For years I have been dismayed by a very common refusal to think. The
dismaying part is that it's based on the work of European history's
greatest political philosopher, Karl Marx. It consists in the assertion
that social media exploits you, that play is labor, and that Facebook is
the new Ford Motor Co.
Now, there are all kinds of things wrong with social media, and I don't
even use it. But even I can recognize that it doesn't exploit you the
way a boss does. It emphatically _does_ sell statistics about the ways
you and your friends and correspondents make use of your human faculties
and desires, to nasty corporations that do attempt to capture your
attention, condition your behavior and separate you from your money. In
that sense, it does try to control you and you do create value for it.
Yet that is not all that happens. Because you too do something with it,
something of your own. The dismaying thing in the theories of playbour,
etc, is that they refuse to recognize that all of us, in addition to
being exploited and controlled, are overflowing sources of potentially
autonomous productive energy. The refusal to think about this - a
refusal which mostly circulates on the left, unfortunately - leaves that
autonomous potential unexplored and partially unrealized.
Here, in an absolutely luminous text, Michel Bauwens shares liberating
thoughts about what you might call a practical and present utopia.
If you want to read it with the multiple links included, just go to this
location on one of my favorite global idea-aggregators, Al Jazeera:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/20122277438762233.html
Best to all, and thanks to Michel for a beautiful text. - BH
***
The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?
--Michel Bauwens
Does Facebook exploit its users? And where is the $100bn in the
company's estimated value coming from?
This is not a new debate. It resurfaces regularly in the blogosphere and
academic circles, ever since Tiziana Terranova coined the term "Free
Labour" to indicate a new form of capitalist exploitation of unpaid
labour - firstly referring to the viewers of classic broadcast media,
and now to the new generation of social media participants on sites such
as Facebook. The argument can be summarised very succinctly by the catch
phrase: "If it's free, then you are the product being sold."
This term was recently relaunched in an article by University of Essex
academics Christopher Land and Steffen Böhm, entitled "They are
exploiting us! Why we all work for Facebook for free". In this
mini-essay, they make a very strong claim that "we can certainly
position the users of Facebook as labourers. If labour is understood as
'value producing activity', then updating your status, liking a website,
or 'friending' someone, creates Facebook's basic commodity."
This line of argument is misleading, however, because it conflates two
types of value creation that were already recognised as distinct by 18th
century political economists. The distinction is between use value and
exchange value. For thousands of years, under conditions of
non-capitalist production, the majority of the working population
directly produced "use value" - either for themselves as subsistence
farmers, or as tributes to the managerial class of the day. It is only
under capitalism that a majority of the working population produces
"exchange value" by selling their labour to firms. The difference
between what we are paid and what the market pays for the products we
are making is the "surplus value".
But Facebook users are not workers producing commodities for a wage, and
Facebook is not selling these commodities on a market to create surplus
value.
Indeed, Facebook users are not directly creating exchange value at all,
but instead communicative use value. What Facebook does is to enable
this pooling of sharing and collaboration around their platform - and by
enabling, framing and "controlling" that activity, they create a pool of
attention. It is this pool of attention which is sold to advertisers,
for an estimated $3.2bn per year, which is barely $3.79 in ad revenue
per user.
We can, of course, argue that Facebook does a lot more than just selling
the attention. For instance, their knowledge of our social behaviour,
down to the individual level, has undoubted strategic value - for
political power players and commercial firms alike. But is this surplus
value really worth $100bn? That remains a speculative bet. For the
moment, it's likely that the nearly one billion users of Facebook do not
find the $3.79 in ad revenue per user very exploitative, especially
since they do not pay to use Facebook, and are using the website
voluntarily. That said, there is a price to pay for not using Facebook,
in terms of relative social isolation from their peers who are users.
Engineering scarcity
What is important, however, is that Facebook is not an isolated
phenomenon, but part of a much larger trend in our society: an
exponential rise in the creation of use value by productive publics, or
"produsers", as Axel Bruns calls them. It is important to understand
that this creates a huge problem for a capitalist system, but also for
workers as we have traditionally conceived them. Markets are defined as
ways to allocate scarce resources, and capitalism is in fact not just a
scarcity "allocation" system but also a scarcity engineering system,
which can only accumulate capital by constantly reproducing and
expanding conditions of scarcity.
Where there is no tension between supply and demand, there can be no
market and no capital accumulation. What peer producers are doing, for
now mostly producing intangible entities such as knowledge, software and
design, is to create an abundance of easily reproduced information and
actionable knowledge.
This cannot be directly translated into market value, because it is not
at all scarce - it's over-abundant. And this activity, moreover, is done
by knowledge workers, whose ranks are steadily expanding. This
over-supply threatens to make knowledge workers' jobs precarious. Hence,
an increased exodus of productive capacities, in the form of direct use
value production, outside the existing system of monetisation, which
only operates at its margins. In the past, whenever such an exodus
occurred - of slaves in the decaying Roman Empire, or of serfs in the
waning Middle Ages - that is precisely the time when conditions were set
for major societal and economic changes.
Indeed, without a core reliance on capital, commodities and labour, it
is hard to imagine a continuation of the capitalist system.
The problem is this: internet collaboration has enabled the creation of
use value in a way that totally bypasses the normal functioning of our
economic system. Normally, increases in productivity are somehow
rewarded, and these rewards enable consumers to derive an income and buy
products.
But this is no longer happening. Facebook and Google users create
commercial value for their platforms, but only very indirectly. And they
are not at all rewarded for their own value creation. Since what they
are creating is not what is commodified on the market for scarce goods,
these value creators do not receive income. Social media platforms are
exposing an important fault line in our economic system.
We have to link this emerging social economy, based on sharing creative
expression, with the more authentic field of commons-oriented peer
production, as expressed in the open-source and "fair use" open-content
economy, which one estimate said made up one-sixth of US GDP. There is
also no doubt that one of the key ingredients of China's success so far
has been the combination of the open-source - such as the country's
domestic "Shanzai" economy - together with the patent-free policies that
are imposed on foreign investors. This has guaranteed an open,
innovative commons for much of Chinese industry.
Even as the open-source economy becomes the default way to create
software, and even as it creates companies that reach a revenue of more
than $1bn, such as Red Hat, the overall effect is still deflationary. It
has been estimated that open-source annually destroys $60bn in revenues
for the proprietary sector.
Thus, the open-source economy destroys more proprietary software value
than it replaces. Even as it creates an explosion of use value, its
monetary value decreases.
Open-source manufacturing
The same effects occur when the shared innovation commons approach is
used in physical production, where it combines an open-source approach
with distributed machinery and capital allocation (using techniques such
as crowd-funding and social lending platforms, like Kickstarter).
For example, the Wikispeed SGT01, a car that received a five-star
security rating and can attain a fuel efficiency of 100 miles per gallon
(roughly 42.5 kilometres per litre), was developed by a team of
volunteers in just three months. The car is being sold for only $29,000,
about a quarter of what a traditional industrial automobile firm would
charge, and for which it would have needed at least five years of
development and billions of dollars.
Local Motors, a rapidly growing crowd-sourced car company, claims to
develop automobiles five times faster than Detroit, with 100 times less
capital, but WikiSpeed has achieved even faster design and production
times. The WikiSpeed car is designed for modularity, using sophisticated
software development techniques (such as agile, scrum, and extreme
programming), an open design, and local production by garages, using
distributed manufacturing techniques.
And Arduino, an open-source electronics prototyping platform, works
similarly to WikiSpeed and is driving prices down in its sector. If
Marcin Jakubowsky's Open Source Ecology project is successful, this will
happen for at least 40 different types of machinery. In every field
where an open-source manufacturing alternative develops - and I predict
that they will be developed in every single field - there will be
similar pricing and income pressures on mainstream economic models.
'Collaborative consumption'
Another expression of the sharing economy is collaborative consumption.
As Rachel Botsman and Lisa Gansky have demonstrated in their recent
books - What's Mine is Yours and The Mesh, respectively - there is a
rapidly growing sharing economy developing through product-service
systems, sharing marketplaces and collaborative lifestyles.
For example, it's estimated that there are about 460 million homes in
the developed world, and that each home has, on average, $3,000 worth of
unused items available. There is clearly economic benefit to be had by
using these idle resources. Much of it will not be rented, however, but
swapped and bartered for free. Even the paid sharing economy will have a
depressive effect on the buying of new products.
Such developments are good for the planet and good for humanity, but the
larger question is: are they good for capitalism?
What will happen with capitalism given social media-based exchanges,
commons-based production of software and hardware, and collaborative
consumption, on an increasingly massive scale?
What happens if more and more of our time goes into producing use value
- a fraction of which creates monetary value - but there is not a
substantial return of income to the use value producers?
The financial crisis beginning in 2008, far from diminishing the
enthusiasm for sharing and peer production, is in fact accelerating the
adoption of such practices. This is not just a problem for the
increasingly precarious working class, but also for capitalism itself,
which is seeing its opportunities for accumulation and expansion dry up.
Not only is the world faced with a global resource crisis, it is also
facing a crisis of intensive development, because value creators are
increasingly income-less. The knowledge economy turns out to be a pipe
dream, because what is abundant cannot sustain market dynamics.
Thus we have an exponential rise in the creation of use value, but only
a linear increase in the creation of monetary value. If workers have
less and less income, who can buy the commodities that are offered for
sale by companies? This, in a nutshell, is the crisis of value that we
are facing as humanity. It is a challenge just as big as climate change
or increases in social inequality.
The meltdown of 2008 was a prefiguration of this crisis. Since the
advent of neoliberalism, workers' wages have been stagnating and
purchasing power was maintained only by an over-extension of credit
throughout society. This was the first phase of the knowledge economy,
in which only capital had access to networks, which it used to create
globally coordinated multinationals.
As the knowledge society grew in size, more and more of businesses'
value consisted of intangible, not physical, assets. The neoliberal
stock market and its speculative excesses can be seen as a way to
evaluate the amount of intangible value that is added to the stock's
value by human co-operation. This bubble had to burst.
The second phase of the knowledge society, in which networks are
diffused throughout society and allow productive publics to be directly
engaged in peer production, creates an additional layer of problems. Add
to the wage stagnation and the exodus out of wage labour that peer-based
use value creation causes, and we can see that the problem is not
solvable within the present paradigm. Is there a solution?
There is - but that is for the next installment. The solution involves
an adaptation of capitalism to peer production, but also opens up the
avenues for a transcendence of capitalism.
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
