Terranova, T. (2013). Free Labour. Scholz, T (ed.). Digital Labour: The Internet as playground and factory. (pp. 33 - 57). Routledge: New York.
p.33
even during the dot-com boom, the "netslaves"
of the homonymous (of the same name) webzine had always been vociferous (noisy) about the shamelessly
exploitative nature of the job, its punishing work rhythms, and its ruthless casualization.
2
In early 1999, 7 of the 1 5,000
"volunteers" of America Online rocked the info-love boat by asking the DepartITtent
of Labor to investigate whether AOL owed them back wages for their years
of playing chat hosts for free. They used to work long hours and love it; but they
also felt the pain of being burned by digital media.
These events point to an inevitable backlash against the glamorization of digital
labor,[...]
In this chapter, I call this excessive activity that makes the Internet a thriving
and hyperactive medium "free labor"-a feature of the cultural economy at large
and an important, yet unacknowledged, source of value in advanced capitalist
societies. (definition)
p. 34
Far from being an unreal, empty space, the Internet is animated
by cultural and technical labor through and through, a continuous production of
value that is completely immanent to the flows of the network society at large.
(without the physical cpmponents required to access the Web, the terms empty and full wouldn't exist.)
Support for this argument, however, is immediately complicated by the recent
history of Anglo-American cultural theory. How should we speak of labor, especially
cultural and technical labor, after the demolition job carried out by 30
years of postmodernism? The postmodern socialist feminism of Donna Haraway's
"Cyborg Manifesto" spelled out son1e of the reasons behind the antipathy of 1 980s
critical theory for Marxist analyses of labor. Haraway explicitly rejected the humanistic
tendencies of theorists who see the latter as the "pre-eminently privileged
category enabling the Marxist to overcome illusion and fmd that point of
view which is necessary for changing the world."6 Paul Gilroy similarly expressed
his discontent at the inadequacy of Marxist analysis of labor to the descendants of
slaves, who value artistic expression as "the means towards both individual selffashioning
and communal liberation." 7 If labor is "the humanizing activity that
makes [white] man," then, surely, this humanizing labor does not really belong in
the age of networked, posthuman intelligence.
(Are the Marxist theories no longer applicable in postmodernism? Is Marx outdated?)
The expansion of the Internet has given ideological and material
support to contemporary trends toward increased flexibility of the workforce,
continuous reskilling, freelance work, and the diffusion of practices such as "supplementing"
( bringing supplementary work home from the conventional office) .8 (Castel)
W hat I will rather do is map the way in which the Internet connects
to the autonomist social factory.
It is fundamental to move beyond the notion that cyberspace is about
escaping reality in order to understand how the reality of the Internet is deeply
connected to the development of late postindustrial societies as a whole.
p.35
Cultural
and technical work is central to the Internet but is also a widespread activity
throughout advanced capitalist societies. Such labor is not exclusive to so-called
knowledge workers but is a pervasive feature of the postindustrial economy. The
pervasiveness of such production questions the legitimacy of a fixed distinction
between production and consumption, labor and culture.
THE DIGITAL ECONOMY
The term digital economy emerged in the late 1 990s as a way to summarize some
of the processes described above. As a term, it seems to describe a formation that
intersects on the one hand with the postmodern cultural economy (the media, the
university, and the arts) and on the other hand with the information industry (the
information and communication complex).
(Definition)
We will distinguish here between the New Economy-"a historical period
marker [that] acknowledges its conventional association with Internet companies"
11-and the digital economy-a less transient phenomenon based on key
features of digitized information (its ease of copying and low or zero cost of sharing)
.(Distinction between new and digital economy)
p.36
The predominance of
relationships of collaboration across distance and exchange without money suggested
that this was a practiced relationship with a viable and alternative political
and economic model.
In the absence
of states or markets to mediate social bonds, network communities
are instead formed through the mutual obligations created by gifts of time
and ideas.13
Barbrook's vision of the informational commons was only reinforced by the subsequent
explosion of peer-to-peer, file-sharing net\vorks-a huge network phenomenon
that had the music and film industries up in arms.
"moneycommodity
and gift relations are not just in conflict with each other, but also
co-exist in symbiosis."14
(So is it ligitimit to tak about social capitalism?)
Participants in the gift economy are not reluctant to
use market resources and government funding to pursue a potlatch economy
of free exchange. However, the
potlatch and the economy ultimately remain
irreconcilable, and the market economy is always threatening to reprivatize the
common enclaves of the gift economy.
The provision of free labor, as we shall
see later, is a fundamental moment in the creation of value in the economy at
large-beyond the digital economy of the Internet.
p.37
The volunteers for America Online, the netslaves and the amateur web designers,
did not work only because capital wanted them to, but they were acting
out a desire for affective and cultural production, which was nonetheless real just
[...]overdeveloped countries[...]Free labor is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption
of culture is translated into excess productive activities that are pleasurably embraced
and at the same time often shamelessly exploited.
Knowledge workers need open organizational structures in order to produce,
because the production of knowledge is rooted in collaboration; this is what
Bath·ook had defined as the "gift economy":
The concept of supervision and management is changing to team-based
structures. Anyone responsible for managing knowledge workers knows
they cannot be "managed" in the traditional sense. Often they have specialized
knowledge and skills that cannot be matched or even understood by
management. A new challenge to management is first to attract and retain
these assets by marketing the organization to them, and second to provide
the creative and open communications environment where such workers
can effectively apply and enhance their knowledge. 16
[...]in the digital economy, the worker achieves fulfillment through work and finds in
her brain her own, unalienated means of production. 17
p.38
The digital economy is an important area of experimentation with value and
free cultural/affective labor. It is about specific forms of production (web design,
multimedia production, digital services, and so on), but it is also about forms of
labor we do not immediately recognize as such: chat, real-life stories, mailing lists,
amateur newsletters, and so on. These types of cultural and technical labor are not
produced by capitalism in any direct, cause-and-effect fashion; that is, they have
not developed simply as an answer to the economic needs of capital. However,
they have developed in relation to the expansion of the cultural industries and
are part of a process of economic experimentation with the creation of monetary
value out of knowledge/ culture/ affect.
Incorporation is not about capital
descending on authentic culture but a more immanent process of channeling
collective labor (even as cultural labor) into monetary flows and its structuration
within capitalist business practices.
p.39
Subcultural movements have stuffed the pockets of multinational capitalism for
decades. Nurtured by the consumption of earlier cultural moments, subcultures
have provided the look, style, and sounds that sell clothes, CDs, video games, films,
and advertising slots on television. This has often happened through the active
participation of subcultural members in the production of cultural goods (e.g.,
independent labels in music, small designer shops in fashion). 18 This participation
is, as the word suggests, a voluntary phenomenon, although it is regularly accompanied
by cries of "Sell-out!" The fruits of collective cultural labor have been not
simply appropriated, but voluntarily chan!leled and controversially structured within
capitalist business practices. The relation between culture, the cultural industry,
and labor in these movements is much more complex than the notion of incorporation
suggests. In this sense, the digital economy is not a new phenomenon but
simply a new phase of this longer history of experimentation.
KNOWLEDGE CLASS AND IMMATERIAL LABOUR
if we do not get online soon,
the hype suggests, we will become obsolete, unnecessary, disposable. If we do, we
are promised, we will become part of the "hive mind;' the in1material economy
of networked, intelligent subjects in charge of speeding up the rhythms of capital's
"incessant waves of branching innovations."20 (Am I part of this?)
p.40
The question of who uses the Internet is both necessary and misleading. It
is necessary because we have to ask who is participating in the digital economy
before we can pass a judgment on the latter. It is misleading because it implies
that all we need to know is how to locate the knowledge workers within a class,
and knowing which class it is will give us an answer to the political potential of
the net as a whole. If we can prove that knowledge workers are the avant-garde of
labor, then the net becomes a site of resistance;22 if we can prove that knowledge
workers wield the power in informated societies, then the net is an extended gated
community for the n1iddle classes.23
(definition of immaterial labour)
For Lazzara to, the concept of immaterial
labor refers to two d!fferent aspects of labor:
On the one hand, as regards the "informational content" of the commodity,
it refers directly to the changes taking place in workers' labor
processes . . . where the skills involved in direct labor are increasingly skills
involving cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal and vertical
communication). On the other hand, as regards the activity that produces
the "cultural content" of the commodity, immaterial labor involves a series
of activities that are not normally recognized as "work"-in other words,
the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic
Free Labor 41
standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public
opinion.25
p.41
Lazzara to insists that this form of labor power is not limited
to highly skilled workers but is a form of activity of every productive subject
within postindustrial societies. In the highly skilled worker, these capacities are
already there. However, in the young worker, the "precarious worker," and the unemployed
youth, these capacities are "virtual"-that is, they are there but are still
undetermined.
This intensity is produced
by the processes of "channeling of the capitalist formation which distributes value
according to its logic of profit."28
p.42
The productive capacities of immaterial labor on the Internet
encompass the work of writing/reading/managing and participating in mailing
lists/websites/ chat lines. These activities fall outside the concept of "abstract
labor," which Marx defined as the provision of time for the production of value
regardless of the useful qualities of the product. 29 They witness an invest1nent of
desire into production of the kind cultural theorists have mainly theorized in relation
to consumption.
COLLECTIVE MINDS
Kevin Kelly's popular thesis in Out of Control,
for example, suggested that the Internet is a collective "hive mind." According to
Kelly, the Internet is another manifestation of a principle of self-organization that
is widespread throughout technical, natural, and social systems. (Is this social Anarchy?)
3° From a different perspective, Pierre Levy
drew on cognitive anthropology and poststructuralist philosophy to argue that
computers and computer networks enable the emergence of a "collective intelligence."
W hat is collective intelligence? It is a form of universally distributed intelligence,
constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective
mobilization of skills .... The basis and goal of collective intelligence
is the mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals rather than the cult
of fetishized or hypostatized communities. 32
"The more we are able to form intelligent communities, as open-minded, cognitive
subjects capable of initiative, imagination, and rapid response, the more we will
be able to ensure our success in a highly competitive environment."33
[...]computer networks highlight the unique value
of human intelligence as the true creator of value in a knowledge economy.
Capital, after all, is the unnatural environment within which the collective
intelligence materializes. The collective dimension of networked intelligence
needs to be understood historically, as part of a specific momentum of capitalist
development. (What is this supposed to mean?)
p.44
The production process has ceased to be a labor process in the sense of a
process dominated by labor as its governing unity. Labor appears, rather,
merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers
at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total
process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose
unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living, (active) machinery,
which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty
organism. 36
(Humans as part of the machinery - can we then deduce that in the digital age, humans are part of the Internet?)
If we see the Internet, and computer networks in general, as the latest
machines-the latest manifestation of fixed capital-then it won't be difficult
to imagine the general intellect as being well and alive today.
p.45
As Virno emphasizes, mass intellectuality is not about the various
roles of the knowledge workers, but is a "quality and a distinctive sign of the
whole social labor force in the post-Fordist era."39
Knowledge labor is inherently
collective; it is always the result of a collective and social production of knowledge.40
p.46
This does not mean that old media do not draw on free Labor. On the contrary,
television and print media, for example, make abundant use of the free labor of
their audiences/readers, but they also tend to structure the latter's contribution
much more strictly, both in terms of economic organization and moralistic judgment.
The price to pay for all those real-life-TV experiences is usually a heavy
dose of moralistic scaremongering: criminals are running amok on the freeways
and m.ust be stopped by tough police action; wild teenagers lack self-esteem and
need tough love; and selfish and two-faced reality TV contestants will eventually
get their comeuppance. If this does not happen on the Internet, why is it, then,
that the Internet is not the happy island of decentered, dispersed, and pleasurable
cultural production that its apologists claimed it to be?
Hyperreality confirms
the humanist nightmare of a society without humanity, the culmination of
a progressive taking over of the realm of representation. Cmnmodities on the net
are not material and are excessive (there is too much of it, too many websites, too
much clutter and noise) with relation to the limits of real social needs.
p.47
[...]the commodity does not disappear as such; it rather becomes
increasingly ephemeral, its duration becomes compressed, and it becomes more
of a process than a finished product. The role of continuous, creative, innovative
labor as the ground of n1arket value is crucial to the digital economy. The process
of valorization (the production of monetary value) happens by foregrounding the
quality of the labor that literally animates the commodity.
the sustainability of the Internet as a medium depends on
massive amounts of labor (which is not equivalent to employment, as we said),
only some of which is hypercompensated by the capricious logic of venture capitalism.
Of the incredible amount of labor that sustains the Internet as a whole
(from mailing list traffic to websites to infrastructural questions), we can guess that
a substantial amount of it is still free labor. (so: labour <> employment?)
p.48
the best website, the best
way to stay visible and thriving on the web, is to turn your site into a space that is
not only accessed, but somehow built by its users. 47
Open source "refers to a model of software development
in which the underlying code of a program-the source code, a.k.a. the crown
jewels-is by definition made freely available to the general public for modification,
alteration, and endless redistribution."49
In 1 999, Apache, an open source
web server, became the "Web-server program of choice for more than half of
all publicly accessible Web servers."50 It has since then expanded to the point
where Bavaria in Germany and the whole of China have recently announced a
switchover to Apache.
Open-source companies such as Cygnus convinced the market that
you do not need to be proprietary about source codes to make a profit: the code
might be free, but tech support, packaging, installation software, regular upgrades,
office applications, and hardware are not. (the essence of making a profit out of OS)
p.50
Late capitalism does not appropriate anything:
it nurtures, exploits, and exhausts its labor force and its cultural and affective
production. In this sense, it is technically impossible to separate neatly the digital
economy of the net from the larger network economy of late capitalism.
THE NET AND THE SET
The Old Web was a place where the unemployed, the dreamy, and the
iconoclastic went to reinvent themselves .... The New Web isn't about dabbling
in what you don't know and failing-it's about preparing seriously
for the day when television and Web content are delivered over the same
digital networks. 58
p.52
The qualitative difference bet\veen people shows and a successful
website, then, does not lie in the latter's democratic tendency as opposed to the
former's exploitative nature. It lies in the operation, within people shows, of majoritarian
discursive mechanisms of territorialization, the application of a morality
that the excessive abundance of material on the Internet renders redundant and,
even more, irrelevant. The digital economy cares only tangentially about morality.
W hat it really cares about is an abundance of production, an immediate intetface
with cultural and technical labor whose result is a diffuse, nondialectical antagonism
and a crisis in the capitalist modes of valorization as such.
(The above is an essential part of this reading - think about it)
A NEW CONCLUSION: THE LIBERATION OF FREE LABOUR FEBRARY 2012
"Free Labor" was written in the late 1 990s as output of a funded research project
about the future of the Internet and partially rewritten in the mid-2000s, after the
crash of the dot-com bubble.
Today,
in the middle of chronic financial turbulence and a general slowing down or
recession of the global economy, the digital economy of the social web seems to
belong to a different universe, as numbers of users increase exponentially and the
profits and market value of web 2.0 giants are exceptions to the general depressing
economic climate.
what to make of the other thesis, put for ward in the original article,
that such activity could be considered as a form of labor and that such labor was
being exploited?
Calling users' participation in the digital economy labor was not so much an
empirical description of an undisputable social and economic reality, but a political
choice.
p.53
Within the economic limits of capitalist economies, then, living labor is
(about exploitation)
doubly exploited. To the increasing exploitation clearly visible in the domain
of waged digital work (decreasing autonomy and falling wages for increasing
productivity), we have to add, then, a new kind of exploitation-that which
concerns the immaterial commons of cultural and technical production.
(NOTE)As the wealth generated by free
labor is social, so should be the mode of its return.
The ambiguity of the current condition is implied in the fact that the means
through which such passage can be accomplished are given (with the possible
exception of Anonymous) within the context of those social media technologies
that today are fully privatized and embedded in the capitalist economy at large. It
is within these media that we are witnessing the formation of social and political
movements that question not so much the speciftc domain of social media use but
the overall economic structure that supports them. The Arab Spring and the Assemble
and Occupy movements are two obvious examples of this trend, but so are
the innumerable initiatives and struggles that over the past decade have brought
together the net, the Squares, and the Streets. It is not clear at the moment whether
such struggles will manage to accumulate enough social energy not only to reverse
the current trend but also to generate their own structures and political rationalities,
which are truly alternative to the no-alternative diktat. The liberation of free
labor, however, cannot demand anything less.
p.54
NOTES
1 See Andrew Ross's ethnography of New York City digital design company Razorfish,
No Collar: The Huma11c Workplace and Its Hiddm Costs (New York: Basic
Books, 2002).
2 See http: //www. netslaves.com. And also Bill Lessard and S teve Baldwin's playful
classification of the dot-com labor hierarchies in Nctslallcs: True Tales of Workilzg tlze Web
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000).
3 Lisa Margonelli, "Inside AOI:s 'Cyber-Sweatshop,"' Wired, October 1 999, 1 38.
4 See Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1 996); and Toni Negri, The Politics of SubFersio11:
A Manifesto for the Ttl!enty:first Cmtury (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1 989) and Marx beyond
lvfarx: Lessons on tlze "Gnmdrisse" (New York: Autonomedia, 1 9 9 1 ) .
5 Negri, Tlze Politics of Subversion .
6 Donna Haraway, Simimzs, Cybotgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge,
1 9 9 1 ) , 1 59.
7 Paul Gilroy, The Black A tlantic: J11odenzity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso,
1 993), 40.
8 Manuel Cas tells, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1 996), 395.
9 Antonio Negri, Guide. Ci11que lezioni szz Impero e dintomi (Milan: Raffaello Cortina,
2003), 209 (my translation) .
10 In discussing these developments, I will also draw on debates circulating across Internet
sites such as, for example, nettime, telepolis, rhizome, and c-theory. Online debates are
one of the manifestations of the surplus value engendered by the digital economy, a
hyperproduction that can only be partly reabsorbed by capital.
1 1 Ross, No Collar, 9.
1 2 See Richard Barbrook, "The Digital Economy," nettime, June 1 7 , 1 997, http://www.
nettime.org; Richard Barbrook, "The High-Tech Gift Economy," in Readme! Filtered
by Nettime: ASCII Culture and tlze Rellenge of Knowledge, eds. Josephine Bosma et a!.
( Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1 999), 1 32-8. Also see Anonymous, "The Digital Artisan
Manifesto," nettime, May 1 5 , 1 997; and Andrew Ross's argument in No Collar that the
Free Labor 5 5
digital artisan was an expression of a short-lived phase in the Internet labor market corresponding
to a temporary shortage of skills that initially prevented a more industrial
division of labor.
13 Barbrook, "The High-Tech Gift Economy," 135.
1 4 Ibid., 1 37 .
1 5 Don Tapscott, The Digital Economy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1 996), xiii.
16 Ibid., 35 (emphasis added).
17 Ibid., 48.
18 For a discussion of the independent music industry and its relation to corporate culture,
see David Hesmondalgh, "Indie: The Aesthetics and Institutional Politics of a Popular
Music Genre," Cultural Studies 13 ( January 1999): 34-6 1 . Angela McRobbie has also
studied a similar phenomenon in the fashion and design industry in British Fashion
Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry? (London: Routledge, 1 998).
19 See the challenging section on work in the high-tech industry in Bosma et a!. , Readme!
20 Martin Kenney, "Value-Creation in the Late Twentieth Century: The Rise of the Knowledge
Worker;' in Cutting Edge: Technology, Information Capitalism and Social Revolution,
eds. Jim Davis, Thomas Hirsch, and Michael Stack (London: Verso, 1997), 93; also see
in the same anthology Tessa Morris-Suzuki, "Capitalism in the Computer Age," 57-7 1 .
21 See Darko Suvin, "On Gibson and Cyberpunk SF," i n Storming the Reality Studio, ed.
Larry McCaffery (London: Durham University Press, 1 991), 349-65 ; and Stanley
Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The jobless Future: SctTech and the Dogma cif Work
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 994). According to Andrew Clement,
information technologies were introduced as extensions of Taylorist techniques of scientific
management to middle-level, rather than clerical, employees. Such technologies
responded to a managerial need for efficient ways to manage intellectual labor. Clement,
however, seems to connect this scientific management to the workstation, while
he is ready to adm.it that personal computers introduce an element of autonomy much
disliked by management. See Andrew Clement, "Office Automation and the Technical
Control of Information Workers," in The Political Economy cif Itifon11ation, eds. Vincent
Mosco and Janet Wasko (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).
22 Barbrook, "The High-Tech Gift Economy."
23 See Kevin Robins, "Cyberspace or the World We Live In," in Fractal 1\!Icdia: New 1\!Iedia
in Social Context, ed. Jon Dovey (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1 996).
24 See Frank Webster, Theories cif the Irifonnation Society (London: Routledge, 1 995).
25 Maurizio Lazzarato, "Imm.aterial Labor," in lvfarxism beyond i\llarxism, eds. Saree Makdisi,
Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl for the Polygraph Collective (London:
Routledge, 1996), 1 33.
26 The Criminal Justice Act (CJA) was popularly perceived as an antirave legislation, and
most of the campaign against it was organized around the "right to party." However, the
most devastating effects of the C JA have struck the neotribal, nomadic camps, basically
decimated or forced to move to Ireland in the process. See Andrea Natella and Serena
Tinari, eds., Rave Off (Rome: Castelvecchi, 1996).
27 Lazzarato, "Im.material Labor," 1 36 .
28 In the two volumes o f Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
described the process by which capital unsettles and resettles bodies and cultures as a
movement of "decoding" ruled by "axiomatization." Decoding is the process through
which older cultural limits are displaced and removed, as with older, local cultures during
modernization; the flows of culture and capital unleashed by the decoding are then channeled
into a process of axiomatization, an abstract moment of conversion into money
56 The Shifting Sites of Labor Markets
and profit. The decoding forces of global capitalism have then opened up the possibilities
of immaterial labor. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizoplumia (London: Athlone, 1 984); and A Thottsand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrellia
(London: Athlone, 1 988).
29 See Franco Berardi (Bifo) , La 11ejasta utopia di potere operaio (Rome: Castelvecchi/DeriveApprodi,
1 998), 43.
30 See Kevin Kelly, Out ojCo11trol ( Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1 994).
31 Eugene Provenza, foreword to Pierre Levy, Collective bztelligellce: lvfankind's Emezging
VVOrld in Cyberspace ( New York: Plenum, 1 995) , viii.
32 Levy, Collective Inte!l(etlce, 1 3.
33 Ibid., 1 .
34 See Little Red Henski, "Insider Report from UUNET," in Bosma et al. , Readme! 1 89-9 1 .
3 5 Paolo Virna, "Notes o n the General Intellect," i n Makdisi, Casarino, and Karl, lvfarxism
beyond lvlarxisnz, 266.
36 Karl Marx, Gnmdrisse (London: Penguin, 1 973), 693.
37 Virna, "Notes on the General Intellect," 266.
38 Ibid., 270.
39 Ibid., 271 .
40 See Maurizio Lazzarato, "New Forms of Production," in Bosma et al. , Readme! 1 5 9-66;
and Tessa Morris-Suzuki, "Robots and Capitalism," in CuttizzL Edge: Tcclmology, Informatioll
Capitalism a11d Social Rcvolutio11, 1 3-27. n.p. : Verso, 1 998.
41 See Toni Negri, "Back to the Future," in Bosma et al., Readme! 1 8 1-6; and Haraway,
Simians, Cybos, and Womm.
42 Andrew Ross, Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice (London: Routledge, 1 998).
43 See Barbrook, "The High-Tech Gift Economy."
44 The work of Jean-Franc;:ois Lyotard in The Postmodem Condition is mainly concerned
with k11ow/edge rather than intellectual labor but still provides a useful conceptualization
of the reorganization of labor within the productive structures of late capitalism. See
Jean-Franc;:ois Lyotard, The Postmodem Condition: A Report 011 Knowledge, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 989).
45 See Arthur Kraker and Michael A. Weinstein, Data ]J-ash: The Theory of the Virtual Class
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1 994).
46 See Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Conummity: Homesteading 011 the Electronic Fro11tier
(New York: Harper Perennial, 1 994).
47 See Howard Rheingold, "My Experience with Electric Minds;' in Bosma et al., Readme!
1 47-50; also David Hudson, Rewired: A Brief (and Opiuio11ated) Net History (Indianapolis:
Macmillan Technical Publishing, 1 997). The expansion of the net is based on different
types of producers adopting different strategies of income generation: some might
use more traditional types of financial support (grants, divisions of the public sector,
in-house Internet divisions within traditional media companies, businesses' web pages,
which are paid as with traditional forms of advertising); some might generate interest
in one's page and then sell the user's profile or advertising space (freelance web production);
and some might use innovative strategies of valorization, such as various types of
e-comn1erce.
48 See Margonelli, "Inside AOI:s 'Cyber-Sweatshop.' "
49 Andrew Leonard, "Open Season," Wired, May 1 999, 1 40. Open source harks back
to the specific competencies embodied by Internet users in its pre- 1 994 days. When
most net users were computer experts, the software structure of the medium was developed
by way of a continuous interaction of different technical skills. This tradition
Free Labor 57
still survives in institutions like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) , which is
responsible for a number of important decisions about the technical infrastructure of
the net. Although the IETF is subordinated to a number of professional committees, it
has important responsibilities and is open to anybody who wants to join. The freeware
movement has a long tradition, but it has also recently been divided by the polemics
between the free software or " copy left" movement and the open-source movement,
which is m.ore of a pragmatic attempt to make freeware a business proposition. See
debates online at http://www.gnu.org and http: //www.salonmag.com.
50 Leonard, "Open Season."
51 Ibid., 1 42.
52 It is an established pattern of the computer industry, in fact, that you might have to give
away your product if you want to reap the benefits later on. As John Perry Barlow has
remarked, "Familiarity is an important asset in the world of information. It may often
be the case that the best thing you can do to raise demand for your product is to give it
away." See John Perry Barlow, "Selling Wine without Bottles: The Economy of Mind
on the Global Net," in H(glz Noon 011 the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace,
ed. Peter Ludlow (Cambridge, MA: MlT Press, 1 996).
53 The technical and social structure of the net has been developed to encourage open
cooperation among its participants. As an everyday activity, users are building the system
together. Engaged in interactive creativity, they send e-mail, take part in electronic
mailing lists, contribute to newsgroups, participate in online conferences, and produce
websites. Lacking copyright protection, information can be freely adapted to suit the
users' needs. Within the high-tech gift econ01ny, people successfully work together
through "an open social process involving evaluation, comparison and collaboration"
(Barbrook, "The High-Tech Gift Economy," 1 35-6) .
54 John Horvarth, "Freeware Capitalism," nettime, February 5, 1 998.
55 Ibid.
56 Netscape started like a lot of other computer companies: its founder, Marc Andreessen,
was part of the original research group that developed the structure of the World Wide
Web at the CERN laboratory, in Geneva. As with many successful computer entrepreneurs,
he developed the browser as an offshoot of the original, state-funded research
and soon started his own company. Netscape was also the first company to exceed the
economic processes of the computer industry, inasmuch as it was the ftrst successful
company to set up shop on the net itself. As such, Netscape exemplifies some of the
problems that even the computer industry meets on the net and constitutes a good
starting point to assess some of the conunon claims about the digital economy.
57 Ross, Real Love.
58 Chip Bayers, "Push Comes to Show," Wired, February 1999, 1 1 3.
59 Ibid. , 1 56.
