Activity

Social media users are double objects of commodification: they are commodities themselves and through this commodification their consciousness becomes, while online, permanently exposed to commodity logic in the form of advertisements. Most online time is advertising time. [...] advertisements do n…

Oscar Gandy has introduced the notion of a panoptic sort: "The panoptic sort is a difference machine that sorts individuals into categories and classes on the basis of routine measurements [...]"

Sut Jhally (1987, 78) argues that "reorganising the watching audience in terms of demographics" is a form of relative surplus value production. One can interpret targeted Internet advertising as a form of relative surplus value production: At one point in time, the advertisers not only show one adv…

• Cocercion [...]
• Alienation: Companies, not the users, own the platforms and the created profit.
• Appropriation: Users spend time on corporate Internet platforms that are funded by targeted advertising capital accumulation models. The time spent on corporate platforms is the value created by …

[...] Smythe does not celebrate audiences as always rebelling and does not argue for social-democratic reformism that tolerates exploitation and misery. His analysis rather implies the need for the overthrow of capitalism in order to humanize society and the overthrow of the capitalist media system…