142.
47. It is an established pattern of the computer industry, in fact, that you

might have to give away your product if you want to reap the benefits later on. As
John Perry Barlow has remarked, “Familiarity is an important asset in the world
of information. It may often be the case that the best thing you can do to raise
demand for your product is to give it away.” See John Perry Barlow, “Selling
Wine without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net,” in High Noon
on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace, ed. Peter Ludlow (Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 1996), 23. Apple started it by giving free computers to
schools, an action that did not determine, but certainly influenced, the subse-
quent stubborn presence of Apple computers within education; MS-Dos came in
for free with IBM computers.

48. Barbrook, “The High-Tech Gift Economy,” 135–36.
49. John Horvarth, “Freeware Capitalism,” posted on nettime, 5 February

1998.
50. Ibid.
51. Netscape started like a lot of other computer companies: its founder,

Marc Andreessen, was part of the original research group who developed the
structure of the World Wide Web at the CERN laboratory, in Geneva. As with
many successful computer entrepreneurs, he developed the browser as an off-
shoot of the original, state-funded research and soon started his own company.
Netscape was also the first company to exceed the economic processes of the
computer industry, inasmuch as it was the first successful company to set up
shop on the Net itself. As such, Netscape exemplifies some of the problems that
even the computer industry meets on the Net and constitutes a good starting
point to assess some of the common claims about the digital economy.

52. Ross, Real Love.
53. Chip Bayers, “Push Comes to Show,” in Wired, February 1999, 113.
54. Ibid., 156.
55. Ibid.
56. Berardi, La nefasta utopia.

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Immaterial Labor

Maurizio Lazzarato

A significant amount of empirical research has been conducted concerning the new
forms of the organization of work. This, combined with a corresponding wealth of
theoretical reflection, has made possible the identification of a new conception of
what work is nowadays and what new power relations it implies.

An initial synthesis of these results — framed in terms of an
attempt to define the technical and subjective-political composition of the working
class — can be expressed in the concept of immaterial labor, which is defined as the
labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity. The
concept of immaterial labor refers to two different aspects of labor. On the one hand,
as regards the “informational content” of the commodity, it refers directly to the
changes taking place in workers’ labor processes in big companies in the industrial
and tertiary sectors, where the skills involved in direct labor are increasingly skills
involving cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal and vertical communi-
cation). On the other hand, as regards the activity that produces the “cultural con-
tent” of the commodity, immaterial labor involves a series of activities that are not
normally recognized as “work” — in other words, the kinds of activities involved in
defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms,
and, more strategically, public opinion. Once the privileged domain of the bour-
geoisie and its children, these activities have since the end of the 1970s become the

from Paolo Virno and Michael Hardy, eds. Radical Thought In Italy: A Potential Politics

domain of what we have come to define as “mass intellectuality.” The profound
changes in these strategic sectors have radically modified not only the composi-
tion, management, and regulation of the workforce — the organization of produc-
tion— but also, and more deeply, the role and function of intellectuals and their
activities within society.

The “great transformation” that began at the start of the 1970s
has changed the very terms in which the question is posed. Manual labor is increas-
ingly coming to involve procedures that could be defined as “intellectual,” and the
new communications technologies increasingly require subjectivities that are rich
in knowledge. It is not simply that intellectual labor has become subjected to the
norms of capitalist production. What has happened is that a new “mass intellectu-
ality” has come into being, created out of a combination of the demands of capital-
ist production and the forms of “self-valorization” that the struggle against work
has produced. The old dichotomy between “mental and manual labor,” or between
“material labor and immaterial labor,” risks failing to grasp the new nature of pro-
ductive activity, which takes this separation on board and transforms it. The split
between conception and execution, between labor and creativity, between author
and audience, is simultaneously transcended within the “labor process” and reim-
posed as political command within the “process of valorization.”

The Restructured Worker

Twenty years of restructuring of the big factories has led to a curious paradox. The
various different post-Fordist models have been constructed both on the defeat of
the Fordist worker and on the recognition of the centrality of (an ever increasingly
intellectualized) living labor within production. In today’s large restructured com-
pany, a worker’s work increasingly involves, at various levels, an ability to choose
among different alternatives and thus a degree of responsibility regarding decision
making. The concept of “interface” used by communications sociologists provides
a fair definition of the activities of this kind of worker—as an interface between
different functions, between different work teams, between different levels of the
hierarchy, and so forth. What modern management techniques are looking for is
for “the worker’s soul to become part of the factory.” The worker’s personality and
subjectivity have to be made susceptible to organization and command. It is around
immateriality that the quality and quantity of labor are organized. This transfor-
mation of working-class labor into a labor of control, of handling information, into
a decision-making capacity that involves the investment of subjectivity, affects work-
ers in varying ways according to their positions within the factory hierarchy, but it

M A U R I Z I O L A Z Z A R A T O

from Paolo Virno and Michael Hardy, eds. Radical Thought In Italy: A Potential Politics

134,5

is nevertheless present as an irreversible process. Work can thus be defined as the
capacity to activate and manage productive cooperation. In this phase, workers are
expected to become “active subjects” in the coordination of the various functions
of production, instead of being subjected to it as simple command. We arrive at a
point where a collective learning process becomes the heart of productivity, because
it is no longer a matter of finding different ways of composing or organizing already
existing job functions, but of looking for new ones.

The problem, however, of subjectivity and its collective form,
its constitution and its development, has immediately expressed itself as a clash
between social classes within the organization of work. I should point out that what
I am describing is not some Utopian vision of recomposition, but the very real ter-
rain and conditions of the conflict between social classes.

The capitalist needs to find an unmediated way of establishing
command over subjectivity itself; the prescription and definition of tasks transforms
into a prescription of subjectivities. The new slogan of Western societies is that we
should all “become subjects.” Participative management is a technology of power,
a technology for creating and controlling the “subjective processes.” As it is no
longer possible to confine subjectivity merely to tasks of execution, it becomes nec-
essary for the subject’s competence in the areas of management, communication,
and creativity to be made compatible with the conditions of “production for pro-
duction’s sake.” Thus the slogan “become subjects,” far from eliminating the
antagonism between hierarchy and cooperation, between autonomy and command,
actually re-poses the antagonism at a higher level, because it both mobilizes and
clashes with the very personality of the individual worker. First and foremost, we
have here a discourse that is authoritarian: one has to express oneself, one has to
speak, communicate, cooperate, and so forth. The “tone” is that of the people who
were in executive command under Taylorization; all that has changed is the con-
tent. Second, if it is no longer possible to lay down and specify jobs and responsi-
bilities rigidly (in the way that was once done with “scientific” studies of work), but
if, on the contrary, jobs now require cooperation and collective coordination, then
the subjects of that production must be capable of communication—they must be
active participants within a work team. The communicational relationship (both ver-
tically and horizontally) is thus completely predetermined in both form and con-
tent; it is subordinated to the “circulation of information” and is not expected to be
anything other. The subject becomes a simple relayer of codification and decodifi-
cation, whose transmitted messages must be “clear and free of ambiguity,” within a
communications context that has been completely normalized by management. The

I m m a t e r i a l L a b o r

from Paolo Virno and Michael Hardy, eds. Radical Thought In Italy: A Potential Politics

necessity of imposing command and the violence that goes along with it here take
on a normative communicative form.

The management mandate to “become subjects of communica-
tion” threatens to be even more totalitarian than the earlier rigid division between
mental and manual labor (ideas and execution), because capitalism seeks to involve
even the worker’s personality and subjectivity within the production of value. Cap-
ital wants a situation where command resides within the subject him- or herself,
and within the communicative process. The worker is to be responsible for his or
her own control and motivation within the work group without a foreman needing
to intervene, and the foreman’s role is redefined into that of a facilitator. In fact,
employers are extremely worried by the double problem this creates: on one hand,
they are forced to recognize the autonomy and freedom of labor as the only possi-
ble form of cooperation in production, but on the other hand, at the same time, they
are obliged (a life-and-death necessity for the capitalist) not to “redistribute” the
power that the new quality of labor and its organization imply. Today’s manage-
ment thinking takes workers’ subjectivity into consideration only in order to codify
it in line with the requirements of production. And once again this phase of trans-
formation succeeds in concealing the fact that the individual and collective inter-
ests of workers and those of the company are not identical.

I have defined working-class labor as an abstract activity that
nowadays involves the application of subjectivity. In order to avoid misunderstand-
ings, however, I should add that this form of productive activity is not limited only
to highly skilled workers; it refers to a use value of labor power today, and, more
generally, to the form of activity of every productive subject within postindustrial
society. One could say that in the highly skilled, qualified worker, the “communi-
cational model” is already given, already constituted, and that its potentialities are
already defined. In the young worker, however, the “precarious” worker, and the
unemployed youth, we are dealing with a pure virtuality, a capacity that is as yet
undetermined but that already shares all the characteristics of postindustrial pro-
ductive subjectivity. The virtuality of this capacity is neither empty nor ahistoric; it
is, rather, an opening and a potentiality that have as their historical origins and ante-
cedents the “struggle against work” of the Fordist worker and, in more recent times,
the processes of socialization, educational formation, and cultural self-valorization.

This transformation of the world of work appears even more
evident when one studies the social cycle of production: the “diffuse factory” and
decentralization of production on the one hand and the various forms of tertiariza-

M A U R I Z I O L A Z Z A R A T O

from Paolo Virno and Michael Hardy, eds. Radical Thought In Italy: A Potential Politics

136,7

tion on the other. Here one can measure the extent to which the cycle of immaterial
labor has come to assume a strategic role within the global organization of produc-
tion. The various activities of research, conceptualization, management of human
resources, and so forth, together with all the various tertiary activities, are organized
within computerized and multimedia networks. These are the terms in which we
have to understand the cycle of production and the organization of labor. The inte-
gration of scientific labor into industrial and tertiary labor has become one of the
principal sources of productivity, and it is becoming a growing factor in the cycles
of production that organize it.

‘Immaterial Labor” in the Classic Definition

All the characteristics of the postindustrial economy (both in industry and society
as a whole) are highly present within the classic forms of “immaterial” production:
audiovisual production, advertising, fashion, the production of software, photogra-
phy, cultural activities, and so forth. The activities of this kind of immaterial labor
force us to question the classic definitions of work and workforce, because they com-
bine the results of various different types of work skill: intellectual skills, as regards
the cultural-informational content; manual skills for the ability to combine creativ-
ity, imagination, and technical and manual labor; and entrepreneurial skills in the
management of social relations and the structuring of that social cooperation of
which they are a part. This immaterial labor constitutes itself in forms that are
immediately collective, and we might say that it exists only in the form of networks
and flows. The organization of the cycle of production of immaterial labor (because
this is exactly what it is, once we abandon our factoryist prejudices — a cycle of pro-
duction) is not obviously apparent to the eye, because it is not defined by the four
walls of a factory. The location in which it operates is outside in the society at large,
at a territorial level that we could call “the basin of immaterial labor.” Small and
sometimes very small “productive units” (often consisting of only one individual)
are organized for specific ad hoc projects, and may exist only for the duration of
those particular jobs. The cycle of production comes into operation only when it is
required by the capitalist; once the job has been done, the cycle dissolves back into
the networks and flows that make possible the reproduction and enrichment of its
productive capacities. Precariousness, hyperexploitation, mobility, and hierarchy are
the most obvious characteristics of metropolitan immaterial labor. Behind the label
of the independent “self-employed” worker, what we actually find is an intellectual
proletarian, but who is recognized as such only by the employers who exploit him

I m m a t e r i a l L a b o r

from Paolo Virno and Michael Hardy, eds. Radical Thought In Italy: A Potential Politics

or her. It is worth noting that in this kind of working existence it becomes increas-
ingly difficult to distinguish leisure time from work time. In a sense, life becomes
inseparable from work.

This labor form is also characterized by real managerial func-
tions that consist in (1) a certain ability to manage its social relations and (2) the elic-
iting of social cooperation within the structures of the basin of immaterial labor.
The quality of this kind of labor power is thus defined not only by its professional
capacities (which make possible the construction of the cultural-informational con-
tent of the commodity), but also by its ability to “manage” its own activity and act
as the coordinator of the immaterial labor of others (production and management
of the cycle). This immaterial labor appears as a real mutation of “living labor.”
Here we are quite far from the Taylorist model of organization.

Immaterial labor finds itself at the crossroads (or rather, it is
the interface) of a new relationship between production and consumption. The acti-
vation of both productive cooperation and the social relationship with the consumer
is materialized within and by the process of communication. The role of immate-
rial labor is to promote continual innovation in the forms and conditions of com-
munication (and thus in work and consumption). It gives form to and materializes
needs, the imaginary, consumer tastes, and so forth, and these products in turn be-
come powerful producers of needs, images, and tastes. The particularity of the com-
modity produced through immaterial labor (its essential use value being given by
its value as informational and cultural content) consists in the fact that it is not
destroyed in the act of consumption, but rather it enlarges, transforms, and creates
the “ideological” and cultural environment of the consumer. This commodity does
not produce the physical capacity of labor power; instead, it transforms the person
who uses it. Immaterial labor produces first and foremost a “social relationship” (a
relationship of innovation, production, and consumption). Only if it succeeds in
this production does its activity have an economic value. This activity makes imme-
diately apparent something that material production had “hidden,” namely, that
labor produces not only commodities, but first and foremost it produces the capital
relation.

The Autonomy of the Productive Synergies of Immaterial Labor
My working hypothesis, then, is that the cycle of immaterial labor takes as its start-
ing point a social labor power that is independent and able to organize both its
own work and its relations with business entities. Industry does not form or create
this new labor power, but simply takes it on board and adapts it. Industry’s control

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over this new labor power presupposes the independent organization and “free
entrepreneurial activity” of the labor power. Advancing further on this terrain brings
us into the debate on the nature of work in the post-Fordist phase of the organiza-
tion of labor. Among economists, the predominant view of this problematic can be
expressed in a single statement: immaterial labor operates within the forms of orga-
nization that the centralization of industry allows. Moving from this common basis,
there are two differing schools of thought: one is the extension of neoclassical anal-
ysis; the other is that of systems theory.

In the former, the attempt to solve the problem comes through
a redefinition of the problematic of the market. It is suggested that in order to
explain the phenomena of communication and the new dimensions of organization
one should introduce not only cooperation and intensity of labor, but also other
analytic variables (anthropological variables? immaterial variables?) and that on this
basis one might introduce other objectives of optimization and so forth. In fact,
the neoclassical model has considerable difficulty in freeing itself from the coherence
constraints imposed by the theory of general equilibrium. The new phenomenolo-
gies of labor, the new dimensions of organization, communication, the potentiality
of spontaneous synergies, the autonomy of the subjects involved, and the indepen-
dence of the networks were neither foreseen nor foreseeable by a general theory
that believed that material labor and an industrial economy were indispensable.
Today, with the new data available, we find the microeconomy in revolt against
the macroeconomy, and the classical model is corroded by a new and irreducible
anthropological reality.

Systems theory, by eliminating the constraint of the market and
giving pride of place to organization, is more open to the new phenomenology of
labor and in particular to the emergence of immaterial labor. In more developed
systemic theories, organization is conceived as an ensemble of factors, both mate-
rial and immaterial, both individual and collective, that can permit a given group
to reach objectives. The success of this organizational process requires instruments
of regulation, either voluntary or automatic. It becomes possible to look at things
from the point of view of social synergies, and immaterial labor can be taken on
board by virtue of its global efficacy. These viewpoints, however, are still tied to an
image of the organization of work and its social territory within which effective
activity from an economic viewpoint (in other words, the activity conforming to
the objective) must inevitably be considered as a surplus in relation to collective
cognitive mechanisms. Sociology and labor economics, being systemic disciplines,
are both incapable of detaching themselves from this position.

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from Paolo Virno and Michael Hardy, eds. Radical Thought In Italy: A Potential Politics

I believe that an analysis of immaterial labor and a description
of its organization can lead us beyond the presuppositions of business theory—
whether in its neoclassical school or its systems theory school. It can lead us to
define, at a territorial level, a space for a radical autonomy of the productive syner-
gies of immaterial labor. We can thus move against the old schools of thought to
establish, decisively, the viewpoint of an “anthropo-sociology” that is constitutive.

Once this viewpoint comes to dominate within social produc-
tion, we find that we have an interruption in the continuity of models of produc-
tion. By this I mean that, unlike the position held by many theoreticians of post-
Fordism, I do not believe that this new labor power is merely functional to a new
historical phase of capitalism and its processes of accumulation and reproduction.
This labor power is the product of a “silent revolution” taking place within the
anthropological realities of work and within the reconfiguration of its meanings.
Waged labor and direct subjugation (to organization) no longer constitute the prin-
cipal form of the contractual relationship between capitalist and worker. A poly-
morphous self-employed autonomous work has emerged as the dominant form, a
kind of “intellectual worker” who is him- or herself an entrepreneur, inserted within
a market that is constantly shifting and within networks that are changeable in time
and space.

The Cycle of Immaterial Production
Up to this point I have been analyzing and constructing the concept of immaterial
labor from a point of view that could be defined, so to speak, as “microeconomic.”
If now we consider immaterial labor within the globality of the production cycle,
of which it is the strategic stage, we will be able to see a series of characteristics of
post-Taylorist production that have not yet been taken into consideration.

I want to demonstrate in particular how the process of valoriza-
tion tends to be identified with the process of the production of social communica-
tion and how the two stages (valorization and communication) immediately have a
social and territorial dimension. The concept of immaterial labor presupposes and
results in an enlargement of productive cooperation that even includes the produc-
tion and reproduction of communication and hence of its most important contents:
subjectivity. If Fordism integrated consumption into the cycle of the reproduc-
tion of capital, post-Fordism integrates communication into it. From a strictly eco-
nomic point of view, the cycle of reproduction of immaterial labor dislocates the
production-consumption relationship as it is defined as much by the “virtuous
Keynesian circle” as by the Marxist reproduction schemes of the second volume of

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Capital. Now, rather than speaking of the toppling of “supply and demand,” we
should speak about a redefinition of the production-consumption relationship. As
we saw earlier, the consumer is inscribed in the manufacturing of the product from
its conception. The consumer is no longer limited to consuming commodities (de-
stroying them in the act of consumption). On the contrary, his or her consumption
should be productive in accordance to the necessary conditions and the new prod-
ucts. Consumption is then first of all a consumption of information. Consumption
is no longer only the “realization” of a product, but a real and proper social process
that for the moment is defined with the term communication.

Large-Scale Industry and

Services

To recognize the new characteristics of the production cycle of immaterial labor,
we should compare it with the production of large-scale industry and services. If the
cycle of immaterial production immediately demonstrates to us the secret of post-
Taylorist production (that is to say, that social communication and the social relation-
ship that constitutes it become productive), then it would be interesting to examine
how these new social relationships innervate even industry and services, and how they
oblige us to reformulate and reorganize even the classical forms of “production.”

Large-Scale Industry

The postindustrial enterprise and economy are founded on the
manipulation of information. Rather than ensuring (as nineteenth-century enter-
prises did) the surveillance of the inner workings of the production process and the
supervision of the markets of raw materials (labor included), business is focused on
the terrain outside of the production process: sales and the relationship with the
consumer. It always leans more toward commercialization and financing than toward
production. Prior to being manufactured, a product must be sold, even in “heavy”
industries such as automobile manufacturing; a car is put into production only after
the sales network orders it. This strategy is based on the production and consump-
tion of information. It mobilizes important communication and marketing strate-
gies in order to gather information (recognizing the tendencies of the market) and
circulate it (constructing a market). In the Taylorist and Fordist systems of pro-
duction, by introducing the mass consumption of standardized commodities, Ford
could still say that the consumer has the choice between one black model T5 and
another black model T5. “Today the standard commodity is no longer the recipe
to success, and the automobile industry itself, which used to be the champion of
the great ‘low price’ series, would want to boast about having become a neoindustry

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from Paolo Virno and Michael Hardy, eds. Radical Thought In Italy: A Potential Politics

of singularization” — and quality.1 For the majority of businesses, survival involves
the permanent search for new commercial openings that lead to the identification
of always more ample or differentiated product lines. Innovation is no longer sub-
ordinated only to the rationalization of labor, but also to commercial imperatives.
It seems, then, that the postindustrial commodity is the result of a creative process
that involves both the producer and the consumer.

Services

If from industry proper we move on to the “services” sector
(large banking services, insurance, and so forth), the characteristics of the process I
have described appear even more clearly. We are witnessing today not really a growth
of services, but rather a development of the “relations of service.” The move beyond
the Taylorist organization of services is characterized by the integration of the rela-
tionship between production and consumption, where in fact the consumer inter-
venes in an active way in the composition of the product. The product “service”
becomes a social construction and a social process of “conception” and innovation.
In service industries, the “back-office” tasks (the classic work of services) have dimin-
ished and the tasks of the “front office” (the relationship with clients) have grown.
There has been thus a shift of human resources toward the outer part of business.
As recent sociological analyses tell us, the more a product handled by the service
sector is characterized as an immaterial product, the more it distances itself from
the model of industrial organization of the relationship between production and
consumption. The change in this relationship between production and consump-
tion has direct consequences for the organization of the Taylorist labor of produc-
tion of services, because it draws into question both the contents of labor and the
division of labor (and thus the relationship between conception and execution loses
its unilateral character). If the product is defined through the intervention of the
consumer, and is therefore in permanent evolution, it becomes always more diffi-
cult to define the norms of the production of services and establish an “objective”
measure of productivity.

Immaterial Labor

All of these characteristics of postindustrial economics (present
both in large-scale industry and the tertiary sector) are accentuated in the form of
properly “immaterial” production. Audiovisual production, advertising, fashion, soft-
ware, the management of territory, and so forth are all defined by means of the par-
ticular relationship between production and its market or consumers. Here we are

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at the furthest point from the Taylorist model. Immaterial labor continually cre-
ates and modifies the forms and conditions of communication, which in turn acts
as the interface that negotiates the relationship between production and consump-
tion. As I noted earlier, immaterial labor produces first and foremost a social rela-
tion—it produces not only commodities, but also the capital relation.

If production today is directly the production of a social rela-
tion, then the “raw material” of immaterial labor is subjectivity and the “ideologi-
cal” environment in which this subjectivity lives and reproduces. The production
of subjectivity ceases to be only an instrument of social control (for the reproduc-
tion of mercantile relationships) and becomes directly productive, because the goal
of our postindustrial society is to construct the consumer/communicator — and to
construct it as “active.” Immaterial workers (those who work in advertising, fash-
ion, marketing, television, cybernetics, and so forth) satisfy a demand by the con-
sumer and at the same time establish that demand. The fact that immaterial labor
produces subjectivity and economic value at the same time demonstrates how capi-
talist production has invaded our lives and has broken down all the oppositions
among economy, power, and knowledge. The process of social communication (and
its principal content, the production of subjectivity) becomes here directly produc-
tive because in a certain way it “produces” production. The process by which the
“social” (and what is even more social, that is, language, communication, and so
forth) becomes “economic” has not yet been sufficiently studied. In effect, on the
one hand, we are familiar with an analysis of the production of subjectivity defined
as the constitutive “process” specific to a “relation to the self with respect to the
forms of production particular to knowledge and power (as in a certain vein of
poststructuralist French philosophy), but this analysis never intersects sufficiently
with the forms of capitalist valorization. On the other hand, in the 1980s a network
of economists and sociologists (and before them the Italian postworkerist tradition)
developed an extensive analysis of the “social form of production,” but that analy-
sis does not integrate sufficiently the production of subjectivity as the content of
valorization. Now, the post-Taylorist mode of production is defined precisely by
putting subjectivity to work both in the activation of productive cooperation and in
the production of the “cultural” contents of commodities.

The Aesthetic Model

But how is the production process of social communication formed? How does the
production of subjectivity take place within this process? How does the production
of subjectivity become the production of the consumer/communicator and its capac-

I m m a t e r i a l L a b o r

from Paolo Virno and Michael Hardy, eds. Radical Thought In Italy: A Potential Politics

ities to consume and communicate? What role does immaterial labor have in this

process? As I have already said, my hypothesis is this: the process of the production of

communication tends to become immediately the process of valorization. If in the past

communication was organized fundamentally by means of language and the insti-

tutions of ideological and literary/artistic production, today, because it is invested

with industrial production, communication is reproduced by means of specific tech-

nological schemes (knowledge, thought, image, sound, and language reproduction

technologies) and by means of forms of organization and “management” that are

bearers of a new mode of production.

It is more useful, in attempting to grasp the process of the for-

mation of social communication and its subsumption within the “economic,” to use,

rather than the “material” model of production, the “aesthetic” model that involves

author, reproduction, and reception. This model reveals aspects that traditional eco-

nomic categories tend to obscure and that, as I will show, constitute the “specific dif-

ferences” of the post-Taylorist means of production.2 The “aesthetic/ideological”

model of production will be transformed into a small-scale sociological model with

all the limits and difficulties that such a sociological transformation brings. The

model of author, reproduction, and reception requires a double transformation: in

the first place, the three stages of this creation process must be immediately char-

acterized by their social form; in the second place, the three stages must be under-

stood as the articulations of an actual productive cycle.3

The “author” must lose its individual dimension and be trans-

formed into an industrially organized production process (with a division of labor,

investments, orders, and so forth), “reproduction” becomes a mass reproduction

organized according to the imperatives of profitability, and the audience (“recep-

tion”) tends to become the consumer/communicator. In this process of socializa-

tion and subsumption within the economy of intellectual activity the “ideological”

product tends to assume the form of a commodity. I should emphasize, however,

that the subsumption of this process under capitalist logic and the transformation

of its products into commodities does not abolish the specificity of aesthetic pro-

duction, that is to say, the creative relationship between author and audience.

The Specific Differences of the Immaterial Labor Cycle
Allow me to underline briefly the specific differences of the “stages” that make up

the production cycle of immaterial labor (immaterial labor itself, its “ideological/

commodity products,” and the “public/consumer”) in relation to the classical forms

of the reproduction of “capital.”

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144 ,5

As far as immaterial labor being an “author” is concerned, it is
necessary to emphasize the radical autonomy of its productive synergies. As we have

seen, immaterial labor forces us to question the classical definitions of work and
workforce, because it results from a synthesis of different types of know-how: intel-
lectual skills, manual skills, and entrepreneurial skills. Immaterial labor constitutes
itself in immediately collective forms that exist as networks and flows. The subju-
gation of this form of cooperation and the “use value” of these skills to capitalist

logic does not take away the autonomy of the constitution and meaning of immate-
rial labor. On the contrary, it opens up antagonisms and contradictions that, to use
once again a Marxist formula, demand at least a “new form of exposition.”

The “ideological product” becomes in every respect a com-
modity. The term ideological does not characterize the product as a “reflection” of
reality, as false or true consciousness of reality. Ideological products produce, on
the contrary, new stratifications of reality; they are the intersection where human
power, knowledge, and action meet. New modes of seeing and knowing demand

new technologies, and new technologies demand new forms of seeing and know-
ing. These ideological products are completely internal to the processes of the for-
mation of social communication; that is, they are at once the results and the pre-
requisites of these processes. The ensemble of ideological products constitutes the

human ideological environment. Ideological products are transformed into com-
modities without ever losing their specificity; that is, they are always addressed to
someone, they are “‘ideally signifying,” and thus they pose the problem of “meaning.”

The general public tends to become the model for the consumer
(audience/client). The public (in the sense of the user—the reader, the music lis-
tener, the television audience) whom the author addresses has as such a double pro-

ductive function. In the first place, as the addressee of the ideological product, the
public is a constitutive element of the production process. In the second place, the

public is productive by means of the reception that gives the product “a place in
life” (in other words, integrates it into social communication) and allows it to live
and evolve. Reception is thus, from this point of view, a creative act and an integrative

part of the product. The transformation of the product into a commodity cannot
abolish this double process of “creativity”; it must rather assume it as it is, and

attempt to control it and subordinate it to its own values.

What the transformation of the product into a commodity can-
not remove, then, is the character of event, the open process of creation that is estab-

lished between immaterial labor and the public and organized by communication.
If the innovation in immaterial production is introduced by this open process of

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from Paolo Virno and Michael Hardy, eds. Radical Thought In Italy: A Potential Politics

creation, the entrepreneur, in order to further consumption and its perpetual re-
newal, will be constrained to draw from the “values” that the public/consumer pro-
duces. These values presuppose the modes of being, modes of existing, and forms
of life that support them. From these considerations there emerge two principal
consequences. First, values are “put to work.” The transformation of the ideological
product into a commodity distorts or deflects the social imaginary that is produced
in the forms of life, but at the same time, commodity production must recognize
itself as powerless as far as its own production is concerned. The second conse-
quence is that the forms of life (in their collective and cooperative forms) are now
the source of innovation.

The analysis of the different “stages” of the cycle of immaterial
labor permits me to advance the hypothesis that what is “productive” is the whole
of the social relation (here represented by the author-work-audience relationship)
according to modalities that directly bring into play the “meaning.” The specificity
of this type of production not only leaves its imprint on the “form” of the process
of production by establishing a new relationship between production and consump-
tion, but it also poses a problem of legitimacy for the capitalist appropriation of this
process. This cooperation can in no case be predetermined by economics, because
it deals with the very life of society. “Economics” can only appropriate the forms
and products of this cooperation, normalizing and standardizing them. The creative
and innovative elements are tightly linked to the values that only the forms of life
produce. Creativity and productivity in postindustrial societies reside, on the one
hand, in the dialectic between the forms of life and values they produce and, on the
other, in the activities of subjects that constitute them. The legitimation that the
(Schumpeterian) entrepreneur found in his or her capacity for innovation has lost
its foundation. Because the capitalist entrepreneur does not produce the forms and
contents of immaterial labor, he or she does not even produce innovation. For eco-
nomics there remains only the possibility of managing and regulating the activity
of immaterial labor and creating some devices for the control and creation of the
public/consumer by means of the control of communication and information tech-
nologies and their organizational processes.

Creation and Intellectual Labor
These brief considerations permit us to begin questioning the model of creation
and diffusion specific to intellectual labor and to get beyond the concept of creativ-
ity as an expression of “individuality” or as the patrimony of the “superior” classes.
The works of Simmel and Bakhtin, conceived in a time when immaterial production

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1 4 6 , 7

had just begun to become “productive,” present us with two completely different
ways of posing the relationship between immaterial labor and society. The first,
Simmel’s, remain completely invested in the division between manual labor and
intellectual labor and give us a theory of the creativity of intellectual labor. The sec-
ond, Bakhtin’s, in refusing to accept the capitalist division of labor as a given, elab-
orate a theory of social creativity. Simmel, in effect, explains the function of “fashion”
by means of the phenomenon of imitation or distinction as regulated and com-
manded by class relationships. Thus the superior levels of the middle classes are the
ones that create fashion, and the lower classes attempt to imitate them. Fashion
here functions like a barrier that incessantly comes up because it is incessantly bat-
tered down. What is interesting for this discussion is that, according to this con-
ception, the immaterial labor of creation is limited to a specific social group and is
not diffused except through imitation. At a deeper level, this model accepts the divi-
sion of labor founded on the opposition between manual and intellectual labor that
has as its end the regulation and “mystification” of the social process of creation
and innovation. If this model had some probability of corresponding to the dynam-
ics of the market of immaterial labor at the moment of the birth of mass consump-
tion (whose effects Simmel very intelligently anticipates), it could not be utilized
to account for the relationship between immaterial labor and consumer-public in
postindustrial society. Bakhtin, on the contrary, defines immaterial labor as the
superseding of the division between “material labor and intellectual labor” and dem-
onstrates how creativity is a social process. In fact, the work on “aesthetic produc-
tion” of Bakhtin and the rest of the Leningrad circle has this same social focus.
This is the line of investigation that seems most promising for developing a theory
of the social cycle of immaterial production.

Translated by Paul Colilli and Ed Emory

1. Yves Clot, “Renouveau de I’industrialisme et activite
philosophique,” Futur anterieur, no. 10 (1992): 22.

2. Both the creative and the social elements of this
production encourage me to venture the use of the
“aesthetic model.” It is interesting to see how one could
arrive at this new concept of labor by starting either
from artistic activity (following the situationists) or from
the traditional activity of the factory (following Italian

I m m a t e r i a l L a b o r

workerist theories), both relying on the very Marxist
concept of “living labor.”

3. Walter Benjamin has already analyzed how since the
end of the nineteenth century both artistic production and
reproduction, along with its perception, have assumed
collective forms. I cannot pause here to consider his works,
but they are certainly fundamental for any genealogy of
immaterial labor and its forms of reproduction.

Notes

from Paolo Virno and Michael Hardy, eds. Radical Thought In Italy: A Potential Politics

Critical Concepts
Media Relations and Media Product:
Audience Commodity

Lee Artz

O ver 50 years ago Dallas Smythe found the antidote. He was the first
scholar to publish the scientific rationale for rejecting the ideological
romanticism of U.S. mass communication research.1 Smythe insisted
that the political economy of the commercial media—and their source

of profits—best explained the processes and practices. After years as an FCC eco-
nomic analyst of the radio and telegraph industry and several content analyses of
television programming, Smythe observed that audiences were “products” that
commercial networks sold to corporate advertisers. Smythe recognized that audi-
ences were subjected to programming which was produced, distributed, and pro-
moted to meet the interests of advertisers who ultimately funded private television
and developed media technology for profit. These identifiable relations helped clar-
ify much of the operation, and reception, of media in the United States.

Smythe also spoke frequently at international conferences on media and tech-
nology, offering valuable theoretical and practical observations in defense of cul-
tural diversity and democratic access to the media and deserving of recuperation
and reconsideration. However, although many of Smythe’s concerns have been
championed and popularized in international communication discourse, his obser-
vations regarding the function of audiences in the media process have been less
visible. In fact, despite cogent argument and ample evidence, his perspective on the
commodity audience has been institutionally shunned by academic departments
across the U.S. for some fifty years—ironically indicating the need for a similar
political economy of academe—and prompting this essay’s restatement and critique
of his theoretical claims and his practical suggestions concerning audience-as-
commodity. Although others have pursued the path laid by Smythe’s observations
and several have even extended his approach to media audiences in critically useful
ways,2 my purpose here is more limited: to briefly recap Smythe’s insights while
suggesting that his political economy approach deserves more recognition and ap-
preciation within media studies.3

On Margins and Markets

Certainly many of Smythe’s students, inspired and convinced by his work, have

made remarkable contributions pursuing some of the trajectories he laid out, but his
legacy is absent from most accounts of mass communication research traditions.
From 1948, when Smythe began teaching the first ever political economy of media
course in the U.S. at the University of Illinois, despite being subjected to a House
Un-American Activities Committee investigation and slander campaign, and long
after his 1963 move to Canada where he continued teaching and writing, through
the publication of Thomas Guback’s edited collection of Smythe’s work, his theo-
retical and political challenges to the capitalist status quo and its preferred commu-
nication theories have been pushed to the margins.4 His 1951 essay, “The Con-
sumer’s Stake in Television,” published in the Quarterly of Film Radio and Televi-
sion, which first intimated his theory of audience-as-product, preceded by several
years the popular and long-lasting journalism text, Four Theories of the Press, by
Fred S. Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm.5 However, Siebert and
company championed the accepted free market ideology of cold war America, ar-
guing that media systems could be differentiated by philosophical preferences for
freedom and control while ignoring how market imperatives in production, distri-
bution, and regulation influence commercial media products, from programming to
audiences. Unsurprisingly, Smythe’s critique of commercial media was never well-
received by commercial media or their government supporters, whereas Schramm
and other leading developmental and administrative researchers (backed by govern-
ment and corporate funding) were well-positioned to establish their pluralist
“market place of ideas” perspective as the academic norm for explaining and study-
ing mass communication systems and practices. Nonetheless, Smythe’s political
economy has more scientific rigor, validity, and reliability; relies on the continuing
contradictions of corporate media practices to demonstrate its efficacy; and contin-
ues to fill pockets of appreciation among a growing number of international media
scholars and activists.

Smythe’s approach to the study of media institutions and practices is quite dis-
tinct from many contemporary political economy of media studies which more nar-
rowly focus on ownership and consolidation.6 Indeed, his work approaches what
Vincent Mosco advises for the future of political economy—a greater concern with
social and cultural relations and the political and social consequence of industry
practices that advance particular economic interests.7 Smythe’s analysis focuses on
the kernel of capitalist media: the actual market imperatives which drive, organize,
and over-determine its programming content. He was not misled by ideological
justifications. As he wrote in a review of Schramm’s Responsibility in Mass Com-
munication, preferences for market-based theories of media are “self-serving ra-
tionale(s) used by politicians and businessmen to ornament operations” for less
noble purposes.8 For Smythe, theories of media need be historical and in context:
“doctrines (not ‘theories’) of press freedom grow out of the class and power struc-
tures of societies and differ in relation to whose freedom is protected, restraints
from what sources, and in the service of what value patterns or policies.”9 Contrary
to Schramm’s apologetic romanticizing of moral truths in the so-called “social re-
sponsibility theory” whereby the elite press best represents the interests of the pub-
lic against incursions by government censors, Smythe emphasizes the public rela-
tions benefit of a theory which obscures and protects business activities from public

61 Critical Concepts / Artz

scrutiny and criticism. He also insists on recognizing economic relations and their
impact. In reality, the need for “huge capital requirements to enter publishing of
newspapers, mass circulation magazines, TV and motion pictures, effectively
closes off easy access to the ranks of mass media entrepreneurs. Hence, the only
way that deviant ideas can get access to the public is by courtesy of the conserva-
tives who operate the mass media. As [Robert] Merton and [Paul] Lazarsfeld point
out, this bias serves to shield the existing business organization from criticism.”10
For Smythe, the “social responsibility theory” in the U.S. is no different than the
press doctrine in the Soviet Union of the 1950s: “In both cases, the press is effec-
tively dominated by the dominant class . . . [and] press ‘freedom’ serves the poli-
cies and values of the dominant class… .”11 Unheeded, Smythe’s concern for politi-
cal and economic materiality of media relations and practices would lead academe
to ignore the public need for media scrutiny of corporations. Given the failure of
the media in covering the (weapons of mass destruction, Al-Qaeda terrorist connec-
tion, and imminent terrorist threat) lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it would
seem Smythe was too sanguine about the media’s scrutiny of government, as
well—a troubling observational error given Smythe’s knowledge of and experience
with government advocacy of RCA’s private monopoly of radio12 the television
manufacturers’ and broadcasting industry’s influence over FCC regulations during
the 1950s,13 and his awareness of the “new struggle for markets by giant corpora-
tions” seeking commercial satellite systems after Sputnik was launched by the So-
viet Union.14 More importantly, it seems Smythe’s alert regarding public scrutiny
of corporate activity, the government, and the media themselves has been largely
disregarded if the predominance of advertising, public relations, and marketing
degrees at esteemed U.S. universities is any indication. Few have comparable pro-
grams for public media, labor communication, or environmental communication
which do not ultimately serve to improve business functioning and corporate or
government public relations. Indeed, contrary to the non-chalant resignation of
John Peters and Peter Simonson, it was not “the gods that left us with Wilbur
Schramm and company,”15 but less lofty actors who worked diligently to establish
institutions of class power, including academic programs that have popularized
theories which justify those relations.

It is unlikely Smythe found god-work in the collaboration of commercial net-
works, ad agencies, and private corporations that created the U.S. media system,
although there is a certain magic in the way citizens have been transformed into
consumers. Still, it is no illusion to see that publics and audiences have been neatly
packaged into marketable commodities produced and sold by television program-
mers.

Often considered “free” by consumers, television has always been a commercial
enterprise in the United States but seldom understood in its entirety. The complex-
ity of the industry and its socio-cultural consequence have confounded researchers
for decades, as discrete parts of the whole, including audiences, have been thor-
oughly analyzed at the expense of an over-arching understanding of the class nature
of media institutions and practices. Recovering Smythe’s insights and methodology
could begin to resolve this dilemma.

Democratic Communiqué 22, No. 1, Spring 2008 62

Media Economics

“In the first place there is a group of products and services . . . receiving sets …
attachments and antennas. There is electric power. There are replacement parts… ,”
writes Smythe.16 Fifty years on we have FM and XFM radio, cable-ready televi-
sion, satellite radio and TV receivers, plasma screen and LCD monitors, HDTV,
DVD players, and other communication hardware as media products. Moreover, at
least since the government-backed formation of the Radio Corporation of America
(RCA), in the United States, and the capitalist world in general, profit-seeking cor-
porations provide the impetus for research and development, production and distri-
bution, conditions for the personal and social use of media technology, technical
standards, and regulatory guidelines or rules. It is almost unremarkable that media
content providers, such as television networks and programmers, trumpet each in-
novation as a benefit for consumers;17 content providers need content deliverers
(manufacturers of television, satellite, internet receivers, etc.) to communicate with
audiences. Yet, while media technology greatly affects the form and delivery of
media content, media technology is produced primarily for sale to individual con-
sumers. Thus, once a market is saturated, as with television sets in the US where
some 98% of homes have at least one set, manufacturers must rely on recurring
sales through the planned obsolescence of equipment, from the introduction of new
products which consumers can be persuaded to want (such as cell phones, cell
phones with cameras, or I-pod-ready phones with additional options), or from tech-
nical innovations which consumers will need to access content (such as color tele-
vision, digital receivers, or HDTV). As Smythe explains:

Replacement markets are generated by designed obsolescence: by
style changes and by deliberate standards of quality in manufac-
ture which produce tolerably short product lives and the predict-
able “junking” of familiar products (because it would cost more
to repair them than to replace them). And the stylistic features of
all consumer goods and services based on the calculated manipu-
lation of public taste so that consumers increasingly pay for im-
ages rather than use-values.18

Five decades ago, Smythe noted that absent political power, “consumers must de-
pend passively on corporate decisions to innovate.”19 In short, media technology is
always an important ingredient in the communication process and media practice,
even more significantly in the capitalist world, the manufacture of media technol-
ogy is profit-driven in its development and use. The cost to individual consumers
appears as a primary concern for Smythe in many of his writings.

Likewise, although Smythe did not emphasize the economic parameters of me-
dia content per se—he omitted it entirely in his 1951 essay and only addressed it
directly in the context of pay-TV in a 1958 essay 20 – movies, television and radio
programs, magazines and their articles, and other media content are also commer-
cial media products. Networks, studios, and independent producers create programs
by producing stories, scripts, and media commodities which are owned or sold to

63 Critical Concepts / Artz

networks as a means for attracting reading and viewing audiences. This content can
also be sold, or re-sold through syndication to other broadcast and cable networks,
offered for purchase on pay-per-view TV, repackaged as video and CD product, or
copyrighted and “synergistically” produced in other media products such as books,
computer programs, and internet websites or non-media products such as apparel,
games, and toys. For some media content producers, the marketing of content as
end-product is quite lucrative: movies, books, magazines, etc. However, for radio
and television networks, programming has much more value as a means, a vehicle,
a recruiting tool for producing a more important product: the audience.

In Smythe’s early considerations of the economic value of audiences he strug-
gles to explain “station time and…audience loyalty” as something more: “a pro-
gram for the audience (in whose continuing loyalty the station has a vital interest),
and the probability of developing audience loyalty to the advertiser.”21 Smythe rec-
ognizes the economic relationship between advertiser and the corporate product
sponsor—commodity producers pay ad agencies for the advertiser’s product: the
broadcast commercial, the published ad, or the billboard, etc. He also identifies the
source of profit for the corporate product depends on whether “audience response
results in the ringing of cash registers where the sponsor’s product is sold to the
ultimate producer.”22 However it is only in his “Communications: Blindspot of
Marxism” essay in 1977 that Smythe more fully articulates his theory of audience-
as-commodity, although still conceiving of audience time as commodity.23

Smythe asks, “What is the commodity form of mass-produced, advertiser-
supported communications under monopoly capitalism?” The materialist answer,
writes Smythe, is audiences, including readerships. Under contemporary capitalism,
“all non-sleeping time of most of the population is work time. This work time is
devoted to the production of commodities in general (both where people get paid
for their work and as members of audiences) and in the production and reproduc-
tion of labor power (the pay for which is subsumed in their income). Of the off-the-
job work time, the largest single block is time of the audiences which is sold to
advertisers. It is not sold by workers but by the mass media of communications.”24

Smythe details this process by suggesting that advertisers “buy the services of audi-
ences with predictable specifications who will pay attention in predictable numbers
and at predictable times to particular means of communication (TV, radio, newspa-
pers, magazines, billboards, and third-class mail). As collectivities these audiences
are commodities. As commodities they are dealt with by producers and buyers (the
latter being advertisers).”25 Audiences have more or less value depending on their
demographics and the value of those demographics to particular product producers:
denture manufacturers value over-50 viewers, candy manufacturers prefer younger
viewers, beer producers target males 21-34, and so on.

Audience Power, Audience Profit

Whether one accepts Smythe’s portrayal of television viewing as working at “the
production and reproduction of labour power”26 – an important theoretical claim in
and of itself—the immediately applicable portion of his theoretical presentation of

Democratic Communiqué 22, No. 1, Spring 2008 64

audience as commodity is that audiences are assembled as commodities which have
exchange value for programmers and advertisers. At the elementary level—again,
leaving aside the question of audience “work” – audiences are constructed, created,
produced by television and radio programmers and print publishers as discrete
goods which have value to advertisers. Audiences can thus be sold to advertisers
for their exchange value – they are useful to advertisers who need viewers and read-
ers who will attend to their persuasive messages. The larger the audience and the
more the audience has demographic (and psychographic?) characteristics matching
the demographics of real and potential consumers, the more value that particular
audience has to an advertiser. Here then is the real significance of Smythe’s discov-
ery: “in economic terms the main function of the mass media in this system is to
produce audiences prepared to be dutiful consumers… The real end-product is the
commodity to be sold, and the audience produced by the mass media is but part of
the means to that end.”27 Very quickly one realizes that the primary task facing me-
dia content producers is how to attract, capture, and deliver those audiences (and
their attention) to advertisers.28 In other words, media content producers create pro-
gramming not for audiences per se, but for specific audiences which have exchange
value, i.e., audiences which are desirable to advertisers.

Television programming thus understood appears as a lure or bait to catch and
keep people paying attention to the output of the mass media enterprise. As such,
the luring ‘program’ content of TV is designed to attract the particular kind of audi-
ence the advertiser plans to produce as the intermediate good to complete the mar-
keting process for his product—the consumer. The press, TV and radio media are
not primarily producing news, entertainment, or editorial opinion—none of those
can be sold. Rather, the prime function of news, entertainment, and editorial pro-
gramming is to produce audiences to be sold to advertisers.29 Programming cannot
disrupt the intended purpose for broadcast: priming audiences to buy. Audiences
must be stimulated, but not reflective or thoughtful. Programming must flow with
commercial spots to socialize viewers to self-interest, celebrity worship, and instant
gratification—ingredients valuable to advertisers and marketers. From this more
critical political economy position, we can better understand television program-
ming decisions as actions based on market projections and share dividends, not on
public preferences.

In the mid-1990s, CBS produced “Murder, She Wrote.” a mystery series set in a
fictional seaside village in Maine, featuring an older female amateur sleuth and
mystery writer. It frequently placed first among the network’s lineup in the Nielsen
ratings and was a champion in its time slot, 8:00 P.M. Sundays. It finished in the
Nielsen top ten during most of its run. Yet, in 1996, the show was canceled. Why?
“It was one of CBS’s most successful offerings, but also among the most expensive
for it to produce. Moreover, Murder, She Wrote skewed toward older audiences,
especially older women, and advertisers will pay much more to attract younger
viewers. In the 1994-95 season, the show charged lower advertising rates than com-
petitors such as Lois and Clark, appearing in the same time slot on rival network,
ABC. Lois and Clark attracted fewer viewers, but was watched by more young
viewers, hence the higher advertising rate.”30

In other words, Smythe’s theory of audience-as-commodity provides the neces-

65 Critical Concepts / Artz

sary framework for understanding the limited influence of audience viewing prefer-
ence. In terms of advertising value, the commodity known as the “Murder, She
Wrote audience” had less worth than other television audiences. The aggregate size
of the audience outpaced all other shows, but the size of each of its constituent
components had little exchange value. CBS was producing a commodity for sale:
the viewing audience. That particular audience (or audiences) had limited exchange
value in the advertising market, hence, the interests of the actual viewing audience
were disregarded for the interests of the profit-making imperatives of the network.
“Murder, She Wrote” could not be profitably produced. It was cancelled.

Traditional media economic texts, and even some critical communications texts
such as Ben Bagdakian’s The Media Monopoly, focus on whether advertising low-
ers (or raises) the costs of consumer products, including media products, and the
impact of information (or ideological) content of advertisements and programs.31
Others, like James Chesebro and Dale Bertlesen, view media technologies as pri-
marily symbolic and cognitive systems, under-privileging the economic and politi-
cal ingredients of any symbolic, cognitive, or technological system.32 While ac-
knowledging their indebtedness to a Marxist concern with the politics of technol-
ogy, Chesebro and Bertlesen provide scant political and economic context for me-
dia culture, severely limiting the efficacy of their insights. Some more avowedly
critical communication researchers attend to economic relations in general, but give
short shrift to the production of audiences, and seldom center audiences as products
in and of themselves. For instance, Robert McChesney’s rich polemic against
“hypercommericialism” in Rich Media, Poor Democracy imagines the news
“audience may simply disappear”33—missing the singular motivation of media net-
works: to produce audiences desired by advertisers through whatever entertainment
or news content is cost-effective; news and ideological criteria are simply caught up
in the movement of that audience-as-commodity production tide. David Crouteau
and William Hoynes reflect a similar delineation: recognizing that advertisers pay a
premium for targeted audiences, they nonetheless either overlook or obscure the
actual financial transactions which define commercial media economic relations.34

Crouteau and Hoynes argue that advertisers pay for “advertising time” and net-
works “generate corporate profits” by “selling” programming to teens and other
preferred target audiences.35 This inverts how the media production cycle functions
under capitalist social relations. Media produce audiences. Programs are the means
of production. Advertisers are the market for the media end-product.36

Granted, for independent producers and production studios, programs are prod-
ucts which are sold to networks for broadcast use. But for networks, which (with
the approval of the 1996 Telecommunications Act and other FCC deregulations)
have been increasingly integrated vertically to avoid the need to purchase pro-
grams, programs are not produced for direct sale (although they may have secon-
dary market value in syndication). Rather, programs are but a necessary component
in the more lucrative production of particular audiences.

To illustrate the distinction attending Smythe’s contribution, consider the pro-
duction of automobiles. For independent contractors, windows, brakes, electronic
equipment, and other auto parts are products which are sold to the auto industry
(although they have value in the auto repair market, as well). However, for the auto

Democratic Communiqué 22, No. 1, Spring 2008 66

industry, which has increasingly integrated production vertically (not to mention
globally) to limit the need to purchase automobile parts, the production of win-
dows, brakes, and other components of cars are necessary costs in the more lucra-
tive production and exchange of automobiles. General Motors, Ford, Toyota, and
other auto corporations decide which suppliers to hire and which parts to produce
in-house based on minimizing the costs of production of automobiles to maximize
their sale and profit. Likewise, NBC, ABC, Viacom, and the rest of the media in-
dustry decide which independent studios to hire or which programs to produce in-
house based on its need to minimize the costs of production of audiences for sale
and profit.

According to Smythe, audiences are commodities produced, exchanged, and
distributed by the television industry and the commercial media industry, in gen-
eral. Networks do not seek audiences anymore than automobile manufacturers seek
cars or fast-food restaurants seek hamburgers. Audiences, autos, hamburgers are
products, a means to an end. Audiences are not the end-goal of the networks, any-
more than automobiles are the end goal of auto manufacturers. Audiences “are not
the direct ‘buyers’ of the programs.”37 Yet, advertisers aren’t the direct buyers of
programs, either. Audiences are the commodities which are sold to advertisers. Net-
works produce programs: they do not sell programs; they sell audiences. Thus, pro-
gram content should not be analyzed solely in terms of its content appeal to audi-
ences. Content should be considered equally in terms of its advertising function:
attracting particular audiences for sale to particular advertisers. Advertisers have no
concern for the networks’ production costs. Networks bear the costs. If a network
can deliver a sizable, desirable audience—even using a poorly produced, inane
show—the advertisers will pay handsomely. A creative, well-produced, critically-
acclaimed program that costs the network much money impresses advertisers not at
all, if the audience, whatever its size, is not a desirable commodity. Networks profit
when the cost of producing the audience is less than income generated by the sale
of that audience to advertisers. The cost of producing a marketable audience in-
cludes: scriptwriters; directors, producers, and editors; animators, amateurs, or ac-
tors and their attendants; set designers, lighting staff, camera crews, technicians,
and diverse skilled assistants; audience researchers, promoters, etc. Thus, networks
continually search for low-cost, low-risk advertising-audience friendly programs:
reality television, game shows, animations; simplistic sit-coms, copy-cat programs,
and the occasional spin-off. Ultimately, advertisers have little interest in the par-
ticular content of programming, because they are concerned with one criterion: will
the desired audience be available for my commercial? Thus, in general, advertisers
have little motivation for the censorship of ideas. Indeed, a little controversy or
titillation might even improve audience size and enhance attention. Viacom’s Com-
edy Central network routinely airs programs that challenge decency standards that
many citizens would find offensive, but because advertisers are purchasing teen
(mostly white male) audiences, they “are not particularly concerned with offending
other viewers.”38 Advertisers only balk at content which might “damage” the de-
sired audience product or disrupt the smooth delivery of that audience to the adver-
tising spot. Status quo values (with a dash of trendy edginess) rule.

At first glance, it appears that Smythe’s emphasis is purely stylistic or that sub-

67 Critical Concepts / Artz

sequent scholars have advanced his insights. Certainly Bagdikian, McChesney,
Crouteau and Hoynes, Ron Bettig and Jeanne Lynn Hall,39 and others share
Smythe’s concern with the commercialization of information, but there is an impor-
tant distinction. Do advertisers come to active audiences or are audiences produced,
sold, and delivered to advertisers? Should media activists attempt to influence me-
dia content by demonstrating to advertisers the market value of particular audiences
or audience interest? Can the media industry and its regulatory agencies like the
FCC be reformed and de-commercialized? Or as Smythe argued are technology and
its market-culture practices intimately connected with the process of production—
where the decision “to apply knowledge in some practical way—and both the
knowledge in question and the practical use to which it is put arise out of the politi-
cal process.”40 Underscoring the audience as commodity takes us from the naïve
and liberal to the profound and revolutionary: meanings, images, rhetorical tropes
and other symbolic production do not appear simply, or even primarily, as part of
the creative process of communication; rather, they arise in tandem as part of the
material production of a commodity. In other words, the distinction clarifies the
function, the power, the problem. The battle for legitimate news, creative culture,
or educational programming is meaningless disconnected from the fight to wrench
media production out of the hands of commercial networks and their corporate cli-
ents. Smythe guides us towards a more theoretically-grounded practical politics.

Theory for Action?

Smythe admitted that he did not theoretically or politically finish the investigation
or explanation of media relations, as he makes clear in his rejoinder to Graham
Murdock’s culturalist critique of audience-as-product.41 Yet, Smythe’s claim that
media content and advertising have no existence separate from one another was
fundamentally solid. His charge might be nuanced to hold that media content and
advertising are symbiotically connected with separate agents and sites of produc-
tion, but the centrality of audience-as-product to any understanding of commercial
media practice holds. Smythe’s case for audience-as-producer of itself seems less
substantial and verifiable. Moving beyond conceptualizing audiences as commodi-
ties with marketable demographic and psychological characteristics, including con-
sumerist proclivities, Smythe argues that audiences “produce” themselves as con-
sumers. This is new and uneven terrain. When Budd, Craig, and Steinman note that
viewers “invest money in equipment simply to watch TV programs,” “viewers pay
increased prices for goods and services that are advertised,” and audiences bear the
additional costs of time as well as damage to their psychological well-being, they
are on solid empirical ground in identifying audiences as consumers.42 When
Smythe insists that audiences “labor” in the economic sense, he revises traditional
and critical consensus about the production process and needs further elaboration.
Smythe suggests that viewers work on themselves as raw material in the process of
creating consumers with interests, knowledge, and behaviors apropos to the con-
sumer lifestyle. He is not speaking metaphorically. The more he considered audi-
ences as commodities, from the 1950s to the 1970s, the more he struggled with the

Democratic Communiqué 22, No. 1, Spring 2008 68

production process. His visits to Maoist China spurred him to further consider the
cultural and social development of humanity, including how humans create them-
selves socially and psychologically. Smythe may have begun an admirable theoreti-
cal journey, pushing socio-economic claims towards the social psychological with
audiences, even individuals, self-constructing themselves through viewing activity
and product cognition as an essential part of constructing collective identities as
fans, consumers, or brand loyalists.

A full discussion on the labor theory of value is not in order here, but we can at
least note that before Smythe commodity producers were understood to produce
goods and services that have use-value with the clear intent to exchange those
goods and services for profit: manufacturers produce products to sell. On the other
hand, even if audiences participate in the productive process of creating consumers,
audiences do not intentionally produce themselves as commodities for sale. This is
not simply a question of who sells the commodity, because admittedly workers do
not sell the product of their labor—that exchange transaction and the profits gener-
ated belong to the capitalist owner. Workers do sell their individual labor power, so
perhaps workers could sell the labor expended in transforming themselves from
citizen-viewers into consumer-audiences—but if there is no compensation or other
economic consideration must we consider programming as the reward audiences
receive for their labor? We have suddenly moved from the sophomoric claim that
TV is “free,” to the position that TV is a form of “wage” provided to audiences that
produce themselves as commodities! If labor power is exchanged for less than
value it adds to the production process, providing profits to the capitalist employer
whenever goods return more than the cost of production (labor and materials), what
are we to make of workers (as audiences) producing a product for which they re-
ceive no compensation, have no intent in creating, and yet the product is bought
and sold by others—advertisers and media producers? Additionally, what are the
theoretical ramifications for class consciousness if millions of workers can collec-
tively labor in isolation from each other? Are anticipated and recurring social con-
tradictions which previously have spurred collective action now mitigated or super-
seded because the capitalist system has perfected a culture industry which has a
means of profit and exploitation that circumvents solidarity and collective democ-
ratic action? Perhaps Smythe’s creative initiative has some complex and intriguing
possibilities for labor theory and deserves further attention, or maybe his intellec-
tual musings are partly the complex result of being enamored with the Chinese cul-
tural revolution that at the time seemed to intimate some promise for a more hu-
manist social order. In either case, as scholars, media activists, and citizens con-
sider and reconsider historical definitions of labor and commodity, they can con-
tinue Smythe’s early assault on administrative mass communication theory with
confidence.

Unfortunately, Dallas Smythe does not often appear in the pantheon of tradi-
tional U.S. media scholars – with such luminaries as Paul Lazarsfeld, Elihu Katz,
Wilbur Schramm, Everett Rogers, et al, whose works better serve capitalist Amer-
ica. The reasons are obvious and multiple: McCarthyism, the limited publication of
his work, a career lived largely in Canada, his sharp political critique of U.S. me-
dia, his public affiliation with China during the 1960s, the general emphasis on

69 Critical Concepts / Artz

administrative research and industrial application within U.S. media studies curric-
ula. Certainly, Smythe did not publish as much as his ideas warranted, nor as much
as might be required to provide widespread access to those ideas. Following his
experience at Illinois, Smythe was painfully aware of how traditional mass commu-
nication researchers and instititutions serve corporate needs administratively and
ideologically. And, although there is little evidence that Smythe’s research and
writings were rejected by peer-reviewed journals,43 the witch-hunt atmosphere of
the McCarthy years muted collegial response to his ideas. The political climate of
the times convinced Smythe to move to Canada in 1963 and while he taught and
spoke out frequently against the stunted intellectual frames provided by Schramm,
Siebert, and others, he most likely considered academic venues a secondary focus
of his efforts to democratize the media. It is also clear that Smythe spent the greater
part of his life on public campaigns for public media and public access, rather than
scholarly endeavor. Additionally, it is possible that Smythe’s public defense and
admiration of the Chinese revolution influenced how he was viewed by peers and
publishers. In short, whatever the myriad reasons, readily-available Smythe publi-
cations are relatively few.44 Nonetheless, whatever the complex of explanations for
Smythe’s fairly limited standing in traditional media studies, he did not rest with
academic or theoretical observations of how ideologically-conditioned audiences
were constructed by television programming, he constantly campaigned for struc-
tural media reform, participatory democracy, and fundamental social change.

Although Smythe noted that his political economy did not require one to be a
Marxist, any continuation of his ideas would be well-advised to consider including
a Marxist, class-conscious understanding of advertising, ideology, commodity pro-
duction and exchange, and socio-economic class relations. The study of and chal-
lenge to contemporary media institutions and practices (e.g., satellite broadcasting,
narrowcasting, web-streaming) and their relations with advertising, consumption,
and government regulation may begin with Smythe, but will need to extend his
early insights beyond network broadcasting. Contributions from other, more con-
sciously Marxist scholars, including those using Gramsci’s concept of hegemony,
likewise have much to contribute, as they clarify the consensual, beneficial rela-
tions constructed by capitalism partially through media and cultural operations
which inform, entertain, divert, and socialize whole sections of all social classes
and experientially structure social relations through cultural and economic practices
and actions.45

As with any good theory, Smythe’s contribution provides a useful guide to
action and, indeed, informed his own efforts at media reform. If one recognizes that
audiences are commodities manufactured and exchanged by the commercial media
industry and if one acknowledges that technology development and use is the result
of class-based social relations and interests, then one must address the larger socio-
economic structure to explain and transform media. An understanding of the class
character of contemporary media and culture and should inform any citizen action
for media democracy. Smythe had high hopes for China, but as China and the entire
world moves into the capitalist orbit, Smythe’s observations about audience-as-
commodity, capitalist media, democracy, and citizenship must more fully inform
citizen action in the United States. With such an anti-capitalist consciousness, audi-

Democratic Communiqué 22, No. 1, Spring 2008 70

ences cannot be reduced to commodities; they can become producers and agents in
the construction of their own media, their own lives, and their own humanity.

Notes

1. Dallas W. Smythe, “The Consumer’s Stake in Radio and Television,” Quar-

terly of Film Radio and Television 6, no. 2 (1951): 109-128.
2. Sut Jhally, The Spectacle of Accumulation: Essays in Media, Culture & Poli-

tics (New York: Peter Lang, 2006); Eileen Meehan, “Conceptualizing Culture
as Commodity: The Problem of Television,” Critical Studies in Mass Commu-
nication 3, no. 4 (1986): 448-57; Eileen Meehan, “Rethinking Political Econ-
omy: Change and Continuity,” Journal of Communication 43, no. 4 (1993):
105-16; and Vincent Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication: Re-
thinking and Renewal (London: Sage, 1996).

3. Robin Mansell encouraged a similar appreciation in her essay, “Against the
Flow: The Peculiar Opportunity of Social Scientists,” in A Different Road
Taken: Profiles in Critical Communication, ed. J. A. Lent (Boulder, CO: West-
view Press, 1995), 43-66.

4. Dallas W. Smythe, Counterclockwise: Perspectives on Communication, ed,
Thomas. Guback (Boulder: Westview, 1994).

5. Fred S. Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm, Four Theories of
the Press (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956).

6. For example, Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Commu-
nication Politics in Dubious Times (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press,
1999) and Robert W. McChesney and Dan Schiller. The Political Economy of
International Communications: Foundations for the Emerging Debate about
Media Ownership and Regulation, Technology, Business and Society Program
Paper, No. 11 (Geneva, Switzerland: United Nations Research Institute for
Social Development, 2003).

7. Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication.
8. Smythe, Counterclockwise, 92.
9. Smythe, Counterclockwise, 95, emphasis in original.
10. Smythe, Counterclockwise, 95.
11. Smythe, Counterclockwise, 96.
12. Dallas W. Smythe, The Structure and Policy of Electronic Communication

(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 1957), 51.
13. Smythe, “Consumer’s,” 111.
14. Dallas W. Smythe, “The Space Giveaway, Part 1: Who Will Own Communica-

tions Satellites?” 242-245, The Nation, October 14, 1961.
15. John Durham Peters and Peter Simonson, eds., Mass Communication and

American Social Thought: Key Texts 1919-1968 (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2004), 273.

16. Smythe, “Consumer’s,” 110.
17. For example, see Dan Schiller’s “Why the World Went Mobile,” LeMonde

Diplomatique, February 2005, http://mondediplo.com/2005/02/11telecom

71 Critical Concepts / Artz

18. Smythe, Counterclockwise, 249.
19. Smythe, “Consumer’s,” 111.
20. Smythe, Counterclockwise.
21. Smythe, “Consumer’s,” 110, emphasis in original.
22. Smythe, “Consumer’s,” 110.
23. Dallas W. Smythe, “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism,” Cana-

dian Journal of Political and Social Theory 1, no. 3 (1977): 1-27.
24. Smythe, Counterclockwise, 269.
25. Smythe, Counterclockwise, 270.
26. Smythe, Counterclockwise, 269.
27. Smythe, Counterclockwise, 251.
28. I leave aside here the debate over how any monitoring system can verify that

audiences are actually attending to the program –broadcast or texts published.
Suffice it to say, circulation figures and Nielsen and Arbitron ratings—in all
their various permutations—rely primarily on reader possession of the media
product or audience presence during the broadcast to infer reader and audience
attention and reception. Although this frustrates them, advertisers can only
purchase audience presence and hope that their creations are able to attract
attention—hence the frequency, redundancy, repetition, image content, and
increased volume (in sound and quantity) of ads.

29. Smythe, “Communications,” 281.
30. Karen E. Riggs, “Murder, She Wrote: U.S. Mystery,” Museum of Television,

http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/M/htmlM/murdershew/murdershew.htm
(accessed November 14, 2006).

31. Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly (6th Edition) (Boston: Beacon Press,
2000).

32. James W. Chesebro and Dale A. Bertelsen, Analyzing Media: Communication
Technologies as Symbolic and Cognitive Systems (New York: Guilford Press,
1996).

33. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, 35, 58.
34. David Crouteau and William Hoynes, The Business of Media: Corporate Me-

dia and the Public Interest (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2001).
35. Crouteau and Hoynes, 23, 24.
36. Of course, “active” audiences also provide a means for realizing profits, if they

become “active” consumers and purchase goods and services.
37. Mike Budd, Steve Craig and Clay Steinman, Consuming Environments: Televi-

sion and Commercial Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1999), 35.

38. Crouteau and Hoynes, 124.
39. Ronald V. Bettig and Jeanne Lynn Hall, Big Media, Big Money: Cultural Texts

and Political Economics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
40. Smythe, Counterclockwise, 234.
41. Smythe, Counterclockwise, 296.
42. Budd, Clay, and Steinman, 36, 37, 98.
43. William Melody notes that Smythe did face obstacles to publishing in the U.S.

during the 1950s. “Dallas Smythe: Pioneer in the Political Economy of Com-

Democratic Communiqué 22, No. 1, Spring 2008 72

munications,” in Counterclockwise: Perspectives on communication, ed. Tho-
mas Guback (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 1-6.

44. In addition to a few essays published early in his career and those appearing in
Canadian journals, Smythe published two books: Dependency Road: Commu-
nications, Capitalism, Consciousness and Canada, and Counterclockwise:
Perspectives on Communication, a comprehensive collection of Smythe’s es-
says, unpublished writings, speeches and biographical notes assembled by
Thomas Guback.

45. One example of a materialist, Gramscian treatment of hegemony and media is
offered by Lee Artz and Bren Murphy in Cultural Hegemony in the United
States, (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 2000). Eileen Meehan expresses how to
move beyond a text-based and audience-privileged cultural studies approach in
her essay, “Culture: Text or Artifact or Action,” Journal of Communication
Inquiry 25, No. 3 (2001): 208-217.

Bibliography

Artz, Lee and Bren Ortega Murphy. Cultural Hegemony in the United States. Bev-

erly Hills, CA: Sage, 2000.
Bagdikian, Ben H. The Media Monopoly (6th Edition). Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.
Bettig, Ronald V. and Jeanne Lynn Hall Big Media, Big Money: Cultural Texts and

Political Economics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
Budd, Mike, Steve Craig and Clay Steinman. Consuming Environments: Television

and Commercial Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999.
Chesebro, James W. and Dale A. Bertelsen, Analyzing Media: Communication

Technologies as Symbolic and Cognitive Systems. New York: Guilford Press,
1996.

Crouteau, David and William Hoynes, The Business of Media: Corporate Media
and the Public Interest. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2001.

Jhally, Sut. The Spectacle of Accumulation: Essays in Media, Culture & Politics.
New York: Peter Lang, 2006.

Mansell, Robin. “Against the Flow: The Peculiar Opportunity of Social Scientists.”
In A Different Road taken: Profiles in Critical Communication, edited by J. A.
Lent, 43-66. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995.

McChesney, Robert W. Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in
Dubious Times. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

McChesney, Robert W. and Dan Schiller. The Political Economy of International
Communications: Foundations for the Emerging Debate about Media Owner-
ship and Regulation. Technology, Business and Society Program Paper, No.
11. Geneva, Switzerland: United Nations Research Institute for Social Devel-
opment, 2003.

Meehan, Eileen. “Conceptualizing Culture as Commodity: The Problem of Televi-
sion.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 3, no. 4 (1986): 448-57.

________. “Rethinking Political Economy: Change and Continuity.” Journal of
Communication 43, no. 4 (1993): 105-16.

73 Critical Concepts / Artz

________. “Culture: Text or Artifact or Action,” Journal of Communication In-
quiry 25, No. 3 (2001): 208-217.

Melody, William. “Dallas Smythe: Pioneer in the Political Economy of Communi-
cations.” In Dallas W. Smythe, Counterclockwise: Perspectives on Communi-
cation, written by Dallas W. Smythe, edited by Thomas Guback, 1-6. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 1994.

Vincent Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication: Rethinking and Re-
newal. Beverly Hills CA: Sage, 1996.

Peters, John Durham and Peter Simonson, eds. Mass Communication and American
Social Thought: Key Texts 1919-1968. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
2004.

Schiller, Dan. “Why the World Went Mobile,” LeMonde Diplomatique, February
2005, http://mondediplo.com/2005/02/11telecom (accessed November 1,
2006).

Siebert, Fred S., Peterson, Theodore, and Wilbur Schramm. Four Theories of the
Press. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1956.

Smythe, Dallas. “The Consumer’s Stake in Radio and Television,” Quarterly of
Film, Radio and Television 4 (1951): 109-128.

________. The Structure and Policy of Electronic Communication. Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois, 1957.

________. “The Space Giveaway, Part 1: Who Will Own Communications Satel-
lites?” The Nation, October 14, 1961.

________. “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism,” Canadian Journal
of Political and Social Theory 1, no.3 (1977): 1-27.

________. Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness and
Canada. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1981.

________. Counterclockwise: Perspectives on Communication, ed. Thomas
Guback. Boulder: Westview, 1994.

________. “The Role of Mass Media and Popular Culture in Defining Develop-
ment,” in Dallas Smythe, Counterclockwise: Perspectives on Communication,
ed. Thomas Guback. Boulder: Westview, 1994: 247-262, 1994/1974

The author thanks anonymous reviewers, as well as Simon Fraser University for
access to the Dallas Smythe Papers.

Lee Artz, Professor of Media Studies at Purdue University Calumet, is a former
steelworker and machinist. Artz has published book chapters and journal articles
on media practices, social change, and democratic communication. He has co-
authored Cultural Hegemony in the United States (2000), and co-edited The Media
Globe: Trends in International Communication (2007), Marxism and Communica-
tion Studies: The Point Is to Change It (2006), Bring `Em On! Media and Power in
the Iraq War (2004), The Globalization of Corporate Media Hegemony (2003), and
Communication and Democratic Practices (2001).

Democratic Communiqué 22, No. 1, Spring 2008 74

CULTURE MACHINE VOL 13 • 2012

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PAYING ATTENTION:

TOWARDS A CRITIQUE OF THE ATTENTION

ECONOMY

Patrick Crogan and Samuel Kinsley

Paying Attention

How are the ways we understand subjective experience – not least
cognitively – being modulated by political economic rationales? And
how might artists, cultural theorists, social scientists and radical
philosophers learn to respond – analytically, creatively,
methodologically and politically – to the commodification of human
capacities of attention? This theme issue of Culture Machine explores
these interlinked questions as a way of building upon and opening
out contemporary research concerning the economisation of
cognitive capacities. Drawing on and extending work produced for a
2010 European Science Foundation-funded conference, also
entitled Paying Attention,1 this special issue proposes a contemporary
critical re-focussing on the politics, ethics and aesthetics of the
‘attention economy’, a notion developed in the 1990s by scholars
such as Jonathan Beller, Michael Goldhaber and Georg Franck.
This notion – and the related conceptualisations such as ‘experience
design’, the competition for ‘eyeballs’, ‘click-throughs’ and so on –
animates contemporary digital media production, advertising and
the online, multitasking, near-pervasive media milieu in which they
develop.

If an economy is the means and rationale through which a given
society commodifies and exchanges scarce resources, then the
‘attention economy’, following Marazzi (2008), defines human
attention as a scarce but quantifiable commodity. According to
Goldhaber (1997) and subsequent critics, this is the techno-cultural
milieu in which contemporary Western societies operate and in
which the ‘web-native’ generation lives. In the industrial age the role
played by the forms of media in coordinating consumption with the
needs of production was identified and critiqued by prominent

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members of the Frankfurt School. As Bernard Stiegler (amongst
others) argues in the wake of Kulturkritik, in the digital era the
function and impact of the ‘programme industries’ attains a new
level of influence and penetration with profound potential to
transform the enabling dynamics of social, cultural and political
relations, negotiations, and identity formation. In Taking Care of
Youth and the Generations, Stiegler (2010) announces a battle for
criticality that must be fought – or, rather, re-commenced – against
the mainstream adoption of digital technology’s potential visible in
notions like the attention economy. In response to this call, this
special issue will both experiment with the concepts, sensibilities and
methods necessary to attend to the attention economy and attempt
to understand how substantive examples reveal the contemporary
bio-political reality of the commodification of our cognitive
capacities.

Understanding processes of commodification, regulation and
subjectivation of and through capacities for attention requires that
we explicitly conceptualise the relation between bodies, cognition,
economy and culture. This is precisely the point from which the
articles in this special issue launch their various critical engagements.
There are accordingly contributions by Michel Bauwens, Jonathan
Beller, Bernard Stiegler and Tiziana Terranova. Together, they
unpack and question the notions of economy and attention and the
assumptions and implications of their combination. Political
economic, philosophical and critical theoretical perspectives
informing critical and activist responses to the predominant global
mobilisation of attention are laid out and put into dialogue in and
between these texts. A series of essays from an interdisciplinary
range of scholars deepens this critical interrogation. These extend
and elaborate on this dialogue, focussing on particular thematic, and
(inter)disciplinary issues and drawing on specific digital media case
studies, including: social networking; the urban governance of
communal identity; and the inattention paid to the material
provision of the devices and facilities of ‘immaterial labour’. This
issue also offers an additional section containing discussion, position
statements and provocation from more practice-oriented
contributors. It is a central tenet of this issue’s theoretical agenda
that critical and creative responses to the forms of digital mediation
of attention must be composed, in dialogue, and must also mutually
inflect each other’s development.

In this editorial we contextualise the interrogation of the notion of
attention as it is mobilised in approaches to the attention economy.

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In the next section we offer a genealogical reading of the discourse of
attention and its economies as the theoretical milieu from which this
issue of Culture Machine proceeds. We bring together what we see as
some of the key conceptual and discursive waypoints via which the
critique represented in this issue can be navigated. To sketch the
shape of the critique presented by this issue as a whole and to
introduce the substantive arguments therein, in the concluding
section of this editorial we offer a thematic outline of the insightful
and provocative articles that make up this issue.

Attending to Attention

There have been several articulations of the commodification of the
human capacity for attention and the political economic rationales
for reconstituting capitalism in the locus of the body. It would be a
mistake to lionise an originator or moment of inception of this set of
ideas, but one might look to a range of progenitors: from (post)
Marxian such as Debord’s (1992) critique of the Society of the
Spectacle and Adorno and Horkheimer’s (1997) critique of the
‘Culture Industry’; Edward Bernays’ (1947) psychoanalytically
inspired development of public relations as a means of ‘engineering’
attention, as well as Foucault’s (2008, 2010, 2011) discussion of
biopolitics and the ‘techniques of the self’. As digital technologies
arrived in the popular consciousness, in the late 1990s, multiple
appeals were made to a ‘digital’, ‘information’ or ‘network’ economy
(for example: Barbrook, 1999; Castells, 1996; Tapscott, 1996) that
undergird arguments concerning an attention economy. In recent
literature, a number of scholars have attended to attention variously
as: an intellectual crisis brought about by the internet (Carr, 2010);
an issue rooted in the industrial production of moving images
(Crary, 1992, 2001); as well as a pedagogical concern with regard to
how young people come to know and care for their society and the
world (Stiegler, 2010) but also with regard to how we collectively
negotiate truth through network technologies (for example:
Rheingold, 2012).

In this introduction we identify four particular, yet related, ways of
thinking about how attention is commodified, quantified and
trained. First, the attention economy has been theorised as the
inversion of the ‘information economy’, in which information is
plentiful and attention is the scarce resource. Second, post-Marxist
critics have identified ‘cognitive capitalism’, the enrolment of human
cognitive capacities as ‘immaterial labour’ par excellence, as the

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foundation for an attention economy. Third, several continental
philosophers have identified the cerebral and neural as an object or
site of politics, with a neural conception of attention becoming,
particularly for Stiegler, a key issue. Finally, the internet, as a
mediator of contemporary intellectual and social activities, has been
identified by popular commentators as a threat to our mental
capacities, devaluing them, and thus posing a risk to our ability to
contribute to society. They are by no means exhaustive, but it is
betwixt and between these various understandings of an attention
economy that the discussions within this issue are accordingly
positioned.

The scarcity of attention

The abundance of information, or ‘content’ (that enigmatic
abstraction of message from medium), ever more available to us via
an increasing range of media devices, services and systems, sets our
ability to attend to that information as a scarcity. In 1971 Herbert
Simon articulated the issue in terms of ‘information overload’:

[T]he wealth of information means a dearth of
something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that
information consumes. What information
consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the
attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of
information creates a poverty of attention.
(Simon, 1971: 40)

Several evocations of an attention economy were formed at the end
of the last century, including: Beller (1994), Davenport and Beck
(2001), Franck (1999) and Goldhaber (1997). The latter three offer
normatively positive readings of this emergence, while Beller
(discussed further below) proposed the need for a recalibrated
critical practice based on a Marxist cultural and political economic
framework. The paradigm of the commodity adopted in the latter
formulations invites the assumption that attention has no degree:
that one either pays attention or does not. Thus, as the capacity for
attention by a finite audience, a society, is dispersed across a
broadening range of media, those media command ever decreasing
‘segments’ of that market. This is the premise for Michael
Goldhaber’s (1997) argument that ‘the economy of attention – not
information – is the natural economy of cyberspace’:

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[O]urs is not truly an information economy. By
definition, economics is the study of how a society
uses its scarce resources. […] We are drowning in
information, yet constantly increasing our
generation of it. […] There is something else that
moves through the Net, flowing in the opposite
direction from information, namely attention.
(Goldhaber, 1997)

Attention as a commodity, for Goldhaber, endures: it is not a
momentary circumstance but something that has prolonged effects.
Thus when attention is garnered it builds a potential for further
attention in the future: ‘obtaining attention is obtaining a kind of
enduring wealth, a form of wealth that puts you in a preferred
position to get anything this new economy offers’. The commodity
of attention is accordingly a form of property. For Goldhaber,
attention as ‘property’ leads to the rise of immaterial labour, and the
lessening of the money economy in favour of some form of
‘attention transaction’. This ill-defined concept and the
unsubstantiated claim that ‘disappearance of the involvement of
capital will be equally the case for attention-getting objects of just
about any sort’ demonstrates the limits to the proposition of a
totalising attention economy (Goldhaber, 1997). Where
Goldhaber’s analysis rings true is in predictions that we would
increasingly place import upon online social networks and the
diverse means by which they are accessed – for example: blogs,
email, Facebook, instant messaging, Twitter.

An understanding of the deluge of media forms as the constitution
of attention scarcity in the mainstream media sector has significant
ramifications in the context of education and pedagogy. This is the
central thesis of Georg Franck’s (1998, 1999) articulation of an
attention economy founded upon the ‘socialisation of prominence’
and the ‘decline of material wealth’. Suppliers technically reproduce
media content while the audience ‘pay’ through live attention to
each copy:

Only through this asymmetry is it possible to
collect such masses of donated attention, which is
what makes a medium attractive for those
appearing in it and which allows the media their
lavishness in conferring the modern peerage of
prominence. (Franck, 1999)

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The difference between money and attention for Franck is that in
addition to an apparent exchange value attention has the corollary
value of identity. Attention cannot be accumulated in the same ways
as money but, Franck argues, it can be calculated through ‘esteem’.
This is accordingly the foundation of the attention economy within
the academy (unsettlingly close to the model for the British
Research Assessment Exercise). The aim of education, for Franck, is
the acquisition and application of knowledge; it is a form of
capitalized attention that constitutes a ‘mental capitalism’. Indeed, in
his 2010 conference presentation, Franck argued that this has much
earlier origins; that, in fact, the enterprise of science has always been
a continuing production of knowledge value. Thus the attention
economy is a further development of the industrialisation of a
‘knowledge society’ (Franck, 2010). It is therefore nothing less than
the self-consciousness we can afford that depends on an income of
attention. Franck argues that the power of science can be explained
as the attempt to gain cultural leadership in the formation of an
industry dedicated to knowledge production. Thus, in a ‘knowledge
economy’, the wealth of attention can be wielded as a capital.

The thesis presented by Goldhaber and Franck can be read as a
restatement of the idea that a media ecosystem delivers attention to
advertisers and therefore to consumption (Dovey, 2011). Thus,
attention is rendered equal to time. The advertising metrics of cost-
per-click-through or cost-per-thousand-viewers holds and the
context or nature of the attention rendered is ignored: as long as the
quantifiable metric is achieved the cost remains the same (Dovey,
2011). As Franck attempts to argue, with the increased competition
for our attention and the suggested decline of the traditional mass
media monopolies, the quality of attention paid becomes a concern.
Like Goldhaber and Franck, Thomas Davenport and John Beck
(2001) argue that there is a transition underway from time as labour
to time as attention:

Certainly something to which people allot a good
deal of time in practice can receive minimal
attention. […] Conversely, a huge amount of
effective attention can be given to something in a
small amount of time. (2001: 28)

Attention is implicitly figured in all of these accounts as a largely
rational, and entirely conscious, capacity. As Davenport and Beck
suggest: ‘Attention is focused mental engagement on a particular
item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a

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particular item, and then we decide whether to act’ (Davenport and
Beck, 2001: 20). An attention economy is therefore not considered
problematic because the strong causal link implied, the rational
choice of the economic subject, maintains a semblance of freedom.
However, once that causality is problematised a range of issues
opens up concerning the commodification of cognition as such.

Cognitive Capitalism

The critiques offered of the account of Homo economicus as rational
and self-interested and the broader destabilisation, if not dispersal,
of the stable human subject present an alternative account of the
attention economy. Attention is embodied as a cognitive capacity,
expressed not only consciously but also sub-consciously in the
various ways in which we comprehend and interact with the world.
Leftist, largely Marxian or post-Marxist, criticism of the apparent co-
opting of capacities for attention by the systems of capitalism have
variously addressed the industrialisation of attention capture, the
extension of state apparatuses of control towards cognition, and a
reaffirmed targeting of the ‘general intellect’ by capitalism. We focus
on two particular positions adopted here, that of Jonathan Beller, in
relation to the industrial processes of attention capture through
screen media, and that of the ‘post-Fordist’ movement, which
includes the work of Franco Berardi, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno,
and in particular Christian Marazzi, concerning the transformation
of labour into immaterial labour and the destruction of income.

Language lies at the heart of the post-Fordist transformation of
labour into what Marazzi (2008) calls the ‘New Economy’.
Marazzi’s thesis is that the distinction between the ‘real economy, in
which material goods are produced and sold, and the financial
economy, where the speculative dimension dominates investor
decisions’ must be reconceived in terms of language as a primary
creative force (Marazzi, 2008: 14). With the diminution of the value
of the labour force tied to the growth of the speculative financial
markets, and the pensions and savings of the workforce also tied to
those markets, the masses are enjoined to identify their personal
fortunes (in the fullest meaning of that word) with the success of the
financial markets:

With their savings invested in securities, workers
are no longer separated from capital […] they are
tied to the ups and downs of the markets and so

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they are co-interested in the ‘good operation’ of
capital in general. (Marazzi, 2008: 37)

These alliances of speculative capacities and the workforce,
combined with the promotion of the abstract value of brands
divorced from products and the growth of immaterial labour,
identify language ‘not only as a vehicle for transmitting data and
information, but also as a creative force’ (Marazzi, 2008: 27, original
emphasis). As machines increasingly perform manual labour, the
post-Fordists argue that digital technologies ‘change the relationship
between the intellectual content of work and its material execution’
(Berardi, 2001: 51; cited in Marazzi, 2008: 40). There is accordingly
a devaluation of labour time through the apparently limitless
expansion of available information, but that ‘limitless growth in the
supply of information conflicts with a limited human demand’
(Marazzi, 2008: 64). The ‘New Economy’ thus has at its heart an
attention economy. Marazzi argues that this sets in train a move in
the economy to consume not only work time but also ‘non-
productive’, or leisure, time.

The decrease of leisure time within the attention economy also
produces a crisis of income because ‘rather than increasing,
[income] seems instead to diminish […] in relation to the increase
in the quantity of time dedicated to work’ (Marazzi, 2008: 68). The
corollary is that if ‘attention time increases then the time dedicated
to earning a salary inevitably decreases’ (68). Thus the crisis in the
‘New Economy’ is its excess:

an economy innervated by communication
technology needs consumers who have a large
amount of attention time [and given that] the
New Economy… consumes not only work time
but also nonwork time or living time… it follows
that the crisis of the [attention economy] is
determined by the contradiction between
economic time and living time. (Marazzi, 2008:
146; original emphasis)

The crisis of this ‘excess economy’ lies in the disproportionate
relation between an ever increasing, and devaluing, sphere of
information and a diminution of attention time. In a call that
resonates with the suggestions made in-interview by Michel
Bauwens in this issue, Marazzi suggests that resistance can be
offered through the formulation of a ‘biopolitics from below’,

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ground-up movements to ‘take care of the multitude; that enables it
to live for itself’ (Marazzi, 2008: 157).

In a 1994 article on cinema as ‘capital of the 20th century’ and in his
2006 book The Cinematic Mode of Production, Jonathan Beller offers
an ‘attention theory of value’, developed over the course of several
years, as a ‘hypothesis of the production of human attention…
derived from the way in which capital process occupies human time
in the cinema and other media’ (Beller, 1994: §11). This attention
theory of value diagnoses, via a Marxian understanding of labour, the
‘prototype of the newest source of value production under
capitalism today’, namely ‘value-producing human attention’
(Beller, 2006a: 4). Cinema is the central technical fulcrum around
which this hypothesis turns: it is cinema that ‘brought the industrial
revolution to the eye’ (Beller, 2006b): ‘spectators’ practice of
connecting a montage of images moving in front of them was not
just analogous but homologous to workers in a factory assembly line
producing a commodity’ (Beller, 2006b).

In ‘Paying Attention’, an essay published in the same year as his
book and bearing the same title as its Epilogue, Beller argues that
‘the media have not just been organizing human attention; they are
the practical organization of attention… Attention is channeled in
media pathways that traverse both hardware and wetware’ (2006b).
Thus for Beller, as for the Post-Fordists, the attention economy not
only acts in terms of apparently rational practices but also through
cognition itself, the ‘wetware’ of the brain, as a form of not only
mental capitalism but also cognitive capitalism.

Beller arrives at a similar political economic concern for cognitive-
linguistic capacities to Marazzi. However, his polemic calls forth a
dystopian vision of a near total biopolitical subsumption of those
capacities, understood as Marx’s conceptualisation of ‘general
intellect’, in capitalist production: ‘We speak, act, think, behave, and
micro-manage ourselves and others according to the “score” that is
the general intellect – in short, the protocols or grammar of capital’
(Beller, 2006b). The subsuming of the general intellect into the
protocols of capital is thus the subsumption of humanity. As Patricia
Clough suggests of Beller’s argument: ‘labour itself becomes “a
subset of attention, one of the many kinds of possible attention
potentially productive of value”’ (Clough, 2003: 361 citing Beller,
1998: 91). The system of production that calls forth this totalising
attention economy is the industrialisation of image production that
Beller names ‘cinematization’ (Beller, 2006b). Enframed by our

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screens, and repressed in that framing, Beller suggests we are on the
brink of a nightmarish society of the spectacle: ‘in the world of
paying attention, humanity has become its own ghost’ (2006b).
However, it is, for some, perhaps not enough to speak in general
terms about cognition. For if the embodied nature of this form of
cognitive capitalism is to be understood as founded in the
marshalling of the neural and synaptic capacities of the brain, as
Beller (2006b) alludes with his use of the pseudo-technical term
‘wetware’, then it follows that we must attend to the brain as a site of
enquiry.

Taking care of brain and spirit

In the last decade there has been something of a ‘neurological’ turn
in the humanities (Lovink, 2010; Munster, 2011), in which theorists
have looked to neuroscience to find the specific somatic basis for the
inter-relation of mind and body and associated concepts such as
affect. General engagements with neuroscience, popularised by
neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio (2010) and Marc
Jeannerod (2002), have gained popular traction and have been
adopted by a range of scholars in the humanities and social sciences,
such as Connolly (2002), Malabou (2008) and Rose (2006). There
have also been adoptions of specific neurological research findings
both as impetus and justification for arguments (for example: Carr,
2010; Hayles, 2007; Stiegler, 2010). Three inter-related positions
are of particular relevance to the work collected in this journal: that
of Katherine Hayles (2007), whose work in turn is used by Bernard
Stiegler (2010 and this issue), and that of Catherine Malabou
(2008).

In a relatively short essay of 2007 Hayles offered a hypothesis of a
‘generational shift in cognitive styles’ between ‘deep’ attention and
‘hyper’ attention (2007: 187). The cognitive style of ‘hyper
attention’, Hayles suggests, evolved first as a means of dealing with
‘rapidly changing environments in which multiple foci compete for
attention’ (2007: 188), whereas ‘deep attention’ emerged later,
largely from pedagogical and scholarly sensibilities, ‘for solving
complex problems represented in a single medium’ (188). To
develop her hypothesis Hayles draws upon policy-oriented
discourses of the pathologies of attention deficit and hyperactivity
disorder and the study of media technologies (see: Kaiser Family
Foundation, 2005), backed up by broad readings of neuroscience
(Bear, Connors, & Paradiso, 2007). Hayles argues that this shift in

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cognitive styles is a pedagogical issue, for it challenges established
models of teaching and learning. Digital media are both part of the
problem and part of the solution for Hayles, for

[d]igital media offer important resources in facing
the challenge, both in the ways they allow
classroom space to be reconfigured and the
opportunities they offer for building bridges
between deep and hyper attention. (Hayles, 2007:
195)

Taking this argument as one of many impetuses, in a wide-ranging
argument about attention as a form of care (following Foucault,
2008), both for the self and for society, Bernard Stiegler adapts
Hayles’ categories of ‘deep’ and ‘hyper’ attention to identify a
particular risk to contemporary society. In Taking Care of Youth and
the Generations Stiegler (2010) announces a struggle for criticality
that must be re-commenced against the mainstream adoption of
digital technology’s potential visible in notions such as the attention
economy. This line of argument has as its basis a system of thought
that Stiegler has formulated through which we can understand the
human as a technical being, or rather becoming (see: Stiegler, 1998,
2009, 2010). Attention, understood in this ontology, is not an
individual but rather a psychic and social capacity that is historically,
and thus technically, conditioned: ‘The formation of attention is
always already simultaneously a psychic and social faculty’ (Stiegler,
2010: 18).

Drawing on and revising Edmund Husserl’s analysis of internal time
consciousness, for Stiegler attention accordingly consists of an
interplay between the interior (psychic) and technical accumulation
of ‘retentions’, which are the conscious acts of processing the
passage of time (see Stiegler, 2010: 17-19). This technical
accumulation is the exteriorisation of memory as ‘tertiary’
retentions, whereas primary and secondary retentions are interior to
the formation of the subject. The fixity of particular ways of
knowing, as tertiary retention, is understood by Stiegler, following
Derrida (1997) and the linguist Sylvian Auroux, as grammatisation:
the processes of describing and formalizing human behaviour into
representations such as symbols, pictures, words and code, so that it
can be reproduced. As Crogan has previously explained, ‘grammars’
are constructed in this way through which technocultural
programmes can be instantiated: ‘These are actions, habits, rituals,
practices that amount to sets and sequences of grammes […]

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conditioned and channelled by the ensemble of grammars which
comprise the cultural pro-gram’ (Crogan, 2010: 96 citing Stiegler,
2009: 72-73; additional emphasis). Grammatisation processes are,
according to Stiegler, a form of pharmakon. Drawing on Derrida’s
deconstructive reading of the Phaedrus in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’),
Stiegler glosses pharmakon as both a poison and a cure – a form of
recipe, substance or spell (Derrida, 1981). In Phaedrus, Plato uses
the concept of the pharmakon as a play of oppositions:
poison/remedy, bad/good, to characterise the ambivalent nature of
writing as a technique of memorisation.

What might be understood as the biopolitical apparatus of the
emerging attention economy outlined by Beller and Marazzi – albeit
from a Marxian perspective – is performed through an
interiorisation of the attention commodification logic. To
understand this interiorisation we must, in Stiegler’s view,
understand its basis in the pharmakon of grammatisation. This is not
only a formulation of biopower, operating at the level of the body,
but also of psychopower, operating within mentality and upon the
brain. This form of power consists in the tendency towards the
displacement of ‘attentional’ techniques, which produce ‘deep’
attention, by industrially mass-produced ‘attentional technologies’
that are designed to generate one particular kind of attention – to
consumption:

the appearance of so-called new media leads
directly to the hypersocialisation of attention
through the increasing collaboration among the
programming industries to capture audiences, to
the detriment of deep attention
… very probably correlating with attention deficit
disorder and infantile hyperactivity. (Stiegler,
2010: 94)

Not only does this operate socially but, Stiegler argues, attentional
technologies also affect the neural functions of the brain by
interfering with the ‘plastic’ function of synapses. However, because
of its plasticity the brain remains open to influence. Equally, as
Stiegler argues in this issue, the ‘pharmacological’ character of
psychotechnologies leaves open the capacity for a less poisonous
mobilisation of the recognised potential of digital audiovisual
culture to re-form the economy and society.

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In an argument cognate to Stiegler’s (2010) work, provocatively
entitled What Should We Do with Our Brain?, Catherine Malabou
(2008) engages with contemporary neuroscience literature to revisit
the question of the subject, or ‘the self’, in light of the proposition of
neuroplasticity. Malabou builds on recent neuroscientific
developments concerning understandings of (neuro)plasticity with
her own thinking of plasticity through the philosophy of Hegel. As
the title of her work illustrates, Malabou is interested in the
philosophical import of the neuroscience of plasticity. For Malabou,
plasticity provokes ethical and political questions and demands that
we attend to our neural and cognitive nature(s) in relation to how
we act. She argues that to consider ‘an ongoing reworking of
neuronal morphology’ (Malabou, 2008: 25) forces us to think
beyond the notion of a ‘hard wired’ evolutionary tendency, beyond a
biological or genetic determinism:

It is precisely because […] the brain is not already
made that we must ask what we should do with it,
what we should do with the plasticity that makes
us, precisely in the sense of a work, sculpture,
modelling, architecture. (Malabou, 2008: 7)

What is at stake for Malabou (2008) then, as Ian James (2012)
suggests, is ‘both the plasticity of neuronal self and that of collective
social and political organisation’ (James, 2012: 100). While she
does not directly address attention, Malabou’s argument clearly has
such capacities at its heart.

Even though Malabou utilises the empirical findings of the ‘hard’
sciences, she is at pains to outline how the accounts of
neuroscientists such as Damasio and Le Doux resort to culturally
specific notions such as an auto-poetic function in describing how
consciousness develops by telling itself stories about its own
‘begetting’ (see Malabou, 2008: 58-62). Consequently, it is
important to realise that hard science does not simply provide an
essential epistemological truth about the neuroscientific basis for
our faculties of attention. On the contrary, Malabou argues it is all
the more important to critically evaluate the ideological basis for
scientific and technocultural knowledge production as the
neurological turn heads in the direction of a cultural and historical
conception of consciousness. Equally, Isabelle Stengers has
forcefully argued that scientific ‘truth’ emerges through a shifting
dialogue between human and non-human assemblages. Again,
scientific knowledge for Stengers (1997, 2005) does not have a

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special form of access to things in themselves. Nature ‘cannot be
dominated by a theoretical gaze, but must be explored, with an open
world to which we belong, in whose construction we participate’
(Stengers, 1997: 37). We cannot accordingly exempt our own
‘nature’, studied by science, from these caveats. In a complementary
way, Malabou notes that human nature ‘contradicts itself and…
thought is the fruit of this contradiction’ (2008: 82). Accordingly,
we can see that it remains important to maintain a healthy
scepticism about any forceful or unproblematic affirmations of a
settled neuroscientific basis for the study of attention.

Online intelligence

A number of popular commentators have offered arguments
concerning the effects and potential of the internet that range from
feeling anxious about a perceived diminishing of attention caused by
life online, to proposing an emerging capacity for creativity and
collaboration engendered by network technologies. Amongst the
anxious are Nicholas Carr, who expresses a technological
determinist fear of the human subject being rewired by network
media, and Jaron Lanier, who suggests the ‘hive mind’ of
participatory media has blunted intelligence through a form of
‘digital Maoism’. Amongst those seeking to promote or rehabilitate
media technologies as a positive supplement to the human are
Howard Rheingold, who suggests the negative effects of the internet
are outweighed by the positive if we are mindful in our usage, and
Clay Shirky, who argues that digital technologies have produced an
increase in leisure time that creates an untapped cognitive potential
he calls a ‘cognitive surplus’.

Perhaps the most apprehensive, and widely-read, argument is
Nicholas Carr’s (2010) The Shallows, in which he argues that the
internet as a mediator of much of contemporary communication
engenders particular forms of interaction that are having detrimental
effects on our mental capacities. In Carr’s thesis, the brain is thus
rewired by the internet so that users of digital media are rendered
more efficient automatons for repetitive tasks that require little
attention, but at the expense of ‘higher’ cognitive faculties:

calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is
being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that
wants and needs to take in and dole out

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information in short, disjointed, overlapping
bursts – the faster the better. (Carr, 2010: 10)

The substantive elements of the argument, as with Hayles’ ‘deep’
versus ‘hyper’ attention, are supported by references to work in
neuroscience. Here again we are faced with the political implications
of adopting scientific research without reservation, perhaps making
greater claims of importance than are warranted. Indeed, articles
within this issue – in particular, the contributions by Bucher and
Terranova – raise concerns about Carr’s mobilisation of
neuroscience.

The apparent ‘efficiency’ afforded by the advances of digital media
within the world of work has been characterised by Shirky as
productive of a latent potential he calls a ‘cognitive surplus’ (2010).
According to Shirky’s thesis, we (and the American public in
particular) have, for some time, been encouraged to squander our
time and intellect as ‘passive’ consumers. This has produced an
excess of intellect, energy and time, what Marxists might identify as
leisure time, which could be put to productive use. Just as Marazzi
(2008) argues, Shirky, albeit from a very different standpoint,
suggests that latent leisure time can be put to ‘good’ use in the
production of value. His oft-cited example is that of Wikipedia,
which has been largely created with only one percent of the ‘latent’
time and energy of the American populus. Such an argument is of
course open to Marxist critiques of the appropriation of leisure time
for production, such as Julian Küklich’s (2005) articulation of
‘playbour’ and Terranova’s (2000) critique of ‘free labour’. The
corollary to this excess, for Marazzi (2008), is that the increase in
information leads to a greater scarcity of attention. Shirky (2010)
sees no such diminution of the consumptive capacity; rather, he
suggests there is only a rise in ‘creativity’. Following Maurizio
Lazzarato’s (1996) treatment of ‘immaterial labour’, we might
understand Shirky’s proposition as forms of life becoming the source
of innovation. We would thus arrive at the propagation of neoliberal
biopower in the commodification of life itself, a similar outcome to
the concerns of Nikolas Rose (2006).

Through this introduction to the various ways in which attention
has been conceptualised and problematised, it should have become
clear that while there certainly is a broad interest in the capacity for
attention and its uses, there is by no means a consensus of opinion.

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The various tropes of attention as commodity, cognitive affordance
or form of labour offer a fertile ground for further analysis and
discussion, which is precisely the purpose of this issue. Thus in the
final part of this editorial we present a brief discussion of the papers
we have brought together that collectively offer a critique of an
‘attention economy’.

In this issue

This issue sets itself two interrelated tasks in response to the scope
and implications of these interrelated positions concerning
attention, consciousness, culture, economics and politics. Firstly, it
interrogates the notion of attention as it is elaborated in approaches
to the attention economy and to media as forms of attention
capture. The essays by three leading contributors to thinking in and
around these themes, Bernard Stiegler, Tiziana Terranova, and
Jonathan Beller, have such an interrogation as their principal task.
They develop different, overlapping and sometimes contrasting
perspectives on how a critical reposing of the question of attention
might reframe its purchase on the central themes of the relation
between interiority and exteriority, minds and media, economics
and culture. The interview with Michel Bauwens, and the essays by
Ben Roberts and Sy Taffel, are also working toward this end in that
they identify various limitations and exclusions of the predominant
articulation of the attention economy and move toward alternative,
more productive, ethical or socially just formulations.

The second task of this issue is pursued in the essays of Tania
Bucher, Martin Thayne, Rolien Hoyng and the three contributions
to the additional section of the issue. These three – from Ruth
Catlow, Constance Fleuriot and Bjarke Liboriussen – represent less
scholarly but no less acute strategic inquiries into the thinking and
re-making of what Stiegler calls attentional technics. Together, these
contributions address particular instantiations of media forms,
design practices and phenomena – from Facebook and Second Life
to pervasive media design and Istanbul’s digitally mediated
European Capital of Culture project – as a way of exploring and
critically inflecting the implementation of the attention economy.
This second mode moves from material phenomena to theoretical
analysis and critique, while the first goes the other way. As we have
argued, however, the necessity of the traffic between them is a
central tenet of how we endeavour to pay attention to contemporary
digital technoculture in this issue.

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Stiegler’s essay, ‘Relational Ecology and the Digital Pharmakon’, is
placed first to indicate the formative role of Stiegler’s philosophy of
technology in the germination of the critical discussion on what it
means to ‘pay attention’. From its beginning, his project was
dedicated to the ‘urgent’ task (as he noted in the preface to Technics
and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, 1998) of developing a new
critique of contemporary technoculture, capable of making a
difference at this specific epoch of what could be called the ‘digital
transition’. This critique, which has been progressively elaborated in
a number of books and book series, proceeds from a rigorous
philosophical redefinition of the human as always composed with its
technical milieu. As discussed above, human being is ‘essentially’
inessential, a contingent, metastable (at best) mix of this artefactual
exteriority, one which possesses its own dynamic composed with
that of the human (for now at least). With an interiority that
imagines and anticipates itself and its future on the basis of the
memories available to it from out of the past – thanks to what
Foucault called ‘the archive’ and Heidegger ‘facticity’ – the human
makes exterior forms that mediate this experience and inflect its
becoming other. ‘The media’ have become, consequently, a central
focus of Stiegler’s critique of contemporary technoculture and, in
particular, of the monopolisation by commercial interests of the
forms and channels through which interior experience becomes the
(material) stuff of the collective cultural dynamic.

In the essay presented here, Stiegler argues for the importance of
approaching attention – that activity of consciousness (interiority)
before the exterior world – from this perspective in order to
comprehend the stakes of expansion of the attention economy.
Drawing on Gilbert Simondon, D. W. Winnicott and others, he
argues that attention must be thought of as an intrinsically social as
well as individual psychic act. Attention is not a passive or automatic
perceptual process, but one that is trained, learnt, and culturally and
historically – and therefore, technically – conditioned. Stiegler
reviews Western philosophy and cultural and social history to
identify the central part played by the grammatising technics of
graphical, writing and more recently audiovisual media in
conditioning the ‘attentional forms’ through which the West became
the global, globalising power that today confronts us with a range of
crises signalling our possible ‘end’. If, today, ‘attentional’ techniques
and technics tend to be replaced by industrially mass produced
‘attentional technologies’ that are designed to generate one
particular kind of attention – to consumption – this is by no means a
fait accompli. Stiegler insists on the pharmacological character of the

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technical provision of our contemporary ‘relational ecology’. This is
precisely the point and the possibility of paying attention to
attention: to reanimate the potential for a less poisonous adoption of
the widely recognised potential of digital audiovisual culture in order
to re-form (that is, re-mediate) culture, sociality, economy and
ecology today.

Tiziana Terranova offers a more specific critique of the
contradictory assumptions subtending the notion of the attention
economy before developing an alternative account of the ‘social
brain’. Her argument is not dissimilar in intent to Stiegler’s turn
toward a Simondonian reposing of attention as the mediated
relation between individual and collective. Her ‘Attention, Economy
and the Brain’ identifies the economic logic operative in the
‘discovery’ of the attention economy by Goldhaber and others as the
solution to the problem of informational abundance in the mass
mediated (and then digitally saturated) technoculture of late
modernity. Attention becomes the new scarce resource which the
economic must manage, utilise, exchange, distribute and speculate
upon. Terranova interrogates the dovetailing of this economic
revaluation of the mental activity of producers and consumers with a
biopolitical (Jonathan Crary, after Foucault) and neurological
(Catherine Malabou, N. Katherine Hayles) redefinition and
institutional reforming of labour, leisure, education and cultural
production in general. In the second part of the essay, she evokes the
necessity of thinking the ‘social brain’ by drawing on Stiegler and
Lazzarato’s recent mobilisation of nineteenth-century French
sociologist Gabriel Tarde’s critique of the social and cultural damage
wrought by industrialisation’s deskilling of the labour force and the
separation of work from the continuity of social and cultural life.
Tarde’s proposition concerning the brain’s ‘labour of attention’ is
developed as a means of thinking the always social, outward,
communicative dimension of the brain’s activity, its constant,
iterative incorporation of the exterior in its working out of existence.
The social nature of this attentional labour realises value. The drive
which animates the proponents of attention economics, namely, to
capture, quantify, predict and monetise the attention paid by
individual brains, fails to comprehend this disjunction between the
economic calculation of the value of attention and the role of
attention in the very production of the values of the culture upon
which the economy feeds.

In ‘Wagers Within the Image: Rise of Visuality, Transformation of
Labour, Aesthetic Regimes’, Jonathan Beller continues and extends

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his mobilisation of the Marxist traditions of political economic and
Kulturkritik in a polemical account of the contemporary tendency of
global capitalist technoculture. Building on his critical account of
attention economy rhetoric in The Cinematic Mode of Production
(2006) and earlier work discussed above, Beller develops a
materialist critique of cognitive capitalism and its economy built on
visuality, spectacle and the mobilisation of the ‘sensuous labour’ of
the worker-consumer. If the Soviet avant-garde filmmakers such as
Eisenstein and Vertov had theorised and experimented with the
potential of cinema to engineer a new ‘soul’ for the modern worker-
citizen, industrial capitalism had already begun the development of
the proto-consumer supporting the ongoing expansion of capitalism
outward geographically as well as across all aspects of lived
experience through its industrial production of routine experience,
spectacle and leisure time. This development becomes fully manifest
in the contemporary passage toward a fully globalised, digital
mediated realtime, which Beller is at pains to argue is strictly
correlative to the unprecedented impoverishment and oppression of
the majority of the world’s population and the exhaustion of its
natural resources. Insisting on the complicity of all mediated cultural
production in this destructive dynamic – including scholarship in
the age of the ‘digital humanities’ where cultural capital
accumulation threatens the value and viability of critical thought –
Beller explores the possibilities for responding to or resisting the
pervasive ‘reconfiguration of subjectivity’ as capitalist commodity.
His conclusion is that critical theory might do well to pay attention
to how those excluded (in deed and in thought) from the immaterial
virtual citizenry of the digital future try to make something of and
with the digital media designed not for their benefit. Attention to
what Beller calls an ‘aesthetics of survival’ being developed at the
limit of what can be represented today might re-open speculation on
questions of the just, the common, and the care of all beings, older
questions needing to be remembered and re-posed in light of the
virtualising logistics of globalisation.

In his interview with Sam Kinsley, Michel Bauwens, co-founder of
the P2P Foundation, argues that peer-to-peer production represents
a pathway toward the all-too-evidently necessary reinvention of the
industrial capitalist economic model. Peer-to-peer is already a
legitimate description of how the ‘knowledge workers’ of cognitive
capitalism work, even if their labour takes place in proprietary
enterprises and is consequently alienated from them in its product’s
entry into marketing, distribution and intellectual property regimes.
In Bauwens’ words, ‘the commons creates value and the market

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captures that value’. He considers historical precedents for the
increasingly apparent tension between the collective and cultural
values of peer-to-peer and the capitalist economic system, in, for
example, the transition from the late Roman empire to the feudal
system, and from the feudal to the early capitalist one. He
approaches the contemporary ‘crisis’ moment from a hopeful
perspective, looking at these past moments as instances of a kind of
becoming-out-of-phase of the sociocultural with the economic-legal
regimes which presaged an overturning of the status quo. Bauwens
surveys different positions within the peer-to-peer movement – such
as that of Yochai Benkler, the Oekonux group and Dmytri Kleiner –
concerning the means and logic of a ‘prefigurative politics’
promoting or provoking this overturning. Responding to a question
about how the attention economy notion figures in this account of
the possible passage to a P2P economy and culture, Bauwens states
that while there is enormous investment in the commodification of
attention (along with everything else capable of being thought of as
‘valuable’ today), there is no reason to think that ‘capitalism has
won’ because of the success of a platform such as Facebook. Related
to his thought of how today we live across or between two phases of
cultural and economic (re)production (and echoing here Stiegler’s
pharmacological approach), Bauwens argues that we are both ‘de-
commodifying and commodifying today’, and that there is both
potential and danger in this situation. The Occupy movement
represents for Bauwens a genuinely novel form of mass political
action (along with the Pirate Party and the Indignados movements),
one that operates in the disjunction between the mainstream media
and the networking, peer-to-peer potential of digital network media.
These movements more or less consciously adopt an open source,
peer-to-peer approach to political intervention, and represent a
prefiguration of the ‘new society’.

In ‘Escaping Attention: Digital Media Hardware, Materiality and
Ecological Cost’ Sy Taffel argues that the rhetoric of the ‘immaterial’
character of the digital technologies of the attention economy elide
very material concerns. Like Beller’s insistence on paying attention
to the majority of the global population routinely forgotten in
discussions of contemporary global technoculture, Taffel makes
explicit the social and ecological implications of the materiality of
digital technological production from resourcing, manufacture and
energy use, to distribution and consumption, through to disposal
and recycling. Drawing on an ecological conception of media and
materiality developed through Gregory Bateson’s critical revision of
the cybernetic tradition and Felix Guattari’s ecophilosophy, and

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combining the Marxist materialist analysis of industrial production
with a sense of the global expansion of alienation in the era of what
Stiegler calls hyper-consumption, Taffel explores several case studies
which highlight the problematic forgetting of materiality in
contemporary debates about technoculture. These include the
exploitative sourcing of rare earth materials (typified by the
notorious trade in ‘Coltan’ tantalum from the war-torn region of the
Democratic Republic of the Congo), the exploitative just-in-time
manufacturing processes of the latest consumer electronics in
various parts of the world (with Apple’s Chinese contractor,
Foxconn, a recent high profile case), and the exploitative e-waste
and recycling practices that have evolved with little effective
regulation or oversight. These serve to remove from view the terrible
wastage of consumer gadgets by those who can afford them and
extract what industry is prepared to salvage from them on condition
that the costs are kept as low as possible. The ecological and human
costs (in health and social well-being) are borne by the distant
populations dependent on the revenues from the highly dangerous
labour of dismantling these gadgets. Taffel makes us consider the
consequences of these material entailments of the virtual, realtime
digital technosphere and offers a way of bringing these two aspects
of global technoculture into a critically conceivable and ethically
more productive relation.

Ben Roberts examines the free, libre and open source software
movement (FLOSS) as his contribution to the reevaluation of
attention economy in this issue. ‘Attention-seeking: Technics,
Publics and Software Individuation’ resonates with the essays by
Stiegler and Terranova in identifying the limitations of Goldhaber’s
economic valuation of attention along the lines of Marx’s account of
exchange value as the reductive translation and insertion into a
narrow capitalist economic order of something phenomenally and
socially more complex. Roberts then examines some influential
formulations of open source and collaborative software production
that promote alternative models of attentional forms and their
development. Christopher Kelty’s Two Bits: The Cultural
Significance of Free Software (2008) receives the most attention for
the way it insists on the collective dimension of open software, a
move which responds to the more individualistic (and politically
naïve) celebration of autonomous ‘creative labour’ in Yochai
Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks (2006). Kelty’s notion of software
production as a ‘recursive’ contribution to the open source
community’s shared discursive becoming is scrutinised by Roberts.
Its ambivalent indebtedness to a Habermasian notion of the public

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sphere is identified as its problematic basis – the problem being that
software production tends to be treated as a lingua franca for an
ideal and ideally unified single internet public. This is where Roberts
turns to Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of technology to point the
way toward an account of FLOSS’ potential to critically and
creatively shape the formation of digital attentional forms. This
account would need to understand software development as a
process of individuation between individuals and their collectives,
one always composed with the dynamic of technical individuation in
which software developers are themselves part of the individuation
of software ‘individuals’. Software production would be in this
account both less and more than a recursive contribution to a public
debate about the future of ‘the’ internet, and its potential to reform
the milieu of attentional technics could be better assessed from this
perspective.

Taina Bucher, in her article ‘A Technicity of Attention: How
Software “Makes Sense”’ offers a sceptical response to the
neurological turn in the humanities. Bucher mobilises an
understanding of ‘technicity’ to critically examine the internalisation
of control as ‘governmentality’ (pace Foucault) that underpins the
specific human-machine assemblages of attention harnessing
located in Facebook. Through a detailed reading of the specific
affordances of some core protocols of Facebook, in code and the
practices they engender, Bucher examines the techno-social
structure of the attention apparatuses of Facebook. These
algorithms operate within a form of technicity, which Bucher takes
to be a ‘coconstitutive milieu of relations between the human and
their technical supports’ (Crogan and Kennedy, 2009: 109).
OpenSocial, OpenGraph and GraphRank are examined as particular
articulations of power, realised in relation between code and subject,
as the algorithms automate the ‘sense making’ processes of what
content is ‘relevant’ to a particular user. Bucher thus identifies this
marshalling of what is visible, and also invisible, in Facebook as a
locus of attention as a form of ‘governmentality’, which she takes to
be the rationalities underlying the techniques for directing human
behavior (Foucault, 2008). For Bucher, then, attention is managed
by Facebook to propagate a certain social order of continued
participation.

In ‘Friends Like Mine: The Production of Socialised Subjectivity in
the Attention Economy’, Martin Thayne approaches Facebook
through the lens of political economy. He interrogates the emerging
interrelationship between capital, labour, subjectivity and affect

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which has become increasingly synonymous with a number of
online social networking technologies and practices. In this regard,
Thayne analyses the ‘Like’ button as a designed, socio-technological
interaction which captures the emotive connections and
engagements produced amongst the multitude of Facebook users.
The extraordinary, speculative, financial value of such sites are
‘based’ on how such elements serve its advertising architecture,
which utilises the information contributed by users (including ‘liked’
pages) to deliver more relevant and targeted marketing. Through an
exploration of the collaborative and socialised modes of subjectivity
which emerge from the use of the ‘Like’ button and similar tools,
Thayne suggests that proprietary online social networks are central
to the commercial subsumption of forms of life itself. This account
draws on work which aligns the biopolitical production of
knowledge, desire, attention and sociality with modes of immaterial
labour. Presented here, then, is a critique of those mechanisms of
bio- and what Stiegler would call psycho-power which permeate
Facebook. This critique examines how specific functions, protocols
and applications may embody the productive power of SNS
technology in the context of configuring attention and controlling
social interactions.

Rolien Hoyng in ‘Popping Up and Fading Out: Participatory
Networks and Istanbul’s Creative City Project’ analyses the
networks constructed as both a part and result of Istanbul European
Capital of Culture 2010. Considered as an assemblage, Hoyng
argues that Istanbul as a Capital of Culture functioned both as an
attention directing apparatus, with the compulsion of ‘interactivity’
as participation, and also as a focal point for resistance. Hoyng’s
essay focuses on socio-technical forms of governance that targeted
Istanbul’s transformation into a ‘creative city’ and, in particular, on
discourses and practices of ‘networking’. For Hoyng, the apparatuses
of networking are what Stiegler calls ‘psychotechnologies’ that both
condition and delimit our knowledge, know-how (savoir-faire) and
our capabilities to care, including ‘taking care’ of ourselves and our
city (here, Istanbul). Drawing on extensive empirical evidence
derived from fieldwork, Hoyng critically examines the specific
practices of networking that stitched together the groups from
which power over the ‘creative city’ process was exercised and also
provided a means for resistance. New relations of care among urban
populations capable of defying regimes of psychopower are unlikely
to emerge, according to her, from displays of otherness through
information systems. For Hoyng, these kinds of relation require the

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cultivation of a multiplicity of attentional forms that mediate care,
memory, and dialogue and that accommodate different sets of skills.

In the additional section of this issue, artist and arts activist Ruth
Catlow, architectural design researcher Bjarke Liboriussen and
Pervasive Media researcher and educator Constance Fleuriot
consider significant attentional forms and practices in the recent and
emerging digital media milieu. Liboriussen’s ‘poster’ considers the
lessons to be learnt from the Second Life ‘bubble’s’ intertwined
utopianisms of its now exhausted virtual property speculation and its
promotion of a virtual architectural design experience. The wider
implications of the technicity of ‘virtual worlds’ are explored in this
thoughtful contribution. Ruth Catlow of Furtherfield online art
community discusses We Won’t Fly for Art (2009), a collaborative
media art project she undertook with co-founder Mark Garrett to
encourage participants in the international contemporary art
community to pay attention to the ecological implications of their
default acceptance of the regime of jetsetting around the
international exhibition circuit. The project encouraged 26 people
to sign up and participate in a collaborative reflection on the
complicity of international art with global capitalism, something that
is shared by the Furtherfield’s ‘Media Art Ecologies’ programme – of
which this work was part. In ‘Avoiding Vapour Trails in the Virtual
Cloud’, Constance Fleuriot gives an account of research workshops
she conducted at the Digital Cultures Research Centre with
pervasive media designers in order to develop both a language and
an ethical perspective – an ethically inflected design language – on
pervasive media development practice. Pervasive media is rapidly
moving from the experimental to the commercial development stage
and soon will be a major form of attentional technics. Using
Stiegler’s call for a reinvestment in Kant’s notion of enlightenment
as the entry into ‘majority’ of all, Fleuriot characterises the
workshops she conducted as dedicated to developing a wider critical
and ethical engagement of the designers in what they are doing
(Stiegler, 2010).

Notes

1 The European Science Foundation conference, ‘Paying Attention:
Digital Media Cultures and Intergenerational Responsibility’
(www.payingattention.org), was convened by Professor Jonathan
Dovey and the authors, Digital Cultures Research Centre,
University of the West of England, Bristol, in September 2010 to

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gather the input and insights of creative practitioners exploring
critical and alternative uses of new media forms and technologies.

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TOWARDS A CRITIQUE OF THE ATTENTION ECONOMY

Patrick Crogan and Samuel Kinsley

Under R�i�

How YouTube
Created the
Attention
Economy

“Like, Comment, Subscribe,” a new history of the platform
by Mark Bergen, makes the case that YouTube cracked the
code for turning the desire to watch and be watched into

money.

By Kevin Lozano
October 4, 2022

Illustration by Daniel Jurman

YouTube has consumed a good part of my days for more than a decade. As a teen-ager, I used the

video-streaming platform to scrounge for crumbs of knowledge, watching free lectures on
everything from algebra to literary modernism. Now I navigate to the YouTube app on my

television most mornings to watch the news. I stream workout videos. I listen to music. I watch
celebrities give tours of their garishly decorated mansions. Sometimes I stay on the site for hours,

lost in the maze of memes, dinner ideas, and all manner of distraction.

My YouTube habit is far from unique. According to the company, the site has more than two

billion monthly “logged-in” users. In a given twenty-four-hour period, more than a billion hours
of video are streamed, and every minute around �ve hundred hours of video are uploaded. The

torrent of content added to the site has helped establish new forms of entertainment (unboxing
videos) and revolutionized existing ones (the mukbang). YouTube is a social network, but it is

more than that; it is a library, a music-streaming platform, and a babysitting service. The site
hosts the world’s largest collection of instructional videos. If you want to �x a tractor or snake a

drain or perfectly dice an onion, you can learn how to do these things on YouTube. Of course,
these are not the only things you can learn. Anti-vaxxers, 9/11 truthers, live-streamed acts of

mass violence—all of these have surfaced on YouTube, too.

“No company has done more to create the online attention economy we’re all living in today,”

Mark Bergen writes at the start of “Like, Comment, Subscribe,” his detailed history of YouTube,
from 2005, the year it was founded, to the present. Among the titans of social media, YouTube is

sometimes overlooked. It has not attracted as much adulation, censure, theorizing, or scrutiny as
its rivals Facebook and Twitter. Its founders are not public �gures on the order of Mark

Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey. Aaron Sorkin hasn’t scripted a movie about YouTube. But Bergen
argues that YouTube “set the stage for modern social media, making decisions throughout its

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history that shaped how attention, money, ideology, and everything else worked online.” It’s one

thing to attract attention on the Internet; it’s another thing to turn attention into money, and this
is where YouTube has excelled. The site, Bergen writes, was “paying people to make videos when

Facebook was still a site for dorm-room �irting, when Twitter was a techie fad, and a decade
before TikTok existed.” Posting on Facebook or Twitter might net you social capital, an audience,

or even a branded-content deal, but the bene�ts of uploading videos to YouTube are more
tangible: its users can get a cut of the company’s revenue.

The site has been compensating “creators” since 2007, a scant two years after it launched, and
only a year after Google acquired the company for a price tag of $1.65 billion. YouTube splits its

advertising revenue �fty-�ve per cent to forty-�ve per cent, in favor of creators—one of the best
deals available to anyone hoping to be paid for their time on the Internet. Since 2018, the main

prerequisites a creator has needed to monetize their videos is a minimum of a thousand
subscribers and four thousand “watch hours” in the previous twelve months. Recipe developers,

video-game live-streamers, podcasters, teen-age trolls, children playing with toys, aspiring
entrepreneurs hawking get-rich-quick schemes, right-wing shock jocks (at least those who

haven’t been demonetized), and major television networks are all members of the baronial class of
YouTube moneymakers. In a recent interview, the veteran science-and-education vlogger Hank

Green said that the site presented such favorable terms that the idea he would “walk away” from
YouTube would be like leaving America: “There are things I very much do not like about it, but I

feel a little like a citizen, so that would be such a big decision to make.”

Bergen, a reporter for Bloomberg News and Businessweek, catalogues YouTube’s rise and the

billions (of users, dollars, hours of video) it controls in a tone that is at once resigned, rhapsodic,
and disgusted. The story his book unspools is one of breathtaking pro�t and foolish stumbles,

violence and greed and corporate obfuscation. It is also one of surprising stability: YouTube,
Bergen writes, is “the sleeping giant of social media.” Even as TikTok has become a megalith and

other social networks have lost their touch with the youth, the site has retained its audience. A
recent Pew Poll found that YouTube is used by ninety-�ve per cent of American teen-agers aged

thirteen to seventeen, compared to sixty-seven per cent who used TikTok. As one of its
employees told Bergen, “How do you boycott electricity?”

YouTube was the invention of three former PayPal employees: a graphic designer named Chad
Hurley and two coders, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. Hurley had the vaguely populist

aspiration of providing a service for what he called the “everyday people” of Web 2.0, those
online diarists who �ocked to LiveJournal and WordPress. Inspired by early social-media sites

such as Friendster and hornier fare like the attractiveness-ranking site Hot or Not, the trio hoped
to create something fun, popular, and possibly even sexy. Dating was, in fact, tossed around as one

of the early motivations for the site: in a memo Karim sent to his co-founders, he wrote, “A
dating-focused video site will draw much more attention than stupid videos. Why? Because

dating and �nding girls is what most people who are not married are primarily occupied with.”
(This hormone-fuelled premise, of course, informs the origins of Facebook, too.)

One of the book’s insights is that there’s no way to separate the economic power of YouTube
from its emotional and psychological attachments—voyeurism is what inspired it in the �rst

place. From this perspective, Hurley’s desire to cater to the “everyday people” of the Internet
might be better understood as a prescient sense that one could convert the passive desire to

watch and be watched into pro�t. As it has grown, YouTube has embraced this understanding of

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its purpose. A 2017 video outlining the company’s brand mission claims that the site’s purpose is

to discover “the rawest, purest, most un�ltered portrait of who we are as people.” The drive to
make ever more attention-getting content has created a persistently difficult question for the site:

What are you willing to do to capture eyeballs?

Any platform that relies on user-generated content is always at war with its more troublesome

users—those uploading not only pirated stuff but also material of the shocking and morally
reprehensible variety. Content moderators were an essential part of YouTube’s early staff. The

challenge they faced wasn’t just nudity or content that broke copyright rules but an unceasing
geyser of grossness—“fetish clips of women in heels stepping on creatures, cats being boiled

alive”—and images so disturbing that one former moderator would only barely describe to
Bergen what she saw. Other content violations were more subtle. An early handbook implored

moderation staff to “Use your judgment!” above a pair of pictures. One that showed, according to
Bergen, a “woman holding a banana to her mouth suggestively” should be rejected, though

“another eating a corn dog normally” was “�ne.” One of the lawyers who helped outline YouTube
policy in those days wondered, “What kind of Pandora’s box have we opened?” Bergen deploys

his own mythic comparison to the site’s unruly, babbling collective of content: “The sprawling,
Babelian video site made internet governance nearly impossible.”

As early as 2007, mass murderers were taking to YouTube to air out their beliefs and share their
plans. The site’s moderators and other warning systems (concerned viewers could �ag videos,

which then entered a lengthy queue) could not always respond quickly. A year earlier, the Thai
government threatened to ban the site for hosting videos that insulted the king, a criminal

offense in the country, leading a Google lawyer to urge a YouTube contractor to leave as quickly
as possible. Around the same time, German officials bombarded the company with demands to

remove videos containing Nazi imagery. Since YouTube did not yet have an office in Germany,
the company decided that it could get away with ignoring the requests; a member of the policy

team placed a placard on his desk that read “Do not Appease the Germans.” As the mountains of
content piled up, and YouTube’s scope became more global, one thing became abundantly clear:

imploring someone to use their judgment was a �imsy model for best practices.

The company used Google’s technology to develop arti�cial-intelligence tools to scan footage for

clear content violations, allowing for the removal of obvious hate symbols, sexually explicit
content, and copied footage. It struggled to articulate a consistent rationale for other decisions—

offending content was handled in ways that could seem slipshod, panicked, and self-serving.
YouTube removed some videos deemed offensive (for example, the more violent variety of

Saddam Hussein-execution clips) and left others up (a teaser for an Islamophobic movie that led
to protests around the Middle East). When criticized, the company turned to what has become a

standard defense among the social-media giants: it was merely a platform and not a publisher.
But YouTube, Bergen’s book makes clear, was never a neutral arbiter—the company made

decisions that in�uenced which ideas succeeded. A series of changes to its recommendation
algorithm, beginning in 2012, illustrated a clear preference for certain kinds of content: “watch

time” was privileged over “views,” meaning that videos that kept viewers engaged for longer were
given preferential treatment, and “viral hits” that attempted to achieve views alone were

downgraded.

The algorithm changes, or at least the perception of them, affected the kind of videos that were

posted to the site. Out were ephemeral joys, such as clips of dogs on skateboards. In were videos

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that the recommendation engine seemed more likely to surface: “long, engaging content about

something newsworthy,” according to Bergen. This included videos by unsavory talking heads,
such as the Canadian white nationalist Stefan Molyneux and the British men’s-rights activist

known as Sargon of Akkad, who dilated on race science and anti-feminism—subjects that
attracted a particularly devoted core of viewers. But the single greatest bene�ciary of the

algorithm shift was the Swedish video-gamer Felix Kjellberg, known as PewDiePie. His hours-
long live streams and antic commentary were perfectly suited to an algorithm that rewarded

eyeballs on the screen. By the early twenty-tens, he had become YouTube’s biggest star. As his
persona grew more extreme, he became one of the company’s biggest problems, attracting

constant attention for provocative stunts. YouTube apparently put up with him for a simple
reason—he was a cash cow. From 2012 to 2019, Bergen writes, “humanity consumed

130,322,387,624 minutes of PewDiePie videos.” The ads shown during these videos earned him
more than thirty-six million dollars and YouTube itself around thirty-two million dollars.

For a number of years, YouTube largely left alone more expliclity bigoted and conspiratorial
�gures such as Molyneux, Richard Spencer, and Alex Jones. Most of them, as Bergen writes,

“were also on Facebook and Twitter anyway.” A 2017 investigation from the Times of London
found that videos uploaded by neo-Nazis and �� supporters were bene�tting from ad

placement; companies like A. T. & T. and Johnson & Johnson threatened to boycott. YouTube,
along with the other social-media titans, began to ban the likes of Jones and Molyneux, and

demonetized the borderline cases as it revised and revised again its “hate speech” policies. But a
cottage industry of take artists continues to �ourish. This spring, creators commenting on (or

mocking) the Amber Heard–Johnny Depp defamation trial were popular and pro�table.
(Though some recent research suggests that the algorithm may not have bolstered YouTube’s

fringe as much as the platform’s basics of mass scale and economy did.)

Yet, despite a continual stream of scandal and disaster, YouTube has emerged from its

controversies relatively unscathed. The site is not immune to public pressure or the threat of
regulation—Google and YouTube paid a hundred and seventy million dollars in a settlement

with the F.T.C. and the State of New York over allegations that it had violated children’s online-
privacy laws. (This month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a potentially momentous case: the

outcome of Gonzalez v. Google will decide if YouTube is more broadly liable for the content it
makes available for its user.) But YouTube doesn’t have the outsized reputation that Facebook

and Twitter have taken on as public villains, destroyers of democracy, and general irritants. How
has it evaded the same characterization?

Bergen comes up with several answers to this question. He suggests that, because YouTube’s most
popular videos are music, video-game streaming, and children’s entertainment, its political

content has attracted less attention than Facebook’s. He also notes that the platform was “better
situated to avoid information warfare” than Facebook or Twitter because the company shared

“relatively little data with outsiders,” and therefore played a less prominent role in debates over
misinformation. Crucially, Donald Trump was not popular or active on YouTube either, and that

allowed the site to avoid the scrutiny of the other platforms that served as his bully pulpit. But a
more convincing reason for why YouTube has avoided becoming a public punching bag like its

declining rival Facebook is that it is simply too useful and too ubiquitous to fail. As long as the

06/01/2025, 16:18 How YouTube Created the Attention Economy | The New Yorker

4/7

https://archive.is/o/rhQTs/https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-depp-heard-verdict-is-chilling

https://archive.is/o/rhQTs/https://www.wired.com/story/not-youtubes-algorithm-radicalizes-people/

https://archive.is/o/rhQTs/https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/09/google-youtube-will-pay-record-170-million-alleged-violations-childrens-privacy-law

platform is where everyone on the Internet goes to do their homework and �x their plumbing, it

will continue to be one of the Internet’s indispensable sites—a self-sustaining ecosystem that
incentivizes the creation of more and more content. What this content is doing to us, its viewers,

is another question. As a YouTube employee put it in a personal newsletter at the end of 2014,
“With over 72 billion hours of video watched on YouTube this year—mostly torpid fragments of

pop culture—it IS possible we’re seeing too much.” ♦

Kevin Lozano is a writer and editor. His work has appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, the
Washington Post, Dissent, and elsewhere.

06/01/2025, 16:18 How YouTube Created the Attention Economy | The New Yorker

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https://archive.is/o/rhQTs/https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/kevin-lozano

the author(s) 2010
ISSN 1473-2866
www.ephemeraweb.org
volume 10(3/4): 455-

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ephemera
theory & politics in organization

articles

Mobilizing the audience commodity: Digital
labour in a wireless world
Vincent Manzerolle

This paper re-examines the work of Dallas Smythe in light of the popularization of Internet-enabled
mobile devices (IMD). In an era of ubiquitous connectivity Smythe’s prescient analysis of audience
‘work’ offers a historical continuum in which to understand the proliferation of IMDs in everyday life.
Following Smythe’s line of analysis, this paper argues that the expansion of waged and unwaged digital
labour facilitated by these devices contributes to the overall mobilization of communicative, cognitive
and co-operative capacities – capacities central to the accumulation strategies of ‘informational
capitalism’. As such, the rapid uptake of these devices globally is an integral component in this
mobilization and subsumption. In the case of Smythe’s provocative (and somewhat controversial)
concept of the audience commodity the work of the audience is materially embedded in the capitalist
application of communication technologies. Consonant with Smythe’s emphasis on the centrality of
communication and related technologies in the critical analysis of contemporary political economies, this
paper elaborates upon the concept of digital labour by rethinking Smythe’s theory of the audience
commodity as a central principle organizing the technical and social evolution of IMDs.

Introduction

Work under contemporary capitalism is profoundly bound up with the development,
deployment, and colonization of everyday life by digital information and
communication technologies (ICTs). The growing ubiquity of mobile web-enabled
devices (IMDs), particularly those that exist at the convergence of computing and
mobile telephony, are paradigmatic technologies illustrating this point.1 This paper will
focus on one example of these devices – the smartphone2, which will soon constitute the

__________

1 According to Gartner Research Inc. (2009), mobile phone sales in 2009 reached 1.2 billion units, of
which 172 million were smartphones. Although the overall market for mobile phones declined year
over year, the smartphone market grew an astonishing 24 percent year over year
(http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1306513). Strong growth in this sector continued in Q1 of
2010 with a 48.7 percent increase in smartphone sales over the same period in 2009
(http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1372013).

2 The term smartphone (a common industry term) is somewhat misleading since it privileges voice
transmission as a defining feature. Instead, these devices – whose emblematic brands include Apple’s
iPhone and Research in Motion’s Blackberry – are more fundamentally defined by the integration of
telecommunication and mobile computing, including web browsing capabilities, GPS, email and,
increasingly, social networking media as core competencies.

abstract

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global mainstream of mobile communication (Lohr, 2009). The implications drawn
from the following analysis can also be applied to a wide variety of yet to be designed
mobile and wireless devices.

This paper engages with the critical work of Dallas Smythe to frame an analysis of
digital labour in an era of ubiquitous connectivity. Smythe’s concepts have, arguably,
gained a renewed saliency amidst the emerging practices and celebratory rhetoric of
web 2.0. Following his line of analysis, the expansion of waged and unwaged labour
facilitated by devices such as the smartphone, involves the mobilization of
communicative, cognitive and co-operative capacities – capacities central to the
accumulation strategies of ‘informational capitalism’ (Fuchs, 2010).3 I argue that the
rapid uptake of these devices globally is an integral component in this mobilization and
subsumption of human capacity. In the case of Smythe’s provocative (and somewhat
controversial) concept of the audience commodity, the ‘work’ of the audience is
materially embedded in, and articulated through, the capitalist application of
communication technologies. Consonant with Smythe’s emphasis on the centrality of
communication and related technologies in the critical analysis of contemporary
political economies, this paper elaborates the concept of digital labour by rethinking
Smythe’s concept of the audience commodity as a central principle in the technical and
social evolution of IMDs.

This argument, therefore, has two central components: first, it examines Smythe’s
contribution to Marxist thought, highlighting the place of communication and
communication technologies in the organization of waged and unwaged work. The
paper will then develop this framework as it applies to ubiquitous connectivity
generally and IMDs specifically. Finally, it will briefly outline how these considerations
shed light on the rapid evolution of IMDs as they become dominant media across a
variety of everyday settings.

From Marx to Smythe: Communication and labour

Before detailing Smythe’s contribution to the analysis of contemporary forms of digital
labour it is instructive to highlight his connection to key components of Marx’s critique
of capitalism, specifically the centrality of co-operative and communicative capacities
to the reproduction of industrial capitalism. Throughout the section entitled ‘Co-
operation’ in Capital Volume 1, Marx outlines how a necessary precondition for the
creation of surplus value involves enclosing the social and communicative relations
between workers. As a result of this ongoing process, ‘The socially productive power of
labour develops as a free gift to capital whenever the workers are placed under certain
conditions, and it is capital which places them under these conditions’ (Marx, 1976:

__________

3 Communicative capacity refers to an index of human potential involving the encoding and decoding

of meaning. Moreover, capacity of this sort enables the individuation and articulation of the self as a
socially constituted agent within certain definite social relations. As a function of capitalist
innovation, these capacities are increasingly the object of technical mediation leading to their
reconstitution, amplification and prospective exploitation by the capitalist application of ICTs.

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451). As a result of the gains in productivity engendered through the organization and
co-ordination of workers, and guided by various bourgeois fetishistic myths,4
technology (capital) is seen as the bearer and creator of value rather than co-operative
labour power. In reality it is the co-operation of workers, and the synergy created from
their co-operation, that generates surplus value. For this reason, ‘co-operation remains
the fundamental form of the capitalist mode of production…’ (Marx, 1976: 454).

Following Marx’s understanding of the communicative and co-operative basis of labour
and as a result surplus value, Smythe demonstrates via a materialist analysis of ICTs
under capitalism that the co-operative and creative basis of human labour is a regular
object of capitalist mediation and technological innovation. Indeed, technological
innovation increasingly mediates the articulation of human communicative capacities in
general. For Smythe, one of the key abstractions emerging from this process of
mediation is the audience as commodity. In the commercial broadcast model, viewers’
attention to commercial messages is exchanged for television programmes (the ‘free
lunch’). The audience participates in the necessary work of consuming, and responding
to, commercial messages. By performing this service gratis, the audience works for
media capital by marketing goods and services to themselves and others (Smythe, 1981:
9). In so doing, ‘(a)udiences thus labour for advertisers to assure the distribution and
consumption of commodities in general’ (Jhally, 1987: 67, emphasis added). The
necessary expansion of consumption required by declining production costs calls into
being the ‘[m]ass media of communications’ as a systemic creation of industrial
capitalism ‘whose purpose is to set a daily agenda of issues, problems, values, and
policies for the guidance of other institutions and the whole population. They [media
capital] mass produce audiences and sell them to advertisers’ (Smythe, 1981: xii). Thus
the increasing productive capacity of industrial capitalism is mirrored by a concurrent
production of audiences as ‘a new major institution which now holds a central place in
the interwoven complex of institutions – the family, workplace, school, church, and
state’ (1981: xiii).

Smythe therefore places mass communication, consciousness and communicative
capacities within the productive framework of industrial mass production and
consumption by highlighting their necessary role in realizing, as well as conserving,
surplus value within the sphere of circulation.5 It is in this process that the audience
commodity becomes central. As Sut Jhally explains,

Industrial capital seeks a means of reducing its circulation costs. Media capitalists offer access to
audiences to accomplish this, thus sharing in the surplus value of industrial capital. Consumers
participate in the process of buying…It appears that broadcasters sell consumers to industrial
capitalists rather than seeing their activities as part of the process of selling commodities of
industrial capitalists to consumers. (Jhally, 1987: 117)

Seen from the perspective of the total circuit of capital, the media and cultural industries
are important components in expanding and speeding up this circulation of commodities
through the incorporation of pre-existing communicative and co-operative capacities
mediated by evermore sophisticated and ubiquitous ICTs. The broadcasting model that
__________

4 For an insightful and contemporary overview along these lines see Mosco, 2004.
5 See Marx, 1978.

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defined the rise of the audience commodity, and the more contemporary forms of
fragmentation that mark Internet users, are successive evolutionary steps in the ever-
expanding circuit of capital comprising the integration of both production and
circulation.

Through Smythe’s emphasis on the capitalist application of ICTs, the sphere of
circulation can be seen as productive in two senses: 1) it literally facilitates the
expanded circulation of commodities and thus the realization and accumulation of
surplus value; and 2) it facilitates the subjective reproduction of the wage-labourers
themselves. To this end, the capitalist application of ICTs creates what Smythe calls the
‘the consciousness industry’ – a consortium of institutions emphasizing the productive
articulation of communicative capacities and the overall management of consciousness
itself.6 In so doing it enables the reproduction of the wage-relation in general by
compelling consumers back to work so as to consume an expanding bundle of goods
through the willing, and sometimes involuntary, acceptance of new and novel needs.

Real subsumption, mobilization and the consciousness
industry

The operation of the consciousness industry, however, has an evolving technical and
material basis. As Smythe has detailed, the development of spectrum-based wireless
technologies able to overcome the temporal and spatial barriers that divided the places
of work from the places of leisure has been central to the production of audiences by the
consciousness industry. This has involved the exploitation of a commonly held
resource: the electromagnetic spectrum. The integration of the radio spectrum and
wireless technologies into the management of consumer consciousness is part of a more
general mobilization of productive capacities across entire populations. Citing the work
of John Paul de Gaudemar, Frank Webster and Kevin Robins argue that the language of
mobilization offers a compelling frame within which to understand ‘the ways in which
capital uses labour power and how populations are “mobilized”’ (Robins and Webster,
1999: 111). De Gaudemar outlines two major forms of mobilization: absolute
mobilization, in which ‘the traditional way of life of rural populations (is)
systematically undermined in order to create a factory workforce. This process
involve(s) disciplinary efforts, both within the factory and across the fabric of everyday
life’ (1999: 111); and relative mobilization in which earlier ways of policing workers
are ‘replaced by an internal factory discipline in which technology [comes] to play a
core role and in which control coincide[s] with the goal of productivity and surplus
value extraction: the machine as dual instrument of control and of increased

__________

6 Smythe elaborates on the consciousness industry: ‘Although the mass media began the mass
production of information, they are linked through interlocking business organization and a complex
of largely managed, i.e., oligopolistic, markets with a much broader base of information production
and exchange. The whole complex is [the] Consciousness Industry. Advertising, market research,
photography, the commercial application of art to product and container design, the fine arts,
teaching machines and related software and educational testing, as well as the formal educational
system, are all part of it’ (Smythe, 1981: 5).

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productivity’ (1999: 112); this process coincides with the rise of Fordism and
Taylorism.

While the application of ICTs in the realm of waged labour makes work more intensive,
it also contributes to the direct integration and blurring boundaries between ‘waged’ and
‘unwaged’ time. The colonization of everyday life by ICTs catalyzes a transformation
whereby ‘[f]ree time becomes increasingly subordinated to the “labour” of
consumption’ (Robins and Webster, 1999: 116).

Absolute and relative mobilization, however, map onto Marx’s distinction between the
processes of formal and real subsumption under capitalism. The former depends on
clear divisions between work and leisure time, whereas the latter attempts to erase all
such distinctions. In this case, the condition of relative surplus-labour – that is, the
intensification of work within a given working day – is the precondition, and material
expression, of real subsumption (Marx, 1976: 1025). Real subsumption is intimately
tied to cycles of rapid technological change, particularly when labour practices have,
through technological innovation, become subject to relative surplus value
(intensification) (Marx, 1976: 1035). As real subsumption comes to define ever-greater
parts of the collective labour process through ICTs, ‘capital puts to work…the
lifestyles, desires, and knowledge that are formed outside it’ (Read, 2003: 18).7 Real
subsumption therefore becomes an active force outside of the factory once the
circulation of capital has become completely inseparable from the social and subjective
reproduction of the individual worker.

The history of ICTs explored by Robins and Webster via de Gaudemar’s concept of
mobilization is, in fact, a history in which the synchronization of the factory and home
is facilitated by the capitalist application of ICTs. The growth of demographic,
psychographic, and other lifestyle data about consumers through the expansion of
commercial broadcast media made possible the appearance of the audience commodity,
a process which would, through the growing ubiquity and interactivity of
communication media, result in ‘the integration of advertising, market research, point-
of-sale devices, and just-in-time inventory…single, integrated constellation’ (Dyer-
Witheford, 1999: 81), which extends across spaces of work, sociality and domesticity.

Smythe’s view of who and what is alienated under the conditions of real subsumption
not only includes workers dispossessed of the means of production, but also includes
processes of self-production. Self-commodification occurs when one’s self-reflexive
and social capacities are increasingly inseparable from the machinations of capital
accumulation and capital intensive ICT infrastructure, which are increasingly central to
the articulation and deployment of one’s personal capacities. As Smythe writes, ‘Today
and for some time past, the principal aspect of capitalist production has been the

__________

7 What arises from the completion of this process is what some contemporary Marxists call the ‘social
factory’. The constitution of a social factory as the metaphor to understand the effects of real
subsumption has been explored at length by autonomist Marxists like Tronti (1966), Negri (1989),
Dyer-Witheford (1999) and Virno (2004) and constitutes an important stream in communication
research that parallels and often complements many of the research interests expressed in Smythe’s
work.

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alienation of workers from the means of producing and reproducing themselves’
(Smythe, 1981: 48).

For Smythe, the concept of real subsumption characterizes a process that brings social
and communicative capacities within the gravitational pull (i.e. enclosure) of capitalist
social relations; it is this particular process described in Smythe’s approach to the
capitalist application of communication technologies. Taken to its logical end, the
process of communicative enclosure, which begins in the factory, evolves into a
seamless integration of work and non-work time through the intervention of capitalist
technologies and social relations (like the commodity form) into the social lives of
workers. Smythe’s analytic starting point – the capitalist application of information and
communication technologies – offers an important contribution to the concept of real
subsumption as it takes up ‘the place of communications in the wider system of social
reproduction and the reproduction of capital’ (Jhally, 1987: 67). Communicative
capacities under the guidance of the consciousness industry contribute to increased
synchronization between the production of subjectivity and the speeding up of
circulation.

Smythe’s concept of the audience commodity and audience work has been criticized for
its phantasmal and seemingly un-Marxian characteristics (Lebowitz, 2009: 217). The
claim that audience work actually creates surplus value has been a specifically disputed
one. Although the creation of surplus value in a classical Marxist sense does not neatly
map on to the ‘work’ of the audience (particularly in the case of commercial mass
broadcasting), arguably, it is the appearance of the audience as a saleable commodity
that provides the means of harnessing communicative capacities for the purposes of
circulation as if they were producing surplus value. Under traditional mass
broadcasting, the appearance of surplus value is really, in the first instance, an
abstraction – a necessary abstraction – but an abstraction nonetheless.

The audience commodity and audience work do not actually produce surplus value
directly. Rather, the conservation and realization of surplus value in the sphere of
circulation occurs through the intervention of capital in the materialization of social
communicative, co-operative and cognitive capacities of audiences; it is in this sense
that the audience can be said to actually ‘work’. That is, the audience is active in the
‘production of circulation’ as a necessary, though ‘unproductive’ (Marx, 1976: 1038)
function required by post-Fordist capitalism. The work of the audience is an abstract
category that, at first glance, merely reflects the conservation of surplus value in the
speeding up of circulation through the communicative mobilization of consumers. The
net savings incurred through this mobilization, however, produces the audience as a
commodity, which then guides the development and deployment of commercial media
systems, and in particular, the commercial application of spectrum-based technologies.
This function gains a greater material reality with the spread of interactive digital
media. In this way the abstraction of the audience commodity and its work becomes a
real force in the world – a real abstraction (Toscano, 2008).

The contemporary IMD industry, its rapid evolution and colonization of everyday life,
is, therefore, a material expression of shifts in the nature of waged and unwaged digital
labour in a political economic milieu defined by ubiquitous and personalized digital

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ICTs. In terms of the necessary and unwaged labour involved in the sphere of
circulation, the colonization of these devices in ‘free’ time has spurred on the
valorisation of user generated content and other potentially valuable personal data –
data used both to commodify personal information and to enhance, rationalize and
personalize marketing and advertising in exchange for user’s attention, functioning as
Smythe’s ‘free lunch’ inducement. IMDs are key components in the valorisation of co-
operative and communicative capacities as these capacities pass through the converged
nexus of digital ubiquitous networked media. The resulting configuration creates the
conditions for what Christian Fuchs (2010), following Smythe, suggestively calls the
‘prosumer commodity’ as a structuring principle in the development of the mobile web
and digital labour generally.

Mobile 2.0: Rise of the prosumer commodity?

The increasing forms of self-commodification that mark a variety of digital labour
practices (Hearn, 2008) are reflected in the technical, functional and social capacities of
the mobile media. Indeed, the sinews of digital labour writ large, comprising both
waged and unwaged labour, increasingly demand the maintenance of digital identities
and social networks as a function of the highly competitive categories of so-called
‘creative’, ‘intellectual’ and ‘affective’ labour (see Fuchs, 2009b; 2010; Cohen, 2008).
These digital labour practices are made materially possible in part by increasingly
ubiquitous media like Blackberries and iPhones and are systemically performed by an
increasingly precarious, alienated and exploited worker.8

The personalization of consumer ICTs endemic to the web 2.0 era, including IMDs,
creates the basis for scalable audiences with varying degrees of heterogeneity and
segmentation for the purposes of direct marketing and advertising. As highly
personalized consumer devices, IMDs are increasingly employed to further the constant
presence and cultural status of polling and marketing surveillance under the guise of
democratizing culture (for example through integration of these devices in the flow of
broadcasting content like American Idol, CNN or Much Music) by creating an instant
feedback mechanism. The intensifying rhythms of capitalist cultural production and its
ubiquitous flows of information are now increasingly inseparable from the human body.

As opposed to traditional mass media audiences, in the web 2.0 era ‘users are also
content producers: there is user-generated content, the users engage in permanent
creative activity, communication, community building and content production’ (Fuchs,
2009a: 82). In this case, the more apt term is the ‘prosumer commodity’; but, rather
__________

8 In waged labour, as technologies to maximize the communicative and co-operative capacities of paid
labourers, these highly complex devices reflect an increasingly precarious working arrangement. Not
only are contracts shorter, requiring workers to be more flexible in terms of their scheduling and
skills set in order to keep up with industry changes, but the integration of these ubiquitous media
have made work both more intensive and extensive for waged workers (see the Pew Internet &
American Life Project study by Madden and Jones, 2008). Intensive because workers are now
expected to accomplish more ‘within the traditional time and space confines of their job’; and
extensive because it has become ‘much easier for individuals to work longer hours’ (Middleton,
2006: 169-170).

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than signifying a democratization of media content, Fuchs contends the term signifies
‘the total commodification of human creativity’ (2009: 82). Coined by Alvin Toffler
(1980), the term ‘prosumer’ reflects the convergence of the cultural roles of producer
and consumer. Crucial to this convergence is the role of ICTs in amplifying the
communicative capacities of individuals in everyday settings. This convergence is also
marked by the rapid expansion of a flexible, precarious and contract-based workforce
(Neilson and Rossiter, 2008; Gill and Pratt, 2008). It must be reiterated that the relative
alienation and precarity of this category of workers is masked by the triumphalism of
the prosumer. As Edward Comor argues, ‘surely what the prosumer reflects and
develops – including social norms and attitudes – is itself little more than an alien force:
the abstract power of private property and social relations mediated by contracts and the
price system’ (Comor, 2011).

It is worth remembering, however, that web 2.0 is not a specific object, technology or
application. Rather, it is more fruitfully understood as a set of marketing discourses
promoting the interactive and personally empowering nature of the Internet, which
ostensibly stems from the valorisation of user-generated content. ‘Web 2.0’ reflects a
concerted effort to re-brand the commercial opportunities of the web, advocating its
incorporation into professional and social settings via an assemblage of interactive,
networked and digital media. In addition to the perception of empowered users across a
variety of technologically mediated settings, ‘web 2.0’ reflects a new web-based
marketing approach that strategically employs user-generated content in the production
and targeting of commercial messages. As Fuchs concisely summarizes, ‘[i]n the case
of the Internet, the commodification of audience participation is easier to achieve than
on other mass media’ (Fuchs, 2009: 84).

The drive to democratize culture said to inhere in web 2.0 (Jenkins, 2006; Tapscott and
Williams, 2008) is outweighed by a much more powerful interest in monetizing online
behaviour. The Internet-based operations of media conglomerates – even relative
newcomers like Google and Yahoo – do not break from, but, instead, build upon
principles developed by traditional mass media (for example, Google’s Ad Sense
updates the audience commodity for the web 2.0 era). AdMob, acquired by Google in
2009 for $750 million USD, is highly valued because of its prospective ability to
‘monetize’ data traffic to and from personal devices. In so doing, it produces and sells
mobile audience commodities through the generation of detailed user information
across a number of different metrics and includes the collection of data about
application and website use. As AdMob proclaims:

AdMob offers brand advertisers the ability to reach the addressable mobile audiences. Our
innovative ad units will carry your brand messaging onto the top mobile sites. As one of the
leading brand mobile advertising marketplaces, we have the products and the people to help you
meet your campaign needs. (AdMob, 2010)

It goes on to note, ‘(m)obile advertising provides you with targeted access to mobile
users, and is easy to buy and measure’ (AdMob, 2010).

The logic of monetization hinges on audience attention as the primary commodity
produced and delivered to advertisers. As a result of this logic, content is tailored to
highly targeted audiences (Dahlberg, 2005). Not only is the audience more fragmented

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online, it can now be spatially mobile and mobilized by, for example, the empowering
rhetoric of ‘web 2.0’. IMDs are more than innovative communication technologies; they
now represent a potentially lucrative venue (or platform) for consuming billable data
and reconstituting the audience commodity as one composed of many discrete
identities.

Given the propensity to incorporate the unpaid labour of the prosumer, it is not
surprising that IMDs are heralding the rise of 1:1 marketing (Mitra, 2008) or so-called
‘participatory marketing’ that relies on social media to incorporate user-generated
content (UGC) directly into the marketing process. The following examples
demonstrate how IMDs might act as platforms for the direct solicitation of users to
reflexively participate in their self-commodification. Once they have done this, users
are rewarded with a ‘free lunch’ consumed on their mobiles.

Both MyScreen and Sidebar offer users targeted and personalized content delivered to
their mobile devices in exchange for personal data. These examples reflect the way in
which the mobile prosumer commodity is being constructed in application-based
services – services offering new revenue streams enabling the collection of personalized
data through the willing participation, or unpaid ‘work’, of the device user. These
encapsulate some of the dominant evolutionary paths that mobile devices will take;
paths in which a particular user – the prosumer – is the object of potential
commodification. But in this case IMDs provide a personalized platform to close the
loop between informational production and consumption (prosumption).

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As a platform for the mobilization of the prosumer commodity, applications or ‘apps’
are a defining characteristic of IMDs, shaping the contours of the mobile industry.
Online application stores now exist for all major handset manufacturers and also
include content producers and network operators (of these, the iTunes store is the most
popular). Many of these stores offer software development kits for the production of
applications, which can then be sold by third party developers, with the companies
taking a share of the profits. These apps perform a variety of services, including tourist
information, games, news, maps and other branded content. Indeed, most applications
are now a means for targeted ads, marketing data or branding strategies and function as
tools for collecting valuable personal data (Furchgott, 2009). In an effort to compete
with AdMob’s application based advertising and metrics, Apple has thrown its hat in
the ring by releasing iAd as a feature of its new operating system, iOS4. Moving away
from search-based advertising popularized by Google, Steve Jobs notes that, ‘(p)eople
are not searching on a mobile device like they are on the desktop’; rather, they access
their information increasingly through applications (Stone, 2010). In this way
applications are a central area of expansion in the use of smartphones, representing an
expanding revenue stream for a variety of mobile industry players including handset
manufacturers, software developers and telecommunication companies (Middleton,
2009).

The production of the mobile audience commodity by offering some sort of free lunch
is juxtaposed by the limited willingness of big media to provide net neutrality on mobile
broadband (demonstrated recently by partnership talks between Verizon and Google).
This prospectively two tiered system comprising prosumer commodities and pay-per-
byte users will, if trends continue, become the central revenue model for telecom
providers, software designers, entertainment content providers, and handset
manufacturers seeking to profit from accelerating IMD use (Parker, 2009).

In coming years, location-based services (LBS) are expected to become an important
driver in the micro-billing system, particularly as IMDs become fully integrated into the

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user’s environment. Simply put, LBS are applications used ‘to locate the customer in
space’ and thus to ‘better map and understand what they are doing in a particular place
and at a particular time, and so articulate and enmesh product and service offerings into
this context…’ (Goggin, 2006: 197). These types of applications use the GPS function
now standard in most smartphones to offer information about the individual’s
surroundings. In exchange for highly detailed locational data, users are given potentially
valuable and context specific information about their surroundings. LBS are predicted
to account for roughly 14 billion USD in 2014 compared to 2.3 billion in 2009
(Zeledon, 2009). Features might include finding car dealerships, bars and restaurants
nearby, locating friends or searching for maps and directions. Industry trends suggest
that such features will become largely subsidized by advertising and marketing in which
campaigns can be narrowly targeted focusing on place. Combined with detailed profiles
of user tastes, habits and interests, LBS will provide valuable channels for monetizing
the work of the prosumer commodity. One way in which this may happen is by
targeting digital coupons to smartphone users based on their location and profile
(Reedy, 2009). Additionally, location-based services are giving way to what is called
augmented reality, ‘a class of technologies that place data from the web on top of a
camera view of the physical world’ (Kirkpatrick, 2009), further blurring the distinction
between the real and virtual world in the hope of monetizing user behaviour channelled
through IMDs.

Although the conversion of mobiles into platforms for the articulation of the prosumer
commodity actually fulfils a certain narrative of capitalist media identified by Smythe,
it is the radio spectrum itself that is the least understood, yet most important component.
Policies governing this limited and increasingly scarce resource will set certain material
limitations on how the paid and unpaid labour of mobile users will come to define the
evolution of these technologies. The spectrum infrastructure is typically associated with
terms like 3G, 4G, WiMAX or Long-term evolution (LTE), but the growth of the
prosumer commodity and the smartphone (among other IMDs) has engendered huge
demand for mobile bandwidth with which many telecom providers are currently ill
equipped to deal. In pursuit of long-term profitability amidst the popularity of web 2.0,
telecommunications providers and handset manufacturers have pushed mobile devices
from simple transmitters of voice to multi-media data receivers/transmitters. And, as a
result, the general trend of increasing data use at the mobile level has begun to outpace
voice transmissions (Middleton, 2010). With smartphone sales predicted to outsell
normal phones by 2011, estimates of the cost to upgrade the US broadband
infrastructure are as high as $350 billion USD. Such demands have placed increasing
pressure on government regulators to offer more spectrum for commercial applications
and to subsidize upgrades with tax-payer money (Reuters, 2009).

Both mobile broadband and web 2.0 have risen from the ashes of the first dot-com
bubble. Like the euphoria surrounding web 2.0, high-speed mobile Internet has been
called the ‘great white hope of the telecommunications industry’ (Brody and Dunstan,
2003). These two technological moments – web 2.0 and 3G/4G – represent what
Fransman (2002) would call ‘consensual views’ within the telecom industry regarding
the path of ICTs in the private (and public) sector. This view provides a collective
promotional narrative that is able to draw investment from public and private sectors
alike. These narratives are significant because the choice to pursue 3G and 4G

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technologies is a risky (and expensive) one, premised on a belief that consumer demand
for broadband will steadily increase and pay off the huge investments needed to replace
the infrastructure. The next generation of mobile media, 4G, is being envisioned as
seamless mobile broadband access far surpassing the patchwork of 3G standards that
currently exist; it will no doubt be subsidized by tax payers due to its apparent
necessity.

In these ways, the mobilization of the prosumer commodity has pushed the existing
limits of mobile broadband networks. The most salient example is the case of the
iPhone and its preferential relationship with AT&T in the U.S. – a relationship that has
been a double-edged sword. While average revenue per user (ARPU) is up 3.8 percent
and, as of October 2009, wireless data revenue is up 33.6 percent year over year, this
increase has caused a ‘data traffic jam’ that has angered users and slowed down the
network overall (Malik, 2009). This problem has led to increased research in to 4G
technologies like LTE and WiMAX, which, once implemented, may increase average
uplink and downlink rates, but will require costly upgrades and more sophisticated
handsets. Such upgrades are also associated with broader economic stimulus plans and
form a central plank in national broadband plans in the United States (see
www.broadband.gov). The rising demand for mobile bandwidth precipitated by the
popularity of the iPhone has made the question of spectrum policy and allocation all the
more pressing. As noted by FCC chairman Julius Genachowski (Schatz and Sheth,
2009), there is a ‘looming [spectrum] crisis’ (Reuters, 2009); this claim is also echoed
by industry leaders. This real or manufactured potential for crisis has reinforced an
industry view that net neutrality should not be applied to the next generation of
broadband standards.

Conclusion: Spectrum as commons

As ever more bandwidth is required to keep up with demand, choices made regarding
spectrum allocation policies and technologies will become all the more important.
Addressing the changing demands of waged and unwaged digital labour calls for
rethinking the possibility of a spectrum commons (Lehr and Crowcroft, 2005). This
may include a shift away from the private property model that has dominated spectrum
management thus far and the implementation of more flexible spectrum management
policies (Bauer, 2002). As it stands, the monopoly control of much of the spectrum by
telecommunications and other commercial interests acts as a kind of rent placed upon
an existing natural phenomenon that belongs to all of humanity.

Since all current trends point towards a society of ubiquitous connectivity premised on
the organization and allocation of the spectrum and since it is through personal
technologies that most people will increasingly come to experience communicative and
co-operative relationships – a world where each person becomes, more and more, an
island technologically linked to others – Smythe’s prescient comments on the spectrum
as commons gain a renewed importance:

The radio spectrum is to communications today as is land to crops and water to fish. It is a
peculiar natural resource, one whose politico-economic and social aspects have been largely
ignored by social scientists. Like all other features of the human environment, it must be looked at

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in its relationships with people…Like no other resource, the radio spectrum is the first form of
world property. (Smythe, 1981: 300)

Smythe’s analysis of the specifically capitalist application of communication
technologies offers an analytic entry point into the ways digital technologies are
deployed in an effort to more fully subsume communicative capacities as forms of
‘digital labour’. Smythe has described technology as ‘a mystifying term, which
describes the ongoing capitalist system’ as well as comprising ‘capitalism’s most potent
propaganda weapons in the struggle between the rich and the poor nations and the rich
and the poor within nations’ (Smythe, 1981: 20). Considering how spectrum-based
technologies now constitute a ‘normal’, perhaps necessary (Livingston, 2004), bundle
of goods demanded by individuals, both in their capacity as wage labourers and social
agents, Smythe’s warnings become even more salient and vital for contemporary media
criticism.

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Vincent Manzerolle is a Media Studies doctoral candidate and Lecturer in the Faculty of Information and
Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. His research interests center on consumption and
information technologies, the history of information systems, and mobile media. His dissertation work
focuses on the international growth of smartphones and their role in mediating work and leisure time.
E-mail: vmanzero@uwo.ca

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