[Ray Kyooyung Ra, Core #5/5, Blog #10/15] Capitalism, racial capitalism, and invisible exploitations in the digital space

Sorry for the late post! There was a CaMS department mixer today, and I just got back home from it.

What pertinent coincidence that we are reading for "Labor" Week with everything happening over at post-Musk Twitter. For me, it was particularly interesting to read Terranova’s theorization of “free labor” – foundational to our contemporary understanding of new forms of work emerging in the digital spaces such as fan-produced cultures, commentaries, reviews, home-made amateur videos, images – alongside whatever cesspool post-Musk Twitter space is becoming (or feared to become). “Far from being an unreal, empty space,” the Internet is considered to be one “animated by cultural and technical labor… a continuous production of value that is completely immanent to the flows of the network society at large.” (68) Terranova further develops her idea of communally-produced value in digital economies alongside Marxist theories to locate where ‘exploitation’ – the discrepancy between the wage received and value generated – occurs:

As the wealth generated by free labor is social, so should be the mode of its return. This means investing this wealth in the reproduction of the common—that is, in new forms of welfare (from the institution of basic guaranteed income to larger investments in housing, health, education, knowledge, technology, and so on). (104)

By her definition, the “free labor” generated by the collective common can only be compensated through and to the collective common. This is a neoliberalist abstraction that mistakes coexistence for unproblematic equivalence, building on to Terranova's commentary on minoritarian, gendered, and raced character of Internet populations. (83) This also leads to the point where a connection can be drawn between Terranova’s work and the material consequences of Musk’s rather feral management of Twitter’s labor force:

“Collective knowledge work, then, is not about those who work in the knowledge industry. But it is also not about employment. The mass layoffs in the dotcom sector have not stopped Internet content from growing or its technologies from mutating. The acknowledgment of the collective aspect of labor implies a rejection of the equivalence between labor and employment, which was already stated by Marx and further emphasized by feminism and the post-Gramscian autonomy.” (89)

Musk’s actions in the last weeks have made visible (1) invisiblized labor such as CCM work (Roberts) and cultural data work (D’Ignzaio, Klein) as well as (2) the significance of Twitter users’ “free labor” that keeps the platform afloat despite the unprecedented scale of layoffs. Would Terranova argue: so what if copywriting becomes sloppy, what if selective censoring of parody accounts undermines individual user security, and what if ad revenues see a drop for the time being? As long as the users are still producing “free labor” on this platform – meaning, if they keep their profiles active and continue on posting – would Twitter be able to keep on expanding?

And as Terranova hinted, and writers like Nakamura and Beller have further expanded, the logic of racial capitalism permeates throughout the World Wide Web in its different layers: those of users, management, unseen material labors, etc. I want to emphasize here: the argument that capitalism begets racism and exploitation, and one that states that racist exploitation and racialization were the foundations to capitalism are different. While Terranova’s focus on users' work is helpful in examining the process of how free labor sustains the platform it is generated from, figures like “an anatomy of an AI system” or the “Diverse Economies Iceberg” (D’Ignazio, Klein) visualize even deeper roots of exploitation that are necessary to make our “What’s happening?” to get tweeted out seamlessly across the interface.