Christian Fuchs - Digital labour and Karl Marx

DIGITAL LABOUR AND KARL MARX

How is labour changing in the age of computers, the Internet, and social media such as Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter? In Digital Labour and Karl Marx , Christian Fuchs attempts to answer that question, crafting a systematic critical theorisation of labour as performed in the capitalist ICT industry. Relying on a range of global case studiesfrom unpaid social media prosumers or Chinese hardware assemblers at Foxconn to miners in the Democratic Republic of CongoFuchs sheds light on the labour costs of digital media, examining the way ICT corporations exploit human labour and the impact of this exploitation on the lives, bodies, and minds of workers.

Christian Fuchs is professor of social media at the University of Westminster in London. He is the author of more than 200 academic publications in the fields of Internet studies, social media studies, critical social theory and information society studies. He is the editor of the open access online journal tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique . Among his publications are the books Internet and Society, Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies , and the collected volumes Internet and Surveillance: The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media and Critique, Social Media, and the Information Society .

DIGITAL LABOUR AND KARL MARX

Christian Fuchs

First published 2014

by Routledge

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and by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2014 Taylor & Francis

The right of Christian Fuchs to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him/her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fuchs, Christian, 1976-

Digital labor and Karl Marx / Christian Fuchs.

pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Knowledge workers. 2. Information technologyEconomic aspects. 3. Information technologySocial aspects. 4. Industrial sociology. I. Title.

HD8039.K59F83 2013

335.412dc23 2013017800

ISBN: 978-0-415-71615-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-88007-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo

by Apex CoVantage, LLC

This book is dedicated to Marisol and the singularity of our non-labour of love

El amor

me dar aire, espacio ,

alimento para crecer y ser mejor ,

como una Revolucin

que hace de cada da

el comienzo de una nueva victoria

Gioconda Belli

CONTENTS

FIGURES

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TABLES

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INTRODUCTION

Muhanga Kawaya, an enslaved miner in North Kivu (Democratic Republic of Congo) who extracts minerals that are needed for the manufacturing of laptops and mobile phones, describes his work in the following way: As you crawl through the tiny hole, using your arms and fingers to scratch, theres not enough space to dig properly and you get badly grazed all over. And then, when you do finally come back out with the cassiterite, the soldiers are waiting to grab it at gunpoint. Which means you have nothing to buy food with. So were always hungry (Finnwatch 2007, 20). A Chinese engineer at Foxconn Shenzhen, where computers and mobile phones that are sold by Western companies are assembled, says, We produced the first generation iPad. We were busy throughout a 6-month period and had to work on Sundays. We only had a rest day every 13 days. And there was no overtime premium for weekends. Working for 12 hours a day really made me exhausted (SACOM 2010, 7). In Silicon Valley, a Cambodian ICT (information and communications technology) assembler exposed to toxic substances reports, I talked to my co-workers who felt the same way [that I did] but they never brought it up, out of fear of losing their job (Pellow and Park 2002, 139). Mohan, a project manager in the Indian software industry who is in his mid-30s, explains, Work takes a priority. [] The area occupied by family and others keeps reducing (DMello and Sahay 2007, 179). Another software engineer argues, Sometimes you start at 8 am and then finish at 1011 pm, five days a week. And anytime you can be called. [] Also you dont develop any hobbies (ibid.). A software engineer at Google describes the working situation there: ConsBecause of the large amounts of benefits (such as free foods) there seems to be an unsaid rule that employees are expected to work longer hours. Many people work more than 8 hours a day and then will be on email or work for a couple hours at home, at night as well (or on the weekends). It may be hard to perform extremely well with a good work/life balance. Advice to Senior ManagementGive engineers more freedom to use 20% time to work on cool projects without the stress of having to do 120% work (www.glassdoor.com). The Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that gives businesses and developers access to an on-demand, scalable workforce. Workers select from thousands of tasks and work whenever it is convenient (www.mturk.com). Clients can advertise on the platform that they look for certain services for a certain wage, to which those who want to perform them can respond online. If the deal comes about, then the worker performs the task and submits the result to the client online. The work tasks almost exclusively involve informational work. A search for speech transcription tasks (conducted on November 20, 2012) resulted in three tasks that had (if one assumes that it takes on average six hours of work time to transcribe one hour of interview time) an hourly wage of (a) US$4, (b) US$4 and (c) US$3. In contrast, typical professional transcription services (e.g. www.fingertipstyping.co.uk/prices_and_turnaround.htm, www.franklin-square.com/transcription_per_line.htm) charge approximately US$15$25 per hour.

In February 2013, the German public service station broadcaster ARD aired the documentary Ausgeliefert! Leiharbeiter bei Amazon (At mercy

Work.Shop.Play is an online platform owned by CBS Outdoor Limited. It describes its purpose in the following way:

We are interested in your ideas, opinions, behaviour and general feedback on a variety of topics. One week we may send you surveys asking how you feel about topics in the news at the moment. The next, we might ask you how often you drink coffee, what brands you buy and which coffee shop you prefer. The week after that, it might be a survey about new technology, which gadgets you own and why you bought them. [] CBS Outdoor work with lots of big brands, telling them how to best advertise and market their products and services to consumers. [] Sometimes, the research team at CBS Outdoor will use survey results to create material for our sales teams to present to these brands. Other times well be using the results internally, to better inform our company about urban audiences. Occasionally we may post survey results on Twitter or Facebook. [] When we were setting up work.shop.play. we thought long and hard about how to reward our members. We developed a list of prizes that we think will appeal to everyonesuch as cinema and theatre tickets, shopping vouchers, magazine subscriptions and guidebooks to UK cities. From time to time there will also be bigger prizes up for grabs, such as nights away at a top hoteland sometimes there may be one prize, while others there may be 10 or more. (workshopplay.co.uk, accessed February 17, 2013)Next page