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Fuchs, Christian. 2013. 'Class and Exploitation on the Internet.' Fuchs, Christian. 2013. Class and exploitation on the Internet. In Digital labor. The Internet as playground and factory, ed. Trebor Scholz, 211-224. New York: Routledge. <211> 13 CLASS AND EXPLOITATION ON THE INTERNET Christian Fuchs The term social media has been established to characterize World Wide Web platforms such as social networking sites, blogs, wikis, and microblogs. Such platforms are among the most accessed websites in the world and include Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Blogger, Twitter, LinkedIn, and WordPress. All online platforms and media are social in the sense of providing information that is a result of social relations. The notion of sociality underlying the now frequently employed term social media is based on concepts such as communication, community, cooperation, collaboration, and sharing. All too often, the term is used without differentiation or grounding in social theory. This chapter challenges techno-optimistic versions of social media analysis by pointing out its limits. First, the notion of a participatory Internet is questioned by conducting an analysis of the political economy of selected corporate social media platforms. Next, an alternative theorization of social media that is based on Marx’s class theory is offered. Finally, some thoughts about the need for an alternative Internet are presented. Critical Internet studies is an emerging field of research. Trebor Scholz’s conference The Internet as Playground and Factory has shown how important critical thinking about the contemporary Internet is and that there is a huge interest in critical political economy and theory relating to the Internet. Today, we are experiencing times of capitalist crisis, and it is no surprise that critical studies and critical political economy are celebrating a comeback after decades of postmodern, culturalist, and neoliberal domination of academia. Questions relating to class, labor, exploitation, alienation, and ideology have become paramount. The critical analysis of social media requires a critique of both ideology and exploitation. It also calls for practical proposals. Trebor Scholz (2008) has stressed that “the suggestion of sudden newness of social media is aimed at potential investors” and that web 2.0 is therefore primarily a marketing ideology. Jodi Dean argues that the Internet and other forms of communication in “communicative <212> capitalism [are] rooted in communication without communicability” (Dean 2004: 281). Dean suggests that the Internet becomes a technological fetish that advances post- politics. Mark Andrejecvic (2002: 239) speaks of “the interactive capability of new media to exploit the work of being watched.” In his book iSpy, Andrejevic argues that “accounts of exploitation do not necessarily denigrate the activities or the meanings they may have for those who participate in them rather than the social relations that underwrite expropriation and alienation” (Andrejevic 2001: 283). These and other contributions are characteristic of the emergence of the field of critical Internet studies.1 In this chapter, we explicitly propose to re-actualize and “reload” Marxian theory. The task is to create a Marxist theory of the Internet. Participatory Web as Ideology Henry Jenkins argues that, increasingly, “the Web has become a site of consumer participation” (Jenkins 2008: 137). He argues that blogs and other social media bring about a “participatory culture.” Benkler (2006), Shirky (2008), and Tapscott and Williams (2007) have made similar arguments. Answering the question of whether the web is participatory requires an understanding of the notion of participation. In democracy theory, the term participation is mainly used and most prominently featured in participatory democracy theory (Held 2006). The earliest use of the term participatory democracy that I could trace in the literature is in an article by Staughton Lynd (1965) that describes the grassroots organization of the student movement. Two central features of participatory democracy theory are the broad understanding of democracy as encompassing areas beyond voting, such as the economy, culture, and the household, and the questioning of the compatibility of participatory democracy and capitalism. A participatory economy requires a “change in the terms of access to capital in the direction of more nearly equal access” and “a change to more nearly equal access to the means of labor” (Macpherson 1973, 71). “Genuine democracy, and genuine liberty, both require the absence of extractive powers” (Macpherson 1973: 121). A participatory economy involves the democratizing of industrial authority structures. Consequently, an Internet platform can only be participatory if it involves participatory ownership structures. Such participatory economy is a necessary, although not a sufficient, condition for participatory democracy. Further factors include participatory learning and decision making. Platforms that are not built on a participatory economy model cannot be participatory. Can Google, YouTube, and Facebook be considered participatory? Google is a corporation that is specialized in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. It is one of the largest transnational companies in the world. Common points of criticism of Google are that the page rank algorithm is secret and that the search results are personalized, which is facilitated through close surveillance of the search behavior of users. Google also exploits and monitors users <213> Rank Website Character Owner 1 politico.com Corporate Allbritton Communications 2 cnn.com Corporate Time Warner 3 foxnews.com Corporate News Corporation 4 msnbc.com Corporate NBC Universal 5 realclearpolitics.com Corporate RealClear Holdings 6 nytimes.com Corporate New York Times Company 7 reuters.com Corporate Thompson Reuters 8 bbc.co.uk Public service BBC 9 politics.co.uk Corporate Adfero 10 cbcnews.go.com Corporate Walt Disney Table 13.1 Search results for “political news” on google.com (August 19, 2011) by selling their data to advertising clients. Half (50.12%) of all people using the Internet access Google,2 and that is roughly 1.05 billion people, or almost 15% of the world population.3 Google would not exist without these users, because its profits are based on ads targeted to searches, which means that the search process is value-generating. Google’s more than 1 billion users are, however, largely lacking financial compensation. They perform unpaid, value-generating labor. The stratification of the visibility of Google search results becomes evident if one searches for the term political news on Google: the main search results are news sites owned almost exclusively by big corporate media companies (see Table 13.1). Facebook is the most popular social networking service in the world.4 Some points of criticism of the service are that it has a complex and long-winded privacy policy, and it is nontransparent to users which data are collected about them and how the data are used. Facebook users are not involved in decisions. Facebook fan groups are dominated by popular culture, with politics being a sideline. Oppositional political figures are marginalized (see Table 13.2). Facebook is dominated by entertainment. Politics on Facebook is dominated by established actors. Alternative political views are marginalized, and especially critical politics is not often found on Facebook. It is a more general feature of the capitalist culture industry that focuses more on entertainment because it promises larger audiences and profits. Owned by Google, YouTube is the third most trafficked web platform in the world.5 There have been some well-known political uses of YouTube, such as the video of the death of Neda Soltani in the 2009 Iranian protests and the video of the death of Ian Tomlinson at the London anti-G20 protests. YouTube is also a known haven for videos by human rights activists that would be censored elsewhere. However, the question arises about how much visibility YouTube really provides to progressives, at least compared to the numbers of views of other material that is shared on YouTube. The list of the ten most viewed videos on YouTube (shown in Table 13.3) exemplifies how the corporate exploiters of surplus <214> Rank Website Character Number of fans 1 Facebook Technology 50.7 million 2 Texas Hold ‘Em Poker Computer 48.6 game 3 Eminem Pop star 45.4 4 YouTube Technology 43.6 5 Rihanna Pop star 43.4 6 Lady Gaga Pop star 42.4 7 Michael Jackson Pop star 39.7 8 Shakira Pop star 39.0 9 Family Guy TV series 36.4 10 Justin Bieber Pop star 34.8 41 Barack Obama Politician 22.4 Michael Moore Socialist 495 866 filmmaker Noam Chomsky Socialist 325 325 intellectual Karl Marx Communist 186 722 intellectual Table 13.2 The most popular Facebook groups (Data source: http://statistics.allfacebook.com/, August 19, 2011) Rank Video Type Ownership Views 1 Justin Bieber – Baby Music Universal 607 million 2 Lady Gaga – Bad Romance Music Universal 407 m 3 Shakira – Waka Waka Music Sony 383 m 4 Eminem – Love the Way You Lie Music Universal 371 m 5 Charlie bit my finger – again! Entertainment Private user 367 m 6 Jennifer Lopez – On the floor Music Universal 350 m 7 Eminem – Not Afraid Music Universal 266 m 8 Justin Bieber – One Time Music Universal 260 m 9 Justin Bieber – Never Say Never Music Universal 248 m 10 Thigh massage video Entertainment Private user 244 m Table 13.3 The most viewed YouTube videos of all times (source: youtube.com, accessed on August 19, 2011) value-generating labor control YouTube’s political attention economy. At first sight, YouTube’s video category “News & Politics,” which is one of fifteen categories, seems to be the bright political star on the YouTube firmament. A closer look, however, shows that the most viewed video in this category is one in which children sing the song “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands.”6 It is an open question whether politics really does make many people very happy today. Entertainment is sought after on YouTube and Facebook, whereas more overtly political clips are far less visible.
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