Free Labour: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy - Tiziana Terranova.
Working in the digital media industry is, according to Terranova’s findings, not the fun it is so often made out to be. Webzine and America Online (AOL) are provided as initial examples of casualization of labour and gruelling workloads. In 1999, just over half of fifteen thousand of AOL “volunteers” appealed to the Dept of Labour to investigate whether they were owed years of remuneration for of playing chat hosts for free.
Terranova has pointed this being a “glamorisation of digital labour”; the wrestle for legitimacy and parity of knowledge work. It is also perhaps evidence of wider spread complexities in relation to labour in late capitalist society. She draws her central argument from that of the Italian Autonomists and what they have called the “social factory”, a “process whereby work processes have shifted from the factory to society.”
Paul Gilroy and Donna Harraway - see my related blog post on Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto - disavowed what they felt was a tendency of theorists to employ a Marxian model; labour as being a mode of self-fashioning and proving communal liberation
This was true for intentions to adjust the nine-till-five workplace model. The expansion of the online channels has meant an increased flexibility, yes, in: re-skilling, freelance work, the ‘hot desking’ phenomenon, and what is defined as “supplementing” or bringing supplementary work home to work outside of scheduled hours. Labour has blurred the distinctions between measured output and leisure.
The Digital Economy
A term which highlights the intersection of cultural economy - media, higher education, social sciences, arts and the information industries. Richard Barbrook applies his own definition, describing the digital economy as ‘characterised by the emergence of new technologies’ and new types of workers, described as “digital artisans”. Adopting a Marxian-Hegelian schema, for Barbook the internet is somewhere to work, exchange, meet and share but these do not directly involve a financial component; but also that of a gift economy. These are explained as not working in opposition but in a symbiosis and have the capability to 'overcome capitalism from the inside.' The internet operates in the this way, acting as a sort of channel through with "human intelligence" renews the ability to produce.
Knowledge Class and Immaterial Labour
Computer networks, and those employed within them, are the both; "at the material and ideological heart of informated capital". Direct labour within this network is defined as skills in cybernetics and computer control; information technology workers, etc. immaterial labour is in distinction to this as it involves activities that are not normally recognised as work. Within the internet exists whole networks of immaterial labour encompassing writing/read/managing/mail lists/chat bots/chat forums. It is build on the premise of extraction, the labour of programmers to build websites maybe evident when visiting it; more so the implications of the labour involved in maintenance of the site too as product needs to be updated to progress the acquisition of capital. These all fall outside of what Marx classified as allocation of time for the "production of value regardless of the useful qualities of the product," and especially concern the exploitation of the young, or "precarious worker." who so often contribute to the busy traffic and labour output online.
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