4AAVC101 - week 3

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These are my notes from October 10 for 4AAVC101 at King's College London for the 2017-2018 school year. The lecturer, Nick Srnicek, is the author of two excellent books at the intersection of technology and leftist politics: Inventing the Future (with Alex Williams), and Platform Capitalism.

The usual disclaimer: all notes are my personal impressions and do not necessarily reflect the view of the lecturer.

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The Value of Data

Readings

Learning to Immaterial Labour (PDF) by Mark Coté and Jennifer Pybus

On the source of MySpace’s ridiculously high valuation at the time of its acquisition by News Corporation ($580 million).

Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy (PDF) by Tiziana Terranova

On knowledge work in the new digital economy and how it relates to classical Marxist ideas. I need to re-read this more carefully but it seems really, really good.

Digital Labour and Karl Marx by Christian Fuchs

It’s a 400-page book (in the Recommended Reading section) so I haven’t had a chance to get to it yet, but it looks pretty awesome and I’m stoked to read it.

Lecture

• an overview of tech companies that sold for ridiculous amounts in recent years
  • MySpace, $580m to News Corp in 2005, never having made a profit; resold for $35m in 2011
  • Instagram, $1b to Facebook in 2012, with $2.7m in losses and 13 employees
  • WhatsApp, $19b to Facebook in 2014, with $138m in losses and 32 employees
  • LinkedIn, $26b to Microsoft in 2016, having lost $166m in 2015
• moving beyond the obvious point that valuations are arbitrary and not necessarily reflective of any sort of “value” that can be agreed on objectivity, we can still find a common factor that explains the seemingly excessive valuations among these companies, and that is user data
• if you look at companies like Google, Twitter, FB: 90%+ of revenue comes from advertising, which means that their audiences are the commodities being sold
• we see a shift from the old TV-based advertising model—where audiences are treated as passive consumers—to a more interactive model where audiences are actively producing content as well (think YouTube, Instagram, Twitter)
• today: focus on platforms with lots of user-generated content (Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, etc). excluding Apple because most of their revenue comes from selling physical phones (although, to be fair, the value of the phones is partly due to the UGC provided by the app development community)
• we can think of this user-generated content as immaterial labour (knowledge, culture, ideas, etc)
  • the work we do is individualised and portrayed to us as “self-investment”: we’re building up our entrepreneurial profile, our “brand”, our cultural capital
  • also usually affective: social, emotional (making connections, reading the “room”, empathy in anticipating reactions, etc)
• and of course this labour produces value for these corporations:
  • when we like pages on FB, we’re telling FB what our preferences are and thus enabling them to target ads better
  • when we Google something and click through to a link, we’re giving Google feedback that it can use to make it search algorithms better
  • thus our entire online activity is a source of profit for these corporations—we are a source of free labour
• so the question is: what can we as consumers, workers, citizens etc do??
  • Wages for Facebook is one campaign (modelled after Wages for Housework in the 60s, which was intended to raise the visibility of unpaid domestic work done primarily by women)
  • show of hands in the class: no one thinks we deserve wages for Facebook
    • in fact one student suggests that if we were paid to use FB, the system could fall victim to manipulation
    • another student says that we’re provided a service (i.e., the ability t use Facebook) in exchange so it’s fair
    • another says that we don’t deserve regular wages, but if Facebook is selling data to third parties, then maybe we should be renumerated for that
    • (in any case, the whole point of the Wages for Facebook campaign is less to actually demand wages from FB and more to get people to realise that FB is exploiting us)
  • Jaron Lanier’s proposal, in Who Owns The Future
    • incidentally, I read this book by happenstance a few days prior, and wrote a fairly negative review on Goodreads which you can read if you’re curious
    • his main idea is that tech companies should compensate people for the value they provide via their personal data
    • result: micropayments, creation of personal data markets
    • basically extending this neoliberal hellscape we live in just a tiny bit farther
    • (you can tell I’m not on board with this idea)
    • Srnicek brings up: does this mean that only rich people will be able to afford privacy, while poor people will have to live in a privacy-less dystopia?
    • how much is personal data worth, anyway? usually each transaction results in only fractions of a cent for each user—will that result in enough value over time to make these micropayments worth implementing?
• Srnicek mentions UBI as a potential response to problems caused by automation, and also in recognition of the fact that a lot of work is currently not being paid
  • my own take on UBI is similar to my take on Jaron Lanier’s micropayment scheme: I see it as a suboptimal solution whose primary function is to preserve this dying capitalist shell a little while longer etc etc, your mileage may vary
• Srnicek’s skepticism of the Wages for Facebook campaign
  • are these companies exploiting unpaid work? it certainly doesn’t feel like work, but of course, just because we don’t think of it as work doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not work
  • if we’re actually providing free labour for which we’re not compensated, you’d think that there would be economic growth as a result; instead, we’re living at a time of secular stagnation
    • my response to that would be the tendency of tech companies to try and shrink markets (which Jaron Lanier does address quite well in his book) but I’d have to think about this some more
  • we should go back to first principles and decide on what “work” even is
  • in capitalism, wage-labour is just a particular way of organising work
    • in it, workers don’t own the means of production, and usually have little input in decisions & no claim to the goods produced
    • therefore, for online work to be exploitative, it needs a certain set of social relations around it
    • if it is exploitative, it’s certainly not the kind of exploitation we’re used to with wage-labour: there’s no boss telling us to get work done
      • my thoughts: doesn’t that just mean it’s self-employment, where the superego is the boss? whether or not it’s ontologically a form of wage-labour doesn’t really matter imo
    • as content creators, we do decide what to produce (within limits), and we have (some) intellectual property rights
    • thus Srnicek concludes that digital content creators aren’t just another form of wage labour (which I agree with to an extent—it kind of depends on your purpose for classifying something as “wage labour”)
• Srnicek concludes that we should be skeptical of the idea that online labour is exploitative, and that we are producing commodities & thus free labour for these companies (at least when it comes to a very specific, academic definition of “labour”)
• question to ponder: should content creators on, say, YouTube, be guaranteed specific workers’ rights?
  • my response is no but that comes from a fairly radical place of wanting to transcend the idea of “work” entirely
  • i also kinda hate the whole influencer culture that YouTube/IG/Snapchat et al have spawned, which is an extremely unequal industry almost entirely funded by selling unnecessary crap to audiences (not that different from the entertainment industry as a whole but it’s just a little more blatant about it)
  • sometimes I’m afraid that I focus too much on sweeping, fundamental changes that need to be made at the expense of being able to propose small steps in the right direction
    • this is one of those cases
    • is it even possible to make tech companies sufficiently “better” without fundamentally transforming the whole economic system? I DONT KNOW AND IT SCARES ME
    • pls tell me if you have any thoughts on this ty

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