The politics of the hacker movement is anchored in a loosely defined conception of the world. The key to this narrative is the notion that we live in an information society, that information resources are different from tangible resources since information can be endlessly duplicated, and a strong bent for explaining historical change with technology. These beliefs are prevalent both in the libertarian and the anarchist camps of the computer underground.
In this chapter the world-view of hackers is contrasted with Marxist theory. It is argued that Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) development would be better set in the context of a restructured post-Fordist labour market. By taking labour as our point of departure, information appears no longer as a finished end product but as a continuous labour process. The demarcation line between information resources and intellectual property, on one side, and tangible resources and private property, on the other side, looks less absolute from this horizon. Permeating our discussion is the question about the causes of historical change, whether it can be attributed to technology or social conflicts. Not only are ‘information age’-futurists separated from Marxists on this question, the divide cuts right through the Marxist tradition as well. The practice of hacking gives some clues about how human agency relates to technology. Furthermore, the FOSS movement provides a vantage point for updating Marxist theories on labour and value. The employment of user communities by companies is part of a more general trend where audiences and consumers become sources of surplus value for capital. In short, the hacker movement and Marxist theory can enrich each other, though at first sight they seem to stand very far apart.
Their differences start already with the notion of the information society. That idea underpins most Internet-related literature and it is the departing point for self-reflection within the computer underground. The genesis of the information society concept comes from writers in the 1950s announcing an end to class conflicts. The sharp end of their argumentation was pointed against Marx’s prediction that capitalism headed towards a polarisation of two antagonistic classes, capitalists and proletarians, which would make a final showdown inevitable. These writers objected that the modern industrial society with its welfare provisions was moving towards diminishing social conflicts.1 In the following decade, the claims about an end to ideology were coupled with the idea of a post-industrial society. The social causes for conflicts in capitalism would give way together with the manufacturing industry. One of the earliest and most scholarly inclined among post-industrial thinkers is Daniel Bell.2 Writing in the 1960s and 1970s, Daniel Bell paved the way for more popularised works by futurists like Alvin Toffler, Peter Drucker and Robert Reich, just to mention the most influential names. With the advent of the Internet in the 1990s, similar thoughts surfaced yet again taking a slightly different shape, this time emphasising networks and information. A milestone is the three-volume study of the so called ‘network society’ by the sociologist Manuel Castells. While adopting the standard themes of the genre, Castells grounds his argument on a great amount of empirical data and treats his subject more critically than his peers. He acknowledges the continued existence of social conflicts in the network society but disputes the relevance of class-based struggle.3 The latest, though hardly the last, outgrowth of this tradition is Richard Florida’s announcement of the rise of the creative class. He proposes that monotonous work assignments are about to be replaced with stimulating jobs, not because of workers’ resistance, but since creativity is more profitable to capital.4 A common trait of this literature is the assurance that the downsides of old capitalism will be solved by a more advanced capitalism.
Though this loose family of ideas set out to attack Marxism, it was often conceived by people that once were Marxists themselves. Thus, at least superficially, there are many overlapping features between the inexplicit assumptions of post-industrial thinking and historical materialism. In the futurist outlook, history is divided into three periods according to a few key technological breakthroughs: the agricultural age, the industrial age and the informational age. Classical Marxism identifies epochs in history too but on very different criteria. Presented as a straightforward and somewhat simplified schema, these stages count to primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and eventually, communism. The categorisation is here based on how labour is organised in class relations. The Marxist writer Nick-Dyer Witheford pins down the key difference that separates Marxism from its post-industrial look-alikes: ”That rewriting retains the notion of historical progress towards a classless society but reinscribes technological advance rather than class conflict as the driving force in this transformation”.5 The information-age literature is more plagued with technological determinism than any version of historical materialism ever was.6 Despite that these shortcomings of the historical materialist theory have been severely criticised by opponents of Marxism, as well as by many self-critical Marxists, postulations about the information age often go unquestioned, except by Marxists. Being somewhat rhetorical, one could say that bourgeois thinkers enrolled historical materialism, and radicals dropped it, at the time when liberal market economy instead of communism seemed to be the fixed endpoint of history. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Marxists have responded by exposing the vulgarities and the ideological agenda behind post-industrial fancies.7 The main objections are as follows. Writers abiding to the information-age concept fail to take account of power relationships in their new society. They forget that information is not a given end product but the result of human labour. They ignore that a staff of what Robert Reich calls symbol-analysts require a manual labour force that satisfies the material needs of those professionals. Finally, they downplay the continuity of capitalism and industrialism in the new era of information and services.
Though these objections are valid, the criticism is counter-productive if it goes too far and denies the importance of information altogether. If information is not given its due credit the implications from it cannot be drawn, but are left to apologetics to interpret for their own ends.8 The insight of Roland Barthes on how mythology works can be of assistance here. He says that a myth, to be plausible, always contains a core of truth. The lie just casts the significance of the facts in a different light. When futurists jump on the Information-age bandwagon they set out to glorify digital capitalism. Thus they dig out all those potentialities in capitalism that are humane, in other words, that are the contradictory tendencies pointing away from capitalism, towards communism. The irony comes full circle when progressive scholars, anxious to reveal the ideological smokescreen of the apologists, respond by fiercely denouncing the same potentialities. We should therefore be cautious not to dismiss the futurists in a tout court fashion.
The recycling of topics from post-industrial literature is most forthcoming in the work of some autonomous Marxist writers.9 Post-modern capitalism is here framed in discussions about networks, immaterial labour and communication, which surely has contributed to the popularity of the work of Antonio Negri’s and Michael Hardt. A speculation on offer is that their readiness to borrow concepts first claimed by post-industrial ideology owes to them having distanced themselves from historical materialism to begin with. They trace their philosophical roots to other sources of influence. In the place of Hegel stand Niccolo Machiavelli, Benedict de Spinoza, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Maybe this has allowed them to jump straight at a post-modern, linguistic-centred reading of Marx. The ambition here is, however, to work towards roughly the same conclusions but from within a more classical Marxist terminology. This take on the subject matter is needed to anchor the post-modern, cyber-Marx in a longer tradition of Marxism. If the old school of labour theory is simply abandoned for something else, we will lose the many insights into labour struggle collected in this extensive body of study. In line with the mission statement above, the argumentation will be traced through a disparate collection of classic Marxist sources as they happen to run in parallel with the ideas presented more coherently by some autonomous Marxist authors.
The dynamics of history conceptualised in Marxism is heavily indebted to Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel departed from his contemporaries in recognising that society was not a given static but was at every moment in the process of evolving into something else. The process of change consisted of a dialectical movement between opposites unfolding into a higher unity. Hegel’s idea is best captured in the well-known dictum: ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis’. In the context of Marxism, capitalism (thesis) has created its adversary, the industrial proletariat (anti-thesis); which will bring about communism (synthesis). In Hegel as in Marx, the movement towards synthesis correlates to the idea of totality. By totality is meant that the parts are related to the whole in a meaningful way and that individual observations can only be explained with some knowledge about the systematic level.10 While retaining the dialectic model of thinking, Marx replaced Hegel’s idealism with materialism and famously declared that he had ‘turned Hegel on his feet’. In opposition to idealism, the materialist world-view laid down that human consciousness is conditioned by its material existence and social relations. The materialist conception of history underlies Karl Marx’s philosophy but it was Friedrich Engels that systemised the theory and gave it the name ‘historical materialism’. The next generation of Marxists, most notably Karl Kautsky, inherited the historical materialist terminology and gave it a more rigid and simplistic articulation. In its popularised version the theory claimed that it could prove the scientific necessity of history moving dialectically towards communism. It had a big influence on the early labour movement and as a mobilising tool, if not as an intellectual tool, it might have been of some use. It is this strawman that is attacked when adversaries set out to dismiss Marxism in general. A brief summary of the propositions in historical materialist theory is required in order to criticise it and relate it to notions about the Internet and the information age.
Historical materialism deduces changes in society back to its material base. One part of the base is made up of the forces of production. Forces of production include the technical instruments of labour (machinery, tools) and the skills of the labourers. The second half of the material base is the operation and control over the forces of production. This is known as the relations of production. The class presiding over the relations of production is the ruling class of that period. In a capitalist society, relations of production are orchestrated through private property, and property is concentrated in the hands of the capitalist class. The ruling class favours a particular legal, political, and ideological setup of society, the so-called superstructure. Norms that acknowledge private property and sanction contractual agreements, and laws that punish violations of property and the breaking of contracts, for instance, are favoured by the ruling class since it supports capitalist relations of production. Having laid bare the hidden clockwork of society, the theory then gives some projections about how this mechanism operates over time. In the strict, orthodox version of the theory advocated by Gerald Cohen, the epic looks like this: forces of production develop continuously, as labour methods and tools are improved incrementally. The relations of production, on the other hand, are conserved by the ruling class, since they have a stake in preserving status quo. A growing mismatch between forces and relations of production fuels a revolutionary upheaval and ensures the victory of the suppressed class.11
The narrative of orthodox historical materialism corresponds with some very popular ideas in the computer underground. It is widely held that the infinite reproducibility of information made possible by computers (forces of production) has rendered intellectual property (relations of production, superstructure) obsolete. The storyline of post-industrial ideology is endorsed but with a different ending. Rather than culminating in global markets, technocracy and liberalism, as Daniel Bell and the futurists would have it; hackers are looking forward to a digital gift economy and high-tech anarchism. In a second turn of events, hackers have jumped on the distorted remains of Marxism presented in information-age literature, and, while missing out on the vocabulary, ended up promoting an upgraded Karl Kautsky-version of historical materialism. Among contemporary Marxists, conversely, the simplistic scheme of orthodox historical materialism has been discredited. Before we incorporate the lessons from the Internet and hacking into theory, we had better consult the latest developments in Marxist philosophy. For instance, as will be discussed towards the end of the chapter, the exceptionalism ascribed to information that underpins the claim about a digital gift economy and information commons, does not hold water when examined closer. It is crucial to problematise these concepts or else we might be tricked into singing in a different tune the official hymn of digital capitalism in a different tune.
The key controversy in the debate over historical materialism is to what extent technological development modifies class relations as opposed to the impact of class struggle in shaping technology. It is a question that cuts right through the Marxist tradition and is also present in Karl Marx’s authorship.12 A conceptual weakness with the first approach, the technicist line of reasoning, is that technology is here understood as a self-explanatory, coherent and delimited category. But tools only become useful in a certain environment that supports their utilization. This ambiguity was formulated by Wiebe Bijker, a student of technology, by saying that technologies are subject to interpretative flexibility. An out-dated technology cannot be assessed without knowing both the historical context and the semiotics of which it was a part. Bijker illustrates his claim by pointing at the passing from high-wheeled bicycles to safety bicycles. The temptation to dismiss, in hindsight, the high-wheeled bicycle as an inferior and unsafe prototype on the path to evolutionary perfection (the safety bicycle) must be resisted. High-wheeled bicycles were used by upper-class youths, not primarily for transportation but to show off their nerves and skills. The very qualities that made these vehicles unsafe from one perspective made them attractive from the viewpoint of its chief propagators. To be seated high above the heads of ordinary pedestrians was certainly part of the fun. Furthermore, some long-forgotten conditions of the time, such as muddy and bumpy roads, could even make it sort of practical. Bijker therefore rules out the common notion that the high-wheeled bicycle was a brief deviation from an otherwise linear path towards ever greater functionality.13
It is only in hindsight that a technology seems to advance along a fixed benchmark. The point of direction marked out in orthodox historical materialism is therefore, at the very least, seriously confused. An innovation will never take hold unless it is in the interest of a class fraction to actively prepare the ground for it. The classical example hereof is Imperial China. Already back in the fifteenth century the material and intellectual resources seem to have converged for an industrial take-off. Instead of industrialising, the Ming dynasty was marked by stagnation, at least in terms of innovation, though the economy boomed and the population grew steadily. Industrialisation came three hundred years later and on the western fringe of the Euro-Asian continent. The reason for this can be ascribed to the organisation of the Chinese empire as opposed to the organisation of nation states in Europe. Class rule in China was intimately tied up with state bureaucracy. Often the imperial administration chose to impede inventions because cohesion and stability was its top priority. While making this argument, the historian of economics Joel Mokyr stresses the monolithic political culture of the Chinese empire at the time when technological stagnation took hold. In earlier and technologically more dynamic dynasties, politics had also been more pluralistic. On the European continent, in contrast, sovereignty was divided between several, rivalling nation states. If one monarch blocked an expedition or invention within his jurisdiction, the explorer or inventor could turn to the sovereign in a neighbouring state.14
Maybe this explains how the European ruling class came to ally itself so closely with disruption and change. Arguably, the longevity of capitalism owes precisely to its elasticity in capturing the innovations of the subjugated class. The hacktivist group Electrohippies puts it well: “All resistance is fertile”. Their motto could sum up the rewriting of the history of technology by autonomous Marxists. Here the thrust of technological development is attributed to capital’s responses to working class resistance.15 A well-documented fact supporting such a reading is that machinery is often introduced after major labour conflicts. The sudden urge among managers to lay off obstinate workers and weaken unions overcomes the costs also associated with new technology. This observation, familiar to labour theory, is expanded by autonomists so that the changes we are living through at the moment, networks, computerisation etc., are attributed to the great social upheaval of 1968 which launched capital into a process of crisis and restructuring. The perspective is appealing since it challenges the common image of capital as active and labour as reactive or passive. It reverses the causality drawn up between technological and economical structures on one hand and class struggle on the other. And if the ontological claims are narrowed down to the context of computer technology, it does a fairly good job at describing the relation between the hacker movement and software development. But, at least as far as Antonio Negri is concerned, the effort to break away from set patterns within the Marxist discipline comes at a high price. He dismisses the dialectics inherited from Hegel and declares that the law of value has ceased to function. As we will return to later on, the law of value stipulates that the exchange value of goods is correlated to the amount of labour-time it takes to produce the goods. According to Negri, the productivity of social and scientific labour disqualifies this correlation and makes labour immeasurable.16 Without the law of value, however, much of Karl Marx’s political-economical critique is left hanging in the air.
The law of value is not only consistent with capitalism after 1968, but the hypothesis is rather helpful when investigating the high-tech, information-rich computer sector. In this task, lead will be taken from the Belgian Trotskyite Ernest Mandel. Mandel covered roughly the same terrain as Antonio Negri; studying the increased use of scientific labour in a period which he tentatively labelled ‘late capitalism’. Later on, Fredric Jameson based his acclaimed study of post-modernity on Mandel’s analysis, declaring post-modernism as “the cultural logic of late capitalism”.17 Jameson was attracted to the Marxist version of an epochal breach in capitalism because it provided him with a position from which the post-industrialist notions could be countered. This vantage point was succinctly phrased by Ernest Mandel in the saying that the superstructure has been mechanised.18 By that he meant that the economic instrumentality previously perfected in the factory had now embarked upon culture, law, politics, and society at large. Where post-industrialists claimed that political economy has dissolved into a cloud of culture and meaning, Mandel retorted that the economy has become near omnipresent.19 Antonio Negri attests to the same phenomenon, though speaking from a very different tradition within Marxism, when he announces that society has been subjected to real subsumption. The terminology is borrowed from Karl Marx. In a draft for the first volume of Capital, Marx compared formal subsumption to real subsumption. Formal subsumption describes how the early capitalists hired craftsmen to produce goods for a market but without reforming their working methods. Real subsumption arose as the workers became more dependent upon the capitalist and the whole enterprise was restructured according to capital’s needs. The craft methods were broken down into the organisation of the factory. Negri says that the same thing is now happening to human relations, to language, and to life, a development culminating in the social factory.
The mechanisation of the superstructure, or, if preferred, the real subsumption of society, provides a framework for analysing the heightened relevance of communication in the economy today. Part of the reason why classical Marxism looks outdated is because of its one-sided focus on manual labour and the production of tangible goods. Language was of little concern at the time when Karl Marx wrote. When the Frankfurt School begun scrutinising the culture industry in the 1930s and 1940s they departed from traditional Marxist themes.20 But they too saw communication primarily as a question of propaganda and ideology. For a long time, mass media was a political rather than an economical problem. Today it is clear that language is a key element of production. Indeed, the Italian Marxist Paolo Virno assigns communication industries a heightened order within the echelons of production. In the twentieth century, this privileged position was held by heavy industries that made machinery tools. Since machinery tools had an impact on downstream production, Marxist doctrine considered it to be of particular importance. Nowadays the skills and the motivation of the staff are more important than tools and machinery. Accordingly, Virno argues, it is the communication industries that create the means of production most relevant to all the other industries.21 It is through this prism that the surge of post-structuralist theory and the pivotal role given to language by thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida can be seen, though they would have objected to being framed in such a context.
An emphasis on language does not mean that the materialist conception of history is abandoned for a turn back to idealism. Quite the opposite, the materialist outlook is reaffirmed by recognising that communication has been mechanised.22 Nothing illustrates this point better than computer algorithms. In source code, signs have become mechanics in their own right. Software shifts between being a consumer product, a process technology, an infrastructure, an instrument of regulation, a subculture, and a language. This provides a concrete example of Negri’s claim that the forces of production and the relations of production have blurred into an indistinguishable one. What happens in one area, a changed self-image in the computer underground, for example, directly translates into the other area, the advance of a different technology.
The struggle for free source code is an excellent point of reference when we contemplate over the determination of structures versus the agency of humans, the Gordian knot of Marxist philosophy. The strong inclination towards technological determinism in the computer underground is a contradictory mixture of thought and praxis. Just as with their endorsement of information-age literature, everything is not what first meets the eye. For hackers, in contrast to almost everyone else, technology increases their collective strength. Technophilia reassures hackers of their eventual victory just as dialectical historical materialism did to revolutionaries in those days when communism was thought of as the fixed endpoint of history. In most other cases, references to the inevitability of technological progress are meant to discourage people from taking action. Decisions over technological development are firmly located in the hands of a profession, and, by extension, investors. Often it is hard to discern a field of technology as under dispute at all. It is near-total defeat, not the absence of antagonism, which has rendered technological development to appear as a neutral, self-directed process, floating freely outside the universe of political choices. Radical scholars, anxious to reveal the political stakes behind technology and the possibility of intervention into these flows, spare no energy in attacking deterministic viewpoints. Raymond Williams, a stern critic of technological determinism, lays down that: “The moment of any new technology is a moment of choice.”23 Conversely, however, for a choice to be of any meaning, it must delimit in some way the choices available after it has been made.24
The fascination in the computer underground for Marshall McLuhan’s contemplations (declared by Wired Magazine as their protective saint and Raymond Williams’ favoured target when attacking technological determinism) should be seen in this light. The influence of McLuhan among hackers must somehow be consistent with their grasping of technology as a politically contested field. This insight is inseparable from the praxis of hacking because capital has lost its monopoly over software development. Hence, the recognition that code design is underpinned by political choices is immediately transparent in hacking. While ascribing to the convictions which Raymond Williams criticises, the hacker subculture epitomise the very opposite of his worst-case scenario where people are pacified because of the overbearing force of technology. If hackers do not ponder over the hidden agendas that shape technology and restrict their life and freedoms, it is because they are in the position of setting such agendas themselves. Their attention is instead on how their choices in code design confine the possible options thereafter, for them and for less skilled computer users. Questions first brought up by progressive architects on how the cityscape affects the conduct of its inhabitants are rebounding in the computer underground. The issue at stake is best captured in the slogan of the cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mitch Kapor: ‘Architecture is Politics’.25 It could be objected that ordinary users are prey to the design choices of hackers as much as to those of companies. Indeed, part of the attraction with being a hacker is to perceive oneself as an elite vis-à-vis ‘newbies’, ‘scriptkid-dies’ and ‘lamers’, some of the many names given to less experienced users. But with the mainstreaming of the Internet, a countervailing awareness is growing on the people in the computer underground. Since the least skilled users also are by far the most numerous, it is their decisions that add up to setting the standard of computers. And in communication networks, standards are everything. Free software can not be written exclusively “by engineers, for engineers” since hackers too will be hurt if the majority of users side with proprietary technology enclosed behind electronic locks. The goal of making free software accessible to ordinary computer users has grown into a real concern among FOSS developers. In conclusion, the decision over what the next generation of computer technology will be like is spread out to every computer user.
Marxists tend to use Fordism and post-Fordism to categorise the historical transformation that elsewhere is talked about as the industrial and informational society. The categorisation of Fordism/post-Fordism centres on differences in the labour process, out of which technology is one component.26 Liberal commentators understand Fordism as a period when productivity in society was rapidly increased but with some unfortunate consequences for workers. Those downsides have now been resolved, the same writers believe, thanks to the passing of Fordism. Labour theoreticians, on the other hand, insist that Fordism from the beginning was a strategy to control and deskill workers and make them expendable. They argue that it was not the advancement of science and technology, but the resistance of workers, that spelled the end to Fordism. When workers organised against the old factory regime, Fordism became increasingly costly to keep up. Post-Fordism is a renewed attack on the positions of workers and, in this regard, it is in complete continuance with Fordism.
The passing from Fordism to post-Fordism was first noted in the 1970s by a group of Marxist scholars known as the French Regulation School. One of the leading names of the school, Michel Aglietta, characterised the labour process of Fordism as semi-automatic assembly-line production.27 At the time he wrote, managers had come to the conclusion that the strategy of Fordism was failing. It could not fulfil their dreams of a factory run entirely without skilled workers. Knowledgeable employees were still called for to bridge the gaps in the semi-automated production line. Furthermore, Fordism created new vulnerabilities to capital’s valorisation process. An interruption at one point on the conveyer belt resulted in a standstill of the whole chain. The monotonousness of the tasks provoked spontaneous absenteeism with devastating consequences for profitability. Another drawback was that large investments in machinery locked production into long production runs. Mass production of single products made the point of sale of the goods all the more risky. The rigidities of Fordism provided a foothold for workers’ resistance. Bogged down by labour conflicts, capital opted for a more flexible accumulation regime, what Michel Aglietta tentatively called neo-Fordism. The labour process was made flexible by shortening the feed-back loops between the worker and the work done. Michel Aglietta observed that this strategy required that the production line was both informated as well as automated. The seminal economic importance of software can be attributed to its usefulness in this regard. Separate stages of semiautomation are integrated in fully automated production flows thanks to the implementation of algorithms. Arguably, the informated and automated factory is a step closer to the qualitative turning point envisioned by Ernest Mandel: “The automatic production of automatic machines would hence be a new qualitative turning point, equal in significance to the appearance of the machine-production of machines in the mid-19th century” (Mandel, 206–207, italics in original). Claims that capitalism is heading in this direction can find support in a few sentences by Karl Marx. In the celebrated paragraph Fragment of Machinery, he sketched out the trajectory of big industry. The future predicted by Karl Marx is a close call to the world we live in today: “But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose powerful effectiveness is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production.” (Grundrisse, 704–705). Karl Marx proposed that at this stage a ‘general intellect’ would emerge as a productive force in its own right. The brief remarks in the Fragment of Machinery strengthens the statement, common in post-industrial literature, that the informational sector is transforming the industry in the same way as industrialisation transformed agriculture. According to this view, information and networks are rendered important because of their productiveness. Sceptically inclined Marxists explain the rapid growth of the tertiary sector in the very opposite way. Instead of attributing it to the productivity of information, the service industry is looked upon as a ‘surplus dump’ that resolves the vast overproduction in monopoly capitalism. If that assessment was correct, however, the information age would be over with the first downturn in the economy and the following destruction of surplus capacity. The sustained and growing importance of information to the industry calls for a closer engagement.
A number of radical scholars, most notably Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt and related thinkers, have married the concepts of a general intellect with post-Fordist restructuring. This fusion of ideas underpins their claim about a novel class composition, variably named cyborgs, immaterial labour, the social worker, or the multitude. The communicative, affective and scientific processes engaged in by these people constitute the general intellect. In announcing the rise of a different class, Negri, Hardt, and others, are contributing to a two-hundred-year-old tradition with roots both in the liberal and the socialist camps. Liberals have invariably heralded the new social stratum as the bearer of an end to class conflicts, while radicals of course have made the very opposite judgement.28 Revolutionary hopes were attached to the high-tech worker already in the 1960s when Serge Mallet wrote about the New Working Class. The subjectivity of the young workers in the automated factory, Mallet attested, was particularly disposed to seeing through the contradictions of the capitalist system.29 Thirty years down the road, Maurizio Lazzarato makes a similar argument about workers in the cutting-edge sector of our day. Immaterial labour, as he calls it, is a hegemonic form of labour in post-Fordist capitalism. He defines immaterial labour as the labour that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity. Firstly, it refers to the changes taking place in the labour process in the industrial and tertiary sectors. The change consists in that the subjectivity of the labourer has become as important to productivity as the trade skills he is in possession of. Secondly, immaterial labour includes activities that cross the boundary between work and leisure, such as setting aesthetic standards, developing tastes, creating consumer norms, and shaping public opinion. Admittedly, the number of immaterial labourers in the world is very small. Lazzarato justifies his interest in them, in affinity with the devotion that Karl Marx showed for the marginal group of factory workers, by projecting that immaterial labour indicates the future direction of capitalism.30
Even so, the idea of a new class of immaterial labourers has been criticised on the grounds that the vast majority of the world’s population live under very different conditions compared to professionals in the media and computer industry. Undue focus on privileged workers in the West mirrors post-industrial ideology where everyone is said soon to become a member of the creative class.31 It should be evident that a plurality of labour relations coexists in the global economy. Far from decomposing old forms of making and living, post-modern capitalism feeds on inequalities and differences between regions. It draws together feudal and patriarchal structures in some provinces with ‘Fordist’ wage labour and ‘post-Fordist’ networks of freelancers and petty commodity traders in other places. Indeed, George Caffentzis has argued convincingly that the more technologically advanced the industrialised countries become, the worse the exploitation of labour gets in the remaining parts of the world. In an article in the Midnight Notes Collective, Caffentzis based his case on a vision of the computer scientist John von Neumann about a self-replicating, automatised factory. In this hypothetical scenario, where the production process involves no living labour whatsoever, there will be no value generated for the capitalist to exploit. The law of value postulates that only human labour can add value to a product. Human labour is unique in that it enlarges the value of a product above the sum of its own inputs. In this narrow, economistic sense, the value of the human input equals the amount of food, clothing, education, and recreation that is necessary for the worker to reproduce her labour power at a given moment.32 The extra value which human labour adds to a product, above this input of ‘necessary labour’, amounts to surplus labour/surplus value. That is to say, labour time which the worker is not compensated for. Accumulation of capital is precisely the build-up of surplus value. The more human labour an individual capitalist can set in motion, the more surplus value he derives from the enterprise. On the other hand, adding more inputs of dead labour, by which is meant tools and raw materials, will not add any more value to the end product above the value of the inputs themselves. Dead labour in production is dead weight. Hence, Neuman’s self-replicating automatic factory would never add any value to the goods it produced above the value of the factory itself. Whatever surplus value gained from running this factory would have to derive from a transfer of wealth from more backward sectors in the economy. Caffentzis concludes that the exploitation of African peasants and workers in South-American maquiladora factories has to be intensified in order to compensate for the automation and absence of living labour in high-tech, Western industries. It is these people that the capitalist world system really depends on, rather than the symbol-analysts in the tertiary sector.33
Caffentzis has relentlessly criticised Lazzarato, Negri, and likeminded scholars on this ground, advising them to expand their geographical horizon. At stake is the question where to best strike against the capitalist system. In affinity with Maoist strategic thinking, Caffentzis takes the desperation of the most wretched people as a stepping stone for revolutionary action. The opposite point of view contends that capitalism is closest to being superseded where it is most developed. It is the second tradition of thought that this book ascribes to. Nevertheless, George Caffentzis’ insistence on the importance of the proletariat in the Third World to the existence of cutting-edge, digital capitalism provides a healthy reality check. His reasoning is theoretically sound, though it does not provide an exhaustive explanation. As will be argued at length, capital has more options for sustaining profitability than increasing the rate of exploitation of workers in the periphery. Shifting production from waged employees to unpaid users is another possibility, a trend that is persistent in the industrialised economies. A scholarly preoccupation with these changes in the labour process is not a manifestation of Eurocentrism, since it has global ramifications. Governments in developing countries have come to embrace Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) as part of national strategies to increase technological and economical independence vis-à-vis Western powers. When municipalities and schools in the South are spared the expense of buying software licenses from multinational corporations, the flow of revenue from the periphery to the centre, that were to compensate for automation in the West, is somewhat reduced. The concrete gains of FOSS development to Third World populations is not invalidated by the fact that the software code has mainly been written by a marginal group of middle class males living comfortably in the rich countries.
The what-if scenario of total automation, which George Caffentzi elaborates with, also puzzled the mind of Ernest Mandel. He wrote that the extensive enrolment of science in production delivers capitalism close to the point where the: ”[…] mass of surplus-value itself necessary diminishes as a result of the elimination of living labour from the production process in the course of the final stage of mechanization-automation.” (Mandel, 207, italics in original) Ernest Mandel builds on the Marxist theory of the ‘falling rate of profit’. The tendency towards a falling rate of profit owes to the decimation of human labour in production. Capital seeks to replace living labour with machinery—dead labour—to increase productivity, stay competitive and combat labour militancy. However, as we saw before, dead labour does not add any extra value. The overall output from production rises with more and better machinery. But the amount of living labour in relation to dead labour falls. It follows that a smaller quantity of surplus value is divided up on the larger amount of goods produced. Profit falls in relation to the amount of capital invested in the undertaking. This is the law of the ‘falling rate of profit’.
The expectations of early Marxists, that capitalism would spiral downwards into aggravated crises and eventually self-destruct because of falling profitability, has by now been thoroughly discredited. Nevertheless, the law of the falling rate of profit does portray a gradual movement towards a logical endpoint, suggested by Ernest Mandel—total automation, which simultaneously is inconceivable with capitalism. A state of total automation, as it was envisioned already by John von Neumann, would be reached when machinery, without any injection of living labour, spits out an infinite volume of goods at instant speed. It is hard to imagine a machine with such dimensions, less than visualising science fiction gadgets or, just slightly more down-to-earth, nanotechnologic fantasies. Or alternatively: software algorithms. That is what is meant by saying that information can be copied infinitely without injecting additional labour. Digitalisation has leapfrogged capitalism to the endpoint of total automation. The extreme situation is, of course, confined to the software industry and related branches. However, if we subscribe to the concept of the general intellect, it follows that informational production stands to become hegemonic in the economy.
Readers are justified in objecting that individual capitalists are doing very well in the software business. How does the statement above square with Microsoft being one of the most profitable companies in the world? Capitalism is not coming to an end because of a future state of total automation. On the contrary, the economic system is currently busy at adapting to the challenge and is doing very well at it. George Caffentzis points to one solution, namely increasing the rate of exploitation in labour-intensive sectors, primarily in underdeveloped, low-tech economies. The surplus value extracted in these countries is then channelled to capital in the high-tech sector. The pattern of growing mechanisation on one side, and growing poverty of labour on the other, is business-as-usual in the market economy, extending a logic that was familiar already to Karl Marx. But the option to intensify exploitation of the Third World proletariat is not endless. Limits are set by the unionisation of workers, growing militancy among the population, and the prospect that western-oriented, neoliberal governments will be toppled, either by nationalist reformers or religious fundamentalists. To the extent that capital is restrained from taking this route, it has to find other ways to solve the problem of automation. A possible route has been uncovered by Tessa Morris-Suzuki. She has elaborated on Mandel’s work to answer how capitalism can sustain the exploitation of surplus value together with a partial, asymmetrical state of automation, but with a twist: “This fission of labor inherent in the nature of robots, in other words, creates a situation where it is only in the design of new productive information and the initial bringing together of information and machinery that surplus value can be extracted. Unless this process is continually repeated, surplus value cannot be continuously created, and the total mass of profit must ultimately fall.”34 She calls this state of affair the perpetual innovation economy. Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s reasoning provides a theoretical backbone for understanding the heightened relevance of innovation and collective learning processes in late capitalism. Valorisation of capital is concentrated to the starting-up of a production line, rather than the running of the production line. Capitalism has always sought to increase profitability by accelerating product cycles. When this logic turns on the innovation process itself, creative destruction enters ‘warp speed’. The odd situation is particular forthcoming in the computer sector. Since the manufacturing process here consists of little more than “copy-and-paste”, efforts are placed in the invention of new software algorithms. Software code is developed and made obsolete at such speeds that the product form of computer applications, i.e. boxes wrapped up and marketed in yearly releases, is dissolving into a continuous process where the application is upgraded every two weeks. Point-of-sale is replaced with subscription services as the favoured business model. The experimentation with novel ways of doing business in the computer sector shows that the reasoning of Tessa Morris-Suzuki, that surplus value is exploited in the stage of innovation instead of manufacturing, has profound consequences for Marxist theory. Her thought can be stretched yet a bit further. Most innovations in post-modern capitalism are what Fredric Jameson has called ‘aesthetic innovation’. It is primarily the invention of style and meaning. Only a tiny portion of society’s aesthetic innovation takes place in science laboratories and advertising agencies. In other words: within the wage relation. The overwhelming majority of aesthetic innovations are made in the street, in communities, in language, by users. It is thus we can start to outline the dimensions of the social factory.
In order to include users and audiences in the production process we need to re-examine the commonsense categorisation of production and consumption. Starting with Jean Baudrillard, post-modernists have relentlessly charged that Marxism is outdated because it fails to give due consideration to consumption as well as production. While post-modernists and mainstream economists recently became aware of the overlapping between the consumer and the producer role in the cultural economy, Karl Marx had a more complex picture to start with. In Grundrisse he wrote:
Consumption produces production in a double way, (1) because a product becomes a real product only by being consumed. For example, a garment becomes a real garment only in the act of being worn; a house where no one lives is in fact not a real house; thus the product, unlike a mere natural object, proves itself to be, becomes, a product only through consumption. Only by decomposing the product does consumption give the product the finishing touch; for the product is production not as objectified activity, but rather only as object for the active subject; (2) because consumption creates the need for new production, that is it creates the ideal, internally impelling cause for production, which is its presupposition. (Grundrisse, 91, italics in original)
The key point is that a product becomes a full product only when it is consumed. In other words, the user plays a part in producing the product. This was the case long before post-modernists, management gurus and, more recently, critics of the intellectual property regime, made the discovery. The fact that it has caught their attention at this late hour is, nonetheless, an indication of the heightened importance of the user in the cultural economy. Culture is nothing if not communication and communication is a continuously ongoing process between the ‘producer’ and the user. This aspect is plainly obvious in collective and oral forms of culture where the exchange between audience and performer is immediate. With the advent of mechanical reproduction of the art work, the performance of a work of art and the site of the performance were separated. Divorced from its context, art could be moved, owned, scaled, and sold. It is thus we have come to think of cultural content as one-directional information and not as communication running in both directions. But something is inevitably lost when art is mass produced. Walter Benjamin’s seminal article on how the artwork fares in the age of mechanical reproduction offers some guidance: “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”35 Far from grieving the loss of authenticity, Benjamin anticipated the involvement and appropriation of the film medium by the audience. A void was left to be occupied by the audience, opening up exactly in the limitations of mass-communication. It remains for the film audience to close the cognitive loop and ‘take the position of the camera’, as Benjamin put it. Even something as passive as watching a film requires a learning process from the viewer. The viewer must place the message in a narrative for the signals to be of any meaning to her. Hence, the dialogue is not so much stifled as postponed and obscured by the commodity form of culture. This is essentially the rediscovery made by the British Cultural Studies. In the 1980s they began to focus on the decoding process of audiences instead of the encoding process by the broadcasters.36 Their research developed in opposition to the tradition inherited from Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, where television audiences tended to be seen as duped and pacified by the culture industry. The reassessment within British Culture Studies was part of a more general trend at the time. Acts of defiance were searched for within popular culture and the perception of active producers and passive consumers was questioned. A centrepiece within this literature from the 1980s is Michel de Certeau’s study of everyday resistance in consumer society.37 He objected to the popular notion that the only resistance worth counting is observable acts of self-conscious and articulated protests. Pointing at how colonised people subvert the religious beliefs which are forced upon them by their conquerors, Certeau argued that similar tactics were used by consumers. The ambition to find new grounds for struggle is commendable. Conversely, the pitfalls of this approach are illustrated by those media scholars who came to describe the zapping between tv-channels as an act of resistance.38 It is unsurprising that these thoughts branched off into the liberal notion of changing the world through consumer choice and, among post-modern leftists, an unwarranted gravity ascribed to the criticism of representations. Opponents of British Cultural Studies have rightly protested that the decoding process by audiences is blown out of proportion, that broadcasters hold infinitely more power over the message, and that the political economy of communication still matters the most.39 The decoding process by audiences does not offer much ground for resistance. As a cognitive and emotional investment and a source of surplus value for capital, on the other hand, the decoding process is a sizeable factor. Thus, the hardliners of political economy are mistaken too when they respond to the adepts of cultural studies by downplaying the importance of audiences.
Dallas Smythe has made an important contribution by applying the Marxist law of value to television audiences. He started with a maxim known since the advent of radio, ‘the Sarnoff Law’, which states that the wealth of a broadcasting network stands in proportion to its number of non-paying listeners. Smythe deduced that the commodity sold by media networks is the attention of audiences. The consumer buying into this product is the advertiser. It follows that the audience has the role of the producer, together with, to a lesser extent, the paid actors making the tv-shows. Mirroring the Marxist term labour power, Dallas Smythe introduces the word audience power to describe the work performed by audiences.40 He runs into some difficulties when explaining why people volunteer to watch television and listen to commercial radio if it is a kind of unpaid, unsolicited work. Smythe starts with a fact familiar to working class women: Work does not end with the labourer leaving the factory gate. In their spare time, workers must prepare themselves for the next day in the factory; by cooking, cleaning, and sleeping; and preparing the next generation of workers, by sexual intercourse and childrearing. Prior to the advance of monopoly capitalism, reproduction of labour power was sorted out inside the household. Bread was baked, clothes sewn, tools tinkered with, and mating of adolescents seen to, inside the family or the extended family. Today the purchase of consumer goods fills the same purpose of facilitating the reproduction of labour power. It is therefore, according to Dallas Smythe, that audiences have to sacrifice their spare time in order to stay informed about available goods.41
Smythe did not expand on the similarity between the reproductive labour of audiences and that of women. Still, the experience of women demonstrates that capitalist exploitation of unwaged, reproductive labour is neither a marginal nor a novel phenomenon. In the 1970s feminist Marxists brought attention to the fact that housewives and children link up to capitalist circulation. Women devote necessary labour and surplus labour time to cleaning, cooking, caring, childrearing etc., out of which the surplus labour is appropriated by the husband. The relationship between the members of the family is feudal while the household relates to capital through the man’s employment. The exploitation of the woman’s reproductive labour affects the ratio between necessary labour and surplus labour at the workplace. Hence, the man is basically relaying surplus value from his wife to his employer.42 With women entering the labour market en masse since the 1970s, coupled with expanded commodification of the household, some of that reproductive, un-waged labour is now carried out by audiences.
It might still be objected that it does not take the average six hours a day of televised indulgence to learn about life-supporting consumer goods on offer in the local corner shop. But if Smythe’s thought about the need to reproduce labour power is given one more twist, his idea gets really interesting. Our concern is not with the needs of the individual to reproduce her labour power, but the need of the system for the individual to do so (which, one way or the other, is often experienced by the individual as the same thing). Reproduction of labour power goes beyond the satisfaction of anthropological needs (eating, sleeping) required for bare, human survival. It also includes the education of the worker with the skills she requires to be employable. What it means to be employable, however, changes with the mode of production. Fordism, for example, took advantage of a higher standard of public education that had previously been forced upon capital in working class struggle. Large-scale industry could now build on, and soon demand, a workforce with basic training in writing, reading and counting. In the same way, the post-Fordist economy calls for certain skills from consumers and audiences. Speaking the language of brands and navigating in the graphical interface of a computer are productive, overhead costs of a cognitive, semiotic-based and post-Fordist accumulation regime. Though it all began with workers defecting from drudgery in the Fordist factory, the pursuit of subcultural identities and leisure activities have grown into an educational requirement of the system to operate smoothly.
Television audiences are not the best example for making this case since their efforts are very minor and it is open to dispute if they can be said to do anything at all. It is easier to think of computer audiences. A remark by Martin Kenney, writing on the economy of the high-tech sector, is enlightening: “But the software requires its users to learn how to use it. This means that the ability of software companies to capture value is related to our willingness to learn how to use their programs. […] From this perspective, in the aggregate the users have invested far more time in learning how to use a software program than did the developers.”43 The key strategic asset of computer firms is not their fixed capital, not their employees, but their user base. Know-how of a product among a large audience creates a high switching-cost in the market. Even if an individual customer wants to switch to a competitor, he is often held back by the inertia of the mass of users with whom he needs to stay in contact with. Hence, the user base is the chief source of stability for a firm in a highly volatile market. The step is a short one from a computer user who learns how to navigate in a graphical interface and a user-developer who improves on the application. It now becomes clear that the engagement of FOSS development communities by capital is not an isolated event. The software industry has merely refined something much more generic. The concept of audience power provides a backdrop against which the toil of users in the social factory can rightly be assessed.
Many other businesses are following suit in more actively taking advantage of user communities. The music industry has a long history of outsourcing the development of music fads to youth subcultures. But user-centred development models are going beyond mere aesthetic innovation. It can be found in everything from surfing boards to advanced medical equipment.44 According to Tiziana Terranova, free labour is structural to the cultural economy. She objects to the leftist romantic notion of authentic subcultures and countercultures that are besieged by commercialism. ‘Independent’ cultural production takes place within a broader capitalist restructuring which has always-already anticipated and shaped the ‘active consumer’.45 The involvement of users and audiences in the production process answers the question how capitalism can sustain profits despite approaching a state of near total automation. Extensive use of machinery has not abolished the law of value but it certainly has changed the terms of its operations. Living labour has been expulsed from inside the production process and the jurisdiction of trade unions. But labour returns from the ashes with a vengeance. The investment of living labour must be made perpetually in order to create the setting in which decontextualised, mass-reproduced, digital use values are to be consumed. The making of the product by employees and the use of the product by users are intertwined into a continuous labour process. The importance of emotional and educational investments made by user communities and audiences is reinforced in proportion to digitalisation and the corresponding downsizing of in-housed workers. In some parts of the economy, especially in the cultural and informational sector, user communities can be assumed to be the main source of surplus value for capital. The surplus profit model of Red Hat, examined in the first chapter, is but one example of how capital manages to sustain profits in this circumstantial way.
The exploitation of the surplus value of audiences is not an exhaustive answer to the question why and how FOSS development communities are engaged by capital. Other aspects to be considered are capital’s wish to externalise labour costs, to circumvent organised labour, and the incapability of capital to organise the labour process and get creative results. On the flip side of the coin is the defection by working class youth from monotonous jobs and monotonous mass consumption in favour of playful and communicative doing. The thought model is useful though to give a frame of reference from within Marxist theory. It provides an antidote to the much unwarranted optimism about digital media empowering consumers from the passivity of old media. Furthermore, it encourages us to look for new kinds of labour conflicts arising out of the enrollment of volunteer developers, such as black-hat hacking, cracking and pirate sharing.46 From this vantage point we can proceed to look at the themes debated in the computer underground with more of a critical distance.
‘Information wants to be free’ has long been the rallying cry of hackers, crackers and file sharers. The words were first coined at a hacker conference in 1984 by Stewart Brand, a senior figure in the American counter-culture movement. The saying has since come to live a life of its own among devotees. Likewise, sceptics have commonly dismissed cyber-politics by replying that ‘information doesn’t want anything’. Looking closer at what Stewart Brand actually said makes it clear that his thought was a bit more sophisticated than is given away by the catch phrase: “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient.”47 As is shown by the full quote, Brand counterpoised two warring forces and situated them in the political economy of information. The intentionality ascribed to information was strictly metaphorical. Still, the question remains if the contradiction pointed out by Stewart Brand is unique to the political economy of information? That seems to be the conclusion of mainstream economic theory. The economist Fritz Malchup commented in the 1960s on the unusual properties of information: “If a public or social good is defined as one that can be used by additional persons without causing any additional cost, then knowledge is such a good of the purest type.”48 Public good has played a minor role in liberal economic theory. The concept was briefly touched upon by John Stuart Mill and he exemplified with lighthouses.49 He advocated that the service provided by lighthouses should be administrated collectively as a public good. Mill’s remarks on lighthouses correspond with Thomas Jefferson’s often quoted comparison between light and ideas, where Jefferson acknowledged that just like light, ideas can be freely shared.50 Thomas Jefferson, head of the US patent commission, concluded that inventions cannot, by their very nature, be subject to exclusive private ownership. Some Marxists, especially those researching the cultural economy, have noticed the peculiarity of information. The two pioneer critics of the culture industry, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, made some suggestive remarks: “Culture is a paradoxical commodity. So completely is it subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly consumed in use that it can no longer be used”51
Summing up, there are plenty of observations supporting the idea that the political economy of information is queer in some way. Campaigners for information commons are eager to stress this discrepancy between endless digital resources and limited tangible resources. The non-existent marginal cost of reproducing knowledge is in conflict with its treatment as a scarce property. Though this statement is undeniably true, there is something fishy about making the uniqueness of information the cornerstone of an analysis. A few quotes from Stanford law professor Lawence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas, help to demonstrate the shortcomings of this thinking. It should be said, however, that the erroneous assumptions are shared by almost everyone who campaigns in favour of information commons. Lessig is a good example since he is widely read and he sums up the matter in a few succinct words. In the book he strongly advocates that information and culture should be distributed in a commons. He then immediately reassures the reader that markets and commons can coexist peacefully: “Not all resources can or should be organized in a commons”, and: “While some resources must be controlled, others can be provided much more freely. The difference is in the nature of the resource, and therefore in the nature of how the resource is supplied”52 It is in the nature of informational, non-rival resources to be organised in a commons. In the same vein, rivalrous, tangible resources are thought of as optimised for markets. Since it is the nature of the resource which determines if a product is rivalrous or non-rivalrous, the proportion between the two categories is assumed to be constant over time. Hence, policy makers face a straightforward, technocratic task of deciding between commons or market for each resource.
We can now see what is wrong with the ‘information exceptionalism’ narrative.53 It serves to brush over any destabilising implications to status quo from information commons. In an effort to unwind policy makers and the business community, some people even campaign against the word ‘intellectual property’ in favour of ‘intellectual monopolies’. The message is clear: The challenge to intellectual property is not a threat to private property. While intellectual property is seen as creating artificial scarcity, traditional property is assumed to be grounded in objectively existing limitations. Ownership of tangible, rival goods is therefore taken as ‘operational’, or even ‘optimal’. In the Marxist discipline, on the other hand, scarcity is always a social institution. It is part and parcel of the property relation. In his study of archaic societies, Marshall Sahlins makes a comment on the modern society that is instructive: ”The market-industrial system institutes scarcity, in a manner completely unparalleled and to a degree nowhere else approximated. Where production and distribution are arranged through the behaviour of prices, and all livelihoods depend on getting and spending, insufficiency of material means becomes the explicit, calculable starting point of all economic activity.”54 The historical roots of scarcity date back to the enclosure movement in fifteenth and sixteenth century England. Land that previously had been held in common by villagers was parcelled and fenced in.55 Law transformed these turfs into private property assignable to individual rights holders. Accordingly, Marxists prefer to look upon intellectual property as an extension of traditional property, and highlight the continuity rather than a discontinuity between the two. This is evident from a sentence by Dan Schiller, a long-time sceptic towards the enthusiastic claims about information systems: “As against the postindustrialists’ assertion that the value of information derives from its inherent attributes as a resource, we counter that its value stems uniquely from its transformation into a commodity—a resource socially revalued and refined through progressive historical application of wage labor and the market to its production and exchange.”56 Additionally, Marxists would question the analytical procedure of taking the informational use value and its inherent characteristics as the referential point for an analysis. The product is, after all, not an entity in its own right, but a stage in the metamorphosis of the labour process. If there is a discontinuity, which is probably the case, it should not be sought in a discrepancy between non-rival goods and tangible, rival goods. It should be located in a rupture in the labour process. As we saw previously in the chapter, the hunch that work has changed in a qualitative way has caught the imagination of numerous scholars. They have tried to name this rupture by inventing new names for labour, i.e. immaterial labour, social labour, scientific labour, etc. With such a line of attack, it follows that the contradictions arising from the political economy of information ought not to be phrased as ‘infinite reproducible information treated as a scarce resource’. It is more appropriate to think of it as private property being straightjacketted onto a socialised labour process that only exists in communication. Such a description allows for a more dynamic analysis of information systems. It now becomes evident that commodification is underway long before copyright and patent law move in to privatise knowledge.
As Katherine Hayles has vividly shown, the term ‘information’ is itself part of the problem. The notion that it is possible to abstract information patterns from the material body was a cultural invention made in the natural sciences in the 1940s and 1950s. It met the needs of an ascending technoscientific industry. The industry wanted a definition that allowed reliable quantifications and Claude Shannon’s theory of information satisfied the requirement. He specified information as a signal that is indifferent to the meaning that it conveys to the receiver. Competing definitions, where information and the message it conveys were treated as inseparable, also surfaced at the time. To assess ‘information as meaning’, however, would necessitate a measuring of the changes taking place in the mind of the receiver. It was such practical considerations, Hayles laid down, which persuaded the scientific community to side with a narrow, mathematical, and de-contextualised definition of information.57 Information defined in this way is a substance that can be divorced from the labour process and owned as private property. It can be equipped with an individual author. Intellectual property is merely a logical consequence of such a mindset.
We need a language that makes visible to us that so-called information goods are continuously co-produced at multiple points of creation and reception. Information is, in other words, embedded in a perpetual labour process that we know better as communication. With this perspective, focus is placed on the labourers producing information and therefore the antagonistic relation is brought to the fore in our discussion. The systematic enrolment of data in the economy has affected all kinds of work assignments. It is surely ludicrous to propose that labour has been replaced by information, since information itself is a product of labour. However, informated and automated production does not just decimate the quantity of labourers employed by industry. It diminishes labour in a qualitative sense too. Since objectified labour can be stored infinitely in binaries, the need for reproducing the same labour twice is effectively erased.58 A quick glance at the precarious situation for freelancing workers in the information sector uncovers the economic interests in force. Contracted workers can be compelled into creating information products that outlast their contracts and make them at least partly redundant on the labour market. Hence, the queerness of information has not emerged out of sheer randomness, as many believe. Digitalisation is consistent with capital’s quest to disband workers and uproot the remaining strongholds of organised labour. Some fields of work can more easily be attacked than others. ‘Symbol-analytical’ labour is particularly vulnerable since its output is pure information. In the case of the manipulation of affects, if that implies person-to-person services, a difficulty arises in divorcing the labour performed from the context of the performance. The respite in these sectors will be a short one though. In higher education, for example, multimedia and recording technologies are pushed in order to replace teachers with interactive instruction manuals.59
It is therefore plausible that more and more fields of the economy will be made subject to digitalisation. Competition and class struggle are animating the labour process and races it along this vector. Though the challenge to organised labour is daunting, digitalisation cuts in both ways. The call to arms by filesharers, hackers, and progressive lawyers, rallying against the current intellectual property regime under the banner of ‘information exceptionalism’, is a case in point. Their moderate vision of information freely provided in a commons and, side by side, property markets in rival, tangible goods, is more subversive than they would like to think. Ever more of the market society is falling pray to the logic of infinite reproducibility. Though limited commons in information is compatible or even beneficiary to capitalism today, that might not be the case with capitalism of tomorrow. This point can be clarified by elaborating on a famous catchphrase by Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation. In agreement with the ‘information exceptionalism’ hypothesis, he insists that free software is free as in free speech, not free as in free beer. In other words, commons in information is about civil liberty and not about price. However, as Paolo Virno has shown, the boundary between the public and the private sphere is not absolute in post-modern capitalism. Free beer is indistinguishable from free speech, in: “[…] the era in which language itself has been put to work, in which language itself has become wage labour (so much so that ‘freedom of speech’ nowadays means no more and no less than the ‘abolition of wage labor’)”60 If we save free speech, we have won free beer.61 Such a scenario is not likely to come true in the near future. Even so, this potentiality is that dark, unseen force which bends the arc of all those events that we can see. Abolition of wage labour is the void in the rhetoric of moderate critics of the intellectual property regime; it is at the heart of the contradicting policies of IBM towards free software development; and it explains the paradox that the culture industry simultaneously profits from filesharing networks and litigates against individual filesharers. In conclusion, if information commons prove resilient to commodification, it is not because ‘information wants to be free’, but because the labourers producing information want to be free.