The Self-consuming Commodity: Audiences, Users, and the Riddle of Digital Labor

Abstract

This article reexamines the digital labor debate in light of its inheritance of the “audience commodity” problematic. It argues that prevailing approaches to the problem of digital labor proceed from a crucial misunderstanding of the economic status and function of advertising in general and in the social media industry in particular. To remedy this problem, it offers an analysis of social media systems as market monopolies that organize a self-defeating arms race among their customers. This arms race enables social networking sites (SNS) to extract large price surpluses, effectively exploiting their customers.

Digital labour: an empty signifier?

“…While research exists in this direction (e.g. Van Dijck et al, 2018), particularly in the context of cultural production (Duffy et al, 2019; Nieborg and Poell, 2018), the critical discussion on the relationship between digital platforms and work has had to confront the ‘impasse’ (Kaplan, 2019) around labour, value and social media exploitation that was inherited from the ‘digital labour’ debate. In turn, having to deal with a heavy load of theoretical implications, the ‘digital labour’ debate has been equally unable to make a clear distinction between Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, on the one hand, and the likes of Uber and Deliveroo on the other (albeit with exceptions, such as Srnicek, 2016).…”

“…It is not the purpose of this article to enter into this dispute. Nonetheless, I share Kaplan's (2019) view that this debate has now reached something of an impasse:…”

“…It is not the purpose of this article to enter into this dispute. Nonetheless, I share Kaplan’s (2019) view that this debate has now reached something of an impasse:No agreement has emerged among media theorists on even the most rudimentary questions, such as whether the activity on [social network sites] should count as work [. .…”

“…This results in two related and equally problematic concerns. On the one hand, the popularization of the expression ‘digital labour’ as a generic term significantly weakens the critical dimension originally assigned to its Marxist position, irrespective of its (in fact, highly contested) validity (see Arvidsson and Colleoni, 2012; Fuchs, 2010; Kaplan, 2019; Rigi and Prey, 2015). On the other hand, and perhaps most importantly, a blanket use of the expression ‘digital labour’ signals a new phase in the evolution of the relationship between labour and digital technology, whereby the two terms – digital and labour – are increasingly inseparable.…”

The digital potlatch: The uses of uselessness in the digital economy

“…12 Here is a true, and hence revealing, manifestation of the gift economy: advertisers effectively enact pure, generous expenditure-which is possible precisely because they can have no intention of doing so. The more resources they devote to capturing user attention, the more their very activity renders such attention at once more scarce and less useful (Kaplan, 2019). In effect, then, the ultimate producers of scarcity, together with the resulting premiums, are the customers themselves.…”