Activity

[...] the most substantial rewards are allocated, on an industrial
basis, to those who build and maintain the technologies of
extraction, who hold the system’s intellectual property, and who
can trade the aggregate output of personal expression as if it were some bulk commodity like grain or bee…

[...] surveillance becomes a means of commodifying the information that users produce. [...] Such surveillance [...] is rooted in a capitalist desire to commodify information. [...] While capitalism is conditioned by the requirement for privacy (for ex., of bank accounts and holdings) to legitimate…

[...] The symbolic ideology of a commodity first needs to be produced by special ad and public relations employees and is in a second step communicated to potential buyers. Advertising therefore involves production and transportation labour. Advertising production does not create a physical commo…

But are Facebook users productive workers? They are certainly not less important for Facebook’s capital accumulation than its paid employees because without users Facebook would immediately stop making profits and producing commodities. Facebook’s commodity is not its platform that can be used with…

Other, less central aspects of the visions we’re presented of a world without work might trouble us as well. In his book The Zero Marginal Cost Society, Jeremy Rifkin fetishizes fully automated logistics, without considering how often logistics workers specifically have constituted the most radic…