[...] It would however be idealistic to limit the notion of digital labour to the exploitation of users’ online activities by commercial platforms that use targeted advertising or to the creation of digital content that is sold as a commodity. The creation of digital content requires a technological infrastructure that is produced and maintained by labour processes (Fuchs, 2014, 2015). Digital labour is all paid and unpaid labour that helps creating digital technologies, content, and data that is sold as a commodity. It includes diverse activities such as slave-labour extracting minerals that form the physical foundation of information technologies, the labour of militarily controlled and highly exploited hardware assemblers who work under conditions of Taylorist industrialism, a highly paid knowledge labour aristocracy, precarious digital service workers as well as imperialistically exploited knowledge workers in developing countries, workers conducting the industrial recycling and management of e-waste, or highly hazardous informal physical e-waste labour (Fuchs, 2014, 2015). Such forms of digital labour form an international division of digital labour that creates the digital media industry’s profits (ibid.). Why is it important to have such a unified concept of digital labour? Nick Dyer-Witheford (2014, 175) provides an answer: ‘To name the global worker is to make a map; and a map is also a weapon’. So what Nick Dyer-Witheford points out is the political relevance of a critical theory of digital media: it names and analyses the problem and can thereby point citizens, classes and social groups towards what is wrong and what contradictions they face.

[...] Financialisation is a response to contradictions of capitalism that result in capitalists’ attempts to achieve spatial (global outsourcing) and temporal (financialisation) fixes to problems associated with overaccumulation, overproduction, underconsumption, falling profit rates, profit squeezes, and class struggles (Harvey 2003, 89; Harvey 2005, 115). The ideological hype of the emergence of a ‘Web 2.0’ and ‘social media’ that communicated the existence of a radially new Internet was primarily aimed at restoring confidence of venture capital to invest in the Internet economy. The rise of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Weibo and related tar- geted advertising-based platforms created a new round of financialisation of the Internet economy with its own objective contradiction: in a situation of global capitalist crisis corporate social media attract advertising investments because companies think targeted advertising is more secure and efficient than conventional advertising (Fuchs 2014c). Financial investors share these hopes and believe in social media’s growing profits and dividends, which spurs their investments of financial capital in social media corporations. The clickthrough-rate (the share of ads that users click on in the total number of pre- sented ads) is however on average just 0.1 per cent (Fuchs 2014c), which means that on average only one out of 1,000 targeted ads yields actual profits. And even in these cases it is uncertain if users will buy commodities on the pages the targeted ads direct them to. [...]

Social media corporations, advertising and management gurus and uncritical social media scholars that celebrate capitalist platforms associate with social media that it enables everyone to get and share information, to communicate, engage, produce and distribute content, connect with others. [...]

The problem of this approach is the simplistic understanding of participation as content-creation and sharing that ignores the political connotation of participation as participatory democracy, a system, in which all people own and control and together manage the systems that affect their lives (Fuchs 2014c, chapter 3). The engaging/connecting/sharing-ideology is an ideology because it only views social media positively and is inherently technological-deterministic. It assumes that social media technologies as such have positive effects and disregards the power structures and asymmetries into which it is embedded.

[...] Social media ideology is a form of one-dimensional thought both in the East and the West: It is silent about exploitation and disadvantages that users may have from capitalism’s and the capitalist state’s control of the Internet. Eastern and Western social media capitalists not just share the engaging/connecting/­ sharing-ideology, but also the same capital accumulation model that is based on targeted advertising and the exploitation of users’ digital labour (Fuchs 2015, chapter 7).

[...] It is however mistaken to see Facebook as a communications company: it does not sell communication or access to communication, but user data and targeted advert space. Facebook is one of the world’s largest advertising agencies.

[...] Corporations such as Amazon.com and Apple do not just exploit one type of digital labour, but different ones: Amazon.com doesn’t just put a rent on freelance services via Mechanical Turk, it also sells physical goods such as the Kindle and paperbacks and intangible goods such as e-books. Apple’s primary income source is the sale of digital technologies such as Apple computers and the iPhone. But Apple also sells content via its iTunes store. Given the global and convergent character of transnational information corporations, it is not feasible to separate the physical and the mental labour conducting for these companies. Digital workers form a collective workforce. The phenomenon of cultural and digital labour shows that culture and the economy are not separate.

The working conditions are as poor as described in the two examples because global information corporations are profitable businesses: Apple’s profits amounted in 2015 to US$53.4 billion 3 . Amazon’s profits were in the same year US$596 million. There is a class antagonism between information labour and information capital. These conditions can only be changed if the information workers of the world unite at the transnational level in order to challenge the power of information capital. [...] The dialectic takes on a very political form in information capitalism so that class relations bring about highly exploited forms of labour. At the same time, many digital media companies have come under criticism for avoiding paying taxes, which not just increases their profits, but also deprives states of tax income and supports austerity measures that destroy the welfare state and threaten social security.

[...] The world of information technology is one that is shaped by a dialectic of repression and emancipatory struggles. Digital media are technologies of domination and liberation at the same time. These potentials are, however, not equally distributed. In a class-based society, we can always take the dominative use of technologies for certain, whereas alternative uses aiming at liberation are much more fragile and precarious. Only political praxis can bring about humanity’s emancipation from repression. A critical theory of communication and society stands in solidarity with those who resist and oppose the corporationalisation, commodification and bureaucratisation of communication and the world.