Student Feedback

Below is a paragraph that was written after a pleasant discussion with students about one of my current works in progress. Having a venue to discuss faculty writing with students is new for me. I like it. I rarely want to subject my own classes to such a thing. The content is unlikely to fit well into the class. But this class revolves around discussions of academic research more generally and student engagement with issues involved in doing interdisciplinary work. It seems to be working. The students seem to like the glimpse of their professors at work, and I like the opportunity for student feedback on my writing.

Another corollary to the reliance on unpaid digital labor is a loss of waged jobs. As more and more amateur and user-generated content is produced, less and less waged work may become available. This trend may be offset somewhat by the overall expansion in the size of the audience and in the demand for digital content, but as a total share of the labor involved, waged labor will become an ever dwindling part or the total labor expended on digital production. Coupled with this contraction of waged digital labor, there is another type of pressure created by the capitalist integument of digital work. Like other jobs under capitalism, there is always a tendency to de-skill the labor force. This serves to make more labor-power available for exploitation, to increase competition among workers, and to lower wages. While the creation and dissemination of digital content used to require relatively high technical skills and some knowledge of computers and programming, now it is often reduced to a point and click skill. This de-skilling of the digital labor force is, of course, a prerequisite for the widespread use of unwaged digital labor. Tasks such as streaming digital video online, which used to require significant technical skills, now require about the same amount of skill as sending an email. This process is most often seen in the light of a broadening of access and a democratization of the process of producing digital content. And so it is. However, this was never really the goal for capital. Freeing digital labor from the shackles of specialized knowledge is less important to capital than the attendant benefits of expanding the available labor supply in such a way that waged digital jobs vanish into a vast ocean of unwaged, user-generated content. That digital work begins to look more like a kind of addictive behavior and less like an economically valuable activity of its own is of little consequence.

Obscene Litigation

Via ZDNet: Porn Filesharing Lawsuits Crest 30K Defendants

Last Monday saw numbers skyrocket in porn’s war against piracy and torrent sites when four porn companies filed suits in California to target 9,055 alleged file sharers. That was a week after director Axel Braun filed in West Virginia to sue 7,098 alleged pirates for one film, Batman XXX: A Porn Parody.

This is not to be confused with the seven West Virginia suits filed in late September, suing 5,469. That was just before three porn companies came together to file against 1,100 alleged torrent pirates in Chicago. None of these were filed in conjunction with Hustler/Larry Flynt Production’s now-total of four lawsuits for This Ain’t Avatar XXX, with its own defendant total of 7164. ...

The porn industry is not being shy about using shame over its own product as a threat, and this is particularly troubling. While the defendants initially coming up as “John Does” in filing, companies like Hustler/LFP are working the “name and shame” angle and asked a U.S. District Judge to green light revealing the identities of Does from Internet providers. Another adult company preparing to expose the identities of defendants is Third World Media. Once they are identified, they are more likely to settle whether they are guilty or not because of the content. ...

And just how much can that mean to cash-strapped pornographers? According to Dallas attorney Evan Stone (no relation to adult performer Evan Stone), who is handling a number of bittorrent lawsuits including Hustler/LFP, “We usually ask people for $1,500 to settle out of court.

FTW

Librarians rock. Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, recently announced six new revisions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, including:

(1)  Motion pictures on DVDs that are lawfully made and acquired and that are protected by the Content Scrambling System when circumvention is accomplished solely in order to accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment, and where the person engaging in circumvention believes and has reasonable grounds for believing that circumvention is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the use in the following instances:

(i) Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students;

(ii) Documentary filmmaking;
(iii) Noncommercial videos

(2) Computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute software applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications, when they have been lawfully obtained, with computer programs on the telephone handset.
(3) Computer programs, in the form of firmware or software, that enable used wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telecommunications network, when circumvention is initiated by the owner of the copy of the computer program solely in order to connect to a wireless telecommunications network and access to the network is authorized by the operator of the network.
(4) Video games accessible on personal computers and protected by technological protection measures that control access to lawfully obtained works, when circumvention is accomplished solely for the purpose of good faith testing for, investigating, or correcting security flaws or vulnerabilities, if:

(i) The information derived from the security testing is used primarily to promote the security of the owner or operator of a computer, computer system, or computer network; and
(ii) The information derived from the security testing is used or maintained in a manner that does not facilitate copyright infringement or a violation of applicable law.

(5) Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete.  A dongle shall be considered obsolete if it is no longer manufactured or if a replacement or repair is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace; and
(6) Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling either of the book’s read-aloud function or of screen readers that render the text into a specialized format.

This is great news for bloggers, teachers, and civilization in general. Prior to this, circumventing the copyright protection on a DVD was always a felony regardless of its purpose. This caused me a twinge of concern whenever I assigned video work for my classes where using clips from other videos might be appropriate. I had vague visions of my entire class being busted for digital piracy. Now, no more worries about encouraging students to do video mashups for class!

Fair Hitler Use

Via abject learning:



And here is a meta-parody of these recent events:

Blogging's Barbarisms

In his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Walter Benjamin writes:

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. (Illuminations, 256)

I'm interested in the ways blogging also exhibits this barbarism. Discuss.

Rip: Remix, Chapters 1-3

Girl Talk

Via. I'm looking forward to watching this open-source documentary, RiP: A remix manifesto, from Brett Gaylor. Alas, my bandwidth is not up for the task while I'm on the road. I do plan on finding some way to use this in class next year though. Here's the blurb from the website:

In RiP: A remix manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.

The film’s central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy? Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, Brazil’s Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow are also along for the ride.

A participatory media experiment, from day one, Brett shares his raw footage at opensourcecinema.org, for anyone to remix. This movie-as-mash-up method allows these remixes to become an integral part of the film. With RiP: A remix manifesto, Gaylor and Girl Talk sound an urgent alarm and draw the lines of battle.

Which side of the ideas war are you on?

Digital Things

N Pepperell and Jodi left some useful comments for me on the Useful Thing post below, including one simple suggestion to try the term "digital thing" in place of "digital commodity" when needed. I like simple.

I've been writing a little on exchange-value this week and came to Marx's list of commodities in his section on the "Total or Expanded Form of Value." It goes like this:

z commodity A = u commodity B or = v commodity C or = w commodity D or = x commodity E or = etc.

20 yards of linen = 1 coat or = 10 lb. tea or = 40 lb. coffee or = 1 quarter of corn or = 2 ounces of gold or = ½ ton of iron or = etc.

Now I want a list of some digital things that might be at home on an updated list of digital exchange-values. Here is what I have so far:

20 mp3s = 1 ebook or = 2 weeks of DSL service or = 10 weeks of WSJ online or = an 80 minute Skype call to Azerbaijan or = 1 knickknack from eBay or = one month of WoW or = etc.

What other kinds of digital things should be on the list? Tell me more.

A Useful Thing

I've been working steadily on the manuscript on digital commodities. It was far from obvious to me that travel would really be compatible with writing, but so far I've been pleasantly surprised. In spite of, or maybe because of, the vagaries of meals, laundry, shopping, taxis, water, heat, humidity, bugs and all the other unexpected tedium and adventure that travel brings, I have been writing steadily.

I've run afoul of one passage in Marx, though, that is troubling me. So I'm going to post the passage here along with some thoughts in the hopes that some kind readers may donate a comment or two to help nudge me along in the right direction.

The passage is from the end of the first section of Chapter One of Capital, Volume I where Marx writes:

A thing can be useful, and a product of human labour, without being a commodity. He who satisfies his own need with the product of his own labour admittedly creates use-values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use-values, but use-values for others, social use-values (And not merely for others. The medieval peasant produced a corn-rent for the feudal lord and a corn-tithe for the priest; but neither the corn-rent nor the corn-tithe became commodities simply by being produced for others. In order to become a commodity, the product must be transferred to the other person, for whom it serves as a use-value, through the medium of exchange). (131)

My aim is to write about the ways digital commodities (like an mp3 song for example) fail to fit easily within the boundaries of commodity production as they are usually drawn and then use this as a way to approach some of the recent haggling over things like digital copyright and online piracy. This passage seems directly relevant. Yet it also seems to run the danger of derailing the whole project by defining digital commodities as outside of the bounds of commodity production from the very outset. I would like a graceful way to discuss this bind.

What I think I need to say here, only in clear and persuasive language, is that: Digital commodities always run the risk of no longer being commodities because they always carry with them the possibility of changing hands in ways other than by exchange on the market. Digital commodities get spread by peer-to-peer networks, or emailed, downloaded, or given away freely online in any number of other ways. In each of these cases the digital commodity remains a useful product of human labor, but when spread outside of market exchange it no longer functions as a commodity. It no longer serves to accumulate surplus-value for capital.

The place where I balk is where I find myself writing that "digital commodities" cease to be "commodities." This seems unnecessarily ugly to me. Perhaps I'm just being too squeamish though. Marxian theory can surely accommodate yet one more awkward bit of prose. Or perhaps there's some other mistake I'm making here that I'm not seeing.

Part of the trouble I'm having may simply lie in the parenthetical. It was inserted by Engels later on and sometimes I find his helpful comments less than helpful. However, his addition is certainly right, so I really ought to be able to accommodate his feudalism example too.

Enough for now. Comments welcome.

Our Digital Archive

This is from an interesting article in the recent New York Review of Books:

Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly—a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information. Google has no serious competitors. Microsoft dropped its major program to digitize books several months ago, and other enterprises like the Open Knowledge Commons (formerly the Open Content Alliance) and the Internet Archive are minute and ineffective in comparison with Google. Google alone has the wealth to digitize on a massive scale. And having settled with the authors and publishers, it can exploit its financial power from within a protective legal barrier; for the class action suit covers the entire class of authors and publishers. No new entrepreneurs will be able to digitize books within that fenced-off territory, even if they could afford it, because they would have to fight the copyright battles all over again. If the settlement is upheld by the court, only Google will be protected from copyright liability.

Basically, the issue is that Google has won a monopoly on all digitized books and articles because they had the deep pockets to weather a gigantic class-action suit representing all the copyright owners. No one else on the horizon has the resources to replicate either the technical feat of digitizing our print archive, or the legal feat of settling with all copyright holders. Sadly, this massive privatization of our print heritage has unfolded this way because current copyright law has extended the copyrights for everything published in almost a century -- and not just for the small amount of things which stay in print that long. Nothing passes into the public domain any longer. This terribly short-sighted public policy has now inadvertently created a mammoth new monopoly which may not be easily undone. It is an unfortunate way to have dealt with our digital heritage. One can imagine much better ways to set public policy.

Not the Daily Show

Here's a wonderful video from the Daily Show writers about the current writers strike:

Digital Fetishism

Rough Theory has continued the thread on Marx and digital commodities with a response to my previous post and writes:

I agree with the main point here - I see nothing in digital commodities that is different in terms of the role they play within capitalist reproduction to other sorts of commodities (this doesn’t of course mean that new technologies can’t introduce novel potentials for the development of new forms of subjectivity, embodied relationships, etc., but it does mean that there is nothing intrinsically non-capitalist about the new technologies). I tend, though, to describe Marx’s strategic intention slightly differently (and this may just be a matter of phrasing and emphasis). The emphasis in the passage above seems to be on the fetish as something that hides or obscures - and therefore as something Marx’s critique is trying to strip away, in order to reveal the underlying reality beneath - in this case, the reality that, in spite of the growth of technological potentials, human labour remains central.

I tend - and this difference is somewhat slight, but has some important implications - instead to present Marx’s argument about the fetish as part of an attempt to pose the question of why human labour should remain important, given the hypertrophic development of new technologies and the increases in productivity that are structural tendencies within capitalist development. Rather than simply trying to reveal the centrality of labour, Marx is, I think, trying to foreground precisely how irrational it is that human labour should remain central - trying to nudge us in the direction of realising that there is no material reason for this centrality - that material production could quite comfortably shift to something ever-more technologically mediated, and ever-less dependent on the expenditure of human labour. So: yes, on one level he is drawing attention to the human labour that continues to be required - but with the strategic intent of suggesting that this requirement is essentially bizarre - that it is “social”, that it is arbitrary - and, therefore, that it can be transformed without a regression back to premodern levels of material wealth.

I'm also never very satisfied with pitching the fetishism riff as one of concealment, although that strand is certainly present in Marx. Here's yet another way to shift that emphasis that may be more compatible with the point being pursued above by Rough Theory.

Under capitalism, value takes the form of a single, homogenous, social substance: labor. It is quite literally the only thing that capital can value. Capital lives on a monotonous diet of dead labor unlevened by any other supplemental concerns or desires. And for capital more is always better, so the more dead labor capital can accumulate in the form of either commodities or money the better for capital. However, it is only within capitalism that value takes on such a limited form.

We can imagine a splendid array of things to value: beauty, social justice, clean air, happy children, dance music, baseball, rowdy sex, tasty food, great literature, good booze. For capital, these are only every use-values that become interesting only in so far as they may also be bearers of value. Baseball and booze have been successfully shaped into commodities that have value for capital -- clean air and social justice ... not so much. For Marx, the end of capital would also mean the end of labor as the sole value that trumps all other values.

Marx is certainly a fan of technology as something which sets the stage for capital's end through creating the ability to meet our material needs with ever less necessary labor. This could certainly include digital technologies which currently produce such an embarrassing abundance of music and videos that capital has to try to recreate scarcity through legal and electronic counter-measures. However, this is where our current difficulty lies. Simply because we find many things to value online other than the efficiency of labor, this doesn't mean that capital shares our enthusiasms.

mmmm... Marx!

Rough Theory has a tasty recent post on Marx, technology, and the labor theory of value. The post begins:

I’ve read several works recently that argue that Marx’s labour theory of value, while appropriate for the period in which it was written, now needs to be updated to account for the role of technology in the production of wealth. I have no problem with the general notion that, in significant respects, Marx’s argument remains bound to the 19th century, but I can’t help but find this particular notion of what is outdated in Marx’s argument somewhat odd.

I share this sense of oddity and I'm often disturbed when I see discussions of the internet and of digital commodity production used as examples of a new mode of production that exceeds the bounds of the labor theory of value described by Marx. I touched on this recently in the exchange on The Labor Theory of Blogging arguing that blogging could be viewed as another form of unwaged labor, like housework or schoolwork, and so still functions as labor for capital.

Marx devotes the longest chapter in Capital, Volume I to the topic of "Machinery" precisely in order to explain capitalism's enthusiasm for large-scale mechanization in terms other than the highly suspect utopian notions of labor-saving devices being used to free workers from the need to toil. For Marx, machinery as used by capital is one of its most ingenious and devious strategies for extracting ever greater quantities of surplus-labor from workers. Digital machines are no different. Capital loves computers because they make workers more productive, cheapening commodities in general, and cheapening the commodity of labor-power in particular. Thus, allowing workers to donate an ever greater share of their labor time to capital for free.

That work resulting in the production of digital commodities strikes us as so different from work that produces other sorts of commodities is perhaps simply the latest version of the ability of the commodity form to dazzle us that Marx describes as the "fetishism of commodities."

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour. It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was.

Digital commodities seem even more clever than wooden tables, and evolve out of their computerized brains ideas yet more grotesque. They seem to take on a life of their own -- they move, grow, replicate, spawn, and evolve -- and so hide and obscure the human labor they embody.

Thinkingman's Dead

Steve Gimbel over at Philosophers' Playground has a new edited collection out, The Grateful Dead and Philosophy. In addition to just being way cool, the book also has an essay on the Dead, taping, digital commodities, and intellectual property rights. I'm going to have to get a copy soon.

the question about the relation between authorship and ownership -- which is quite similar to a discussion between Dead guitarist Bob Weir and Dead lyricist and Weir's longtime friend (and partner in crime back in their boarding school days) John Perry Barlow. Barlow has gone on to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization dedicated to protecting on-line access to information. One of the revolutions fomented by the Dead was their approach to intellectual property and McDaniel College philosopher Peter Bradley has a wonderful essay in the book discussing the Dead tapers' ethic and considering whether it should be used as the basis for a new approach to intellectual property.

Desiring Blog Production

This post is in response to a comment below from jreeve as well as to a recent post from Decoys on the continuing discussion of the labor theory of blogging begun on I cite.

jreeve writes:

When I read my kids Sesame Street books, they are also getting an advertisement for Big Bird. This inclusion or citation is a big part of the value of those products: the value of a Big Bird doll as greater than that of a stuffed yellow bird is created not by some inherent goodness of the product but rather by the fact I have developed Big Bird as a significant character for my children.

This seems right to me. It's very hard to avoid participating in the corporate marketing aimed at ourselves and our kids. One of the very first words of my youngest was "Picachu" – which was disturbing for her marxist dad on any number of levels. Asking why kids desire Big Bird or Picachu, though, isn't so far removed from asking Wilhelm Reich's question of why people desire fascism? The question isn't one of value, though, but of use-value. Why do we want the particular things we want? Why do these things come to have a use-value for us? Marx writes:

A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference.

Marx writes very little about how use-value becomes attached to one thing rather than another. The question of why we desire the things we do isn't one that Marx addresses directly since for Marx's discussion of value, the particular use-value involved "makes no difference." This is one reason for so much later interest in various Freudian supplements to Marx as a way to approach this question of desire. From here, it's only a short step to discussions of Deleuze and Guattari's desiring-production or Zizek's Lacanian riffs. The advertising and branding that capital engages in today is focused on shaping and producing consumer desires for what capital is selling.

Decoyist writes:

Should the value of blogging be measured in economic terms? As L.P. shows, it can be, but as L.P.’s links also show, it can be seen in other terms. Blogging is economically highly unprofitable without returns from other quarters; given this, one might look to Hegelian recognition, were this to offer much profitability itself in the small circles it operates in; alternatively, the blogger might seek to resist the global order in statements that represent their subjectivity in performativity.

What is it that gets a blogger out of bed in the morning? All of the above and none of the above! It is a question of priorities, caprice. It is difficult for one motivation alone to overshadow all other others without extraordinary discharge of energy, a wastefulness lurking where economy (of whatever kind) imposes – no expenditure without loss. The blogger, in considering economic imperatives, embraces the uneconomical.

This also seems right to me, except that what the blogger embraces might better be understood as a variety of different use-values for blogging, including even, its uselessness. What a blogger gets out of his or her blog isn't the same thing as what capital gets out of that blog. This is another way to describe the difference between use-value (the thing workers desire) and value (the thing capital desires). Use-value is always very malleable and the production of new and different use-values is always possible within capital. Capital is extremely tolerant of these innovations in use-value. In fact, capital almost never cares what we use something for as long as we still buy it, and the more different use-values the better since each use-value brings along with it the possibility of a new commodity to sell.

Capital makes no such concessions when it comes to value. While you and I may be able to imagine finding value in many different things – beauty, love, wit, recognition, or cool – capital can only ever value a single thing: labor. The more labor something takes to produce, the more value it has. Capital is not subtle or flexible on this point and capital's hunger for value can't be sated by offering up some substitute source of value. Capital lives on a steady and monotonous diet of dead labor alone. And while you and I may find many different and wondrous use-values for a commodity, capital sees every commodity through its monochromatic lens of labor-time only. Thus, from capital's perspective the value of blogging lays not in the variety of uses the consumers and producers find for their blogs. For capital, blogs can only have value in that the labor put into them helps to produce and reproduce a commodity, in this case, the commodity of labor-power itself. Even the dreams discussed by Decoyist have a place in this production of labor-power. One can't escape working for capital even in sleep, and in so far as our dreams are part of the production and reproduction of ourselves as labor-power for capital they also have value for capital.

jreeve continues:

To push this onto blogging, can't the same be true about the mechanism behind discussing some film or book? Isn't a blog about the films 300 an ad for the film?Is it possible to think of the labor of blogging as creating that kind of value, or are these narratives foreign to Marxism as it stands now?

This also fits with capital's more recent focus on marketing and advertising as ways of shaping and producing consumer desires. Blogs function as consumer produced advertisements for movies and books and certainly capital benefits. This would be yet another facet of the link between blogs and the production of labor-power as desiring-consumers.

The Use-Value of Blogging

I've argued in two previous posts that most blogs are not commodities themselves, but that they are part of the process for producing the commodity labor-power.

Perhaps an example will help.

Consider a parent telling a bedtime story to their child. The bedtime story itself isn't a commodity. No matter how much enjoyment they find in it, no matter how instructive, no matter how much the kid smiles, or how much time and creativity the parent invests in crafting it, the story is not a commodity. It is not produced for exchange and is not a source of surplus-value for capital. However, in so far as the bedtime story is part of the means of subsistence for the child – like breakfast, t-shirts, school, and cable-tv – then the bedtime story too can be understood as part of the useful labor that goes into producing this next generation of labor-power.

Blogs are like bedtime stories. Blogs are most often not commodities produced for exchange, but they are still part of the useful labor that goes into producing and reproducing the commodity of labor-power. And currently, the vast majority of blogging labor pays just as poorly as telling bedtime stories.

This is one story about the relationship between blogging and capital that can be told, but there are certainly others – stories about immaterial labor, attention economies, or Baudrillard and sign-value. And there may be digital commodities other than blogging that require some new and different kinds of stories be told as well.

However, I'm wary of any story that encourages intellectuals see what they do as something other than, or more important than, labor. As a group, we are too susceptible to the flattery. If nothing else, the story told here has the virtue of connecting blogging and intellectual labor with the much less glamorous economy of unpaid housework and childcare.

Productive vs. Unproductive Blogging

This is a continuation of yesterday's post. More on this topic can also be found here, here and here on I cite as well as here on Foucault Is Dead.

Yesterday, in The Labor Theory of Blogging, I argued that most blogs are not themselves commodities because the vast majority of blogs are not produced for exchange. They are not sold on the market. (Let's ignore the possibility for now that I may be working for free for Google and producing this blog as a commodity for them to sell.) However, even given that most blogs aren't themselves commodities, I think it would be a mistake to conclude that commodity production is not still taking place here in the blogosphere as we work together on the collaborative production and distribution of rants, raves, snark, and other useful information.

In the second half of Jodi Dean's post on Productive Labor, she writes:

The early Marx was concerned with alienated labor. Blogging may be unalienated labor. Even when we are sick of it, we chose to blog. We chose to link, to post, to read, to comment. Blogging's value, then, may escape or elude, at least in part, the commodity form. Capitalists don't want us to know this, so they provide us with indicators that point to possibilities of monetarization: page hits, visits, counts, neighborhoods, stats, referrers, totals. Somehow these numbers give us a sense of value. But this is misleading because, again, a different kind of value is produced.

What sort of value? Is it a value of self-knowledge or self-display or even just a momentary sense of self? Is it a value of connection, of hope, or possibility, of the positing others who read and react? How might we best conceive the value of blogging?

I think the claim that "Blogging may be unalienated labor" is perhaps overly optimistic. Alienated labor for Marx describes the process by which capital separates the worker from both the products and process of his or her own labor, from other workers, and even from human life itself. This discussion of alienation is closely tied to Marx's analysis of the commodity form and most importantly to the imposition of that commodity form on ourselves. We are produced as the commodity labor-power and we must then sell ourselves as workers for capital's use. Labor-power is habitually produced and reproduced in order to be alienated and sold for a wage. This brings us back to the question of blogging and commodity production.

The commodity that blogs help to produce and reproduce is that singularly useful and important commodity, labor-power. But to see why this is, we need to look at one of the more unsavory passages in Marx on productive versus unproductive consumption.

In the first section of Chapter 7 in Capital, Volume I, Marx writes:

Labour uses up its material factors, its subject and its instruments, consumes them, and is therefore a process of consumption. Such productive consumption is distinguished from individual consumption by this, that the latter uses up products, as means of subsistence for the living individual; the former, as means whereby alone, labour, the labour-power of the living individual, is enabled to act. The product, therefore, of individual consumption, is the consumer himself; the result of productive consumption, is a product distinct from the consumer.

The distinction Marx introduces here between the productive consumption of capitalist commodity production versus the unproductive consumption of workers and their means of subsistence has been the source of a number of frustrating debates within Marxism. The trouble is that Marx needs to be able to talk about labor-power as itself a commodity that is bought and sold and that has its own distinct process of production – namely, the consumption of the "means of subsistence for the living individual." He seems to undercut this possibility in the passage above.

Be that as it may, if blogging is to be described as a form of productive consumption of labor, then blogging ought to result in the production of a commodity "distinct from the consumer." If blogs themselves were a commodity produced for exchange, then this might be the case. But as we've seen, blogs tend not to fit in this category. There are a few commercially successful blogs out there that are the result of this sort of productive consumption of labor-power that results in the production and sale of a commodity. For the vast majority of us, though, blogging may be more like the unproductive "individual consumption" described by Marx that results in the "consumer himself." That is, we are what blogs help to produce.

On this view, blogging is like all those other so-called unproductive activities we do such as cooking, cleaning, child care, sleeping, reading, dancing, yard work, bowling, therapy, and sex that help to produce and reproduce us as the living, breathing, thinking commodity of labor-power that we are. Blogs that bitch and moan and rant provide a release that allows us as workers to go to work another day. Blogs can also inform, entertain, enlighten, confound, confuse, anger, soothe, and bore. Blogs about cats and hobbies do this. Academic blogs do this too (with perhaps a heavier dose of 'bore' thrown in). They all help produce people who are then ready and willing to alienate the rest of their lives as wage labor. This is why I think the claim for blogging as unalienated labor is too strong. It's not easy to escape the mode of production. And if blogging has become part of our social, cultural and intellectual means of subsistence, then blogging is also part of that individual consumption that produces us as alienated labor.

This is, of course, the negative moment of capitalist production where everything produced by capital functions only for capital. Fortunately, resistance and struggle also always happens. This is where the "value of connection, of hope, or possibility" that Dean writes about can gain a foothold. Here's one formulation of the relationship between blogging and capital I can endorse: blogs are also a site where class struggle occurs. People are very creative at resisting the alienating destinies planned for them by capital. Blogs may be another place where this resistance can grow and spread. And this is not just true of anti-war blogs and academic blogs. Cat blogging too is a part of that struggle over finding new ways to carve out some unalienated space of one's own and craft new strategies against commodification.

I don't think the blogosphere has any special resistance to being colonized and commodified by capital just like so many other areas of our life have been. It's important not to overestimate the radical potential of blogging. But there is also no reason to think that blogging is any more susceptible to capital either. And revolutions always surprise.

The Labor Theory of Blogging

Jodi Dean at I cite has written a wonderful post on blogging and Productive Labor.

... if we think about blogging, about cat blogging and snark and fandom and mommies and hobbiests, we can't help but be struck by the enormous amount of creative, productive labor expended. Think about the hours and hours of labor time. Creating, making..what? Contributions. Contributions to the flow of ideas, opinions, and impressions.

Marx reminds us that the more labor the worker expends, the less the value of his product. I always think of this in terms of the amount of labor in any individual item that comes off a factory assembly line. But, it's also applicable, in a way, to blog posts. The more collective creative labor power goes in to each one, the less the value of each.

Yet, maybe this is the wrong way to put the question. Perhaps what is at stake is a different account of value. Capitalists are working to commodify and monetize blogging--more than it is already for those of us who pay for hosting, high speed internet access, and the hardware. Some get ad revenue. Some try to get subscribers. Some treat blogging as advertising, a way to generate interest in and increase the consumption of a commodity or service. Some are associating blogging with a kind of self-production and marketing. How exactly this can be monetized, other than by selling books about how to blog or how to market oneself by blogging, is still a mystery--kind of like a treasure or the gold the fantasy around which a rush builds. But, maybe all this is mistaken precisely because the value at work is different.

Blogging requires the expenditure of definite quantities of labor-time. Bloggers themselves are well aware of this fact, and of the many hours they sink into blogging rather than other pursuits. Taken as a whole, the blogosphere represents an enormous investment of labor-time, almost all of it unpaid labor with no monetary wage attached. In fact, most bloggers must pay for the privilege of laboring in the blogosphere by purchasing their own computers and internet access, and running the gauntlet of online advertisements. But what is produced by all this labor? Dean speculates that "Contributions" are produced. "Contributions to the flow of ideas, opinions, and impressions." Capital, though, only concerns itself with the production of commodities. What, then, is the connection between the production of these online contributions and the production of commodities?

As others have pointed out in the comments to Dean's post, for Marx, the value of a commodity is in direct proportion to the amount of socially necessary labor-time it takes to produce the commodity. The more labor-time it takes to produce a commodity, the greater its value. However, it's also true that the dynamic of capitalist production always aims at cheapening commodities – at making workers more productive and decreasing the amount of labor-time needed to produce commodities and so decreasing the value of commodities.

Cooperation is one of the important methods described by Marx that capital uses to increase the productivity of labor-power. Cooperation, like the massive cooperative endeavor that is the blogosphere, makes us all more efficient producers of ideas, rants, speculations, conspiracy theories, cat blogs, fan blogs, and snark and so decreases the amount of labor involved in producing our "contributions to the flow of ideas, opinions, and impressions." For better or worse, this cooperation makes us more productive bloviators and bloggers. I am more productive because I have I cite and Limited, Inc. and thousands of other bloggers to draw upon and collaborate with in my blogging. I write faster. I write better. I am read more widely. And because of this increased productivity due to the cooperative nature of blogging, my work has less value. Not less use-value I hope! We all aspire for our writing to be beautiful, useful, entertaining, and enlightening both for ourselves and for others. But it has less value in the marxian sense that it now takes me less time to produce more, and perhaps better, writing and to distribute that writing to a larger audience than ever before. (Perhaps dozens will read this post!) Yet for all this increased productivity, what commodity is being produced?

For Marx, there are two factors every commodity must have. First, it must have a use-value. That is, it has to be useful to someone, somewhere for something. There are probably some blogs that fail this test, but they tend to be abandoned and lonely places. There are certainly some individual blog posts that fail this test – I myself have authored more than one of these. However, blogs themselves are without doubt useful things. Millions of us read them and write them every day. If they weren't useful to us, even if only as therapy or as targets for derision, then we wouldn't spend our time blogging.

Second, every commodity must have a value. That is, it must be the product of human labor. Every blog, even the bad ones, qualify on this count. Even automated spam blogs have this sort of value since somewhere there are people writing the code to create these abominations.

Finally, there is one last feature that every commodity must have according to Marx. To be a commodity, it must be produced for exchange. Simply put, most blogs aren't commodities because they aren't sold. Very few blogs are produced for exchange – whether directly for subscribers, or mediated through advertising revenue, or even indirectly as publicity and advertising for some other product, service, reputation, or brand name. Millions of blogs are not produced for exchange at all. They are produced for own consumption by the author, and are given away freely to others – despite what various copyright laws may pretend.

Blogs themselves, then, are typically not commodities. They have use-value, and value, but since they are not produced for exchange they are not commodities and so not a direct source of surplus-value for capital. The fact that blogging doesn't turn a profit won't come as a huge surprise to most bloggers.

However, there's more to this story. There is a commodity being produced here, it's just not the blogs themselves. What is still needed is a discussion of the always vexed distinction between the productive and unproductive in Marx. I will return to this tomorrow and to the second half of Dean's post.

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Other posts in this series:

• Productive vs. Unproductive Blogging
• The Use-Value of Blogging
• Desiring Blog Production

Second Life and First Year Property Law

First-year law students have been exploring virtual property law in Second Life this semester. I love this. The class has some posts about their project on Terra Nova as well as their own blog.

My summer reading plans include Julian Dibbell's Play Money, so I'm going to enjoy looking back over these law student views on this brave new world of virtual property.

The Fetishism of Digital Commodities and the Secret Thereof

Our friend at Limited, Inc. has been writing about Marx recently and it has inspired me to scribble a few thoughts on the subject of the fetishism of digital commodities. Once the stupefaction induced by end of the semester grading passes, I plan to return this topic again since it will be the focus of my research in the coming months.

The particular aspect of digital commodities I want to explore is the way use-value comes unhinged from exchange-value. In the digital age, you really can have your cake and eat it too. A digital commodity, like your favorite Metallica mp3, can be sold or given away as many times as you like and still be there for you to play again and again. It's like the miracle of the loaves and fishes – consuming without end and always having more to share, sell, or give away. Below are some preliminary thoughts on one aspect of this topic. Comments and suggestions are very welcome.

LI writes in a recent post on the fetishism of the commodity:

The bond between the system and the ideology is not accidental – as we said above, every human system has to explain itself. It won’t work, otherwise. Ideology, then, is a surface phenomena only the way skin is a surface phenomena – try living without it.

I like this imagery of ideology as the living skin of the commodity form. This means it can be peeled away – but not without a lot of blood and screaming. The ideology of capitalist private property is emblazoned on every commodity and reinforced by the uniqueness of every commodity. Even a mass produced item is one of a finite set of identical commodities. In digital commodities, though, there is never a limit to the number of copies. The imagined scarcity that helps enforce the ideology of private property disappears in the case of digital commodities. Stealing becomes an oddly abstract crime if the one you're stealing from still has the property in question. The loss of this one explanation for capitalist private property has occassioned a great deal of screaming about digital "piracy." Pirates are always scary, bloody and lawless. Perhaps it's the commodity form itself and its enclosing ideology of private property that's being tortured and skinned alive by these new-fangled digital pirates.

I'm looking forward to continuing these speculations. But, sadly, there are papers to grade first...