Post on 11-May-2015
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Juhana Venäläinen Researcher, PhD Student University of Eastern Finland School of Humanities juhana.venalainen@uef.fi
5516126 New Commons / Juhana Venäläinen / University of Eastern Finland / Spring 2013
¡ 1. A few more words on P2P ¡ 2. Immaterial and affective labor ¡ 3. Cognitive capitalism ¡ 4. ”Freedom” in a commons?
¡ P2P infrastructure: § 1. Technological infra (”fixed capital”) § 2. Autonomous information and communication systems
§ 3. Software for autonomous global cooperation § 4. Legal infrastructure for affirming and protecting use-‐value
§ 5. Suitable cultural conditions (new ways of being, knowing and valuing)
(Bauwens 2005)
¡ P2P characteristics § 1. Distributed networks § 2. Anti-‐credentialism (=inclusive communities) § 3. Holoptism (*) (contra panoptism) -‐> horizontal distribution of the process management
§ 4. Flexible hierarchies § 5. Distributed leadership § 6. Non-‐reciprocal gift economy
§ (*) a term coined by Jean-‐François Noubel
¡ Digitalism: Modern ideology of equality and a cult of englightenment § Parallels between lingual and biological domains
§ Illusion of ”energy-‐free” reproduction of information
§ Utopy of a reciprocal gift economy
¡ 1. Ignoring wetware § Hardware, software and netware are not sufficient for building autonomous commons
§ More focus should be put on the reproduction of the “peers” as “wetware” (biological, mental beings)
¡ 2. Misfocusing the struggle of digital freedom § Overemphasis on the rights to singular cultural artefacts (-‐> copyright regimes, etc.)
§ Underemphasis on the rights to the infrastructure § -‐> theory of “cognitive rent”
(Pasquinelli 2008)
¡ The preference of ”direct” social engagement over money-‐mediated market engagement
¡ A ”humanist” idea of the immeasurability of the value of persons and their efforts
¡ A generalized critique of the money-‐form
(Virén & Vähämäki 2011)
¡ Work done on the networking commons: beyond measure” and beyond control?
¡ Or: measured and controlled differently? § Equality matching (eye-‐for-‐an-‐eye) § Informal measurements of effort § Communal pressure § Meritocracy § Oligarchy
¡ What is it “production” of, if anything? ¡ What are the “commons” in question?
¡ E.g. sharing copyrighted music via BitTorrent protocol § The cultural artefacts are produced outside this networking
commons and expropriated to the commons (a “counter-‐enclosure”)
§ New kind of “relational” products through the practices of sharing: ▪ New consumption patterns, trends, hypes ▪ New market information ▪ New ways of advertising
§ -‐> the idea of consumer as a producer (“prosumption”, “produsage”)
¡ “Culture of sharing” as a double-‐edged sword
¡ Sharing as “freedom”?
¡ Capitalizing on the sharing
¡ Creates a global market of “audience commodities”
¡ Technological & economic infrastructures of sharing: highly concentrated
¡ The changing role of affects in capitalist economy
¡ Affects as directly productive of capital
¡ Affective labor as one of the highest value-‐producing forms of labor (from the point of view of capital)
¡ Global economy is (=was) taking a step towards “postmodernization” § Shift from industrial production to informational economy
§ Does not imply the disappearance of the previous forms of labor (industrial, agricultural)
§ Rather the introduction of communicative techniques in all sectors of production (“treat manufacturing as a service”)
¡ The old conception of the global division of labor (I = informational, II = industrial, III = agricultural) does not apply § “All forms of production exist […] under the domination of the informational production of services”
¡ Fordism § “Mute” relation b/w production and consumption § Producer can expect 100 % demand of everything produced § -‐> delayed and restricted “feedback circuit” from consumption to production
¡ Toyotism § Production planning communicates rapidly with the market changes (-‐> fast
“feedback circuit”) § Just in time production
¡ Service economy model § Communication as productive – and as a product – in itself § Based on continual exchange of information and knowledges § “The model of a computer” as a paradigm of production § -‐> immaterial labor
¡ The “other face” of immaterial labor
¡ Involves human contact and interaction
¡ Plays a vital role in service industries from fast-‐food restaurants to stock trading
¡ Produces “immaterial goods”: feelings, excitement, passion, a sense of connectedness
¡ -‐> creation and manipulation of affects
¡ Main theses: § 1. The focus of the wealth creation has been relocated from material
production to the production of knowledge, affects and “life in itself”
§ 2. The affective/cognitive component of value creation is not only “mental” or “immaterial” but diffused in different “materialities”
§ 3. The extraction of surplus value is not based on concrete organization of work within a firm but on the exploitation of the voluntary, independent and non-‐paid cooperation of workers through “cognitive rent”
¡ Notable theorists § Carlo Vercellone (2005; 2007; 2008), Yann Moulier Boutang (2007),
Enzo Rullani (2000; 2004a; 2004b); Andrea Fumagalli (2007)
¡ A new mode of capital accumulation § Based on knowledge and creativity § Knowledge as the prominent factor of production and the site of value creation
§ Stresses investments on the immaterial (education, R&D, communications infra, “human capital” in general)
¡ Key parameters of the accumulation system: § Property rights arrangements § Networks and alliances § Projects management § Geographical, institutional and organizational conditions for extracting profit from knowledge and innovation
¡ Virtualization of the economy ¡ Digitization of knowledge ¡ ICT as socio-‐technological resource ¡ Collapse of the division of labor ¡ Real-‐time production ¡ Tendency of open access ¡ Crises in IP rights ¡ “Biopolitical” mode of production
¡ “Information technology, personal computers and Internet will rise to a similar position as metaphors as the coal mine, steam engine, weaving machine and railway were for industrial capitalism.” (Moulier Boutang 2007)
¡ -‐> a new historical phase and regime of organizing production and the social life in general
¡ Scope of Google § Over 1 trillion indexed pages (2008) § Total revenue ca. 50 bn$ (2012) § Market share of 84 % in desktop search (2011)
¡ McKinsey & Company (2011): § The global added value of search in 2009: 780 bn$ ▪ -‐> 0,50 $ / search
§ Only 4 % of the added value is capitalized within the “search engine industry” ▪ The bulk of profit is gained by other industries and individual households
¡ Beckström’s Law § The value of a network equals the net value added to each user’s
transactions conducted through that network, summed over all users
¡ 1. Not in the production of new knowledge, but in processing pre-‐existing information § Exhibition § Filtering § Production of the context
¡ 2. Not in individually genuine ideas, but in attention and relation between different contents
¡ 3. Not in direct control of the users’ behaviour, but in providing a technological and social platform of free communication
¡ “Political entrepreneur” (Moulier Boutang) § Does not invest in actual production processes or launch them
§ -‐> tries to arrange and control the already existing processes and extract value from them
¡ Fuchs (2011): The extraction of value in Google is based on the non-‐paid work done by the users § Users provide the actual content § Users provide the relational information (metadata) on the content ▪ What is “interesting” ▪ What is trending ▪ Which contents are related and how
¡ Google extracts surplus value from audience commodities sold in targeted advertising
¡ Hardin: “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all”
¡ Now: Freedom in a commons brings profit to all?
¡ -‐> But what freedom, what profit, to who all, and how?
¡ "The development of each human fate can be represented as an uninterrupted alternation between bondage and release, obligation and freedom. This initial appraisal, however, presents us with a distinction whose abruptness is tempered by closer investigation. For what we regard as freedom is often in fact only a change of obligations [...] The process of liberation now starts again with this new duty, just as it had ended at this very point.”
– Simmel, "The Philosophy of Money", 4.I
“Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. […] At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance [disobedience] of the will and the intransigence [stubbornness] of freedom.”
(Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power”, cited in Hardt & Negri 2009, p. 59)
¡ Bauwens, Michel. 2005. “The Political Economy of Peer Production”. CTHEORY. http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499
¡ Bughin, Jacques ym. 2011. The impact of Internet technologies: Search. McKinsey & Company. ¡ Fumagalli, Andrea. 2007. Bioeconomia e capitalismo cognitivo. Verso un nuovo paradigma di
accumulazione. Roma: Carocci. ¡ Hardt, Michael. 1999. “Affective Labor”. boundary 2 26(2): 89-‐100. ¡ Hardt, Michael & Antonio Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press. ¡ Moulier Boutang, Yann. 2007. Le capitalisme cognitif: la nouvelle grande transformation. Paris: Éd.
Amsterdam. ¡ Negri, Antonio. 1999. “Value and Affect”. boundary 2 26(2): 77–88. ¡ Pasquinelli, Matteo. 2008. Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons. Rotterdam: NAi
Publishers / Institute of Network Cultures. ¡ Simmel, Georg. 2004[1900]. The philosophy of money. Psychology Press. ¡ Vercellone, Carlo. 2005. “The hypothesis of cognitive capitalism”. ¡ Vercellone, Carlo. 2008. “The new articulation of wages, rent and profit in cognitive capitalism”.
Queen Mary University School of Business and Management, London. ¡ Viren, Eetu, ja Jussi Vähämäki. 2011. Perinnöttömien perinne: Marx ilman marxismia. Helsinki:
Tutkijaliitto.