A recent article in the journal Science sifted through three months of call records for 50,000 mobile phone users to answer the question: “to what degree are individual human actions predictable?” (Song et al. 2010). More specifically, the authors sifted through location tracking data collected by an unnamed (presumably US) mobile phone operator to track the users’ time-space paths. The article concluded, based on its consideration of the large database, “that there is a potential 93% average predictability in user mobility, an exceptionally high value rooted in the inherent regularity of human behavior” (Song et al. 2010, 1018). Even more surprisingly, according to the authors, predictability did not vary greatly across groups sorted by their level of mobility: the highly mobile group was almost as predictable as more stationary groups. The study predicted the level of mobility—not actual location (for which 93% would have been a strikingly high number), but the authors anticipated this might be the next step: “Although making explicit predictions on user whereabouts is beyond our goals here, appropriate data-mining algorithms [ … ] could turn the predictability identified in our study into actual mobility predictions” (1021). The authors conclude that their findings indicate that “the development of accurate predictive models is a scientifically grounded possibility, with potential impact on our well-being and public health” (1021).
The fact that this kind of research has become the province of a premier science journal indicates the important role that the mathematics and theory behind what marketers call “predictive analytics” plays in the digital era. The management, sorting, and mining of huge amounts of information are to the information age what the physics of ballistics was to the space race. The Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence (Wang, Chen, and Yao 2009) describes predictive analytics as “one of the major future trends for data mining [ … ] They hope to forecast based on the contents of the data [ … ] With predictive analytics you have the program scour the data and try to form, or help form, new hypotheses itself” (421). The best-selling author and Yale Law School professor Ian Ayres provided a more popular gloss on data mining in Super Crunchers: How Anything Can be Predicted, when he observed that “Super Crunching will predict what you will want and what you will do” (Ayres 2007, 44).
Prediction is the data-fuelled fantasy of interactive marketing, and is at stake in techniques with names like “cluster analysis”, “biological response analysis”, “collaborative filtering”, and “sentiment analysis”. What all of these have in common is their reliance on the capture of large amounts of detailed data about people, products, and their various attributes. Taken to the limit, prediction relies upon increasingly comprehensive forms of commercial monitoring. We have reached the point by now that concerns about commercial surveillance have become a recurring theme in both the academic and the popular literature on the emerging surveillance society. In particular there are developed critiques of the threat to privacy (for example: Rosen 2000; Solove 2006), the pathologies of social sorting (see for example: Gandy 2006; Lyon 2007), and the lack of accountability and transparency in commercial monitoring (Andrejevic 2007).
This article focuses on the relationship between surveillance and economic exploitation as a means clarifying the assumptions that undergird both the development of new commercial models and their critique. In particular, I am thinking of Adam Arvidsson’s account of the forms of quantitative and qualitative exploitation that characterize what he describes as “the branding of life” (Arvidsson 2005, 251) associated with the “immaterial labour” of consumers. He borrows his analysis of immaterial labour from Lazzarato, who describes it as the “activity that produces the ‘cultural content’ of the commodity”, noting that it “involves a series of activities that are not normally recognized as ‘work’—in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion” (Lazzarato 1996, 137). Such labour corresponds to what Michael Hardt (also following Lazzarato) describes as an “affective” form of immaterial labour: “the production and manipulation of affects”, which “requires (virtual or actual) human contact and proximity” (Hardt 1999, 93).
Zwick, Bonsu, and Darmody (2008) also have recourse to the critique of exploitation in their perceptive discussion of the much-hyped marketing paradigm of consumer co-creation (the reliance of producers on consumer participation to help build and communicate brand image) as a form of governance. They argue that the economic success of sites that rely on various forms of user-generated content (including Facebook, MySpace, and Second Life) “expropriate the cultural labour of the masses and convert it into monetary value: each in their own specific way, but all according to the same general logic” (Zwick, Bonsu and Darmody 2008, 180).
The notion of exploitation is a recurring refrain in theoretical approaches that inform recent critical work on the capture of user productivity in a variety of contexts. As Hardt (1999) puts it, “in those networks of culture and communication, collective subjectivities are produced and sociality is produced—even if those subjectivities and that sociality are directly exploitable by capital” (Hardt 1999, 93). In her discussion of the “free labour” provided by chat-room moderators in exchange for access to online services, Terranova (2000) notes that such productive activities can, in some contexts, be described as both voluntary and subject to exploitation: “Free labour is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited” (Terranova 2000, 37).
There is in short, much talk of exploitation, but less elaboration of what the term might mean in shifting contexts of labour. The invocation of some notion of exploitation is compelling for a number of reasons including the fact that a critique of privacy invasion does not do justice to the productive character of consumer surveillance. The prospect that advertising might become more effective because it will be able to predict human behaviour with a high degree of reliability and thereby to manage the populace more efficiently in accordance with commercial imperatives is disturbing in a different way from privacy concerns. There is more at stake in such forms of surveillance than profit: specifically the prospect that consumers will be put to work marketing to themselves, and, through this extra work, generate a customized product for which they are required to pay a premium. As Zwick, Bonsu, and Darmody put it: “consumers are asked to pay for the surplus extracted from their own work” (Zwick, Bonsu, and Darmody 2008, 186). Also at stake are issues of power and control, because data in the hands of some promise to provide them with predictive power over others. We need ways of critiquing the promises of control and profit that haunt the imagination of interactive marketers. The concept of exploitation could be a good starting point, but it needs to be clarified and updated for the emerging interactive economy.
One of the dangers of mobilizing the notion of exploitation in online contexts is that it takes a critical concept traditionally associated with industrial labour’s sweatshop conditions and transposes it into a realm of relative affluence and prosperity—that is, those with the time and access to participate in online activities. For good reason, it is harder to get worked up about the “exploitative” conditions of user-generated content sites than about the depredations of sweatshop labour and workforce exploitation. In the case of user-generated content, for example, we are talking in many cases about reasonably well-off consumers engaging in what might be described as optional activities: you don’t have to join Facebook, Twitter, get a Gmail account, or shop online. Even as the distinction between consumer and producer, by many accounts, starts to blur, it is, at times, resuscitated for the purposes of dismissing labour-oriented critiques of consumer activity.
However, to the extent that we are going to take the notion of consumer productivity seriously, it is worth considering the applicability of critiques of exploitation to the online economy. If consumers are generating value, we can interrogate the conditions that structure who is compelled to surrender the economic value generated by their activity and who benefits. Such critiques do more than simply attempt to align consumer (or “prosumer”) exploitation with worker exploitation; they also and perhaps more importantly highlight the implications of platform commercialization for the social and political role played by digital media technologies. To speak of consumer exploitation is, in other words, to invoke a strategy for critiquing the emerging online economy against the background of the promise of consumer empowerment and democratization that have accompanied its development. It is also to anticipate potential consequences of the migration of forms of sociability and communication onto a commercially supported platform. By way of comparison, to raise concerns about the commercial model for the development of broadcasting in the US was not just to interrogate the impact of commercials upon viewers, but to evaluate the ways in which a reliance on sponsorship and, eventually, spot advertising, came to structure the medium itself and the kind of stories, news, and entertainment it provided. A similar range of questions needs to be asked about the consequences of the emerging commercial model for the Internet and related interactive platforms: a model that relies upon increasingly comprehensive monitoring of the populace for the purposes of predicting and managing consumption.
It is important to make explicit the wager of the emerging online commercial economy: that comprehensive monitoring will give marketers greater influence over consumers. Reasonable people may disagree over whether such strategies will work, but there is no doubt that they are at the core of the economic model upon which web 2.0 services and platforms are being constructed. That the business literature is hyping the model and businesses are staking billions of dollars in building the databases and developing the hardware and software for storing and sorting data may not mean that the model will work, but that it is worth considering the consequences. In other words, we are increasingly coming to rely on services and communication infrastructure that rely on the effectiveness of targeted marketing, data mining, and predictive analytics. For the purposes of these marketing strategies, more monitoring is better. As one news account put it: “By analyzing or ‘mining’ large amounts of data, including credit reports, shopping habits, household demographics and real estate records, companies can determine customers who are most likely to buy a product, pay their bills on time, or respond to a marketing campaign. The more data that are gathered and the more powerful the statistical tools that are applied to that information, the more accurate the results” (StarTribune.com 2009). The wager that data-driven marketing will be profitable enough to offset the costs of data collection, storage, and sorting, may, in the end, turn out to be a losing one, but if it is, we should understand that we are staking the future of one of the most important communication media of our era upon it.
The way prediction is used in the marketing industry imagines the possibility of managing marketing conditions to induce desired behaviour by determining which conditions lead to certain behaviours and then creating them. Thus, predictive analytics relies not merely on describing existing conditions, but on generating ongoing, large-scale experiments for studying consumer behaviour. As Ayres (2007) puts it: “Academics have been running randomized experiments inside and outside of medicine for years. But the big change is that businesses are relying on them to reshape corporate strategy” (Ayres 2007, 31). Digital interactive environments lend themselves to such experimentation insofar as they make it possible to vary marketing strategies and then to capture the results of this variation in controlled ways. Predictive analytics work to discover which strategies are most likely to result in the desired response and then to vary the commercially supported interactive environment accordingly.
This process might be described as a technique for triggering latent demand—a description that implies consumers are only doing what they would have done anyway, with the added qualification that, after all, the choice they are making is a free one. It is not clear, however, what exactly latency means in contexts in which consumers are systematically exposed to environments designed to influence their behaviour—nor is it clear that the existence of particular dispositions negates marketing strategies for behaviour management and control. If I have certain anxieties and desires that are triggered and enhanced by custom-targeted forms of marketing that result in a response anticipated by marketers, it seems misleading to say that my behaviour has not been subject to deliberate forms of management and control. In this respect, the ability to collect and analyze large amounts of data in order to influence consumer behaviour might be considered a form of power.
This is certainly the way in which marketers and their adjuncts talk about the potential of monitoring-based marketing strategies. Ayres, for example, notes the asymmetry of control over data relied upon by what he calls “super crunching” large amounts of data: “Tera mining sometimes gives businesses a decided advantage over their consumers [ … ] the companies not only know the generalized probability of some behaviour, they can make incredibly accurate predictions about how individual consumers are going to behave” (Ayres 2007, 32f). He goes on to quote the opening lines of the 139th Psalm: “You have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar” (Ayres 2007, 32f). The comparison is telling—it locates the marketers in the position of an omniscient power, a resuscitated “big Other”, upon whom our smallest actions register and who knows us better than we know ourselves: “because of Super Crunching, firms sometimes may be able to make more accurate predictions about how you’ll behave than you could ever make yourself” (Ayres 2007, 33).
If these characterizations of the power of data mining have some modicum of truth, the marketing strategies it underwrites might be described as manipulation or control, but it takes a few more steps to get to the notion of exploitation. Control and manipulation raise concerns of their own. If indeed data might enable the power of prediction, the concentration of this power in the hands of marketers runs counter to the democratizing promise of the Internet. New media technologies may help level the playing field in some respects by widening access to the means of creating and distributing a range of cultural and informational products, but they also create new asymmetries. Google may know a lot about users’ patterns of browsing, emailing, and eventually mobility, but users know very little about what information is collected about them and how it is being put to use.
Thus, the migration of a wide range of social, professional, and personal communication activity onto private, commercially supported platforms raises new questions of accountability: what level of disclosure about the collection and use of personal information is compatible with democratic values? What types of control should be placed on the use of personal information? Are there details of our personal lives, our medical histories, our personal tastes and behaviours that should be off limits to marketers, and where might we draw the line? These are important questions to ask in light of the commercialization of the Internet—questions that societies long focused primarily on public-sector rather than private-sector accountability need to find ways of answering.
The critique of exploitation provides one approach to such questions, at least to the extent that they touch upon economic issues. The notion of exploitation is, in many recent accounts of online exploitation, a relatively under-examined one. In some instances the term exploitation is used simply to describe a situation in which one party benefits from the activity of another. This seems a bit broad, insofar as it would allow us to describe forms of open-source collaboration or co-creation such as Wikipedia and other open source initiatives as inherently exploitative, which would violate any meaningful critical sense of the term. Nor is exploitation reducible to subjective feelings of exploitation (or the lack thereof)—although these certainly may indicate the presence of exploitation.
Because the versions of the critique of exploitation that concern this paper trace their provenance to Marx’s critique of capitalism, it is worth exploring the core elements of this critique. Holmstrom offers a concise summary of a Marxist conception of exploitation: “The profits of capitalists, then, according to Marx’s theory, are generated by surplus, unpaid and forced labour, the product of which the producers do not control” (Holmstrom 1997, 80). Central to a Marxist account is the notion that coercion is embedded in the relations that structure so-called free choices. As Holmstrom puts it: “Persons who have no access to the means of production other than their own capacity to labour do not need to be forced to work by chains and laws” (Holmstrom 1997, 79)—those are used to ensure that they cannot gain control of resources other than their labour power. The presence of background forms of coercion lurking in what appear to be free choices or exchanges is true not just for industrial wage labour, but also for unwaged domestic labour. Coercion, according to such accounts, is inscribed in the social relations themselves.
The further point to be made is that exploitation is not simply about profit, but also alienation. As Holmstrom puts it: “what workers really sell to the capitalists, according to Marx, is not labour, but the capacity to labour or labour power, which capitalists then use as they wish for the day” (Holmstrom 1997, 79). In selling this capacity, workers relinquish control over their own productive activity—what Marx (1844) also describes as the form of conscious control that distinguishes “species-being” from unreflective life. Alienation takes place not just in the surrender of conscious control over productive activity but also, consequently, in its product. It is a formulation that draws from the description of exploitation in the 1844 manuscripts, where Marx forcefully elaborates the wages of estranged labour: “The worker places his life in the object; but now it no longer belongs to him, but to the object. [ … ] What the product of his labour is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself” (Marx 1844, 27).
Exploitation is not simply about a loss of monetary value, but also a diminishment of one’s humanity and a loss of control over one’s productive and creative activity. As Marx, quoting Hegel, puts it in Volume I of Capital: “But by the alienation of all my labour-time and the whole of my work, I should be converting the substance itself, in other words, my general activity and reality, my person, into the property of another” (Marx 1867, 115). The economic aspect of exploitation—the loss of control over the value generated by surplus labour—helps reproduce the forms of scarcity that compel surrender of control over one’s labour power. In the end, exploitation is evil, as Holmstrom puts it: “because it involves force and domination in manifold ways and because it deprives workers of control that should be theirs” (Holmstrom 1997, 88). This overtly humanist formulation, it is worth nothing, is perhaps not so distant from posthumanist inflected accounts such as Smith’s (2007) conception of an imminent ethics, which is opposed to “anything that separates a mode of existence from its power of acting” (Smith 2007, 68).
It is also worth noting that the empowering promise of the Internet is based, in large part, on an implicit invocation of this notion of exploitation, insofar as it envisions the prospect of overcoming the alienation of control over productive activity. This implied critique of alienation lies at the heart of the celebration of the de-differentiation of consumer and producer, of audience and performer, reader and author, and so on. Such transformations are not to be dismissed out of hand, even if they do refer only to that subset of the population with access to the skills, technology, and resources for using the Internet and related digital technologies. As is frequently pointed out, however, these transformations require a reworking and a revisiting of the critique of exploitation: industrial-age critiques need to be updated for the digital era. The following section explores two attempts to develop a Marxist-inflected critique of exploitation for the digital era and explores their relation to Homstrom’s account of alienation. Both accounts could benefit from further clarification that takes into account the productive and, I will argue, alienating role of surveillance in the development of interactive marketing.
Taking seriously the notion that interactive technologies facilitate enhanced user productivity—that at least in some contexts they reconfigure the (vexed) distinction between production and consumption—means considering how a critique of worker exploitation might apply to the reconfigured realm formerly known as consumption. Zwick, Bonsu, and Darmody’s critique of consumer “co-creation” outlines the double dimension of online exploitation: “First, consumers are not generally paid for the know-how, enthusiasm, and social cooperation [ … ] that they contribute to the manufacturing process of marketable commodities. Second, customers typically pay what the marketing profession calls a ‘price premium’ for the fruits of their own labour” (Zwick, Bonsu, and Darmody 2008, 180). The formulation here is concrete: if someone else realizes a financial profit from one’s efforts, and this capture of value is enabled by relations of control and ownership of productive resources, then exploitation is at work. This formula is applied to two distinct forms of interactive participation or user “co-creation”—the model whereby sites like Facebook provide a commercial platform for user-generated activity, and the process of mass customization, whereby users participate in creating a customized product such as a personalized pair of running shoes that they then purchase for a premium. In the former case, profits are captured indirectly, via advertising; in the latter they are captured directly via purchase. In both cases, however, this approach focuses upon what might be described as intentional user-generated content: the conscious creative activity of users, whether in the form of Facebook posts or design modifications and specifications. In both cases the site’s owners profit from the activity of users—and although the users may get some benefit, they are not, by definition, compensated according to their contribution (at least not in the case where a profit is realized). This model aligns itself with Fuchs’s (2010) account of the exploitation of the labour of so-called “prosumers”—interactive users whose activities help generate value for those who own and control the platforms and applications they use. Fuchs updates the notion of the audience commodity (derived from Smythe 1981)—formerly considered to be something assembled and put to work by media producers—as self-generating: “The difference between the audience commodity in traditional mass media and on the Internet is that in the latter case the user are also content producers” (192). As Fuchs (2010) points out, mere access to interactive platforms does not amount to shared control: “The category of the produsage/prosumer commodity does not signify a democratization of the media toward a participatory or democratic system, but the total commodification of human creativity” (192).
Although all of these approaches to exploitation share a related set of concerns—and all of them align neatly with the critical orientation of this chapter—a number of questions arise regarding this updated conception of exploitation, including: where might we locate coercion, and, in related terms, can a notion of alienation remain operative in these contexts? The presumed benefit of interactivity in both cases is to overcome alienation. The promise of sites like YouTube and Facebook as well as forms of mass customization is precisely that we recognize the results of our productive activity as our own. The fact that consumers are willing to pay a premium for a customized commodity both attests to the persistence of alienation (we pay more, at least in part, to overcome the sense of an anonymous, impersonal, alienated product) and gestures towards its overcoming. In both the case of interactive customization and that of Facebook (as well as other user-generated-content sites), users retain control over their productivity, and they do so in the absence of compulsion. Because this labour is free, it does not provide a livelihood—participation is not the result of practical forms of compulsion.
Right away, however, we might want to start making some distinctions. In many examples of customization, the user’s contribution is relatively minor; the actual products are manufactured elsewhere, very possibly under sweatshop conditions that lend themselves to the standard critique of exploitation. Mass customization sites that allow users to design their own sneakers or purchase custom-tailored jeans provide industrial forms of exploitation with a veneer of participation. For Zwick et al. (2008), even participatory consumers are subject to exploitation in the sense that they do not realize the full value that they have added to the commodity via their participation. That is, they have engaged in value-generating activity, some of which has contributed to the creation of value they do not control.
In the case of user-generated-content, Pasquinelli (2010), following Vercellone (2010), has argued that a more suitable model for exploitation is that of rent. In the digital era, the capture of a productive commons of “cognitive capitalism”—whether in the form of resources for collaboration or the assertion of intellectual property rights, serves as the basis for extracting value from user activity. Thus Pasquinelli argues that Google, for example, “can be described as a global rentier that is exploiting the new lands of the Internet” (2010, 1). The vaunted Google algorithm generates value by building upon the work done by users as they roam the Internet, creating links to web pages. The invocation of the model of land rent, however, raises the question, once again, of coercion. Absent the imperative to, say, earn one’s livelihood by using Google, the model whereby rent and profit merge ends up with a somewhat thinner conception of exploitation.
Alternatively, we might develop a more complex notion of exploitation, in which, for example, coercion could be discerned not directly in the consumer relationship (there is no direct compulsion to purchase a customized item or to use a commercial website that collects information about user activity), but in the background labour relations that lead consumers to attempt to overcome alienation in the realm of consumption. Similarly, we might argue that alienation persists in the very misrecognition of the product of sweatshop labour (the customized Nike running shoe for example) as a form of consumer self-expression. The modicum of consumer control serves as an alibi for a process that remains fundamentally about the appropriation of wage labour. These are perhaps plausible, if not particularly galvanizing arguments, and perhaps rightly deflect our concerns back to more traditional forms of exploitation: the sweatshops.
User-generated content sites make a stronger case for overcoming alienation, insofar as user contributions are, in many cases, more compelling examples of creativity than merely picking from among a number of customization options. Even though value is realized from these contributions, the use of such sites does not entail relinquishing control over certain aspects of one’s creative activity. The case for alienation, at first glance, seems weak, whereas the case for coercion relies on taking seriously the notion that productive activity, in the digital era, comes to rely increasingly on access to networked resources for communication, distribution, and collaboration. As Arvidsson puts it: “the post-Fordist production process directly exploits the communitarian dimension of social life” (Arvidsson 2005, 241). As a perhaps crude example of this process, consider the example of a Facebook application developed by the “software-as-service” company Appirio that allows employers access to employees’ social networks. The application proposes to
increase the size of a company’s ‘virtual account team’ by leveraging relationships that employees might already have to approach strategic accounts or build customer relationships [ … ] The employee can see if a friend has become a lead, bought a product, attended an event [ … ] etc. If the employee chooses they can contact their friend through Facebook to make a connection and ultimately help contribute to their company’s bottom line (and maybe even their own bonus!). (Market Wire 2009)
The application links data from the social networks of individual employees to a proprietary consumer relationship marketing database in order to “track leads, make follow-up offers, and report on campaign success to see how their viral campaigns stack up to other marketing programs” (Market Wire 2009).
If the increasingly precarious conditions of certain types of labour in a flexible and volatile marketplace require the development of social networking resources by employees, and if forms of so-called immaterial labour similarly rely on networking and communication technologies, companies like Appirio provide ways for employers to capture some of the productivity of these networks. Perhaps, in the not-too-distant future, it may become the case that social networking services become crucial productive resources for certain types of jobs. To the extent that this becomes the case, a stronger case can be made for background forms of coercion that structure access to other privately controlled productive resources. If we need access to such services to earn our living—if employers require the creation and exploitation of such networks—and if access is privately controlled, then the standard critique becomes operative. Whether construed as rent or profit, the value captured relies upon the privatization of productive resources associated with the information economy. In such instances we can make a case for both coercion and unpaid productive activity, but not alienation—again a somewhat thinner conception of exploitation. It is not, however, hard to see how these forms of coercion might, in the end, beget alienation. Consider the example of Appirio’s Facebook application: when employers start to view workers’ social network as exploitable productive resources, the incentive emerges to develop “high value” networks—as defined by the employers’ imperatives. Networks that once reflected a certain degree of autonomy become subject to the control and imperatives of employers.
Arvidsson (2005) supplements this account with a somewhat more abstract analysis of exploitation in his critique of branding in the post-Fordist era. In an argument that fits neatly with that of Zwick et al. (2008), he argues that all brands might be considered “co-creations” insofar as they come increasingly to rely on the immaterial labour of consumers. A brand, he argues, is based, in part, on “values, commitments, and forms of community sustained by consumers” (Arvidsson 2005, 236). Brands can thus be understood as a way of capturing this activity for commercial purposes. In this respect they colonize consumer time and channel the creative potential of the immaterial labour of consumers. He describes this as the “branding of life” (Arvidsson 2005, 251). The result, he argues, is both a quantitative form of exploitation—the “absorption” of “the free time of consumers”—and a qualitative one: “making the productive sociality of consumers evolve on the premises of brands” (Arvidsson 2005, 251). This sounds like a form of alienation—the capture of collective productive activity by commercial imperatives. However, Arvidsson’s account does not explore the mechanism whereby this capture and absorption takes place. How might we explain the apparently compelling power of brands to capture, channel, and “filter” consumer activity in accordance with the imperatives of brand managers and owners? Does a brand exert forms of coercions upon consumers? There may be something coercive in this process, but it would require more explication to unearth it.
A discussion of so-called immaterial labour needs to be complemented with a consideration of the material resources that facilitate it. Social networking, always-on communication, and access to the information “commons” depend, increasingly, on commercially supported applications and a privatized, commercial infrastructure. If, on the one hand, it seems fair to say that interactive media technologies facilitate new forms of collaboration and communication as well as the enhanced ability to access and share information rapidly at a distance, they also represent the next stage of the colonization of social life by commerce and marketing. We might think of this as the virtual world equivalent of the replacement of the downtown city centre by the shopping mall, and the consequent privatization and commercialization of social (no longer really “public”) space. Our electronic mail, our mobile phone applications, and our social networks will all pepper us with advertising appeals of one kind or another as we go about the course of our wired lives. This is not the result of some autonomous power of “the brand”—it is a consequence of the commercial system that we are creating to support the rapidly growing digital communication infrastructure.
This system is the result of quite concrete, material choices: the decision to privatize the backbone and Internet service delivery and to rely on commercially supported platforms for a range of communication, networking, and information services. The online world thus becomes one where our libraries (in the form of Google books, for example), our directories, and our e-mail services become advertising saturated. As of this writing, even Twitter has developed a system to insert relevant ads in the results when users search the feeds. The next “logical” step, according to one commentator, would be to allow “users to sign up to have, say, every 10th post be an ad placed through Twitter. That ad is related to something the user is talking about (an ad for a nearby restaurant if a user is talking about a neighbourhood), or simply a branded ad placed because the advertiser likes a particular Twitterer’s audience” (Singel 2010).
So if we wanted to make a case for Arvidsson’s claim that brands come to colonize our social lives, we would want to take a close look at the way in which we are financing new platforms for social life, communication, and information sharing. The commercial infrastructure is by no means a “natural” or inevitable one, as evidenced by the history of the Internet. If it is the case that brands are gaining visibility and marketers are capturing and putting to work the fruit of our online activity, it is the result of our reliance upon the commercial sector to provide the infrastructure for our online communicative, informational, and social lives. There is a striking tendency in contemporary academic and popular accounts of the emerging digital economy to overlook the political economy of the platform. We often talk about “the web” and the networks that support it as unchanging constants—a taken-for-granted and largely neutral infrastructure. In fact, the Internet is a fast-changing and increasingly privatized infrastructure that may look as different in the next twenty years as it did twenty years ago. The affordances of the Internet and the services that run on it change in accordance with the priorities of those who control this infrastructure, and what is taken for granted one day, such as so-called “net-neutrality” may well disappear the next. The same goes for platforms like Facebook, which are constantly tweaked by their private owners to maximize revenues and increase data collection. The flexibility of the virtual environment makes the privatization of cyberspace more malleable than that of physical space: as aspects of users’ professional and social lives migrate onto networked, commercial platforms, these platforms continue to adjust to reflect not just technological developments, but also changing economic models. Facebook, for example, continues to tweak its functionality not just to encourage more users to use it more often, but also to continually modify its privacy policy in ways that facilitate the development of its commercial model. Control over the platform and the applications that run on it, in other words, might help explain how the work of “channelling” user activity to profitable ends described by Arvidsson (2005) takes place.
Arvidsson critiques the process of “brand management” for “pushing this production of an ethical surplus [by which he refers to social bonds and shared meanings produced by networked sociability] to the artificial plateau of the brand, and hence depriving it of its real potentiality” (Arvidsson 2005, 252). Once again, an account of how this “pushing” takes place needs to be elaborated—how do brands coerce us? If they seduce us, does that count? The question really is to what extent a compelling account of the way in which force is embedded in relations of seemingly free exchange at the level of consumption can be developed. For Arvidsson, the result of exploitation via branding is an undermining of the very forms of sociability that are captured and put to work: “It comes to work against the productive potential of the social, on which it ultimately builds” (Arvidsson 2005, 252). This is a critique of alienation—a loss of control over the process and product of shared productive activity. Perhaps such a critique is more appropriately directed towards the underlying structure that shapes the imperatives and facilitates the practice of brand management—that is, toward the galloping commercialization of the resources and utilities for networked communication.
The decision to privatize the Internet’s infrastructure, and, in many cases, to rely upon the commercial sector for the provision of online utilities including e-mail, search engines, document storage, and so on, might be described as a form of enclosure of the digital commons: the separation of crucial productive resources in the digital era from a new generation of productive consumers. In this respect, the notion of exploitation remains relevant to a critique of the online economy and, in particular, to our reliance upon these for-profit utilities that are becoming increasingly indispensable for forms of online work, collaboration, and socializing. However, an account of exploitation needs to be updated to take into account, on the one hand, the possibility of generating economic value from user participation without apparent alienation and, on the other, to critique what Arvidsson (2005) describes as a kind of alienation without payment: the channelling of productive activity beyond the confines of the workplace and the wage labour contract. One way to approach such an account is to consider the way in which user activity is redoubled on commercial platforms in the form of productive information about user activity.
What makes commercial platforms like Google and Facebook profitable is not just that they can draw an audience, and not just that they can benefit from user activity (including that of constructing links and posting content), but that they can capture detailed information about audience activity. Monitoring becomes an integral component of the online value chain both for sites that rely upon direct payment and for user-generated content sites that rely upon indirect payment (advertising). From a commercial perspective, we can view every action that takes place online, whether a purchase or an online post, as a reflexively redoubled one. Acts of production and consumption both become, in this regard, productive, insofar as they generate information commodities. This redoubling links online productivity with the valorisation process: information about user activity becomes an input into the marketing and production processes.
It is at this level that we might attempt to reintroduce a critique of exploitation and consider whether the activity that produces this information is unpaid, coerced, and alienated. Insofar as the information can generate a surplus, it is by definition not compensated according to its value. An account of coercion would have to enlist a systemic understanding that locates coercion in the social relations that structure access. If we take seriously the notion that online forms of interaction and socializing can double as productive immaterial labour, we might describe the infrastructures that support them as productive resources, access to which is structured by those who own and control the resources. Coercion is then embedded in the process whereby private ownership is asserted and reproduced. In the digital context, we can perhaps see this most palpably in the realm of intellectual property; however a critical account discerns it in the background of private ownership and control of the platforms that are becoming integral to social forms of production.
This is perhaps not a particularly compelling account in an era in which private control over Internet resources has been naturalized. Maybe a more convincing account of coercion can be made indirectly via the notion of alienation. Here, the notion of redoubling usefully highlights the difference between the intentional aspect of user-generated content and its estranged or alienated aspect. In this regard, we might talk about the “dual” character of networked activity: the conscious action and the captured information. In the mobile phone research on mobility described at the start of this chapter, every call made by a user also generated a data point: information about the user’s time-space location (not to mention information about who was called and for how long). We might make an analogy here with other forms of user activity: an intentional action such as a purchase, the posting of a photo online, a comment on a Facebook page or a Tweet generates additional unintentional information: data about user behaviour captured by the (commercial) platform. Users have little choice over whether this data is generated and little say in how it is used: in this sense we might describe the generation and use of this data as the alienated or estranged dimension of their activity. To the extent that this information can be used to predict and influence user behaviour it is an activity that returns to the users in an unrecognizable form, turned back upon them as a means of fulfilling the imperatives of others. Estrangement, or alienation, in Marx’s account, occurs when our own activity appears as something turned back against us as, “an alien power” (Marx 1884/2009).
The alienated world envisioned by interactive marketers is one in which all of our actions (and the ways in which they are aggregated and sorted) are systematically turned back upon us by those who capture the data. It is, in the end, a decidedly disturbing vision: an informated world in which the very atmosphere through which we move has become privatized, and commercialized. Every message we write, every video we post, every item we buy or view, our time-space paths and patterns of social interaction all become data points in algorithms for sorting, predicting, and managing our behaviour. Some of these data points are spontaneous—the result of the intentional action of consumers; others are induced, the result of ongoing, randomized experiments.
Thanks to market monitoring, the distinctions between alienated and autonomous activity, at least in the context of consumer behaviour, start to blur. Intentional, conscious activity does double duty: it facilitates forms of online sociability and creativity on the one hand and, on the other, the data it generates is captured and returned to consumers in unrecognizable form. The complexity of the algorithm and the opacity of correlation render it all but impossible for those without access to the databases to determine why they may have been denied a loan, targeted for a particular political campaign message, or saturated with ads at a particular time and place when they have been revealed to be most vulnerable to marketing. Much will hinge on whether the power to predict can be translated into the ability to manage behaviour, but this is the bet that marketers are making. Or more accurately, this is the bet that a society makes when it turns to a monitoring-based system of data-mining and predictive analytics as a means for supporting its information and communication infrastructure.
Privacy-based critiques do not quite capture the element of productive power and control at work in the promise of monitoring-based marketing. If privacy violations constitute an invasion—a loss of control over the process of self-disclosure—market monitoring includes an element of control and management: the systematic use of personal information to predict and influence behaviour. The critique of exploitation addresses this element of power and control. Defenders of market monitoring will argue that individual consumer behaviour remains uncoerced. Critical approaches, however, locate coercion not solely at the level of discrete individual decisions, but also in the social relations that structure them. Given an unconstrained choice, individuals may likely choose not to have their information collected, mined, and turned back upon them for screening, sorting, and marketing purposes. However, the decision to privatize the Internet infrastructure and many applications that are becoming important tools for work, creativity, and social life provides those who own these productive resources with control over the terms of access.
Given the difference between post-Fordist forms of productive consumption and industrial modes of production, a critical approach to exploitation needs to be revisited. This chapter argues for the importance of considering how the components of exploitation (the capture of unpaid surplus labour, coercion, and alienation) operate within the context of technologically facilitated forms of commercial surveillance. Although these components are interconnected—alienation, for example, typically implies the existence of background forms of coercion—they appear in different configurations in the realms of consumer productivity or immaterial forms of collective, social labour. Some critics focus on the element of unpaid labour, others on the element of alienation. The challenge is to think these together against the background of the coercion embedded in relations of control over communication resources and the forms of productive surveillance it facilitates.
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