Mark Andrejevic's Presentation as part of The Internet as Playground and Factory

ex·ploit “ unfolding” “bringing out” “a thing settled, ended, displayed” “having advantage” “achievement” “accomplishment” “selfish use” (1838) “coercive instrumental use of another” “appropriation of the product of forced, unpaid, surplus labor”

Rhetoric of dematerialization
“ The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth in the form of physical resources is steadily declining in value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things. This change marks a great historic divide.” – Gilder, Toffler, Dyson, Keyworth, 1994

Appirio Press Release
“ This extension helps increase the size of a company's "virtual account team" by leveraging relationships that employees might already have…The employee can see if a friend has become a lead, bought a product, attended an event…etc. If the employee chooses they can contact their friend through Facebook to make a connection and ultimately help contribute to their company's bottom line (and maybe even their own bonus!)”

Viral marketing: Based on a search of keywords in friend profiles, the application makes recommendations of friends who might be interested in the offer, which users can then choose to take action on. Because of the integration with Salesforce CRM, customers can use the native functionality to track leads, make follow-up offers, and report on campaign success to see how their viral campaigns stack up to other marketing programs.

Exploitation 1.0
What it’s not:
Reducible to a sense of victimization (“Why do people fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?” – D&G A-O).
The mere of fact of benefit from an another’s productive activity. Collaboration is not exploitation.
The mere fact of lack of payment (see above)

Exploitation 1.0
Some form of coercion (even if this is embedded in “free” relations of exchange)
Capture of value (surplus, unpaid) that results from this coercion.
Alienation: Exploitation does not merely deprive the individual of the full value realized from his or her creative activity, but of the freedom to make this activity an object of will and consciousness.

Alienation
Estrangement occurs when our own activity appears as something turned back against us as, “an alien power” over and against oneself (ibid.).
An update? (Daniel W. Smith on Deleuze): What an ethics of immanence will criticize, then, is anything that separates a mode of existence from its power of acting.

Exploitation 1.0a: Capitalism
Separation as a mode of appropriation (a background of force)
Relations of coercion embedded in the logic of “free exchange” of the labor commodity for a wage.

Exploitation 2.0?
A background of coercion (an unwaged economy that piggybacks on a waged one)
Marketing channeling Marx:
to return control to producers of their creative activity (that is, to overcome their estrangement from the product of their efforts)
to build community (to overcome estrangement from others)
to facilitate our own self-understanding (to overcome estrangement from themselves).

Exploitation 2.0 (cont.)
A lack of coercion?
On top of relations of coercion (how are the wages of the unwaged earned)
Is this ostensible lack based on a conserved notion of surpassed forms of differentiation?
Surplus (appropriated or free?)
Unpaid (unwaged but compensated?)
Alienated (in part?)

Matter Matters: Enclosure
A process of separation that reproduces separation.
In order to access our data, we are separated from it.
Privatization of the network facilitates (separation from communicative resources) reproduces separation from data.

Google is as much about infrastructure as it is about the search engine…They are building an enormous computing resource on a scale that is almost unimaginable”

Some implications
Second-order forms of coercion (willing submission to monitoring against the background of existing waged labor).
the offer to overcome estrangement or alienation produces a second-order form of separation: that of users from the data they generate
Direct forms of coercion: Appirio (generalizable?)
social networking sites serve, as one employer put it, as, “ a fundamental communication tool to probably more than half our workforce”

Alienation
Autonomy ≠ overcoming alienation
Access ≠ control (enclosure of the means of communication, expression, socializing, distribution).

A conserved/surpassed perspective
The lens of consumer choice
overlooks both the value-generating work done by consumers and the logic of enclosure whereby this value is captured.
naturalizes the process whereby private ownership of productive resources structures the terms of exchange.
backgrounds forms of coercion that structure free participation.
concedes permeated of social life by target marketing.

“ it is clear who exploits, who profits, and who governs but power nevertheless remains something more diffuse.”

Mark Andrejevic's Presentation as part of The Internet as Playground and Factory

by The New School on Nov 03, 2009

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