Category: immaterial labor, the social factory, and other Autonomia notions
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By Gordon Hull A little more than a year ago, I floated a version of the thesis that Big Data functions as a form of capitalist accumulation by dispossession. “Accumulation by Dispossession” is David Harvey’s term for what Marx called “primitive accumulation,” and the basic idea is that capital has to extract value from individuals…
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By Gordon Hull I have been circling around the relation between Marx and Foucault for a while, and thinking in particular about the ways that they can be viewed as productively engaged, particularly at the intersection of primitive accumulation and subjectification (e.g., here, here and here) This of course flies in the face of Foucault’s…
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Apparently Burger King ran an ad that attempted to trigger Google Home by having a Burger King employee say “OK, Google: What is the Whopper burger?” First the ad was up, then it was down, now BK says that it might come back. The ad was supposed to trigger Google Home to read the first…
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Brands are of increasing importance to capitalism. As an insightful book by Franck Cochoy argues, this is part of the logic of commodification, which generates a perpetual demand for product differentiation. At the point that a product becomes a commodity – i.e., at the point that it leaves the bazaar, where individual vendors measure out…
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A recent paper by Hamid Ekbia presents an interesting Marxian theory of the relation between exploitation and computer networks. The paper is intended as an intervention in to discussions of the accumulation of value in what is now called cognitive capitalism (I’ve attempted to synthesize some of that literature here). The most interesting part of…
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There is a running debate in critical theory circles about the applicability of Marxian analysis to big data specifically, and to an economy dominated by immaterial goods, more generally (I have blogged about this periodically, circling primarily around the concept of primitive accumulation: see here and here). As part of working through that literature, here…
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One question surrounding big data – in addition to well-established worries about privacy and discrimination – that is starting to get attention is how it functions as a mode of capitalist accumulation. There is an emerging literature on capitalist value creation and big data, but a lot of that is about the creation of surplus…
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By Gordon Hull We don’t access the internet directly – it’s always through some sort of intermediary software. For that reason, it matters – a lot – what the intermediary does, and what kind of interactivity it promotes. Concern about this dates at least to a 1996 (published finally in 2000) paper by Lucas Introna…
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By Gordon Hull At the end of my time in high school, I worked part-time bagging groceries. There was some modest union influence on the job, and its scheduling was pretty predictable: the longer you’d been there, the better schedule you’d get. Your first few weeks, you knew you’d be working late into the evening,…
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By Gordon Hull Over on Cyborgology, my colleague Robin James has a post up about Taylor Swift’s promotion of her new album. James focuses on two moments in that promotion: on the one hand, Swift has removed her music from the free streaming part of Spotify, on the grounds that it insufficiently compensates her (and…
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