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- Cocercion [...]
- Alienation: Companies, not the users, own the platforms and the created profit.
- Appropriation: Users spend time on corporate Internet platforms that are funded by targeted advertising capital accumulation models. The time spent on corporate platforms is the value created by their unpaid digital labour. [...]
the last part means that all surplus value is appropriated
he says later (p263):
One hundred per cent of their labour time is surplus labour time, which allows capitalists to generate extra surplus value and extra profits.
Sut Jhally (1987, 78) argues that "reorganising the watching audience in terms of demographics" is a form of relative surplus value production. One can interpret targeted Internet advertising as a form of relative surplus value production: At one point in time, the advertisers not only show one advertisement to the audience as in non-targeted advertising, but they show different advertisements to different user groups depending on the monitoring, assessment and comparison of the users' interests and online behaviour. [...] The efficacy of advertising is increased [...] The more targeted advertisements there are, the more likely it is that users recognize ads and click on them.
[...] These ads contain more surplus value than the non-targeted ads (i.e. more unpaid labour time of the advertising company's paid employees and of users, who generate user-generated content and transaction data).
need to think about his more in relation to exchange value and does it actually produce surplus value if it's not always individually effective??
Social media users are double objects of commodification: they are commodities themselves and through this commodification their consciousness becomes, while online, permanently exposed to commodity logic in the form of advertisements. Most online time is advertising time. [...] advertisements do not necessarily represent consumers' real needs and desires because the ads are based on calculated assumptions, whereas needs are much more complex and spontaneous. The ads mainly reflect marketing decisions and economic power relations. They do not simply provide information about products as offers to buy, but present information about products of powerful companies.
cite this: information tech enables creation of a new frontier/digital domain where commodity logic is amplified, accelerated, spread everywhere more deeply
[...] claims about the Internet in the 1990s also constituted a "Californian ideology" (Barbrook and Cameron 2001) that stresses individualism, personal responsibility, competition, private property and consumerism, lacks consciousness of inequality and exploitation and is in line with the basic ideas of neo-liberalism (Fisher 2010). [...]
I feel vindicated for my gig economy piece that claimed as much
There are indications that profits have been increasing as a result of the relative decrease of wages and the increase of low-paid precarious employment. [...] the capitalist relations of production have in the latter decades of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century been shaped by an increase of socio-economic inequality that benefits capital at the expense of labour. Neo-liberalism has been a political class struggle project aimed at the "reconstruction of the power of economic elites" and "a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve this goal" (Harvey 2007, 19). The relations of production are shaped by a deep class conflict between the interests of labour.
[...] Its public listing as a stock market company has made Facebook definitely more prone to crisis and therefore more inclined to extend and intensify the exploitation of users. The capitalist Internet has faced a financial bubble before. Capitalism has slid into a big crisis since the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008. The social media economy's financialization may result in the next big bubble. The only alternative to exit the Internet crisis and exploitation economy is to exit from digital labour, to overcome alienation, to substitute the logic of capital with the logic of the commons and to transform digital labour into digital work.
[...] A full 94.7% say that oppose targeted ads on other platforms for which Facebook provides personal data to advertisers (N = 3948).
[...]
Such data show that one cannot assume users are happy about a trade-off between data commodification and "free" access, that they are rather critical of such a trade-off model and that there is a need for discussing alternatives to targeted advertising and corporate Internet platforms.
[...] Money is the dominant medium of capitalism [...] Those who control and accumulate money power are therefore equipped with a resource that puts them at a strategic advantage. This means that alternative online platforms in capitalism are facing power inequalities that stem from the asymmetric distributions of money and other resources that are inherent in capitalism. Practically this means that alternative platforms have less money and fewer users than Facebook. [...]
[...] Practically this means that a lot of companies want to advertise on Facebook and calculate social media advertising costs into their commodity prices. [...]
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