At a conference in San Diego in 2014, the new media artist Laurel Ptak staged an exhibition for a semi-fictional political campaign, ‘Wages for Facebook’. The associated website manifesto, a text set in automatically scrolling, capitalised letters, claims that in the paradigmatic form of Facebook, capitalism has ‘CONVINCE[D] US THAT IT IS A NATURAL, UNAVOIDABLE AND EVEN FULFILLING ACTIVITY TO MAKE US ACCEPT UNWAGED WORK’. We do not normally think of our free time use of social media and other digital platforms as work, even though we are increasingly aware of the kinds of value extraction platform owners derive from it: in the unwitting training we provide for algorithms by every click, in the attention we garner by our social media posts, and more universally, the potential surplus value of our data. ‘WE MUST ADMIT THAT CAPITAL HAS BEEN VERY SUCCESSFUL IN HIDING OUR WORK’, the manifesto reads.1 Where the previous chapter showed how even unemployment has been ‘put to work’, Ptak’s artwork suggests that developments in platform capitalism turn even our most idle online surfing, gaming, and posting into a kind of alienated labour.
‘Wages for Facebook’ can be read next to the work of scholars who place our unpaid interactions on digital platforms under the discrete umbrella term ‘digital labour’. ‘Internet usage is productive consumption or prosumption in the sense that it creates value and a commodity that is sold’, explains the term’s coiner Christian Fuchs.2 Others are more cautious about extending the concept of wage labour to whatever we do online. While in both cases, a capitalist owner derives surplus value from the activity of others, the experience of making cars is not exactly like taking pictures of our pets, and attending an office team meeting is not like group chatting with our friends. For Nick Srnicek, it is important ‘to draw distinctions between interactions done on platforms and interactions done elsewhere’, lest we topple into a nominalism where ‘work becomes inseparable from non-work’ and ‘all social interaction becomes free labour for capitalism’.3
Ptak’s work, in its central conceit, points beyond the impasse: ‘Wages for Facebook’ is a near word-for-word transcription of passages from Silvia Federici’s manifesto, Wages Against Housework (1975) that replaces the word ‘housework’ in the original with ‘Facebook’.4 As Ptak’s gesture disarmingly suggests, dilemmas of how to interpret work in its domestic and digital iterations are in fact sufficiently identical not to require a revision of wording. Likewise, the strategies for analysing and resisting the former might inform the ones aimed at the latter.5 Federici’s manifesto was a contribution to the International Feminist Movement’s 1970s campaign for wages for housework. The contention was that housework and reproductive labour, despite being as structurally necessary to capitalist profits as waged labour, had been successfully dressed up as a woman’s god-given task and no kind of work at all. In her manifesto, Federici harbours no illusion that putting a price on household tasks would in itself liberate housewives. The aim is political, and taken on as such by Ptak: ‘THE WAGE AT LEAST RECOGNIZES THAT YOU ARE A WORKER. YOU CAN BARGAIN AND STRUGGLE AROUND AND AGAINST THE TERMS AND THE QUANTITY OF THAT WAGE, THE TERMS AND THE QUANTITY OF THAT WORK’.
In the first instance, the ‘wages for housework’ campaign is a reminder of the fact that capitalism is a form of economic exploitation never confined to the wage relation. Since capitalism depends on perpetual growth, it must maximise exploitation; inevitably it seeks to find profit in human activities outside the one acknowledged by the wage, whatever form they may take. Unpaid domestic work, unequivocally arduous, produces surplus value for capitalists indirectly (in housing, feeding, and supporting waged workers and replenishing the workforce). Unpaid digital labour, inversely, usually experienced as leisure or convenience, directly produces surplus value for capitalists in the form of monetisable data. ‘Labour’ fits neither activity perfectly; and while they are both exploitative, they are not exploitative in the same way. Nobody is suggesting that doing the laundry and social media updates are the same thing. What they have in common is that they are profitable activities normally invisible as such: imagining them as waged labour, whether as part of a concrete political programme or as a tactical gesture, renders them visible as a first step towards organising them differently.
So there are good political and economic reasons for taking seriously the idea of unwaged work online and elsewhere. But there is another aspect of Federici’s argument without which the parallel between social media and housework must remain superficial. As she points out in Wages Against Housework, ‘capitalism makes money out of our cooking, smiling, fucking’ without causing rebellion, because in the home it is impossible to see ‘where our work begins and ends, where our work ends and our desire begins’.6 If, as Louise Toupin notes in her history of the International Feminist Movement, the idea behind the wage for housework was ‘to establish a separation between the person and the work she was doing’, this is a separation as difficult to access in the digital economy as it ever was, and remains, in housework.7
What is at stake here, beyond delivering free data, is not only that it is difficult to know whether what, at a given moment, you do online is friendship or labour, but rather that the ‘self’ produced in the process increasingly resembles a kind of surplus value, or rather, a kind of ‘living currency’, to use Pierre Klossowski’s term. By farming our desires, capitalism not only gets free housework and free data, it also produces subjects who relate to themselves as commodities, online and offline.
One way to expand this idea has been the concept of the ‘Young-Girl’, advanced by the French anarchist collective, Tiqqun, in Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl (2012). Originally published in 1999, Preliminary Materials proposed that a paradigmatic figure of the ‘Young-Girl’ had become the ‘model citizen as redefined by consumer society since World War I’.8 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, young upper-class Western women took a peculiar position in society, since, rather than performing recognisable labour or overseeing that of others, their function was to labour specifically on themselves:
You read, or have lessons, or otherwise improve your mind, till the middle of the day; take a walk before lunch, go for a drive with your aunt after, and have some kind of engagement in the evening.9
No one can be really esteemed accomplished who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with. A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half-deserved.10
This was the work of a certain self-production, the cultivation of appearance, social connections, manners, and ‘attainments’: kinds of ability – in needlework or drawing room recital for instance – that were practised and cultivated primarily for the performance of feminine accomplishment. Their only permissible pleasures were a rigorously structured system of dances, games, and appearances. This social position had its greatest articulation in the novels of Jane Austen, which – at the start of the nineteenth century – managed to create a whole narrative form out of the dilemmas of intelligent and enterprising women, for whom society afforded no imperative other than that they be themselves, and work hard at it.
Far from being simply superseded with the decline of the gentry who principally practised it, for Tiqqun, the figure of the Young-Girl has instead been allowed to become paradigmatic in the obligation we have all been placed under to ‘permanently self-valorize’: that is to say, to unite – as Austen’s young women did – our very selves with the commodity form, and to make this the underpinning task of all our labour.11 For Tiqqun, at this point we are all Young-Girls, pushed into cultivating, remodelling, and valorising our image.
‘The Young-Girl is obviously not a gendered concept’, Tiqqun state, ‘all the old figures of patriarchal authority, from statesmen to bosses and cops, have become Young-Girlified, every last one of them, even the Pope’. The claim has only become more compelling since Tiqqun made it in 1999, before the rise of social media. They hadn’t seen the pope’s Instagram account, or the series The Young Pope (2016).12 At the same time, taking the signifier ‘young girl’ and turning it into the emblem of the times evidently comes with theoretical risks that cannot be un-gendered.13 Critics have, with justification, taken up Preliminary Materials for its misogyny. Heather Warren-Crow, for instance, frames Tiqqun’s analysis as an example of a ‘girlphobic’ habit, disappointingly persistent in radical cultural criticism, of associating all that the critic disapproves of with adolescence and femininity. Nina Power, meanwhile, is doubtful about the lack of agency and conscious discontent Tiqqun find in the Young-Girl, asking ‘what, ultimately, would it mean to let the Young-Girl speak for herself and not through the categories imposed upon her by a culture that heralds her as the metaphysical apex of civilization while simultaneously denigrating her’?14 While Tiqqun are dismayed at the work of Young-Girlification undertaken by everybody under late capitalism, their feminist critics are dismayed that young women should seem to be blamed for this oppression – not only their own, but everybody else’s – in Tiqqun’s analysis.
It is of course possible to discuss capital’s attempts at increasingly total fusion of personhood and market-value without leaning on young women to provide the requisite paradigm. If even the pope is a Young-Girl now, then why still mention girls at all? It strikes us as justified for at least two reasons. The first one lies in the continuing cultural centrality of the figure of the elevated-yet-denigrated ‘girl’ acknowledged by Power. In 2015, Jacqueline Rose pointed out the rise of an enormously popular type of fiction that specifically invites women, under the fig leaf of moments of revenge, to derive pleasure from protracted scenes of psychological and sexual violence against women. The diminutive ‘girl’ usually found in the titles of these works, she notes, is complicit in a gesture of diminishment that figures women as ‘pliable’ on the one hand and implicitly bad or stupid on the other, and so invites their sadistic punishment.15 We might also recall here that for Sianne Ngai, signalling ‘pliability’ is a central feature of ‘cuteness’ as a dominant aesthetic category in contemporary commodity culture, and as such even posits it as the essential gesture of objectification: ‘the more objectified the object, or the more visibly shaped by the affective demands and/or projections of the subject, the cuter’.16 The squishable bath toy and girlified character both: exciting the ‘desire to protect and cuddle’ as well as aggression. It would seem that in a culture where everyone is under pressure to Young-Girlify, that is, to mould every aspect of their lives into optimum marketability, there is no shortage of Young-Girl cultural objects, and they are aimed at everyone, including women, in what appears to be an offer of compensatory sadism. Add to this often sadistic fetishising of the girl in our fictions and products, the vortex of online hostility generally directed at representative ‘young girls’, from outcries about discrimination against white masculinity to the denigration of a whole generation and their political concerns as those of ‘triggered’, anxious ‘snowflakes’, and it is clear that young women subject to misogynist violence will not be served by ignoring the cultural pull of the tropes mobilised in their names.
Meanwhile, Power’s call to ‘let the Young-Girl speak for herself’ has apparently been answered, and to a hitherto unthinkable extent. In the #Metoo movement following sexual assault allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein in October 2017, victims of the sexual violence of powerful men came forward on social media in their thousands. Welcome as the ensuing debate around sexual exploitation in and around work places has been, its limitations soon became apparent. Commentators have noted that in terms of material change, the group solidarity promised by the movement’s slogan generally shrinks into individualised action, where perpetrators in high-profile cases are persecuted with little change in the systemic professional risks and the means of redress available to the most vulnerable.17
This failed promise of solidarity is mirrored in the performative requirements of the movement: ‘Me, too’ promises the relief of recognition without the burden of explanation – that you will be able to join the ranks of a group that fights for a common cause finally recognised as such. But access to the movement’s benefits – the public pressure it can leverage on institutions and individual perpetrators – comes at the price not only of public exposure, but also of submission to the rules of genre not unlike those of the pseudo-feminist ‘Young-Girl’ potboilers critiqued by Rose two years earlier: you, too, will have to deliver lurid sexual detail, a tidy narrative arc, and situational detail calculated to convey to others the enjoyable, addictive rage that we might call, with Paul B. Preciado, ‘pharmacopornographic’: a marketable, irrefusable titillation effect that becomes its own end and defuses what may have been, and may still become, the effect of a common political cause. The angry Young-Girl is no longer the dismissed hysteric, the ‘madwoman in the attic’ of nineteenth-century fiction, and instead becomes the counterpart of the fetishised victim, a thrilling individualised spectacle, whether on social media, or in hyper-violent revenge fiction. The cultural mechanics of #Metoo thus reproduce crucial parts of the Young-Girl function: putting to work your sexuality alongside any other saleable part of your experience, including your revolt against sexual exploitation, and without the rewards of systemic change.
In a sense, the ‘Young-Girl’ always ‘speaks for herself’, because ‘she’ only exists as a number of social, economic, and cultural protocols that dictate the work we must undertake to surface into visibility under digital capitalism. While, in the impatience for material change, Power’s attempt to strip away cultural and theoretical clutter to get to the true young girl, who is simply persecuted by ‘a bunch of rich white men’ is understandable, it runs the risk of the biological essentialism that fetishises young cis women on the one hand and the social homogenisation of their position, at the expense of class and global context, on the other. Instead, we might put the idea of Young-Girlification to use as a description of a hegemonic form of biopolitical submission required as the entry ticket to late capitalist culture; young cis women continue to be exploited as prominent avatars of it, but they do not describe its essence, nor, for that matter, the full range of people subject to sexual violence in the capitalist workplace. The ‘Young-Girl’, then, rather than blaming women, separates them from the cultural protocol associated with them, and yet offers some explanation for some forms of cultural and economic violence directed against them.
The second reason to stay with the Young-Girl as a critical tool is historical. It is impossible to ignore that Tiqqun themselves fall into the trap of reification when they make their supposedly emblematic abstraction the humanoid target of bog-standard misogyny.18 What remains of interest in their theoretical wager, however, is directed the other way, towards the history of a cultural trap – and one that regards labour. In a rough and very brief introductory sketch, Tiqqun propose that the Young-Girl represents two elements, youthitude and femininitude, as regulatory ideals that allowed capitalism to integrate women and children, groups that were marginal to production in the twentieth-century West, as model consumers. When we try to assess the vagaries of today’s lifework, it is worth looking to this social history of capital.
Others before Tiqqun have remarked on the special place of childhood and youth in the social conditions as well as the ideology of industrial capitalism. Social historians have documented how protective legislation against child labour in early twentieth-century Fordist America coincided with a new imperative in advertising to promote the idea of the child consumer. Max Horkheimer, writing in 1941, went as far as to argue, in psychoanalytic terms, that mass culture had undermined subject formation to the extent that the representative father figure on whom the young peg their battle with the society they enter had been ‘replaced by the world of things’ that addresses the child early and insidiously, with no room left to argue.19 Meanwhile, unskilled young adults came into demand on the production line, displacing older workers whose specialised craft had become expensive and obsolete; not surprisingly, this proved a cultural moment where anxious age became the target for an expanding market of products connoting youth.20 Writing in 1930, Siegfried Kracauer suspected that the youth fetish he identified in German popular culture was not only a reflection of a new prejudice against older workers in company policy, but a denial of death of a whole culture at a time where the lack of cultural and economic perspective makes youth the only bearable time of life.21 Looking back to his early years in imperial Austria at the end of the nineteenth century, Stefan Zweig describes a bourgeois world where young men, for the sake of promotion, affected a slow walk, wore spectacles, grew beards, and tried to grow at least a little fat in order to attain the signifiers of dignified age.22 The inversion of this scene, as the old become newly disposable in the rationalised workplace, is already nervously acknowledged in Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice (1912). Among a group of holidaying trainee business clerks, the protagonist recognises with horror an old man, with dyed hair, make-up and fake teeth, dressed in the dandyish fashion and behaving in the ostentatiously blustering manner of his young colleagues.23 Well before the 1950s and the association of youth with simultaneously rebellious and profitable counter-cultures, writers were identifying at least a triple place for the young under industrial capitalism; as malleable consumers, disposable workers, and as the purchasable promise of youthful hope.
Women have played an even more obviously paradigmatic part in the history of capitalist production’s significant outsiders. The well-worn but important narrative of the invention of the housewife, also the basis of Federici’s work discussed above, is instructive here: as manufacturing, from the eighteenth century onwards, increasingly took people out of the ‘life, care, and home collective’ of the smallholders, it also took out their traditional crafts, now learnt by machines. Those who remained at home, bereft of their productive tasks, were left on their own with the tasks of social reproduction – making babies, care and house work. As Angela Davis crucially points out, women were the losers of this split of home and production in a double sense; the work that they continued to do as housewives lost its social status, since, unlike the activities the factories had taken out of the home economy, it did not directly generate profit. Meanwhile the women who yet had to work for a wage were treated worse and paid less than men, since their presence in the public economy represented a transgression of their idealised, naturalised role in the home.24 As capitalism and patriarchy united to render ‘women’s work’ wageless and essentially workless, because natural, it made their place in- and outside the home more economically vulnerable and precarious than it had generally been in the home economy. Unsurprisingly, this left them perfect targets for the advertisement industry that, beginning in the 1920s, aggressively coached them to commodify their sexuality to maintain their access to the wages of men.25
What emerges from this history is a strange and haunting connection between desirability and disposability. Where Tiqqun point to the young and women as two separate groups that first, were marginal to production, and second, became model consumers (as well as models for advertising’s principal fantasies), they sketch one convincing genealogy for Young-Girl self-commodifiers in the twenty-first century. What Tiqqun leave out is the glaring fact that when everybody turns Young-Girl under digital capitalism, at home as well as at work, they inherit their predecessors’ precarious relation to capital alongside their strategies for survival. This, surely, is the crux of the history of capitalist production’s outsiders – that increasing self-commodification comes alongside increasing precarity. As a tendency in employment structures, it has long been noted: Italian autonomists like Maurizio Lazzarato have pointed to the increasing predominance of ‘immaterial labour’, as forms of work that are either unaccounted for in the wage relation or generate no visible products, and are thus more easily exploited than traditional factory work. Both the ever-expanding service sector and the ‘cognitive’ labour of the digital economy, like data entry, are commonly cited examples for ‘immaterial’ work that is increasingly out-sourced, on-demand, and overall ‘hyperexploitable’.26 A significant related category in the discussion of ‘immaterial’ work has been ‘affective labour’, as any form of work that requires ‘the creation and manipulation of affect’ in others. It is usually undertaken at the cost of what Arlie Russell Hochschild has described, in the now canonical case of airline hostesses, as the ‘emotional work’ of managing and repressing the workers’ own feelings, or, and often at the same time, as for Federici’s housewife, at the cost of the messy engagement of her most private desires.27 Finally, the idea of the ‘feminization of labour’ combines the predominance of service work, affective labour and increasing precarity: even referred to by some 1980s feminists as the ‘housewifization’ of work, it acknowledges the history discussed above.28 What was once the work of those who were either placed outside the wage relation or hyper-exploited at its socio-cultural margins, has become the hegemonic model for today’s digital economy.
There are ‘Young-Girl’ histories that take the link between socioeconomic margin and economic model even further. Preciado follows this logic in Testo Junkie, when he suggests that the paradigmatic workers of our time are the sex worker and the porn actor, representative of our economy in a general ‘pornification of work’: representative because in the first instance, ‘work in the Post-Fordist society is always and in every case the sale of the force of communication and excitation produced by a living body – the sale of that body’s potentia gaudendi’. Accordingly, the purpose of our work today is not to participate – as Tiqqun prefer to frame it – in the Debordian spectacle so much as it is to cause excitation, to addictively stimulate the production of endorphin, adrenaline, and other neurotransmitters in the bodies of others. This has always been true of sex, service, and entertainment industries, although the algorithmic narrowing, for example, in mainstream film production, chain restaurants, and keyword porn makes it more apparent. But it is also increasingly true of affective self-commodification in hierarchical relationships in the neoliberal workplace as well as on social media.
As Preciado puts it, ‘in a porn-economy, there is no work that isn’t destined to cause a hard-on’; everything we do ‘must produce the effect of a fix’. He also stresses the radical precarity of sex workers; that, as in cases of trafficking and illegal migration, they often work from extreme positions of marginality, ‘a majority of migrant bodies declared illegal and distinguished by lines of racialization and social exclusion’, dehumanised to the point of the denial of citizenship. Preciado doesn’t pursue the implication in detail, but there is a bleak warning in his description of how excluded people become ‘penetrable bodies’. If the migrant sex workers of globalisation are the quintessential workers of our present and potential future economy, they are disposable to the point of legal non-existence and yet plugged into a global network for the distribution of images, or moved along global channels for the distribution of human bodies – absolute availability alongside absolute absence of right to citizenship. We have seen in Chapter 2 how this erosion of citizenship is an integral part of disemployment, the exclusion of large groups of the unemployed from official statistics and state assistance, and how this relates to Saskia Sassen’s idea of global ‘expulsions’ of people from the economy, the polity and, in the case of climate catastrophes, from bare survival. Here, Preciado offers the chilling outlook that work itself, in what we might consider malemployment’s final conclusion, makes the worker at work not only precarious, but unaccounted for as an officially existing human being. The globalised sale of excitation renders human workers mechanical parts more than they ever were under unionised Fordism: ‘there is no longer any competition between machine and worker. On the contrary: the worker is becoming a sexual biomachine’.29 The link between an Instagram lifestyle entrepreneur selling make-up and illegal sex workers plugged into globalised technocapitalism, then, would not be simply that of self-commodifying sexuality, rejected out of bourgeois prudishness dressed up as socialism – it is rather that Young-Girlification, among other things, reduces work to the sort of addictive entertainment that is based on simple calculations for physical ‘excitation/frustration’ – so simple that its actors are totally fungible executors of a stimulation protocol.
Histories of the Young-Girl, then, can be understood as capitalism’s successful implementation, from the eighteenth century to the present day, of an expansive regime of desirability as disposability, from the deskilled housewife to the migrant sex worker. Exploitation is not new, and for those able and willing to see it, the transatlantic slave trade, as the engine of capitalist expansion, has indicated the baseline of capitalist exploitation of work from the start. What has changed over the centuries is the extent to which the demand to perform individual desirability, via technologies of global distribution and communication, has spread from the economic margin to the centre even as it entrenches socioeconomic difference: Young-Girlification can account for the similarities between CEOs and webcammers in their performance of a certain kind of total availability within the same protocols of self-commodification, yet it also shows that this very similarity and cultural levelling is predicated on a social division so brutal it comes down to a human/non-human distinction. Yet, at the opposite extreme, the spread of colonisation of life by work, or what Michael Hardt calls the break-down of ‘the division between culture and economy’ has also arrived in what some of us still get to experience as free time, online and elsewhere. It is here, as we will see in this chapter, that digital capitalist culture displays its greatest ideological success; in other words, the spaces where work has, after all, become ‘inseparable from non-work’.30
All this is not to say that self-commodification is an inescapable evil. In Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials, the mix tape postmodernism of their ‘trash theory’ presentation is at odds with the Frankfurt School hauteur (not to mention masculinism) of its conclusion: that Young-Girlification is a kind of extreme depoliticisation, where our explicitly feminised and narcissistic focus on self-curation has promoted docility and irredeemably broken with solidarity. Their only solution, disappointingly, is total rejection. Instead, we might posit alongside this history of self-commodification and the blurring of lines between work and non-work a history of resistance that reaches back just as far. Jane Fairfax, a character in Jane Austen’s pioneering Young-Girl novel Emma (1816), when faced with the prospect of turning governess to ensure her survival, refuses acquaintances’ talk of ‘eligible situations’ and her ‘superior talents’ entitling her to ‘move in the first circle’. Instead, she describes the ‘governess-trade’ as the sale ‘of human intellect’.31 This is dynamite to the Young-Girl fiction those around her hold out as reconciliation – vicariously enjoying the leisure and status of wealthy people by approximating their appearance and sharing their space, a fiction that the novel knows elsewhere as the perpetual ‘penance and mortification’ of the life confined to raising (and fine-tuning the self-commodification of) rich people’s daughters. In an otherwise arch-conservative text, while Jane accepts that she must perform femme class accomplishment to earn her bread, she refuses to have it sold back to her as its own reward. We’ve already seen Federici and Ptak exemplify the political gesture of making invisible work visible in housework and social media, and we might add to these the materially at least partially successful campaigns for sex worker’s recognition to remedy the particular forms of exploitation afforded by hypocritical illegalisation and the ensuing lack of rights and protections. Most recently, we might add the struggle to challenge mainstream presentations of technologically assisted surrogacy; as Sophie Lewis has shown, surrogacy, while often waged work, is rendered hyperexploitative by requiring surrogates to act machinically as ‘pure techne, uncreative muscle’ on the one hand and leaning on sexist ideology of feminine shame and feminine generosity to keep the workforce compliant on the other.32 Not unlike those latter-day Bartlebys of Chapter 2, these workers would likely ‘prefer not to’ but have to anyway. In each case, they struggle not only for a wage, but to have the wage relation acknowledged for what it is so that they can refuse the Young-Girlification of work presented as non-work. There evidently are strategies available for some, albeit limited, de-Young-Girlification by communal resistance, at least for some workers, some of the time.
Meanwhile, in as far as the Young-Girl subjectivities that digital capitalism affords us are concerned, it is always worth remembering that there is no such thing as a homogenous culture and there is no such thing as a culture completely controlled by ideology, or even technology. As we argued in Chapter 1, any prospective post-work society would require nothing short of a thoroughgoing overhaul of all values (so entrenched are our current ones in the ideology of work), as well as new definitions of the ‘care of the self’ and of human flourishing. We should admit that many of those who might in some respects be considered representative Young-Girls, have contributed a great deal to anticipating this kind of self-cultivation, and that their invention of new forms of expertise, judgement, self-experiment, and enjoyment may come in useful to us in such a future. As such, we write in sympathy with the Young-Girl and her relationship to technology. In 1981, a decade before the internet and more than two before the rise of social media, Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ engaged in the wager that the cyborg can stand as the figurehead of an ironic political myth that acknowledges two sides of the structural changes effected by ‘the social relations of science and technology’ in globalised, late twentieth-century capitalism. On the one hand, the cyborg stands for the ‘informatics of domination’, including increasing exploitation of ‘feminized’ labour (‘flex time, part time, over time, no time’).33 On the other, it also stands for ways in which this new, networked reality of ‘disrupted unities of high-tech culture’ obstructs myths of origins and identitarianism deployed in patriarchal ideology:
The cyborg … has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions of organic wholeness … The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and a cosmos … Perhaps this is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy.34
In the ambivalence of the cyborg, we recognise the Young-Girl. Like the cyborg, she stands for forms of work and life that have been rendered vulnerable to exploitation by their entanglement with techno-scientific capitalism, but also for forms of what Haraway calls ‘emerging pleasures, experiences, and powers with serious potential for changing the rules of the game’. If much current evidence of online culture, as we will see in Chapter 4, is discouraging, the jury is still out on whether the intensification of online social life will ultimately lead to narcissistic self-annihilation or a revolution of our platforms and our economy that might render Tiqqun’s description of the imperial Young-Girl unrecognisable to otherwise technically mediated futures.
The process of Young-Girlification, where every aspect of our subjectivities and desires are increasingly ‘put to work’ can be registered in the difference in the public response to the deaths of two ‘actual’ young women in the years following the financial crash (Amy Winehouse was 27, Peaches Geldof, 25). Taken together, they offer a symptomatic story of the development of lifework. The particular intelligence of Winehouse’s writing – set to modern hip hop jazz on Frank (2003), pastiche girl group soul on Back to Black (2006) – can be outlined with a brief comparison of two representative songs. In ‘I Heard Love Is Blind’, Winehouse’s persona makes a series of excuses or attempts at reassurance to a boyfriend who she has drunkenly cheated on with another who resembles him. The twist is that each attempt to diminish what happened inadvertently adds some torturous sexual detail: the very things that mitigate the crime for her are – we infer – only likely to be more heart-breaking for him. This song from Frank gets its reply on Back to Black, in ‘You Know I’m No Good’, in which sexual infidelity once again prompts a kind of misunderstanding between two people’s desires. Again, the speaker’s privileged sexual object is not the man, but the man – as it were – at one-remove (Winehouse wittily discouraged us from going through marriage first hand on Frank’s ‘What Is It About Men?’). Thinking of the boyfriend while with the lover as in the earlier song, Winehouse’s speaker can only reach climax with a composite figure of the body of the present man and the fantasy of the absent one. This time, however, the drama comes not from the boyfriend’s presumed jealousy over the acts being described, but from his indifference.
This is an example of the sophistication of Winehouse’s writing about desire that made her an artist wholly proper to the Young-Girl era. While Tiqqun wrote of an allegedly ‘girlish’ quality increasingly common to all of us, where no pleasure is experienced ‘first hand’, but is always somehow being performed for an imagined audience, Winehouse’s songs were capsule impressions of everyday desire under such a regime. Even if at the same time, they said something about the mediated nature of desire as such: the unexpected ways in which our desires are always dependent on or appear unexpectedly in response to those of other people was something her Young-Girl art was able to be unusually articulate about. But this was only part of the story. As the footage collected in Asif Kapadia’s documentary Amy (2015) reminds us, Winehouse’s career unfurled during a high watermark for the old, openly feral British paparazzi, prior to its adoption of a veneer of restraint after the phone-hacking scandal and subsequent Leveson Inquiry.35 For her five or so years of global fame, Winehouse’s lifestyle and the accordant deterioration of her appearance, alongside her health, from alcohol, drug abuse, and bulimia was documented by crowds of photographers, until, in 2011, the removal of her dead body from her home in Camden Town was accorded, finally, the same treatment.
During these years, it became a cliché to observe that Winehouse’s real life and her signature song ‘Rehab’ had come to double each other. Her ‘work’ of writing, her frequent inability to work when she turned up drunk to her own gigs, the désœuvrement of her collapsing body, and the ‘putting to work’ of every detail of her private life in the tabloids, coalesced in a single ‘Young-Girl’ object. But the footage accumulated in Kapadia’s film presents another context. The documentary’s use of archive footage made by Winehouse’s family and friends makes it a record of twenty-seven years of transformations in home recording technology – from grainy analogue camcorders, to digital film, to early camera phones – but also of our changing use of such technology. As Kapadia reflected in Vogue, there had been major changes in habits even in the few years since Winehouse died; the kinds of unguarded amateur footage produced for spontaneous amusement among Winehouse’s friends had given way to a situation where ‘you’re filming yourself so that you can put it up on Instagram’ and ‘everyone films everything with the idea that it might one day be useful, or they’re going to post it’.36
Like plenty of famous women, Winehouse was ‘Young-Girlified’ when every part of her life – from the physiological outward – was ‘put to work’ for the production of images, even if the fact that this took place mainly off social media makes her example already seem like it belongs to another world. At the same time, she was the author of a ‘body of work’, which while it often had overlaps with or played on facts of her life as a public figure, was also discrete from it. As such, her death could be mourned as the death of an artist, with tribute albums and cover versions, as well as an acknowledgement of a new poignancy of her music after her passing. But what then, of the death a few years later of another young woman celebrity, the sometime writer, sometime model, and general media personality, Peaches Geldof? When Geldof died following a heroin overdose in 2014, coverage in the British media was extensive, but was also cut through with an awkwardness not limited to the cynicism of the usual scoffers that the attention was undeserved. Undoubtedly plenty of people were sincerely saddened by this young woman’s death, but what exactly were they mourning?
Unlike Winehouse or any other traditional artist, Geldof left no coherent ‘work’ on which other attendant kinds of audience identification could be hung. Rather, at the time of her death, her ‘works’ were precisely those of her personality and private life as such, performed across several social media platforms. As Diane Charlesworth puts it, Geldof’s Twitter account in particular was characterised by its performance of ‘good enough’ celebrity motherhood – neither flawlessly aspirational, nor car-crash voyeuristic – which resonated with younger and working-class women. In discussions in the replies to her posts, Geldof’s followers produced a ‘collective dynamic that offered advice and shared information between members, not only in respect to Geldof’.37 With such galvanising fauna of private life taking the place of a discrete creative achievement, we might say that Geldof’s death was experienced as, if anything, more affecting for the absence of an autonomous ‘work’ which could live on in her place. When someone’s whole work is their personality, it is difficult to take their death other than personally.38 While the figure of the person ‘famous for being famous’ predates platform capitalism, the possibility of being so specifically on the basis of a constantly updated body of work charting one’s daily life is clearly specific to it. Winehouse was subjected to – and to a great extent driven to death by – the imposition of the malign kind of ‘Young-Girlification’ Tiqqun warn against; but it was at the same time anchored by an autonomous work that was in itself a sceptical analysis of parts of our Young-Girl predicament. Geldof’s work, by contrast, was all ‘Young-Girl’, and the transition and difference between these two highly mediatised deaths is one that is gradually being dealt out to the rest of us. Already, even Geldof’s example seems rather quaint, at a time when the Kardashians have so expertly positioned themselves as what has been called the ‘ideal promiscuous, entrepreneurial sharing subject … both viral subject and viral object’, distributing their everyday existence and ever-transmogrifying bodies over multiple platforms and media.39 But rather than continuing to consider this as a celebrity phenomenon, we turn now to the ways the structure of the ‘work’ played out in the ‘Young-Girl’ deaths of these two women are actually representative of common experience.
The hard work of being a Young-Girl
‘I’m so lucky. I used to do this just for myself – now I can live off it!’40
This is a common line from the first generation of YouTubers to make substantial amounts of money from their activity on the platform. It sums up a story that was central to the mythology of internet fame in the early years of Web 2.0: a contributor to the video-sharing platform begins to post videos in their spare time; out of boredom, for fun, for free, for their own entertainment, for the interaction with other users and an experience of community. They film themselves talking about their lives and interests: how-to tutorials, reviews, video gaming, fashion, comedy, politics, chronicles of personal crises and everyday life; one, some, or all of the above. Their followership reaches a certain level, and to their own surprise, they begin to reap revenue from the ads run before their posts. Some reach the point where this constitutes the equivalent of a viable or even a high salary. Other social media platforms, like Instagram and Twitter, have also brought careers to some who had visited and contributed to them for other reasons. They share a narrative of accidental fame, brought by initially uncalculated self-expression online, which then turns into work: the work of being yourself.
In YouTube’s business model, based on monopolising and concentrating attention for advertising revenue, those contributors who make millions from their small cut of the company’s profits are of course the exception. At the same time, the majority of those who become famous on social media understand very well and from the outset that they are selling a product.41 Nonetheless, the myth of accidental internet fame remains powerful in a media format so centrally invested in the performance of intimacy. It also, we suggest, marks a notable moment in the history of the Young-Girl. At the start of this book, we noted Theodor Adorno’s view of ‘free time’ as the dialectical flipside of labour, the bourgeois pretence of an ‘oasis of unmediated life’. Adorno claimed that 1960s Americans had been trained to fetishise suntans, camping, and DIY, so that they were not tempted to use their free time to produce radical works of art or criticism that might challenge the mechanisms by which they sell their labour power.42 Thus the hobby was seen as an invention of structured but strictly unproductive activity set apart from the world of work in order to sustain and legitimise it. Even if Adorno was right at the time to suggest that hobbies tamed unregulated free time threatening consumer society, and that free time as freedom was an illusion that kept workers obedient, it is remarkable that both of these forms of capitalist control are almost entirely dispensed with today. Critics have noted, from the ‘netslave’ volunteers of the early internet, to ‘modders’, who modify games online to the benefit of the gaming industry without personal gain, that forms of ‘free labour’ and ‘playbour’ are increasingly prevalent in the digital world.43 In the myth of accidental fame, playbour is raised to the level of an ideal that is apparently opposite to Adorno’s work time–hobby dialectic: that of free time play seamlessly turned career.
In this ideal case, labour has come to the hobbyist unbidden: digital acts of identification and performances of personality are apparently directly translated into popularity, which in turn appears to translate directly into money, a situation which then leads, apparently organically, to the requirement of repeated and professionalised performances to maintain both popularity and income. Self-assertion, via available technologies, becomes so inextricably intertwined with the current shape of the market in this scenario that differences between free time and labour time appear altogether insignificant. Central to this ideal is the appeal of the instant monetary reward for the likeable; an idea that, in the form of the good girl’s reward, has long-established precedents. In one of the Brothers Grimm’s nineteenth-century collection of traditional fairy tales, ‘Goldmarie’, a ‘good and beautiful’ girl is directly addressed by household tasks – loaves of bread cry to be taken out of the oven, ripe apples cry to be picked – and she performs them without question. Eventually, the girl is rewarded by a shower of gold coins that clings to her dress and marks out her double moral-domestic and economic goodness as ‘the golden virgin’ on her return home.44 The old fantasy of gold from a quasi-divine nowhere for the good girl, of reward rather than wage as the superior form of remuneration finds its apotheosis and current form in social media stardom.
Yet there is a remarkable historical peculiarity. One of the strange, and apparently contradictory effects of the new technologies of internet fame has been that where free time and labour, popularity and remuneration seem so closely tied, they are also split to an unprecedented degree. One vlogger, Gaby Dunn, describes an experience increasingly common for ‘mid-level web personalities’ who are not in the top earnings bracket; these are people who have very substantial numbers of fans online, but do not provoke quite enough digital interest for this to translate to a living wage. These middling social media stars will frequently be recognised by excited fans but have to work in menial jobs to make ends meet, leading to awkward encounters at coffee chain and department store tills. As Dunn puts it, ‘social media stars are too visible to have “real” jobs, but too broke not to’. It is difficult to assure an audience of your continued ‘authenticity’ when product placement is one of the main opportunities to supplement a social media star’s income, and where any wrong judgement of the audience’s taste is immediately punished by unfollowing.45 The other side of the Goldmarie dream of spontaneous remuneration is only too apparent to independent creatives online: where money may suddenly materialise for the popular, it may as well not.
Once fame was only possible on the back of an infrastructure of record labels, broadcasting companies, film studios, and printed news media; gatekeepers who chose potential stars also shared the labour, the risks, and the benefits of propagating their work. The ‘democratisation’ of digital platforms for self-display have created an extraordinary excess of the labour of popularity, of voluntary, unwaged content produced in structural isolation that is monetised many times over by digital hardware and software providers, internet and electricity companies, the sellers and buyers of big data, platforms and advertisers, with only a minute share arriving, some of the time, with some of the content producers. Creative industries have long relied on precarious labour, and popularity was a volatile commodity before the invention of the internet. But the multiplicity of ways in which the agents of capital tap social labour online are remarkable. In 2000, Tiziana Terranova already argued that the internet facilitated an ‘immediate valorization’ of online activities at the ‘interface with cultural and technical labour’.46 Today, YouTube takes all of those who were once turned away at the casting, as well as those who just want to sing into their hairbrush, and makes money from them, and their audiences, quite independently and irrespective of whether they conceive of their relationship to the platform as work or play.47
In a sense, the myth of spontaneous remuneration is reversed, and shows its true colours, in this ‘immediate valorization’ of life by capital. The ‘internet famous’, who apparently turn free time play into money, but who in reality are compelled to fine-tune the affective labour of everyday popularity for very uncertain gain, can stand emblematically for the mechanisms of the ‘gig economy’, from task rabbit to Uber; celebrity itself has become a zero hours contract. YouTubers and podcasters on the one hand and taskers on the other have in common that they witness the total elimination of the social infrastructure of traditional employment: there are no regular salaries here, no pensions, no welfare, no rights, no colleagues, in sum: no job. If their valorisation is immediate, it is so in the sense of a lack of mediation by employment in the infrastructures of digital capitalism. Such a regime makes it easy to tap free labour, but makes it hard for its subjects to gain any purchase on a tangible opponent in a fight for working conditions, or even to find an audience for complaint. The hard work of the Young-Girl today, then, entails the digitally mediated performance of her life rendered immediately accessible to the extraction of value by digital capital, at a time when the structures and opportunities for waged labour recede.
The social media stars who do not know how to pay the rent, we might say, represent a development of the trend, from Amy to Peaches, of everyday celebrity. The most significant aspect of this everyday celebrity is that none of us are entirely exempt from it. Those of us who do not actively make a career out of social media are nonetheless increasingly compelled to present ourselves online in the same formats and according to the same rules. Facebook, with its billion users, is only the most obvious example of a platform that, with its focus on visual material and the ‘like’ button, trains its users to document and curate their lives for public judgement and approval.48
The celebrity principle, the social labour of popularity as the fundamental act of social interaction online is reinforced and normalised here; and even for the not-famous, it takes some unexpected, monetising forms. An early example was the use of social media to raise money for charity; the friend of a friend asking for donations to charity in their name as they run a marathon, climb Kilimanjaro or cycle across a desert is a familiar middle-class character from the first decade of the new millennium. But soon, personalised giving online became crowdfunding, as a number of platforms like Kickstarter offered the opportunity to ask for money to support creative projects and start-up businesses, and others like Justgiving made it possible to raise money for individuals struck by personal calamity or in need of expensive healthcare. Both types of funding have raised extraordinary amounts of money for causes that have captured interest and compassion online, but they also signal how unexceptional the idea of selling likeability for everyday survival has become. Where there are cuts to arts budgets, there is busking for support on Patreon; where there is no functioning public health care, there is convincing strangers that you deserve the money needed for life-saving operations. As Anne Helen Petersen points out, most crowdfunding for healthcare in the US, where it is an increasingly common practice, goes to ‘faultless’ diseases, like cancer, and not to ones regarded as ‘blameworthy’, like addiction and mental health problems.49 Not everybody’s despair is as fundable as Joey Rott’s tragedy, a young father of triplets whose wife died in childbirth, and not everybody is able, like Kati McFarland, to draw attention to her condition, and her crowdfunding campaign, by articulately challenging her Republican senator about access to affordable health care in a televised debate.50
If private charity always tends towards liberalism and the reduction of the role of state-funded welfare, crowdfunding charity goes further in that it normalises habits of presenting basic individual needs as a sales-pitch that leaves no room for the articulations of rights and demands. It is worth noting here that while crowdfunding is often moralistic, it is not bound to any one moral agenda. Individual campaigns that seek funding for breast implants with borderline porn have proven as popular as those of the ‘virtuous sick’. The common denominator is popularity, not moralism, and while the digital Goldmarie is required to do whatever work it takes in any one social digital context, her success is measured by monetised popularity alone. A UN Security Council meeting in 2017 provides an example of the flipside of this form of sympathy economy: speakers pointed out that 20 million people starving in East Africa had gone ignored by national and private donors, as only 6 per cent of the 2.1 billion dollars needed had been raised (as of 10 March 2017). It would seem that Africa was not Young-Girl enough; we increasingly desire the affective labour and performance of intimacy of the individual case that 20 million Africans are too abstract to deliver.51 The cultural mechanics of the Young-Girl emerges here in another hauntingly global fashion; if we are victims of its forms of exploitation in our digital social lives, we also subject the rest of the world to its rules.
As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, we see the history of the Young-Girl as including forms of activity that accumulate wealth for capital without being recognised as labour, but also, and interdependently, as a genealogy of human desire bound up with capital. The most troubling aspect of the new forms of affective labour we have been discussing in this chapter, and the stumbling block to nearly all current analyses of games and toils in the twenty-first century is just that: that our desires are so effectively put to work by digital capitalism. Italian autonomist thinkers and French critical theory and its successors have become our most relied-on resources for articulating how late capitalism produces particular subjectivities; how we might stop producing them, a question that accelerates in urgency on the backdrop of financial crashes, digital automation, climate catastrophes, and the most recent implosions of the Western political consensus and the rise of the far right, has remained inconclusive. How do we get out of wanting ‘self-valorization’, the work of the good girl of capitalism?
In 1755, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Second Discourse, argues that humankind’s troubles started when primitive man, formerly independent and free, made the mistake of adding love and language to sex, and consequently developed a shared culture:
As ideas and feelings succeeded one another, and hearts and minds were cultivated, the human race became more sociable, contacts increased, and bonds grew tighter. People developed the habit of gathering together in front of their huts or around a large tree; song and dance, true children of love and leisure, became the entertainment, or rather the occupation, of the idle men and women thus flocked together. Each person began to gaze on the others and to want to be gazed upon himself, and what became to be prized was public esteem. Anyone who best sang or danced; he who was the most handsome, the strongest, the most skilful, or the most eloquent came to be the most highly regarded, and this was the first step toward inequality and also toward vice. These first preferences gave rise, on the one side, to vanity and scorn, and on the other, to shame and envy; and the ferment produced by these new leavens eventually led to concoctions ruinous to happiness and innocence.52
Here, Rousseau already acknowledges that leisure activity is an ‘occupation’, a form of work, and one that is bound up with the work of recognition and public esteem. Rousseau’s image of an originary scramble for personal esteem is of course not equivalent to the later, Marxist idea of self-valorisation in capitalism, and neither can this Enlightenment thinker, even at his most pessimist, imagine that striving for fame might take place, as in today’s algorithmic fight to the death for popularity, outside universally agreed markers of quality in discreet categories of music, dance, sport, and craft. Nonetheless, there is a sense in which Rousseau points to a sort of Neolithic Young-Girl at work at the origin of society itself, and in the same stroke, at the origin of all its miseries and inequalities. Rousseau proposes a clear line from purely functional sex to love, to architecture and family, to language and signification, to art and culture, to the social as the space of showing off and calculated self-display, to war and violence. We do not need to agree with Rousseau to see that his perspective usefully points to some intractable problems in discussions of human life and work. Rousseau’s most important twentieth-century reader, Jacques Derrida, has shown that his work is pervaded by a double move that wants to pin down an innocent origin of the human just as it acknowledges how, from its beginnings, human life was already mediated by technology, language, and processes of articulation in the widest sense.53 If we take into account this crucial philosophical achievement of the past century, the acknowledgement of the inextricable technicity of human life and work, and thus of the social, for our consideration of the Young-Girl, it becomes impossible to look to a place where we can take our desires ‘offline’ entirely, or even to an online utopia where ‘multitudes’ can engage with each other via technological artifices that are situated outside mediated power relations of some form.
We will take up this issue in terms of the question of the future of work in the next chapter. To conclude for now, acknowledging the originary technicity of the social might already help us to shift our perspective on some of the negative qualities generally attributed to the Young-Girl. If it is not such a long way from the stone age axe to make-up, and the unruly potential of desire is always mediated and channelled by technology in some way, it might help us focus our attention on how to rearticulate our social technologies instead of how to get rid of them.