Arguments about what is work and what is not work within digital media industry had been nurtured by advocates of digital labor for the last decade. For some of them, capital has been weakened by the demand for knowledge and creativity which posits workers in advantage. To others, the profits of companies as Google and Facebook prove that the digital environment of work is not far from the well know Marxists theories (especially from Marx predictions in a few passages of the Grundrisse when he points to the capital dependence of social intellect to improve the machinery (Marx, 1973)). Tiziana Terranova seems to be somewhere between these two theorists groups.
For Terranova, the modern appearance of the digital economy hires the ancient process of the capitalist exploitation (33). She argues that the netslaves form of labor is not an exclusivity of the Internet, but it was already present in the late capitalist societies. All these activities on the Internet, what she called “Free labor,” are characteristics and source of value in the postindustrial societies. Terranova resorted to Mario Tronti’s concept of social factory to explain “how work processes have changed from factories to society” shaping a newly machine (34).
In this chapter, the author is not concerned to point the effects of the Internet but to draw the associations existing between “the autonomist social factory” and its surrounding influences such as labor, culture, and power (34). It is a need to go beyond cyberspace to understand Internet’s connections, says Terranova. Outside the Internet, the relationship between the desire for creative production and the current importance that capital projects on knowledge promoted the conditions necessary for the free labor. Thus, human intelligence is the principal source of added value in the digital capitalism (37).
Terranova argues that the digital labor is made of activities that are not immediately recognized as work, such as chat, blogs, and fan pages. For her, these kinds of cultural labor are not produced by capital but were developed by cultural industries and economic efforts to monetarize cognition (38). The original cultural production is structured and organized following capitalist business practices.
Considering that the majority of Internet users are made up of knowledge workers, Terranova alerts for the difficult to quantify knowledge and how this impossibility impacts the classification of this work category (40). Consequently, Terranova opted to replace the stuck concept of class with the notion of Immaterial Labor (Maurizio Lazzarato,1996). For she, is more useful to think about labor not trapped in a specific class. She posits knowledge labor as a form of work exclusively of collective and recognizes this is to reject the equivalence of labor and waged labor. Furthermore, different of Marxists positions, Terranova asserts that late capitalism does not appropriate any aspect of social and cultural activities. Is does “…nurtures, exploits, and exhausts its force and its cultural and affective production” (50).
Finally, considering the differences among critics and sympathizers, Terranova proposes two ways out to questions related to free labor. The first is to return profits to their producers individually or to some social institution that represents them. Secondly, give to data’s owners the right to access and approve their participation in the production process.
Lazzarato, M. (1996). “Immaterial Labour”, in Radical Thought in Italy, eds. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 133-146.
Marx, K. (1973). “The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines),” Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin), 690-695, 699-711.
Terranova, T. (2013). “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy”, Digital Labor, ed. Trebor Scholz. New York: Routledge, 33-53.
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