In this chapter hacking is discussed from the angle of needs and consumption. The reader might ask what the relevance is of consumption and needs to a study of hackers. But production and consumption must not be treated as they appear at face value, as separate spheres of activities. They are two sides of the same commodity relation. To be sure, it is as crucial to understand the setting from which the hacker movement has emerged as it is to know about hacking as a practice. That setting is a semiotic-based, consumer-driven and post-modern accumulation regime. The leading question in the chapter is what kind of resistance is effective against this reformed, capitalist system. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, socialists hoped that the advancement of the productive forces would eventually solve the problem of needs satisfaction without demanding sacrifices from the working class. That wishful thought has since been thoroughly falsified by the never-ending race for positional goods. It will here be suggested that hacking provides a different way of conceptualising scarcity, and, hence, a possibility of breaking out of the semiotic loop. In the computer underground, ‘keeping up with the Jones’ means writing the neatest software code or having access to a high-security server. In other words, distinction is not sought after primarily through conspicuous consumption but by demonstrating productive skills. The need to show distinction is thus satisfied at the very same time as the demand in society for software products is met. Since there are no tradeoffs between fulfilling one’s own needs and those of others, scarcity can be short-circuited by advancing a norm of ‘convivial consumption’. The hacker movement will here be analysed as a producer of needs, to complement the established picture of the hacker movement as a producer of software code. The chapter argues that since those needs do not conform to the logic of scarcity, this aspect of the hacker movement contributes as much to their resistance against capitalist relations as the production of convivial tools, i.e. the making of free software.
It is noteworthy that the belief of early socialists, that humanity would be liberated from scarcity thanks to the development of the forces of production, is resurfacing in the technophilia of many hackers. When they reflect upon the ramifications of their hobby they tend to be heavily influenced by notions about the ‘affluent society’.1 The underlying assumption, explicitly argued in Pekka Himanen’s The Hacker Ethic, is that the ‘high-tech gift economy’ on the Internet has emerged as a consequence of the abundant wealth in industrialised economies. Himanen is typical in referring to the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s work on human motivation from the 1950s. According to Maslow, human needs can be arranged in a hierarchy where primacy is assigned to those needs that are most urgently requiring to satisfy for a human being when he lacks everything. When physiological needs are satisfied, such as food and water, attention is turned to safety needs. Among these are security, stability, freedom from fear, from anxiety and chaos, and the longing for structure. Once security is sorted, human yearning extends beyond the individual. Such needs are social in character, focusing on love and belonging. Self-respect, self-confidence and reputation among peers now capture the human imagination. Finally, if all needs are reasonably satisfied, the individual will be free to engage in self-actualisation.2 The argument of Pekka Himanen, and many others, is that volunteer involvement in FOSS development projects can be explained by the extent to which primary needs have been satisfied in consumer society.
It is not alien to the Marxist tradition of thought that the quantity of social surplus, by which is meant excess productivity in society, modifies the conditions for struggle. Within Marxist scholarship it has been debated if the hunter-gather society could be said to have exemplified a form of ‘primitive communism’. The lack of social surplus prevented a ruling class from forming in these societies. When productivity rose, usually assumed to have followed with the introduction of agriculture, enough social surplus was created to sustain a ruling class, together with ranks of people who worked with other things than providing for immediate subsistence, such as priests, scientists and philosophers. As was mentioned above, quite a few socialists have predicted that as productivity continues to swell, spurred on by the profit motive, the material conditions for transcending capitalism are being established. The same people tend to argue that the conquest of scarcity is a precondition for re-establishing communism proper. The conservative futurist Daniel Bell was so unsettled by this implication of his own writings that he felt compelled to denounce any likelihood of communism due to an end of scarcity in his post-industrial kingdom-come. In Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Bell charged that communism always was, always will be, unattainable. The reason is the human plight of eternal scarcity: “But what we have come to realize is that, the question of resources aside, we will never overcome scarcity. In the post-industrial society […] there would be new scarcities which nineteenth-century utopians could never envision—scarcities of information, […].”3 Daniel Bell missed the point. Marxist theory is clear about scarcity is a social relation and that it cannot be done away with inside the confines of capitalism. In the case of intellectual property, it is obvious that scarcity is embedded in institutions and is deliberately enforced. But even where access to information is not restricted by legislation, scarcity crops up in new disguises in this society. A surplus of information leads to an insufficiency in the capacity of audiences to process the signals. Thus, some economists have begun to talk about an ‘attention economy’ on the Internet where the lack of attention is a source of new demand.4 The market society is so tuned in to generating scarcity that abundance is coded as a ‘scarcity of scarcity’. While Marxism holds that the conditions to overcome the market economy are developed inside the same society, these circumstances remain a potentiality until the capitalist relation has been overthrown.5
The popular adoption of Maslow in the computer underground, where needs are seen as ordered in a hierarchy and being quite constant to the human species, coupled with the belief that the hierarchy of needs is gradually being filled up like water poured into a vessel, is falling short on several accounts. Firstly, the impression that ‘higher’ needs among the population are set free in response to the peaceful and gradual build-up of affluence in western society, denies the antagonistic world in which wealth is created. Secondly, it fails to see the productive aspect of needs. Needs experienced by man as his own often correspond suspiciously well to the needs of the capitalist system. Thus, it is better not to think of needs as a consummative force liberated by the affluent society but instead as a productive force required by the operations of the economic system. Or, to put it differently, post-modern capitalism is as much about producing consumption as it is about producing consumer goods. This situation derives from the fact that circulating capital has surmounted productive capital and subsumed society under its own articulations. Leading on from Fordism, late capitalism requires a social norm of continuously high, working-class consumption matching the ever-larger output of mass-produced goods. Contrary to popular belief, the seeds of this mirror world that we now inhabit were noticed and commented upon by Karl Marx: “[…] Production of surplus value based on the increase and development of the productive forces, requires the production of new consumption; requires that the consuming circle within circulation expands as did the productive circle previously. Firstly, quantitative expansion of existing consumption; secondly: creation of new needs by propagating existing ones in a wide circle; thirdly: production of new needs and discovery and creation of new use values.” (Grundrisse, 408, italics in original). At the beginning of the twentieth century, intellectuals of divergent allegiances foresaw a clash between an ever-expanding industry and the limits, then thought of as being quite constant, of consumers in absorbing the massive output. In his comprehensive study on the subject, Time and Money—The Making of Consumer Culture, Gary Cross tells how conservatives in those days feared a loss of economic incentives. They considered it to be a threat to the work ethic of the working class. Indeed, the same tunes are heard today from the ranks of the economic profession. Progressives, on the other hand, envisioned a utopian state of expanding ‘democratic leisure’. It has since been proved, as much of a surprise to both sides, that private consumption can be expanded in much wider circles than was then imaginable. Gary Cross reminds his readers that the delight of consumption has consistently been downplayed by intellectuals and socialists. Part of the secret behind the longevity of consumption is, quite simply, that it is enjoyable. Despite the fact that consumption in Western societies has surpassed the reasonable many times over without losing any of its appeal, some absolute boundaries for use cannot be avoided quite irrespectively of our assumptions about the nature of human needs. For example, it is hard to overcome the length of the day in which a consumer can be an active, potential shopper. When mass production pushes even beyond these rock-bottom barriers, consumer habits must be rationalised, just as work was rationalised before. Nicholas Garnham describes how a racket of ‘combined consumption’ is devised for this purpose. One area ripe for combined consumption is driving. A sizeable portion of a consumer’s day is spent in the car. The time when a driver cannot consume anything more than petrol represents a ‘loss’ to overall demand in society. According to Garnham, the invention of drive-in fast-food chains, motels and road-side cinemas are examples of how this bottleneck is solved through combined consumption.
Indeed, the sheer mass of individual consumption has itself become a boundary to consumer demand. The downward spiral of satisfaction from crowding was elaborated on by Fred Hirsch in The Social Limits to Growth. He calculated that the satisfaction that an individual consumer gets from a product derives less from her own individual choice and more from the consumption of others in her surrounding. The negative trade-off from crowding constitutes an ‘economy of bad neighbours’. The parade example is the individual freedom that ownership of a car promises to a potential buyer. The appeal to freedom offered by the prospect of owning a car is compromised by the number of existing car owners. The dream of becoming a free, motorised ranger is bogged down in endless road congestions. Markets are inappropriate to satisfy such needs in an overcrowded environment. Fred Hirsch concludes that mass consumer goods must fail to satisfy the expectation of individual consumers.6 We would, however, be erroneous to deduce from Hirsch’s argument that the consumer market is running into a definitive obstacle because of this. On the contrary, a permanent erosion of the use value of individual consumer goods, paired with the delusion that buying more goods is a remedy to social ills, is instrumental in the workings of planned obsolescence. Consumption turns into an endless tail-chase to escape crowding. The market value of gated communities, remote beaches, and sport utility vehicles derives directly from the economy of crowding.
Crowding is one example of how specific, individual forms of need satisfaction are being saturated when consumption is pushed beyond the scope of use for the sake of exchange. The time it takes for consumers to digest mass-produced goods creates friction to the circulation of capital. Those frictions are better not thought of as rigid ceilings, against which infinite consumption eventually will collapse into (in a parallel version to Rosa Luxemburg’s geographic boundaries to imperialism and world market expansion). Rather, they are thresholds that can be surpassed, as capitalism has proved many times over, but by which qualities in the conditions of exploitation and struggle are transformed as well. One such threshold is the passing from goods made for concrete uses towards positional goods where the primary use is to show distinction.7
The renowned thesis of Guy Debord, formulated at the verge of the ‘mass-consumer society’ in the 1960s, was that the image has become the highest form of the commodity. The image has given rise to an immense spectacle.8 Though Guy Debord depicted the society of the spectacle as overwhelming, his writing and actions aspired to the disbandment of this state of things. When the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard picked up the same theme ten years later, his aim was to disprove the very notion of resistance. The principal target of Baudrillard was the Marxist distinction between use value and exchange value. He charged that use value is nothing but an alibi for exchange value and counterposed these two with the term ‘sign value’. There is no escape from the endless semiotic game of sign values, Baudrillard exclaimed. From the 1990s and onwards, interest has surged in the so-called cultural turn or the aesthetisation of the economy. It is generally agreed that imagery has become a key factor in driving consumption and, thus, production. Academics researching the topic draw more from Jean Baudrillard than from Guy Debord. The concept of use value tends to be dismissed with a brief reference to Baudrillard’s critique of Marxism.9 This approach to the cultural economy is far from innocent. Class struggle is replaced with aesthetics, in parallel to post-industrialists who replace class struggle with technology. These writers have accurately described the changes in post-modern capitalism as it appears from the point of perspective of capital, but not as it comes across to the proletariat. It is thus they can declare that resistance against semiotic capitalism is futile, as Baudrillard did, or just take the futility of resistance for granted, as later-day theoreticians generally do. All they are saying, and they are correct in this, is that out-dated forms of struggle are out-dated when coming up against a reformed, semiotic capitalism. In the second half of the chapter, we will take the hacker movement as a springboard for theorising on what kinds of struggle that can be effective today. First we have to examine in more detail the claims about a cultural turn in the economy. In order to retain the centrality of class struggle, however, we will move in the opposite direction to those making the claim. We must deepen rather than abandon the discussion about use and exchange.
Wolfgang Haug did so already in the 1970s when he argued that the tendency towards image is latent in production for exchange. Karl Marx stressed that for a product to have an exchange value it must be of use to someone, i.e. it has to be a use value as well as an exchange value. Otherwise the item will not be purchased. Haug drew attention to the fact that at the point of sale, before the transaction has been carried out, use value does not exist but only the promise of use. It is the appearance of use, not actual use, which is decisive for the closure of a sale. Though this always was the case, in the period of early consumerism the look was taken for granted as identical with the object. When image becomes the highest form of the commodity, appearance of use is acknowledged as separate from use, and this recognition feeds back into the production process. The aesthetics of the commodity is now detached from the object and enters the calculation as an independent factor. Under the pressures of competition, Haug attested, it is ultimately necessary for capitalists to gain technological control over and start an independent production of this aesthetic process.10 By shifting competition to the level of the aesthetic processes, where ‘image fights image’ as Haug puts it, corporations establish themselves as ‘image monopolies’. The compression of time and space in post-modern, late capitalism is both catalyzed by and accentuates the importance of this aesthetic process. The image has an edge over tangible goods since it is immediately responsive to turnover and can be mass-marketed instantaneously over a global space. Indeed, the accelerated speed of newness makes tangible products into a liability. The cumbersomeness of physical property is manifest in the time-lags required to transport and store goods in real space. The other major obstacle is in consumption. The use value of a tangible product is specific and defined, thus it is finite in its functionality. The durability of items previously sold becomes congestion to the next fresh wave of same-but-different things. Automated production, which has actualized this problem by its very efficiency, also provides the solution. The anonymity and uniformity of mass consumer goods create a deficiency in look and feel which advertisers can exploit. The stimulus from consuming comes to a great extent from novelty, which, in mass-produced goods, is used up much sooner than the comfort they yield.11
In other words, the pleasure from consumption derives in large part from factors external to the characteristics of the object in question. Wolfgang Haug sensed this seismological shift when he located the ‘place’ of the use value to outside the product itself: “The balance will shift from an unmediated, materially purposeful use-value to thoughts, feelings, and associations, which one links to the commodity or assumes that others must associate with it. […] Thus it becomes ever more important to see what points beyond the commodity itself, for example, positive and negative relationships to other commodities, its ‘meaning’ and ‘sense’ being based on determinants outside it.” (Haug, 97–8) The shift of focus from actual use to the appearance of use, and from the commodity to that which points beyond the commodity, has seminal consequences for Marxist theory. Wolfgang Haug stopped short at the remarks cited above. After having witnessed the aesthetisation of the economy for another thirty years, we are in the position to expand on his preliminary observations. In the classical definition given by Karl Marx, use value is an objective relation between the person and her needs, a relation that is valid irrespectively of the existence of comparable use values. He contrasted it to exchange value which only exists as a measure. The absoluteness which he ascribed to use value must be rethought when the image becomes the hegemonic form of the commodity. This is because image is essentially the same thing as language. In language, meaning exists as a difference between signs. Hence, the image necessarily relates to a constellation of other images as a difference. Positional goods derive at least part of their use value from their positions vis-à-vis comparable goods. In this sense, there is some merit to Jean Baudrillard’s well-known catch phrase: ‘the sign has no referent’. By that he expressed the idea that there is no function or concrete use which a product ultimately refers to. He claimed that the use value of a product derives from its relation to other signs in a never-ending, self-referring circle.12 Insights from feminist, Marxist theory can be useful in our search for the mechanisms that codify a consumer product-image as desirable. The objectification of the female body is very much part of the same complex of problems. To illustrate what could be meant by saying that the commodity points beyond itself, a quote from Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth on what makes a face look beautiful gives direction to the mind: “Its power is not far-reaching because of anything innately special about the face: Why that one? Its only power is that it has been designated as ‘the face’—and that hence millions and millions of women are looking at it together, and know it.”13 The last sentence is the key to the puzzle. It is the knowledge of other people knowing. It is the desire created by other people desiring. And what goes for a beautiful face goes for any other object deemed as attractive, a slick car or a fashionable dress. In other words, both the use value and the production process of the image are located in communication, which necessarily points beyond both the product itself and the factory in which the product was made. This provides another facet of the labour of audiences, as was discussed at length in chapter two. Audiences have become a labour force on a parity with employees and the decoding process emerges as a source of surplus value in its own right. Youth subcultures that actively take part in defining tastes and promoting consumption is only the furthest exponent of a labour process that is generic and spread out among audiences, users, and consumers.
The idea that the distance between producers and consumers is closing is often voiced by critics of intellectual property law. That claim is one of their main reproaches against the policies of the culture industry. In their opinion, business models based on the delivery of information content to paying customers are hopelessly outdated, at least as far as the Internet is concerned. Instead these critics like to highlight the example set by FOSS ventures and underground record labels that experiment with alternative licenses. In such forward-thinking business models, customers and users are invited to participate in the development process. Their argument resonates with a claim first made by the futurist Alvin Toffler in the early 1980s. He too predicted a merger between the producer and the consumer and invented the neologism ‘the prosumer’ for his new creature.14 Both Toffler and contemporary critics of intellectual property law give credit to digital technology as the agent behind this transformation. Typically, the interactivity of videogames is contrasted with the passivity of watching television, and a vague optimism is attached to the surge of new media.
A glance at any of Karl Marx’s extensive writings on political economy clarifies that production is consumption and consumption is production, and this always was the case. For instance, the consumption of a loaf of bread is simultaneously the reproduction of human labour power. It is the reified relation in bourgeois society that makes production and consumption appear as two distinct spheres of activities. From this standpoint the productive consumer does not look like such a curiosity or novelty. This is not to say that we should rule out that there are changes in the economy moving in the direction suggested by the critics of intellectual property. But these changes cannot be adequately explained with a reference to information technology. Digital media is not the best end to start an inquiry into the merger of the consumer and the producer. The retailing industry might seem like an odd place to depart from, but hopefully it will make more sense as the discussion proceeds. Paul du Gay has examined how the work situation in retailing is reformed by the ambition of firms to stay close to its customers. Anticipating the next wish of the consumer and giving her an out-of-the-ordinary experience has broadly been recognised by managers as the king road to profits. The margins in this segment of the market are higher than when competing with low prices. Furthermore, leading on from the previous discussion, consumer satisfaction exists to some degree in the moment of buying a product, rather than in anything innate belonging to the product. Providing that sensation at the point of sale can be worth more to the customer than the object itself. A dilemma for managers, however, is that the experience that customers have of the company derives from their contact with the front-line staff. It is hard for managers to monitor the subtleties of person-to-person interactions. Commanding the personnel to act pleasantly towards customers tends to be counterproductive. Hence, it becomes crucial to get the clerks at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy to identify themselves with the goals of the company. This requirement goes some way to explain the emphasis on culture in business organisations in the last decades. The firm tries to pass itself off to its employees as if the organisation was about some core value above and beyond making money. Of course, those corporate values always hinge on serving the customer in the right way. The customer is the norm for ethical behaviour in corporate cultures. The hypocrisy is not lost on employees, and, as Paul du Gay readily acknowledges, there is a big rift between what corporate cultures look like on paper and how they come out on the shop-floor. Among low-paid and expendable personnel, cynicism is a common response to management talk about corporate values.15
The warring interests between workers and owners make it tricky for a company to give customers the cosy welcoming that will induce them to spend money. And now, finally, we return to the question of the so-called prosumer. The people that are closest to the customers, thus best placed to persuade them, are the customers themselves. Retailers on the Internet have explored this opportunity to the fullest. A well-known example is the book reviews on Amazon that are submitted by previous customers. The rationale for this policy is evident. First and foremost, the company could not afford to pay a staff to review and keep up-to-date with every new book release. Secondly, the book reviews are credible precisely because they are written by another disinterested reader and not by a company employee with the incentive of getting the book sold. While Amazon might not sell one particular book due to an angry reviewer, on average the book store will benefit from the input of readers. More cases supporting the observation can be found outside the retailing industry. Video games have from the start been the parade example of interactive media. It is logical then that the gaming industry has gone the furthest in engaging their customers in game development. In computer games played over the Internet, almost all interaction in the game world is between players/customers. Not only are the in-game experiences delivered by fellow players, the administration, marketing, even coding of the games, are increasingly outsourced to the players.16 When scratching the surface, it turns out that interactive media comes down to little more than intensified exploitation. It must be stressed, nonetheless, that the benefits from enrolling customers instead of workers in the provision of services cannot be reduced to simply a matter of cutting costs. Equally important is that customers do a better job. The benefits from enlisting consumers as opposed to employees is that the former have a high degree of voluntariness in going about doing what they are doing. Voluntariness is a chief competitive asset to firms that are in the business of selling concepts. And, if we are to believe management gurus, selling concepts is the lead tune in the weightless and aestheticised economy. It follows that the reformed post-Fordist labour market pivots around convincing employees to act as if they had volunteered to do the job. Drawing from the experience of fashion designers, Angela McRobbie examines how work has been stylised as a way of self-enrichment. In the majority of cases the rhetoric about personal development on the job is little more than a cover-up. But it is in those occupations where self-enrichment is experienced as real that the rhetoric becomes truly effective. In a key remark, McRobbie notes that where individuals are most free to chase their dreams of self-expression, they are most effectively controlled.17 That FOSS development fits into this larger picture is evident from Pekka Himanen’s endorsement of the hacker spirit, ‘the work ethos of the information age’, as opposed to the protestant ethic of industrial times. Corporations such as IBM do not have to invent an internal, corporate culture to lure employees into extended cooperation and identification with the firm; an undertaking frustrated by class antagonism and entrenched bureaucracy. They only have to take onboard the FOSS development community.
It would be erroneous of us, however, to explain the current trend with a capitalist master plan. The chain of events has been set off by working class defection from alienated labour. In order to see the full ramifications of this defection, we must look beyond overt cases of workers’ resistance. Part of the resistance is carried out in the passivity of non-employees. That is, in the strategies of working class people to avoid entering the labour market in the first place. Another sizeable factor is employees that hang on to their means of income but expend a minimum of effort while doing so. Capital has to improvise to cope with these kinds of furtive refusals. It is telling, as Paul Heeles notices in an article about the ‘softening of capitalism’, that interest in company cultures began in the 1960s and 1970s. He suggests that it was rising labour militancy that convinced commentators and academics that there was a problem with work. The monotony of factory and office work had to be softened to ‘win over’ labour. From then onwards a stream of psychologist reports have been produced that argue that rewarding work assignments can be reconciled with capitalist relations.18 Of course, with the exception of the most privileged workers in the upper tier of the labour market, capital fails to deliver. But capital has found another way to get what it wants. When workers try to escape from alienated existence they deflect their time and/or energy away towards family, friends, lifestyles and hobbies. This individualised form of flight is for the most part caught up in expanded consumer markets. The next logical step is to transform these consumer activities so that they become productive to capital once again. It is thus we can make sense of the rise of the so-called prosumer. Capital counters the resistance of employees (and non-employees) by dissolving the line between the producer and the consumer. The ‘hacker spirit’ is pitched against the ‘refusal of work’. Digital media technology has certainly facilitated this development but is by no means the root cause of it.
We are thus led back to the starting question: What kind of resistance is conceivable in a semiotic-based, consumer-driven accumulation regime? Criticism against consumerism has primarily been articulated either by conservatives or by environmentalist and lifestyle movements. Left to them, the criticism has targeted over-consumption. There are ascetic, moralist, and self-righteous currents in these traditions of thought. Labour theory, with its heritage from unions and the struggle for a larger slice of corporate profits, are wary against claims that the level of consumption among Western workers could be adequate, or even excessive. Such views are too close to the position of employers. It is worth keeping in mind that Karl Marx saw the multiplication of needs as a civilising force of expanded human richness; and he even congratulated capitalism for it. His criticism was levelled against the bias of the growth of needs fostered under capitalism. It always swelled those needs most profitable to capitalist valorisation, and always at the expense of the whole range of other human needs and desires that are not readily exploitable. In the communist society, a need is limited only by other needs—i.e. all needs are free to grow and will balance each other out in an expanding universe.19
The conditioned objection to consumerism offered by Marx avoids falling into the self-righteous and ascetic trap of alternative life-style movements. Conversely, however, the impulse to own and consume infinitely more is certainly not a privilege of the bourgeoisie anymore. Abstract hedonism belongs to the sphere of exchange value, where possession is detached from use. It is the essence of money that there are no ‘diminishing marginal returns’ to ownership. The same can be said about the image. The image exists as a quantity in relation to other images. Progressive thinkers have shunned such a proposition, while conservatives have endorsed it, no doubt for much the same reason; it renders familiar forms of struggle ineffective. If semiotic consumption is truly without boundaries, then the increases of productivity in the industry make little difference. Shattered are the hopes for a future of post-scarcity and the unfolding of democratic leisure. Furthermore, the demand of workers for increased purchasing power is emptied of some of its emancipating potential, and thus its legitimacy, if redistribution of wealth only serves to grease the wheels of the system. It is on this ground that Jean Baudrillard wrote his obituary notice over anti-capitalist resistance. He failed to see, however, that struggle has not ended but is finding new outlets. Just as the use value of the image is external to the object, struggle too is external to the commodity. Production and resistance are both located in the coding of images as desirable, i.e. in the production of consumption, or, we might also say, it exists in communication.
Feminists, queers, and minority rights campaigners have long fought on this terrain, that is, from points of reference outside the wage relation. Consumption is indirectly targeted by their protest against the hierarchies that are hard-wired in the consumer market. At least some of them maintain that by challenging chauvinism and racism, i.e. the micro-political setting of everyday life, consumerism is attacked too. Social stratifications have proved, however, to be very resilient to educational campaigns. Indeed, political correctness and cosmopolitan values often result in little more than another display of distinction and a new niche market. Another, closely related, practice is the ‘judo strategy’ of adbusting. Though the familiarity of a brand becomes a leveller to ‘name and shame’ a corporation, activists quickly discovered that the judo strategy cuts both ways. Companies themselves adapted the chic look of adbusting to market their brands, while the adbusters became brands and started companies. The focus of these left-of-the-centre movements on contesting representations has a precedent in academia. Studies of consumption and the resistance by consumers have been in vogue in universities since the 1980s. The topic of consumption replaced the emphasis on production that went before. Many of the scholars in culture studies came from a leftist political tradition and continued the themes of struggle, though this time a struggle between the broadcaster and the viewer, the retailer and the shopper, and so on. Priority was given to conflicts over representation. In hindsight, it must be said that the scope of audiences and consumers to resist domination by reinterpreting commercial messages was vastly overrated. Television audiences have had little say over the global consolidation of media ownership, for instance. The influence that media corporations exercise over public opinion, repeatedly demonstrated during general elections in country after country, suggests that the subversion of meaning by audiences is marginal and inadequate to counter biased reporting. Labour theoreticians have rightly been critical of post-modern, identity-based, left-of-the-centre movements and the assertions of media scholars, insisting on the centrality of hitting capital where it hurts, i.e. in the production of surplus value.
It is when we mingle the perspectives of labour theory with the subject of culture studies that interesting things start to happen. Such an approach follows from the claim above that consumers have become directly involved in production. The stage of consumption is an inception of a new cycle of production, not merely reproduction. Putting this statement in Marx’s classic scheme, it would look something like this: means of use—consumption/production—enhanced means of use. Or, in abbreviation: MU-C/P-MU’. Because the starting point in this cycle is consumer goods, that is, means that have been purchased with a wage and not by spent surplus value, capital is out of the loop. Of course, the cycle of consumption/production does not take place independently of capital. The consumer bought the goods from a corporation and he paid with money earned from a second corporation. The nicety here is that the transaction was conducted with money and not with capital. Money and capital is not the same thing according to Marxist theory. Money becomes capital when it is set in motion in the accumulation process. It is in this restricted sense that we can speak of a cycle of consumption/production by users that does not involve capital. The metamorphosis of the consumer goods does not take place inside a firm but in a community of users. And though a firm was involved at the outset by selling the original product to the users, that might not be the case the second time that the cycle repeats itself. This is aptly illustrated by the development of FOSS applications by user groups. Computer firms have got involved in the process at a later date and are merely adding to an activity that is centred on the user community.
With these remarks at the back of our mind, and, with hacking as our touchstone, we can find valuable insights in the discipline of culture studies. It might even help us to correct labour theory on a few points. A central theme in the genre is that consumer products are not sealed off at the point of sale. Functions and meanings of the product are continuously negotiated between the user and the manufacturer. This indeterminacy is what creates a potential for resistance in the act of consumption. The statement is of minor consequence when applied to the intervention of commercial broadcasts and everyday consumer goods. There is only so much that ‘semiotic poaching’ can achieve. The matter gains in gravity when users intervene in consumer electronics, i.e. the praxis of hacking. We have concrete, political outcomes to show for the poaching of computer networks. Another hallmark in culture studies is to stress the subjective experience of the consumer instead of his objective position versus the retailer. Since consumption is a source of pleasure for the individual, a certain ambivalence appears in his sentiments towards the company. Though he is in a subjugated position vis-à-vis the company, as much as the employee is, the crisp, bi-polar antagonism between labour and capital doesn’t cut here. Not even when the consumer is turned into a producer of surplus value for capital does it cancel the fact that the consumer, at least in a restricted sense, is volunteering to do the job. This is reflected in the ambiguous attitude towards big business in the FOSS community. Hackers are usually fine with firms making money out of their software as long as the free license is respected. In all this the labour theoretician will only see naivety on the part of the consumer or hacker. It should be taken under consideration, however, that if hackers had adopted a trade union consciousness, they would be stuck at defending their own copyright claims, and, by extension, strengthening the intellectual property regime as a whole. A case in point is the many cultural workers that front for the intellectual property lobby. There is something to be said for the playful mentality of hackers. The same observation holds true about their passion for computer technology. Marx laid down in Capital that machinery is capital’s material mode of existence. The worker revolts against machinery because it embodies the material foundation of the capitalist mode of production. It is a hostile force that confronts the worker as deskilling, layoffs, and management control, and he responds to it by rejection and sabotage. The same technology reveals itself to hackers as a stimulus. It might then sound odd to say that hackers are part of the same revolt as workers are. Nonetheless, in their affirmation of computers the hacker movement has achieved something that could hardly be done from the trenches of the worker’s movement, namely: They have invented a technology of their own.
Arguably, something similar might be said about the most enthusiastic devotees of popular culture. The culture industry is typically denounced for pacifying the audience and regimenting their tastes and opinions. Conversely, however, standardisation of narratives and references creates a protocol for communication between peers. In the fan fiction subculture, the commonness of popular culture is taken as a starting point for creativity among the participants. Their excursions into collective storytelling defy bourgeois, individual authorship and copyright law.20 Without question, as an independent producer of culture or as a challenger of hegemony, the fan subculture is of marginal importance. Isolated and besieged by market relations, the role of the fan subculture is primarily as a laboratory feeding the culture industry with fresh ideas, as a training camp for a prospecting media workforce, and as a cohort of credible and cheap promoters. But then again, the significance of their activity is not in the products they make. Just as with the wage labourer, the real importance of their activity lies in the making of themselves as makers. In the fan subculture and in the hacker community, new models for organising labour are being rehearsed. It is thus we can take Michel de Certeau’s emphasis on appropriation and subversion of consumer culture and go beyond it. To de Certeau, such practices by ordinary people are tactics to cope inside the ‘belly of the beast’. The argument here is that these tactics can bootstrap a counter-logic and threaten the operation of the dominant system. When people play they produce both needs and the satisfaction of those needs for themselves and for everyone around them. Play expands the boundaries of social needs that are incompatible with market exchange. Those needs are advanced against and on top of the territory now occupied by individual, marketable needs. While individual needs are rivalrous and subject to crowding, social needs are reciprocal and strengthened by additional users. The dictum “the more the merrier” expresses this point succinctly.
It is thus scarcity can be overcome. A comparison between the two models for resolving rising demand for radio frequencies gives guidance to our thought. The state/market model is premised on portioning a limited resource in radio frequencies by drawing borders and licensing ownership rights to the highest bidder. Seen from a purely technical standpoint, segmenting the airwaves in this way prevents any two signals from interfering with each other. The auctioning of frequencies is intended to counter the stress on the transmission capacity imposed from including additional senders. A secondary consequence, however, is that as crowding builds up, both a market in frequencies and a mechanism of centralised control are established. It is social constraints, rather than technological feasibility, that favour this model for administrating radio frequencies. Technically speaking, there are many other ways to share the space in order to avoid any two signals from colliding. That is proven by ‘mesh networks’ where users are simultaneously senders. The signals jump from one sender to another without passing through a central transmitter. In the mesh network, additional users/senders strengthen the power and the range of the network as a whole. By meshing the sender with the receiver, or, the producer with the consumer, the terrain on which scarcity operates can be broken down. In markets in radio frequencies, or, for that matter, in intellectual property markets, scarcity exists only for as long as people abide to the rules. The mass defection from copyright law in filesharing networks demonstrates how the sine qua non property logic of markets can be cancelled out. It might be objected that pirate sharing is a dubious example since filesharers generally do not produce the material which they are handing out. Though labour has been invested in cracking and uploading the files, the sceptic would be justified in insisting that filesharing does not offer a sustainable model for providing new music and new films. But there are people who create the cultural and aesthetic content, fan fiction writers among others, just as resolutely as community activists labour on mesh networks, hackers write filesharing applications and crackers unlock and release encrypted information on the network.
Each of these subcultures are producers of use values within a specific field, hardware, software, culture, etc. In common to all of them is that they are at the same time producers of social needs. In this pursuit, they are not only contributing to the infrastructure on which the commodity form of information can be dissolved. They are themselves in flight from commodified life. The commodity form of need satisfaction, coupled with the wage form of labour, means that to the degree that individual needs are satisfied, they are frustrated as social needs. Indeed, this imbalance in the satisfaction of needs is the background setting from which the hacker movement, like so many other subcultures, has grown out of. While it is true that the option to devote time to hacking owes to a certain abundance in Western societies, the motivation to be a hacker comes from the one-dimensional poverty of that affluence. Frustrated with the hollowness of individual, commodified forms of gratification, people self-organise playful production-consumption of culture and technology outside the intellectual property regime and market exchanges.21 People only have to take the needs on offer and run with them. The haste, by which image-relations accelerate and evolve in the many hands of an anonymous crowd, might just run off faster than the capitalists, who set them in motion, can cope with. Like series of pictures that replace each other faster and faster, at a certain pace the separate images melt into the motion of a single image. The closed end-product becomes an open-ended process. Or, as the hacker saying goes, ‘release fast, release often’. In contrast, the commodity form and the point of sale become a seal and a stoppage in the perpetual development process. Thus we are led over to the theme of the next chapter, that is, production.