[p2p-research] FW: [NetBehaviour] The Digital Surplus and Its Enemies.

[Michael Gurstein]

A very interesting analysis and critique including of Jaron Lanier's recent
book...

M

-----Original Message-----
From: netbehaviour-bounces at netbehaviour.org
[mailto:netbehaviour-bounces at netbehaviour.org] On Behalf Of marc garrett
Sent: Saturday, July 10, 2010 2:55 PM
To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity
Subject: [NetBehaviour] The Digital Surplus and Its Enemies.


The Digital Surplus and Its Enemies.

By Rob Horning

With the advent of Web 2.0, the Internet has begun to take on the 
characteristics of what the Italian autonomists like Paolo Virno called 
the social factory. The idea is that since many of us no longer have all 
that much to offer society, in terms of operating machinery or that sort 
of thing, the new way of extracting surplus value from our "labor" is to 
turn our social lives into a kind of covert work that we complete 
throughout the day, but in forms that can be co-opted by capitalist firms.

Work processes, as Virno explains in A Grammar of the Multitude 
[Semiotext(e); 2004], become diverse, but social life begins to 
homogenize itself in the sense that our identity becomes something we 
all must prove in the public sphere-we all become concerned with the 
self as brand. This results in the "valorization"-Marxist jargon for 
value enhancement-"of all that which renders the life of an individual 
unique"-which is to say our concern for our uniqueness, our identity in 
social contexts, becomes a kind of value-generating capital, or rather a 
circulating commodity.

This plays out in seemingly innocuous ways. It can be a matter of hyping 
a product free of charge but using it or talking about it. Or it can be 
a matter of going to parties with co-workers, learning to get along 
better and therefore increasing the efficiency of processes on the job. 
Or it is a matter of behaving politely among strangers, extending a 
system of politeness and trust that can be harvested economically as a 
reduction in transaction costs. To put it in sociologist Pierre 
Bourdieu's terms, our habitus-our manifest and class-bound way of being 
in the social world-has been transformed into an explicit productive 
force without our conscious consent by the way various social media have 
infiltrated everyday life.

more...
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/tools/print/120581
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