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[...] Even if trade and deregulation may produce benefits for a nation 'in the aggregate', these benefits are unfairly distributed, which is why there are always winners and losers. And those who are not among the winners know full well after twenty-fie years that competition is increasing, social and financial stress is on the rise, and that the formulae contained in the Sunday sermons of the preachers of globalization are nothing but hot air.
[...] it is by no means true that these sectors of the population are furious because the 'cultural left' is calling for a third toilet for transgender persons. They are furious because they have the feeling that such demands are getting lots of attention, while their own economic and social situation is not being given any attention at all.
[...] Anyone who comes forward with the implicit promise 'Vote for us because we shall make sure that things will only get worse slowly!' may just as well hand over the keys of office to the leader of the nearest right-wing populist party. What we need, finally, is what Barack Obama has called 'the audacity of hope'.
funny cus that's what ultimately Obama ended up doing but I see his point
[...] the left was not established so as to have things easy but in order to bring about the impossible. It was created to improve the world and the condition of human beings in the teeth of adversity and apparent hopelessness, to fight for human rights and democracy and to flood the societies of the world with democracy.
[...] The market remains the reference point for all aspects of life. Pierre Bourdieu has called such mechanisms symbolic violence. We have now internalized the market and regard it as self-evident; we assent to its logic, partly willingly, partly against our will. In neoliberalism the burden of self-restraint, of permanent sublimation, is great. We have always to be happy to compete, to compare to measure ourselves against others and to optimize. Unreasonable demands, setbacks, humiliations and failures have to be chalked up to oneself--and then we just have to wait cheerfully for new opportunities. [...]
[...] Practically this means that a lot of companies want to advertise on Facebook and calculate social media advertising costs into their commodity prices. [...]
[...] It is not a direct forced separation, but an indirect one. The indirect forcing factors are basically the disadvantages that you might experience when being outside a network platform such as Facebook, for example the loss of job-opportunities, personal connections, social relations, and other immaterial assets.
SNS offer a transcendence of these limitations, allowing the extension and intensification of exploitation to go beyond the limits that the mass media set. The extension of exploitation is achieved by having users spend more time on SNS. [...]
The dominant positions of several social media, including Facebook and Google have been considered as clear examples of platform imperialism. While these sites can offer participants entertainment and a way to socialize, the social relations present on a site like Facebook can obscure economic relations that reflect larger patterns of capitalist development in the digital age. [...] In other words, a few U.S.-based platforms dominate the global order, which has resulted in the concentration of capital in a few hands within major TNCs and start-ups. [...]
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 without charges. It rather sells advertising space in combination with access to users. An algorithm selects users and allows individually targeting ads based on keywords and search criteria that Facebook’s clients identify. Facebook’s commodity is a portion/space of a user’s screen/profile that is filled with ad clients’ commodity ideologies. The commodity is presented to users and sold to ad clients either when the ad is presented (pay-per-view) or when the ad is clicked (pay-per-click). The user gives attention to his/her profile, wall and other users’ profiles and walls. For specific time periods parts of his/her screen are filled with advertising ideologies that are with the help of algorithms targeted to his/her interests. The prosumer commodity is an ad space that is highly targeted to user activities and interests. The users’ constant online activity is necessary for running the targeting algorithms and for generating viewing possibilities and attention for ads. The ad space can therefore only exist based on user activities that are the labour that create the social media prosumer commodity.
something to remember - as much as I push back on the "Facebook users are doing labour" argument, there is something in there which has to be acknowledged