Gift Commodity Internet Economy

Discussion

From the International Journal of Communication 2(2008), Book Review by Christian Fuchs on Don Tapscott's (et al.) book on Wikinomics:

Christian Fuchs:

"Wikinomics shows how mass collaboration and digital gifts can be subsumed under capitalist logic. The difference between my own approach and the authors’ is that the latter welcome this development, whereas I consider it from a neo-Marxist perspective as the extension and intensification of alienation and exploitation (Fuchs, 2008), yet I recognize that, at the same time, it bears certain potentials for alternative developments. Transnational informational capitalism is characterized by a paradox situation that was foreseen 30 years ago by Herbert Marcuse, in which subjective unfreedom is accompanied by the highest objective potentials for emancipation that have thus far existed in human history (Fuchs, 2008).

I have characterized this paradox economy as the gift commodity Internet economy (Fuchs, 2008). Commercial Web 2.0 applications are typically of no charge for users; they generate profit by achieving as many users as possible by offering free services and selling advertisement space to third parties and additional services to users. The more users, the more profit, that is, the more services are offered for free, the more profit can be generated. Although the principle of the gift points towards a postcapitalist society, gifts are today subsumed under capitalism and used for generating profit in the Internet economy.

The Internet gift economy has a double character; it supports and at the same time undermines informational capitalism.

The gift commodity Internet economy can be read as a specific form of what Dallas Smythe (1981, 2006) has termed the Audience Commodity. He suggests that in the case of media advertisement models, the audience is sold as a commodity. “Because audience power is produced, sold, purchased and consumed, it commands a price and is a commodity . . . You audience members contribute your unpaid work time and in exchange you receive the program material and the explicit advertisements” (Smythe, 1981/2006, pp. 233 & 238). Audiences constitute unpaid labor; the consumption of the mass media is work because it results in a commodity, which is to say it produces that commodity. In this model, the audience’s work would also include “learning to buy goods and to spend their income accordingly,” the demand for the consumption of goods, and the reproduction of their own labour power (Smythe, 1981/2006, 243sq).

The gift commodity economy is based on what Tiziana Terranova (2000) has termed free labour; as a tendency, prosumers produce surplus value without payment. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2005) speak in this context of the exploitation of the multitude that produces knowledge as part of the commons of society. Free labour is the labour that produces the Prosumer Commodity that is sold to corporations at specific rates so that they are allowed to provide personalized advertisements that target and try to mind-control the users while they are active online in order to convince them to buy certain products or services.

Capital is accumulated by collaboration, the provision of free access, peering, sharing, networking, communicating, and opening resources. Consumers become producers of surplus value: “In each instance the traditionally passive buyers of editorial and advertising take active, participatory roles in value creation” (Tapscott and Williams 2007, p. 14). There are “models where masses of consumers, employees, suppliers, business partners, and even competitors co-create value in the absence of direct managerial control” (55). The result is not the emergence of “a new economic democracy . . . in which we all have a lead role” (15), as Tapscott and Williams claim, but a subtly operating, coercive, and highly exploitative capitalist economy that tries to reduce labour and other investment costs by the global dynamic outsourcing of labour to prosumers, competitors, and subcontractors with the help of Web 2.0."

In conclusion, Christian Fuchs writes that:

"Synthesizing both the Web 2.0 commodity-argument and the Web 2.0 commons-argument for me means an actualization of the Marxian antagonism between productive forces and relations of production: “Networks are forms of development as well as fetters of capitalism . . . Networks are a material condition for a free association, but the cooperative networking of the relations of production is not an automatic result of the networked productive forces, a network society . . . is something that people must struggle for” (Fuchs, 2008, p. 160)." (http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/250/125)