The brief, revisionary history of computing presented in the previous chapter makes better sense if embedded within the broader history of modernity. That history can be, in turn, written from different perspectives: social, political, cultural, economic, institutional. Daunting accounts by some of the great thinkers of the twentieth century, who sought to provide an inclusive image by bringing these perspectives together, create an image of modernity driven by incompatible logics and imbued with tensions, paradoxes, and disruptions (e.g., Weber 1904, Polanyi 1949, Heidegger 1962, Arendt 1958, Foucault 1977). All these accounts inform the discussion of computing and economy presented here, but we have found the perspective of political economy to be most aligned with our intellectual pursuits (Ekbia and Nardi 2015). With the dominant socioeconomic system of modernity—capitalism—as the focus, views on political economy have undergone numerous changes over the decades, giving rise to a tumultuous and interesting intellectual history.
This chapter provides a brief overview of this history, as embodied in the works of observers and commentators of capitalism, past and present, with particular attention to the question of the accumulation of wealth in capitalism. Our aim in providing this overview is to acknowledge our intellectual debt to these thinkers, to show our lines of convergence and divergence with them, and to lay the conceptual groundwork for the remaining chapters of the book. Given our interest in computing, we spend more time on accounts of contemporary capitalism.
The industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which turned agricultural economies into capitalist ones, introduced social, moral, and political questions about the division of labor in society, the production and distribution of wealth and resources, and the governance of the economy. These questions engaged leading figures such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill as economists and moral philosophers of the time.
The opening sentence of Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of theWealth of Nations can, in fact, be considered the founding statement of modern political economy:
The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with the produce from other nations. (Smith 1776, p. 10)
The proportion of people who benefit from this national labor, Smith argued, is determined, first, “by the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which its labour is generally applied,” and, second, “by the proportion between the number of those who are employed in useful labour, and that of those who are not so employed” (ibid.). Giving more significance to the first parameter, he then goes on to show how “civilized and thriving nations” have managed to accomplish abundance, “though a great number of people do not labor at all.” This feat is opposed to “the savage nations of hunters and fishers,” who cannot provide their people with the basic means of subsistence, despite the fact that everyone “is more or less employed in useful labor” (ibid.).
In this fashion, celebrating the productive power of labor in modern societies, Smith attributes it to “the quantity of capital stock which is employed” in setting labor to work (ibid., p. 11). A good part of this capital is invested in the supply of machinery that allows, through the proper division of labor, a modern pinmaker to produce almost five thousand pins a day—a revolutionary improvement compared to the production of one pin per day by the primitive pinmaker. Technology, therefore, had to also be celebrated if we note “how much labor is facilitated and abridged by the proper machinery” (ibid., p. 19). Much of this facilitation, in fact, derives from the laborers themselves who, now being focused on one single task, “are much more likely to discover easier and readier methods of attaining any object”—the playful boy, for instance, who reduced part of his labor by attaching a string to a fire engine valve (ibid., p. 20). High labor productivity, enabled by capital and driven by technical division of labor, was, in sum, Smith’s explanation for the affluence of capitalist economies.
Karl Marx begged to differ. He agreed with Smith on the idea of human labor as the source of all wealth, and even adopted his theory of “original accumulation,” but he was adamantly opposed to the idea that the accumulated wealth benefits all sides equally. He detected antagonistic interests where others saw harmony, recognized poverty and alienation when others spoke of progress, and counseled revolution where they prescribed hard work:
The worker need not necessarily gain when the capitalist does, but he necessarily loses when the latter loses … The political economist [Adam Smith] tells us that everything is bought with labor and that capital is nothing but accumulated labor; but at the same time he tells us that the worker, far from being able to buy everything, must sell himself and his family … Whilst the interest of the worker, according to the political economists, never stands opposed to the interest of the society, society always and necessarily stands opposed to the interest of the worker. (Marx 1844, emphasis in original)
Marx traced the origins of his disagreement with the dominant political economy of his time in the observation that “it takes the interests of the capitalists to be the ultimate cause, i.e., it takes for granted what it is supposed to explain” (ibid.). To correct this problem, Marx proposed to proceed from “actual economic fact,” rather than from the “primordial condition [that] explains nothing” (ibid.). He sought, in other words, to answer the questions and concepts of political economy—labor, wage, value, profit, property, money, capital, land, rent, production, exchange, consumption—by examining the dynamics of socioeconomic change, which he considered to be historical and dialectic rather than natural and objective. Conceptualizing production and consumption as an integrated whole, for instance, Marx posited, “Production thus produces not only the object, but also the manner of consumption, not only objectively but also subjectively. Production thus creates the consumer … [It] not only supplies a material for the need, but it also supplies a need for the material … [It] produces the object of consumption, the manner of consumption and the motive of consumption” (Marx 1939/1993, p. 92). Applied to current circumstances, this insight invites us to critically examine a host of issues—for example, the common notion that the adoption of digital technologies is driven by “need.”
Marx’s explanation for capital accumulation is the most celebrated example of his approach. The mechanism of surplus value creation, which revealed what he aptly characterized as the “mystery” of the reproduction of capital, is the distinctive feature of the Marxist theory of capitalist exploitation that sets it apart from other class theories such as Max Weber’s (Wright 2005, p. 23). Where Weber focused his class analysis on the mechanisms of market exchange and how they give rise to unequal “life chances,” Marx identified a second (and more important) mechanism—surplus value creation in the process of production—to account for the accumulation of capital through the exploitation of labor. Marx’s theory of value is also distinct from those of economists such as Ricardo, who associated the exchange value of commodities with the amount of individual labor time that they embody. Unlike these theories, Marx considered the abstract notion of necessary labor-time as the appropriate measure of exchange value because he believed that labor is a fundamentally social phenomenon that can only be defined within specific sociohistorical relations.
Therein lies the power and beauty of Marx’s analysis which is not lost on those who seek to understand the logic of accumulation in late capitalism. David Harvey, for instance, through a critical engagement with Marx’s theory, has developed the concept of “accumulation by dispossession” to show how, contrary to Marx’s prediction, new forms of accumulation are still at work to violently or hideously take common assets away from whole populations and territories on a global scale. He argues that, “capitalism must perpetually have something ‘outside of itself’ in order to stabilize itself” (Harvey 1999, p. 140). In other words, within a continual expansionist paradigm of activity, capitalism constantly searches outside the boundaries of its current hegemonies for new resources, new labor, new customers. This phenomenon has taken any number of legal or illegal forms, such as privatization of land, water, and other natural resources; conversion of common property rights into private ones; suppression of indigenous forms of production and consumption, and predatory credit schemes such as were widely practiced in the run-up to the 2008 housing crisis in the United States and elsewhere. In a nice emulation of Marx’s method, Harvey applied this “inside-outside” dialectic to examine the relation between “expanded reproduction [of capital] on the one hand and the often violent processes of dispossession on the other” (ibid., pp. 141–142).
One of the key questions that arises from these observations is the relation between accumulation through dispossession and accumulation through exploitation of waged labor. This question is central to current debates about the applicability of Marx’s theory to current capitalism and, hence, relevant to heteromation: Where does heteromation fit into this scheme? We pick this question up at the end of this chapter, and pursue it further in the rest of the book.
The moral and historical perspective of Marx’s political economy was challenged by those who sought to build a science of economics on the model of hard (mathematical) sciences, giving birth to the academic discipline of economics that has come to be associated with neoclassicism (Marshall 1890). With a focus on commodity prices and how they are fixed through the equilibrium between supply and demand, neoclassical economics is based on a set of key assumptions about human behavior. Most remarkably, it takes humans as rational and autonomous actors who seek to maximize the utility of their choices on the basis of full and relevant information. The market, according to neoclassicists, is the perfect environment for this kind of behavior, providing the arena for the efficient exchange of goods, as well as the right information about them to enable rational choice. By providing informational feedback, they argue, the market can correct initially incorrect models held by individuals, punish deviant behavior, and lead the survivors to the correct model.
The origin of wealth in the neoclassicist perspective, therefore, is in the rational choices of interest-maximizing individuals and profit-maximizing firms. Other than the fundamental assumption of rational choice, standard neoclassical models of capital growth (e.g., the Böhm-Bawerk model) are based on a set of other simplifying assumptions that are hardly grounded in reality—such as that labor and capital are continuously substitutable without limit (Waterman n.d.). This is a point that has been made by economists of different stripes for a long time (e.g., Kaldor 1962). Neoclassicists’ indifference to such concerns is justified by their quest for a “rigorous” science of economics. The accomplishments of classical physics in theorizing a frictionless world greatly appealed to neoclassicists, who celebrated the analogy between economics and physics as an illustration of the analytic power of “unrealistic” assumptions (Friedman 1953, pp. 16–19). Whereas physicists were reminded by their lab instruments of the pervasiveness of friction, however, “[neoclassical] economists did not have a corresponding appreciation for the costs of running the economic system (Williamson 1985, p. 19).
In their desire to create a rigorous and “objective” science of economics that would be indifferent to moral values and political interests, however, neoclassicists have, in fact, contributed to the establishment of a particular socioeconomic order. In this fashion, the discipline of economics has performatively created the markets that it posits as natural entities. Markets have come to seem so natural that we do not, as an everyday matter of course, call into question their ontological status (Mirowski 2002).
The narrow focus of neoclassicism on rational behavior has been, in turn, challenged by thinkers on different points of the intellectual spectrum, giving rise to a new era of political economy. On the right, neoliberal economists have expanded the classicist horizon to argue that markets provide the best way of organizing not only the economy, but human affairs in general—individual labor, health, security, or a “marketplace of ideas” (Buchanan 1999). On the left, neo-Marxists discuss the impact of finance capitalism and globalization on issues of class, labor, and social equity (Harvey 2010). In between, institutional (Galbraith 1985), cultural and feminist (Federici 1982, Huws 2003, Peterson 2005), and ecological (Foster 2002, Klein 2014) scholars and commentators have focused on issues such as power and influence, domestic labor, and the environment.
Institutionalists, for instance, have drawn attention to issues of heterogeneity of interests, ideological constructs, cultural constraints, and power, showing how politics influences economic decisions and policies, typically giving them a suboptimal character. By highlighting the incomplete and asymmetric character of information available to various players, institutional economists draw our attention to the ways by which institutions define, alter, and constrain the set of choices that individuals have at their disposal.
Individuals act on incomplete information, and with subjectively derived models that are frequently erroneous; the information feedback is typically insufficient to correct these subjective models. Institutions are not necessarily, or even usually, created to be socially efficient; rather, they—or at least the formal rules—are created to serve the interests of those with the bargaining power to devise new rules (North 1990, p. 16).
The emphasis on information asymmetry here derives from a view of economic activity known as transaction cost economics. Broadly defined as “the costs of running the economic system” (Arrow 1969, p. 48), transaction costs are compared to friction in physical systems. In a celebrated essay, Ronald Coase showed that neoclassical theory is limited in its application only to zero transaction cost conditions—that is, to those situations where information and transactions have no cost. Information and transactions, however, have costs, which must be figured into the valuation of a good, above and beyond the costs of production (land, labor, machinery). These costs have to do with “defining, protecting, and enforcing the property rights … [including] the right to use, the right to derive income from the use, the right to exclude, and the right to exchange” (North 1990, p. 28)—in short, the cost of measurement and enforcement.
Whoever defines these rights and rules, therefore, is in a better position to accumulate wealth through property protection, information hiding, deception, or any number of other devices. In this fashion, information asymmetry leads to income asymmetries, putting wealth in the hands of certain individuals, firms, communities, and nations at the expense of others. This is, roughly, the answer of institutional economics to what North considers the “central puzzle of human history”—namely, how societies have diverged in terms of their performance, wealth, and well-being.
Coase’s idea takes on a rather different reading by another group of writers who take their cues from the success of crowdsourced projects such as Linux and Wikipedia. These projects, driven, implemented, and maintained by large groups of volunteers who freely contribute their skill and knowledge without monetary reward, introduce a new model of production that is different from both markets and firms (Benkler 2002, 2003). Coase had shown that the choice between markets and firms as the organization of economic activity is based on their relative transaction cost, and institutional economists such as Williamson generalized this insight to an extended theory of organizations and institutions of capitalism. Cases such as open source software, however, do not seem to fit into this general institutional theory because apparently they neither have the pricing mechanism of markets (e.g., there is no wage) nor the hierarchical structure of firms (e.g., there are no managers).
This is the central argument of a number of writers, who have, in turn, generalized from the case of open source to a broader phenomenon that encompasses peer or social production (Benkler 2002, 2006), the zero marginal cost society (Rifkin 2014), open cooperativism (Conaty and Bollier 2014), the cognitive surplus (Shirky 2010), and human computation (Michelucci 2013). Rifkin, for example, argues that capitalism will shrink because people can produce their own information, print material goods on 3D printers, generate green electricity at home, and educate themselves through online courses. Soon goods and services will be “nearly free” (2014, p. 4).
There are noticeable differences in detail and perspective among these various views, but their shared premise is that computing technology has opened up a space for a new mode of economic activity and production that does not fit into the traditional capitalist modes of accumulation. Depending on their political orientation, different authors and commentators see an opportunity for parallel economic activities that might ultimately undermine capitalism (at least in its most explicit forms of exploitation), or simply for a new means of wealth accumulation. There is empirical evidence to support either scenario, so in a sense, the jury is still out as to what might unfold in the long run. But there are serious reasons to be skeptical of the more positive scenarios that suggest that capitalism will gracefully recede.
Where Benkler, Rifkin, and Shirky see in current computing practices a potential for peer and community production, others recognize a potential for new modes of exploitation. Terranova (2000), building on media theorist Dallas Smythe’s idea (1981) of “audience labor,” used the notion of “free labor” to refer to this emerging phenomenon. Others have since employed this idea to illustrate the economic function of digital technologies in a new capitalism. Fuchs, for instance, follows the specific thread in Marx’s writing that defines class on the basis of the process of appropriation of surplus value—that is, the value produced by labor in the process of production above and beyond the value it needs to create for its own sustenance in the form of a wage. Fuchs’ argument is that the creation of value has shifted from paid labor to unpaid (free) labor:
Users employ social media because they strive to a certain degree for achieving what Bourdieu … terms social capital (the accumulation of social relations), cultural capital (the accumulation of qualification, education, knowledge) and symbolic capital (the accumulation of reputation). The time that users spend on commercial social media platforms for generating social, cultural, and symbolic capital is in the process of prosumer commodification transformed into economic capital. Labour time on commercial social media is the conversion of Bourdieuian social, cultural and symbolic capital into Marxian value and economic capital. (Fuchs 2012, p. 638)
On this basis, all contributors to social media belong to what Fuchs dubs the “exploited class.” Finding the traditional (industrial) notion of “working class” inadequate for the contemporary situation, though, Fuchs (2012) expands the exploited class to include direct knowledge workers (in, e.g., health, education, and other service industries), indirect knowledge workers (e.g., homemakers, largely female, who “produce knowledge in the broad sense of communication, affects, sexuality, domestic goods and services”), and the “underclass” (e.g., the unemployed and underemployed, migrants, retirees), as well as the self-employed (ibid.).
Other observers, such as Galloway and Scholz, follow a similar tack, highlighting the erasure of the boundary between work and leisure as the mechanism that enables the monetization of “unwaged labor” on the internet. Wondering if the playful activity of updating one’s “status” on Facebook can count as labor, Scholz (2013, p. 2), lands on the affirmative side, comparing the activity to “the invisible, unsung forms of traditional women’s labor such as child care, housework, and surrogacy.” Nonetheless, he cautions against the fetishization of computing that might distract us from the “real” places of exploitation—namely, the slums of economic developing countries: “Digital labor in the overdeveloped world is contingent upon the sweat of exploited labor in countries such as China” (ibid., p. 3).
In the 1990s, a different line of thought on capitalist accumulation emerged in Italy under the influence of Michel Hardt and Antonio Negri’s (2000) Empire. Variously called the “Autonomist” or “post-workerist” movement, this thinking is premised on the notion of “value-affect,” which can be roughly understood in terms of the relationship between labor and affect, which Negri, following Spinoza, defines as “the power to act.” The erasure of affect and subjectivity from the measurement of value, which is the linchpin of political economy, has generated an apparent paradox that Negri seeks to undo. The paradox derives from the fact that affect, as something that is not measureable, is at the same time at the center of value creation. To resolve the paradox, therefore, one needs to put affect back at the center of one’s theory, where it belongs—hence, the notion of value-affect.
Negri’s concept of value-affect provides the basis for the Autonomist view of current capitalism, which it says “takes the mind, language, and creativity as primary tools for the production of value” (Berardi 2009, p. 21). This concept also provides support to arguments against Fuchs’s theory of value based on labor time. With labor becoming more complex (relying on affects, motivation, reputation), and value becoming more abstract and financialized (increasingly produced in complex networks involving firms and consumers but also financial analysts, brands, and so on), Autonomists argue that the economy has shifted toward an affective law of value, “where the values of companies and their intangible assets are set not in relation to an objective measurement, like labor time, but in relation to their ability to attract and aggregate various kinds of affective investments, like intersubjective judgments of their overall value or utility in terms of mediated forms of reputation” (Arvidsson and Colleoni 2012, p. 142).
A linguistically focused version of the Autonomist view is developed by Marazzi (2007, p. 21), who argues that communication has come to the fore in new modes of production that emerged in the 1980s, such as “lean,” “just-in-time,” and “post-Fordist” production:
… communication has become as important as electricity was in the age of mechanical production. In fact, communication is the grease that insures the smooth running of the entire production process, from the sale and distribution to the production stage.
Based on themes such as this, Autonomists advocate an alternative meaning of value and wealth “as the simple capacity to enjoy the world available in terms of time, concentration, and freedom” (Berardi 2009, p. 81), and find in digital technologies effective tools for the creation of this kind of wealth.
The communication theorist and political economist Dan Schiller has a very different perspective on the role of information and communication technologies in current capitalism. In his earlier book Digital Capitalism (1999), Schiller chronicled the metamorphosis in the US economy “whereby capitalism was made over to accept a more ICT-intensive orientation” (2014, p. 5). Using examples such as Ford Motor Company, with its 120,000 workstations and vast intranet that connected factories and offices with 15,000 dealers, he shows the steep increase in capital investment in information technology by US corporations in the last quarter of the twentieth century, from 7 percent to around 45 percent. In this account, on a par with industrial capitalism, digital capitalism marks a new era in a five-hundred-year history with abiding tendencies:
[We observe] capital’s continually extended use of wage labor, its search for new and often contested sites of commodification, and its episodic crises, wherein rampant financial speculation triggers a fall into depression and economic stagnation. (Schiller 2014, p. 8)
In this way, Schiller expands his earlier work to demonstrate the role of digital technology in capitalist crises such as the recession of 2008. He traces out the origins of this recession in terms of three processes: (1) reorganization of the system of production, along with the restructuring of labor; (2) the infusion of capital into finance; and (3) escalating military procurement spending. His close examination of the history of General Motors in the last decades of the twentieth century sheds light on the first process. GM, faced with militancy from its factory workforce and competition from Japanese rivals, embarked on a multibillion project to bring information technology to the center of its production, bridging the “islands of automation” that were built earlier, and connecting more than 200 major facilities and 50,000 dealers, suppliers, and offices scattered around three dozen countries (Schiller 2014, pp. 34–35). The weakening of labor unions, later written into law by turning Michigan into a right-to-work state, was at the core of this process. Similar processes of heavy computerization in the financial sector and the military propelled the economic downturn of 2008 and the subsequent events that followed (ibid.).
The cumulative effect of these processes is what can be described as “accumulation through repression,” as manifested most vividly in the growing security apparatus in cyberspace. Schiller (2014, p. 222) draws on a “green paper” by the US Department of Commerce to show how a major portion of the cost for protecting corporate networks fell on taxpayers, while at the same time subjecting ordinary citizens to the most severe forms of surveillance. In a similar vein, McChesney (2013) points to the internet’s essential relationship with commercialism and advertising, especially the widespread collection of personal data, and a “corrupted” state commandeered by corporations who pursue our personal data, wresting it from our control.
This constellation of views shows the development of ideas about political economy, along with changes in the capitalist system in the last 200 years. The diversity of perspectives, particularly on contemporary capitalism, makes it difficult to draw any general conclusions, but a number of points can be highlighted. First, the growing consensus outside neoclassical economics is that modern social life cannot be understood in reductionist and mechanistic terms of “pure” economics because it is permeated with issues, questions, and predicaments that have a strong political economy character.
Second, the parallels between the development of political economic theories on the one hand, and the capitalist system as a socioeconomic arrangement with particular logics of accumulation, reward structures, and incentive mechanisms, on the other, illustrate the strongly “performative” character of economic thinking. Rather than a “natural phenomenon,” the capitalist economy is, ultimately, an outcome of economic theory (Mirowski 2002). It is the economists who, in a performative sense, create the economy (MacKenzie n.d.). The importance of this point cannot be overemphasized in light of the commonplace misperception, propagated by mainstream economic historians (e.g., Langlois 2007), that the capitalist system and its course of development represent a “natural” state of affairs, deriving its character from, for instance, the competitiveness and rivalry “inherent” in humans as part of their biological evolution. This misperception accounts, in part, for the sense of helplessness and confusion prevalent in our culture today.
The third point to be extracted from this brief history is a growing understanding of the tight relationship between technology and economics, a relation that is perhaps underappreciated in both the popular imagination and academic and professional thinking—e.g., in the area of human–computer interaction, where the elephant of political economy is visibly present in the room, but rarely spoken of (Ekbia and Nardi 2015). As North (1990, p. 132) points out, with the exception of Karl Marx, “who attempted to integrate technological change with institutional change … [technology] has essentially remained outside any formal body of theory” in economics, especially in the neoclassical framework. To the extent that technology is featured in economic thinking, it is usually portrayed as a source of wealth. Despite early economic historians such as Adam Smith,1 who emphasized technology as the creator of human well-being, mainstream economics has remained largely silent on the economic predicaments generated by technology.
In summary, and in light of these observations, an analysis of computing from the perspective of political economy of the kind we pursue here can enhance our understanding of the relationship between computer technology and capitalist economies. Such a perspective seeks to understand computing practices within the purview of sociohistorical developments, socioeconomic systems, legal and regulatory frameworks, environmental impacts, governance structures, state power, and political agendas on local and global scales. The notion of heteromation provides a particular angle on this perspective, with a focus on labor and accumulation of wealth.
The account of heteromation presented in this book intersects with many of the ideas and views described here, aligning with some of them and diverging from others. Our contention, first and foremost, is that heteromation captures a new and expanding logic of wealth accumulation in contemporary capitalism, which overlaps with earlier logics but is distinct enough from them to deserve separate treatment. The idea of heteromation is consistent with the commodity chain approach, which, as Schiller observes, is rooted in the work of Wallerstein who examined flows of labor, consumption, and production in a growing global economy (1983). Schiller (2014, p. 7) notes that the value chain metaphor, deeply rooted in mainstream economic thinking since the 1980s, focuses on how capitalist organizations add economic value, sidestepping the wider commodity chain that emphasizes the value of labor in an “ever-reconfiguring process of capital accumulation.” Heteromation is one form of computer-mediated labor in this contemporary context.
In particular, heteromation overlaps with Marxian theory in at least two respects: (1) class structure of capitalist economies; and (2) human labor as the source of value (Ekbia 2016). First, current capitalism, like all earlier forms of capitalism, is closely tied to a class-based society. Class structures are relatively stable, defined as they are by polarized relationships to means of production (e.g., capitalists and laborers). Class formations, on the other hand, are more dynamic, and depend on the ways collectivities organize themselves on the basis of their interests at any given historical moment (Wright 1997). The formations change according to the specific stage or “spirit” of capitalism, as well as the balance of social and political power in a given society. Class formation in American capitalism of the early nineteenth century largely consisted of family-owned enterprises and their employees; it shifted to large corporations controlled by non-owner managers in the second half of the century, and later to monopolistic cartels of the early twentieth century.
Class formations in contemporary capitalism have acquired a hyper-dynamic and fluid character, largely embodied in computer-mediated network relationships with a global span. Networks embody the class formations of contemporary capitalism. A key consequence of these changes is that current capitalism is “inclusionary” rather than exclusionary—that is, it secures value by bringing and keeping large segments of the population into its fold in the form of unwaged, unpaid, or minimally compensated labor. While, as Marx repeatedly pointed out, earlier eras of capitalism also benefited from the reserve army of labor available on the market, in the new world, where connecting to networks can be attained at very low cost, exclusion would eliminate new means of value extraction. Instead, digital inclusion—in the sense of being connected to a network, but not being a member of the privileged class—has become the modus operandi of current capitalism. Capitalism has reinvented itself once again, using the labor of the masses through digital inclusion. One can watch, in real time, as capitalism occupies itself with bringing more and more of the masses into computer-mediated networks—for example, Facebook and Google’s plans to deploy drones to deliver their services to the farthest reaches of the globe.
Second, conventional waged labor has been, and remains, the main source of value creation in capitalist economies. Although the general principle has stayed constant—“to secure and obscure the extraction of surplus value” (Burawoy 1979, p. 254)—the techniques and mechanisms of extraction of value have changed throughout the eras. The historical trend in capitalism has been the employment of more indirect and diffuse forms of control that enable subtle forms of obscuring while expanding the circle of those whose labor is secured. Heteromation embodies this trend, revealing the mechanisms of value extraction despite their subtlety. Although it is increasingly ubiquitous, heteromated labor does not replace, nor does it contradict, the forms of value extraction that Marx analyzed on the basis of his theory of waged labor. To conflate the two is not only an analytic fallacy based on mistaking class formations for class structures, it would do injustice to both forms of value extraction. Heteromation and exploitation in the Marxian sense of the term represent two distinct forms of value extraction in current capitalism, and they should be understood as such. Heteromation involves free or minimally compensated labor, rather than waged labor with its traditional class relations of contractually bound workers and owners.
Heteromation is compatible with Harvey’s notion of the “inside-outside” logic of capitalist expansion. If it is true that capitalism continually acts to appropriate what is “outside” its current activities in order to feed the process of accumulation necessary for its stability, then computing technologies have created a convenient vehicle for realizing this. These technologies are not only labor saving, as dominant accounts remind us—they are labor creating! While automation pushes human individuals outside the loop, heteromation brings them back in through various mechanisms of engagement, as we discuss at length (see, in particular, chapter 10). The dialectic of digital inclusion prevalent in the current networked world (Ekbia 2016), and enacted through heteromated systems, is one embodiment of the inside-outside logic.
We can say that heteromation takes up where accumulation by dispossession leaves off. Just as accumulation by dispossession is one mechanism of capitalist expansion, pushing capitalism toward territory “outside” current sources of value, heteromation is another. Both develop within an inside-outside logic, but heteromation is distinct in its implementation. It lacks the brutal, conspicuous mode of acquisition of accumulation by dispossession; in fact, heteromation succeeds by sneaking in on little cat feet, insinuating itself everywhere in computer-mediated networks through nearly imperceptible, dispersed, delicate methods of incitement. Heteromation extracts value through billions of tiny moments of labor in networks, rather than blatantly, visibly ripping away resources for capital as is typical of accumulation by dispossession.
How capitalism has arrived to its current state, how it has “invented” heteromation as a new form of value extraction, and how computing technology has enabled this transition is the story that we pick up in the next chapter.