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From a Marxist-Hegelian angle, Barbrook saw 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:…

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). According to Barbrook, the digital economy is a mixed economy: it includes a public element (the state’s funding of the o…

[...] Because its profit margin from making components was much larger than the margins it enjoyed from computer assembly, Foxconn was able to take them on by integrating all the parts manufacture and lowering its own margin on the final assembly work. Now that it is the largest private employer in…

On the question of the general intellect, there is little dispute that some high-growth industrial sectors are increasingly dependent on ideas and creative talent, and that capital has had to grant some concessions in order to guarantee a supply of cognitive skills. As long as their control over in…

Capital owners have long sought to transfer work from the producer to the consumer or user, or from the formal site of production to decentralized points of consumption. [...]

But these burdens are only the most tangible evidence of what Italian operaismo theorists such as Mario Tronti called …