archive/dissertation

[...] 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.

Our theoretical point of departure lies in the tradition of autonomist Marxism, so called because of its emphasis on workers’ power to challenge and break their subordination to capital (Cleaver 1979; Dyer-Witheford 1999; Eden 2012). In this tradition analysis starts with class struggles, ‘their content, their direction, how they develop and how they circulate’ (Zerowork Collective 1975).

There are numerous other important direct and indirect subsidies that the government provides commercial media [...] First, advertising is condoned and encouraged by government policies and regulations. Allowing businesses to write off their advertising expenditures as a business expense on their tax returns not only costs the government tens of billions annually in revenues, but also encourages ever greater commercialism in our culture. by performing only lax regulation of advertising content, even as permitted by the law, the floodgates to commercialism are kept wide open. [...]

Second, and by far the most important for entertainment media, is copyright. Media products have always been a fundamental problem for capitalist economics, going back to the advent of the book. Without direct government intervention, the marketplace would barely exist as we have come to know it. The problem is that a person’s use of information, unlike tangible goods and services, does not prohibit others from using it. (In economic terms, it is nonrivalrous and nonexclusionary.) [...]

[...] 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 beets. The real spoils,
in other words, do not go to the aspiring stars, ranked and rated
by the battery of metrics that measure Internet sentiment and
opinion, but to behind-the-scenes content hosts and data miners,
who utilize these and other metrics to guarantee their profits. The
outcome, for this latter group, is a virtually wage-free proposition.
When all is said and done, the informal contract that underpins
this kind of economy is a profoundly asymmetrical deal.