Abstract
Capitalism has been undergoing a metamorphosis over the last few decades, resulting in a change of phase from industrial capitalism to cognitive capitalism or informational capitalism. Some instead speak of a movement within capitalism from Fordism to post-Fordism that has changed capital’s regime of accumulation and the regulation of the capitalist system, transforming its reproduction. The profit from openness model, introduced in Chap. 1, emerged as a complement and alternative, both to the ideological opposition and to the practical limitations of the profit from enclosures model. It was greatly inspired by the success of the globally peer-produced Linux operating system and the so-called Web 2.0 in the first years of the new millennium. But, all talk of openness warrant a closer look: openness is often used as a synonym to freedom, but it is not. To be open is to be open for someone else’s freedom to act. The kind of openness that fosters commoning and the building of robust commons is one thing, and the openness that supports interoperability in a capitalist world is another thing. This difference is connected to classical ideologies. The study’s ideology analysis is elaborated in the chapter, followed by a presentation of the contemporary discussion about immaterial and digital labor with all its ramifications. Finally, the concepts of commons, peer production and platform are defined and clarified, before introducing the social actors and flows connected to the profit from openness model.
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Notes
- 1.
For the sake of simplicity, throughout this book the present phase of capitalism will be referred to as cognitive capitalism. This does not necessarily mean that we adhere to the theoretical perspective developed by the authors who coined that term, nor that we reject the insights of authors who label our stage informational capitalism. In our understanding, cognition, communication, knowledge and information is always material, even if it is not always tangible.
- 2.
The fact that these material underpinnings are related to digital technologies must not obscure the fact that technologies do not determine social life more than they are determined by it. A fair account of cognitive capitalism, or any other stage, could not be built exclusively around technology. Politics, axiology, law and so on, are to some extent autonomous, contingent spheres that need to be taken into account to characterize the capitalist totality. Indeed, we reject deterministic narratives, such as those that tend to assume that there is a technological infrastructure which determines a (legal, ideological) superstructure.
- 3.
This path dependency is related to Marx’s theory of formal and real subsumption. Marx here shows how a new dominant social relation, the wage form of capitalism, was applied to traditional production methods, without the latter first being transformed in any sense. Only in the second phase of the transformation process is the production process fundamentally altered and is science systematically applied in the new machine-centered mode of producing (Dyer-Witheford, 1999; Lund, 2017b; Marx , 1975). Social change can initiate transformations in lagging or path-dependent productive forces, but it takes time.
- 4.
There is a distinction between for example gratis and libre open access to scholarly journals and articles. Gratis open access only removes the price barrier for users, whereas libre open access also removes some permission barriers and secures extended use beyond fair use (Suber, 2012, p. 65). There exist different definitions of libre and how much a libre license deviates from traditional copyright. A full copyright enclosure places a lot of restrictions on what you can do with an intellectual work. You cannot for example distribute full-text copies or semantic metadata-enhanced versions, include works in databases and mash-ups, quote long excerpts, translate the texts, or copy the text for indexing or text-mining (Suber, 2012, pp. 73–4). The Creative Commons license suite is but one example of such licenses that secure use beyond fair use.
- 5.
Creative Commons finally included both approaches in their license suite that spans the whole libre spectrum.
- 6.
Naturally, the difference between the profit from openness model and the traditional business of broadcasting companies lies in the origin of the knowledge flows used to attract an audience: in the latter, it comes from professional, better or worse paid workers; in the former, it usually stems from unpaid labor, knowledge and affects.
- 7.
This process could be understood as a new variation of what Marx called primitive accumulation in relation to the first wave of capitalist enclosure of the common lands in England during the sixteenth century (Marx , 1867). In order to understand this expression, we have to take into account capitalism’s outside. Capitalism’s outside represents both a threat and an enabler. Capitalism fears a self-sustained natural economy that does not rely on the market exchange of commodities (Luxemburg, 1951). On the other hand, capitalism can get rid of its inner contradictions as externalities in so-called value dissociation processes (Scholz, 2014), like when reproductive work such as child care is confined to private homes. But, it can also expand into it, enclosing areas that were formerly public and commons-based, like, for example, under neoliberal de-regulation of public institutions, when this is needed to strengthen capital accumulation and avoid internal contradictions (Harvey ref. in Fuchs, 2014). It is this latter strategy, in a digital world exemplified by the expanding copyright regime, that correlates to the notion of primitive accumulation, or as Harvey later rephrased it: accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2005). What “profit for openness” then does is that it disguises its primitive accumulation of unpaid producers’ data, content or source code under various forms of partial openness in hybrid business models combining openness and enclosures in new ways. This is one of the main topics of our research, and it will be developed further throughout this book.
- 8.
Private property’s relation to the more open (vis-à-vis private property) commons is described like this: “We see in Commons, which remain so by Compact, that ‘tis the taking any part of what is common, and removing it out of the state Nature leaves it in, which begins the Property ; without which the Common is of no use. And the taking of this or that part does not depend on the express consent of all the Commoners.” (Locke , 1988, pp. 288–9)
- 9.
Liberalism came into existence with capitalism and first accepted the market as a basic, but unconscious assumption. Class society was a natural thing to the first generation of liberals who thought that any interference with it would hamper productivity. A second generation of social liberal thinkers, though, highlighted the task of protecting the equal liberty of citizens as they saw the deteriorating living conditions of the working class as a threat to property (Macpherson, 1977, s. 1, 30–1, 44). Thinkers like Mill held that the unequal distribution of the products of labor was unjust, but at the same time maintained that the right of private property—through the freedom of acquisition by contract—included the right to what had been produced by someone else. The capitalist principle was not flawed. Social liberalism maintained that a more equitable effective freedom was compatible with increasing enclosures and centralized aggregations of private property, rather than with an opening up of private property enclosures. Mill failed to see that the capitalist market relation enhances any original inequitable distribution by adding value from current labor to capital (Macpherson, 1977, pp. 53–5). Contemporary liberalism still lingers between the original liberal stance and social liberal stances.
- 10.
“The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of non-workers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labor power.” (Marx , 1970)
- 11.
“For the conversion of his money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must meet in the market with the free labourer, free in the double sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale, is short of everything necessary for the realisation of his labour-power.” (Marx , 1887)
- 12.
Moreover, social inequalities do not only limit people’s freedoms, they force people to contribute to their prolongation through a wage system that reproduces them as social beings and as a workforce, enriching the already rich capitalists through capitalism’s accumulation regime. The capitalists’ unrestricted power to act, and laborers’ restricted power to act, leads to social un-freedom (Cohen, 2006, pp. 167–8, 180–1) and expanding enclosures, the opposite of openness for the great majority of citizens.
- 13.
This is done in explicit contrast to Isaiah Berlin’s classical distinction between negative and positive freedom. Berlin explains negative freedom with the question: “What is the area within which the subject—a person or group of persons—is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be without interference by other persons?” This understanding of negative freedom contains both the formal and effective freedom discussed in this text. The latter alternative coincides with the Marxian notion of positive or real freedom that we favor and use in this study, whereas Berlin’s positive freedom is explained with the question: “What, or who, is the source of control of interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?” (Berlin , 1969, pp. 121–2). This question connects freedom to issues of governance, and more or less concludes that socialism is authoritarian in its views on the subject. Marx is said to hold that understanding the world is the same as to be free and that a rational plan for society would allow for the full development of people’s true nature. Communists are said to hold that rational ends and man’s true nature must coincide, implying that for communists a rational state knows the citizens real and authentic needs even if they themselves are not aware of them (Berlin , 1969, pp. 131–2, 142, 146–8). This is more than anything a critique of authoritarian understandings of socialism and of Marx’s writings, but it does not suffice as a critique of socialism and Marxism per se.
The argument for socialism does not need the kind of positive freedom that Berlin criticizes, instead it can be grounded on Berlin’s negative freedom, stressing that “the distribution of freedom in a society depends upon the distribution of property” (Miller, 2006, p. 16). G.A. Cohen makes a claim that the sum of freedom—Berlin’s negative one—in society is not fixed and that certain forms of socialism could “extend freedom more widely” (Miller, 2006, p. 17). Cohen stresses that communal property of household tools would increase tool-using freedom, the range of tools available increases for each member of the community, even if it removes some capitalist freedoms of private property (Cohen, 2006, pp. 173–4).
Berlin ’s distinction, finally, obfuscates the fact that the market sanctioned by the night-watchman state also regulates forms of interference in authoritarian ways, and thus strengthens class society.
Our study’s central concern with the use of openness within business models uses the notions of negative and positive freedom as two different positions within Berlin’s negative freedom, in an effort to highlight different ideological positions taken on openness’ relationship to the freedom of, or right of, private property. The study will therefore treat governance issues as separate from the distinction between formal/negative and real/positive definitions of freedom.
- 14.
Interestingly, though, whereas the liberal tradition focuses on the relation between the individual/market and the state, the socialist tradition actually includes more variation than first thought of. Anarchism has, for example, historically taken both socialist and communist stances in relation to positive and effective forms of freedoms. The term libertarian socialism was coined by Rudolf Rocker in the 1920s (Lund, 2001). This tradition comes close to an older political tradition of republicanism, which also has bearings on the discussion of the relationship between the open and the free.
- 15.
Republicanism has, due to its long history dating back to both Cicero and Machiavelli (and being older than both liberalism and Marxism), often been related to the question of the king. The republican state has therefore been in more focus than other forms of governance. The opposite of freedom in the tradition is domination and living in servitude to another person; the free man as against the servus or slave (Gaus, Courtland, & Schmidtz, 2015). The republican state’s mission is to guarantee that no agent has arbitrary powers over any citizen, and proposes an equal distribution of power so that each person is empowered to counteract other persons’ power to arbitrarily interfere with her activity (Philip Pettit, 1997, p. 67 cf Gaus et al., 2015). Republicanism connects in many ways to contemporary discourses on commons and their forms of governance.
- 16.
- 17.
GPL and FSF are not formally against the profit-making of capitalist actors, but demand that the licensed code on which business relies is freely available to everyone, even to the company’s competitors.
- 18.
Academics like Laclau and Mouffe deny this distinction and contend that the non-discursive practices are structured on the discursive ones. Eagleton’s short reply to this is that it very well could be true, but that a practice, as a matter of fact, is a practice rather than a discourse. Homogenizing practices obscure them. “A way of understanding an object is simply projected into the object itself, in a familiar idealist move. In notably academicist style, the contemplative analysis of a practice suddenly reappears as its very essence” (Eagleton , 2007, p. 219)
- 19.
Certainly, the theories we will discuss here share a common ground: that of critical theory. As such, they reject the body of techno-optimistic mainstream and management literature, which describes the unpaid activities undertaken by social actors—more specifically produsers, contribusers and users, see 2.6—on “profit from openness”—platforms in a laudatory way (Anderson, 2009; Bruns, 2008; Leadbeater, 2007; Shirky, 2008; Tapscott & Williams, 2007). These mainstream authors offered a warm welcome to these gratuitous contributions, while generally avoiding referring to them as labor or even work—let alone discussing profits, rent or exploitation. Allmer et al. (2015) provide a clear argument against this kind of discourse:
Celebratory and often other non-critical approaches also lack: (a) an in-depth historical awareness, which leads them to interpret social changes in terms of complete discontinuity; (b) a holistic framework that would enable them to analyse and interpret social phenomena as parts of social totality, because it is always the wider context that influences their development and role in society, which means they cannot be analysed in isolation (c) a focus on contradictions/antagonisms and power relations which are entrenched in capitalist social relations. Ignoring these basic issues leads celebratory approaches to interpret the existing social relations as “the best of all possible worlds”, because they also lack (d) a real normative underpinning, while they simultaneously take for granted specific social formations such as capitalist market or predominance of commodity exchange. (Allmer et al., 2015, pp. 155–6)
- 20.
- 21.
A third category was added in Empire, related to the transformation of industrial production by digital technologies. (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. 293). It seems that the latter is connected to the first category of Lazaratto’s proposal (“informational content”), while the former are loosely connected with the second (“cultural content”).
- 22.
In turn, Andrejevic (2013) takes on Terranova’s concept, and advances the idea of free estranged labor to highlight not only the unpaid labor carried out by produsers, contribusers and users but also the estrangement and alienation related to the loss of control of their products.
- 23.
- 24.
Definitions from Autonomist authors who use the notion of digital labor narrow the scope of the concept exclusively to non-waged informational activities. For instance, they define digital labor “as the set of human activities realized outside of working hours, captured by platform-based business models and transformed into value in the form of big data” (Fumagalli et al., 2018, p. 13).
- 25.
Fumagalli et al. suggest a very different distinction between digital labor and digital work, as suggested in the previous footnote. For the sake of conciseness we are not going to discuss it here, but suffice to say that it limits digital labor to informational activities and uses the term digital work for physical activities mediated by Internet platforms (like Uber). Cfr. Fumagalli et al. (2018).
- 26.
“Productive activities” is here used with a focus on the different forms of production of concrete use values.
- 27.
How are anthropological and transhistorical phenomena like playing and working related to historical capitalism? Lund concludes that play is more of a threat to capitalist social relations in different combinations with work than playing alone:
Play in itself does not appear as revolutionary or threatening in relationship to capitalism, while working is to a greater extent. (…). It is first in combinations such as workplay and playwork that playing contributes to the development of attractive forms of production that compete with capitalism. Some capitalist companies also want more play and social interaction within the commons-based production to interact with, while they have problems with the serious and competitive gravity in working. (Lund, 2017b, p. 325)
- 28.
On the exploitation-rent debate, and despite there being some differences regarding the structure and the authors discussed, we highly recommend a quite similar but deeper systematization elaborated by Allmer et al. (2015).
- 29.
Vercellone’s idea of rent associated with enclosures, both at the origins of capitalism and in the current phase—that is, as a condition and as a developing process—resembles the approach of authors such as Luxemburg, Harvey and others regarding the concept of primitive accumulation. Specifically, primitive accumulation has been proposed by Böhm, Land, and Beverungen (2012) in relation to the profit from openness business model and from a rent approach.
- 30.
Moulier-Boutang asserts that knowledge plays a particularly important role in this phase of capitalism (which names the phase and characterizes a new form of exploitation), whereas for cognitive materialism, knowledge was crucial in all phases, and different forms of exploitation were all relevant. More importantly, Moulier-Boutang and the cognitive capitalism approach consider that labor, specifically living labor, is the main category for a humanist approach. For cognitive materialism, knowledge is the main category, in a post-humanist approach.
- 31.
The three modalities are not mutually exclusive, but rather two or three of them act (sometimes in consort) in many productive processes simultaneously. As has been mentioned, exploitation implies the existence of a productive process, but not necessarily a labor process. The following characterization is based on Zukerfeld (2017c).
- 32.
Hardt and Negri speak of “the common” rather than the commons. The common focuses on the sociality given to humans as part of their nature. The common world is continually producing and expanding through collective praxis that as phenomenon is distributed throughout society (Dyer-Witheford, 1999, 2010; Hardt & Negri, 2009; Lund, 2017b). This “common” is thus distributed as a potentiality over the whole of capitalist society, rather than being a limited project as commons are usually understood. The commons’ political position between the state and the market is affected by this, but the two different perspectives see different foundations for political strategies.
- 33.
This position comes close to Hardt and Negri’s: “The common is thus in the paradoxical position as being a ground or presupposition that is also the result of the process” (Hardt & Negri, 2009, pp. 122–3).
- 34.
Paul Samuelson spoke of rival or non-rival character instead, but Ostrom maintained that people could be rivals but not goods. She instead preferred the terms subtractability and non-subtractability (Ostrom & Ostrom, 1977).
- 35.
Hess and Ostrom use the character of the goods as a departure point for their research on the commons, rather than using, for example, the socially situated interactions and communications that Hardt and Negri assume are given by nature to humanity and use in their discussion of “the common”. We can take the following quote as an example of Hess and Ostrom’s perspective:
Most of the ‘commons’ characteristics of knowledge and information have developed from the effects of new technologies … Before the digital era, types of knowledge commons were limited to libraries and archives. Only when vast amounts of knowledge began to be digitally distributed (after the development of the World Wide Web in 1992) did it take on more and more characteristics of commons and commons dilemmas. (Hess & Ostrom, 2007a, p. 46)
Hess and Ostrom focus on goods rather than on the social interaction behind knowledge production, which is a generic human capability. A possible explanation for this is that, since the 1970s Ostrom has been focused on commons based on material and tangible resource systems. Anyway, this perspective relates to Open Source Initiative’s and the permissive licenses’ technical focus on interoperability (the software good), instead of the ethical and social building of cooperation, solidarity and community (see the section on open and free).
- 36.
Hardin claimed that the commons was historically abandoned because of the increase in population, and only worked for low-intensity populations. First it was abandoned for food gathering, at a second stage it was abandoned for waste disposal, and in 1968, he thought that the spectrum of public airwaves was being emptied by mindless music. To him, individuals locked-up within the logic of the commons, lacked private enclosures and mutual restrictions, and were only free to bring ruin onto society (Hardin, 1968).
- 37.
This is so regardless of whether such a person, an original creator, ever really existed. Doing science is, for example, sometimes likened with standing on the shoulders of giants, to quote Isaac Newton. We are all appropriating each other’s ideas and phrases in daily popular communications as well as in scientific communication. These communications always exist in a social context. Copyright, it could be said, is masking every text or art work as something unique by focusing on added peripheral and rhetorical adornments to ideas and general themes that the author and artist has borrowed or “stolen” (M. Rose, 1993). The line between an intellectual work and idea is not easy to draw. Ideas belong to us all, but with the help of the distinction between ideas and works, Boyle contends that copyright provides a philosophical legitimization for enclosing the commons by granting all the rights to an author who is building his or her work on public or common resources (James Boyle c.f., Bollier, 2003, p. 122)
- 38.
This outside of capitalism is of great importance for the functioning of the inside of capitalism. The outside can help to alleviate the effects of capitalism’s inner contradictions as well as becoming a big threat to capitalism if it develops into a self-sustained system (Lund, 2017a).
- 39.
- 40.
Boyle makes this point against Jessica Litman’s definition of the public domain as a commons (Boyle, 2007). Other scholars have stressed that the public domain could also be understood in a different political light as the default rather than the exception in terms of the regulation of property regimes in relation to intellectual works. Halbert takes Carol M. Rose’s distinction between organized and unorganized publics as a starting point for such an argument. A government is an organized public that to some extent acts like a private property owner. The public, in the form of the government, is an owner that speaks with one voice about its property. The unorganized public is society itself. Rights are given, both in the USA as well as in the common law of the UK, to this unorganized entity (Rose, 1994). Halbert points out that: “[i]f, as common law suggests, there are property rights held in common by an unorganized public, these rights bypass the government’s regulatory abilities. The unorganized public, in other words, as an ‘owner’ of property, threatens the state because it undermines the assertion that the government speaks for the public” (Halbert, 2005, p. 18). Halbert therefore claims that Rose’s distinction clarifies the property dimension related to copyright and the public domain. In the organized public, we find all the copyrighted property that the state protects, and in the unorganized public we find the public domain. The public becomes the starting point in this perspective, rather than the private copyright. In the unorganized public, with its property rights, the public domain acquires a more collective and communal form of property. This perspective also gives more importance to fair use rights than to private copyright (Halbert, 2005). This perspective has many merits, but has many similarities with Hardt and Negri’s use of “the common”, whereas we use the commons in more concrete ways—like Boyle, but also like Ostrom and De Angelis—in this study.
- 41.
This nuanced way of perceiving the configurations of different commons’ allocations of different rights and powers to act, runs the risk of making critical judgments about the overall character of a certain commons. Each commons has to be seen as a totality, even if it is made up of a different configuration of separate rights that are allocated in different ways. A commons, to keep on being a commons, leans toward the communal side or pole of things. One interesting question revolves around how many private ingredients a commons can contain and keep on being a commons. Berry and Moss, for example, criticize the Creative Commons licenses for lacking commons or communal features: “[T]he Creative commons network provides only a simulacrum of a commons. It is a commons without commonalty. Under the name of the commons, we actually have a privatized, individuated and dispersed collection of objects and resources that subsist in a technical-legal space of confusing and differential legal restrictions, ownership rights and permissions. The Creative Commons network might enable sharing of culture goods and resources amongst possessive individuals and groups. But these goods are neither really shared in common, nor owned in common, nor accountable to the common itself.” (Berry & Moss, n.d.) This critique of course misses the point that Creative Commons is just an enabler, not a community of practice, but it is relevant, as libre licenses are of fundamental importance for the workings of the commons-based peer production in knowledge commons like Wikipedia. Actually, in the case of knowledge commons the libre license, and the production conditions it creates, tilts the whole commons to the communal side in a crucial way.
- 42.
In this text we prefer peer production over the concept of collaborative production that has also been compared to centralization and commercial purposes (Zukerfeld, 2010). Peer production is preferred, as it more clearly holds connotations about the participants being equals in the production.
- 43.
- 44.
Creative Commons also presents you with the option of choosing a Share-Alike license with an added condition of non-commerciality (BY-SA-NC ).
- 45.
Free and open source software (FOSS) is positioned right at the center of cognitive capitalism. From the late 1990s FOSS-movements have received increasing attention from firms like IBM, Novell, Hewlett Packard, Oracle and Sun Microsystems. 40% of FOSS developers were paid wages in 2009 (Barron, 2013; Bauwens, 2009; Dafermos & Söderberg, 2009). Besides paying wages, the firms donate, provide legal advice, offer consultancy services, equipment and training. Strategic concerns are involved and, for example, IBM, which failed to produce an operating system that could compete with Microsoft, realized that they could earn more money on services and hardware from the sales of Linux distributions, at the same time as they improved the image of their brand and undercut the competitors charging for their own operating systems. From this, Barron points to the centrality of conventional trademark rights for FOSS business models. According to her, FOSS-project leaders and foundations regularly register trademarks to coordinate the monetizing on their projects’ reputations. The trademarks can be licensed to companies that want to have their goods and services associated with the project in return for royalties. Barron concludes that “the true secret of FOSS enterprises’ success in attracting and retaining expert volunteers is attribution” (Barron, 2013, p. 614). On the other hand, commercial enterprises can also manipulate peer production projects. Paid staff can establish a “developer community as a firm’s ‘complementary’ (as distinct from its core) assets” and “legitimize the firm’s commercial exploitation of project outputs” (Barron, 2013, p. 618). The relation of FOSS to capitalism will be discussed further in the chapter on Red Hat.
The position of peer-produced encyclopedias in cognitive capitalism is obviously different from software programs and programming. But hired employees at the non-commercial Wikimedia Foundation (that runs the platforms and administration of Wikipedia) can still be counted in the hundreds and depends more on many small donations from private individuals (Bauwens, 2009; Dafermos & Söderberg, 2009; Lund & Venäläinen, 2016). On the other hand, the financial model with many small donations comes with the twist that the non-commerciality of the project has to be maintained to keep the donations coming (Lund & Venäläinen, 2016).
- 46.
Both schemata are ideal types in the Weberian sense ([1905] 2002).
- 47.
Produsers refers to social actors that produce and use informational goods. We will explain and discuss this concept in detail below.
- 48.
This is similar to Srnicek’s “product platform”, although our focus is not on the product, but on the capitalist business model which depends on enclosures, that is, property, mainly intellectual property, but also physical property.
- 49.
- 50.
We use the term “club” (for both for-profit club platforms and non-profit club platforms) in a slightly different sense than the one used by mainstream economics when referring to “club goods”. We are not referring here to goods that present a limited physical capacity (i.e. so-called rival or high subtractability goods such as swimming pools, highways, fisheries), but to clubs for which the exclusion originates in reasons that are not physical. On the mainstream theory of club goods, see Cornes and Sandler (1996) and for a different angle, Hess and Ostrom (2003).
- 51.
The “about” section of BeautifulPeople reads:
BeautifulPeople has been described as an “elite online club, where every member works the door”. BeautifulPeople is the first community of its kind. To become a member, applicants are required to be voted in by existing members of the opposite sex. Members rate new applicants over a 48 hour period based on whether or not they find the applicant ‘beautiful’. Should applicants secure enough positive votes from members, they will be granted membership to the BeautifulPeople community. (Beatifulpeople.com/about, Accessed 3/9/2018)
- 52.
For the sake of conciseness, here we have only included social actors directly involved in the productive processes that characterize the profit from openness business model. However, we follow Fuchs (2014) in recognizing that the capitalist mode of production acts as a totality, and therefore, slave and other manual labor related to mineral extraction in Africa and assemblage of digital technologies in Asia, among other kinds of labor, are necessary conditions for understanding the profit from openness business model and cognitive capitalism as a dialectical totality.
- 53.
Advertisers refer to companies that pay for displaying ads. However, this category also includes the labor performed by workers hired or outsourced by this kind of firm.
- 54.
We have decided to use the term produsers instead of the usual concept of prosumers . To justify this decision we need to (i) develop a critique of the concept of prosumer and (ii) introduce the concept of produser.
The term prosumer was probably coined by Alvin Toffler (Toffler, 1980, p. 265) and it is still widely used in the field of management (Tapscott & Williams, 2007). Its optimistic appeal has been subverted by critical theorists (Fuchs, 2013; Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010). However, we still find two kinds of theoretical limitations. Both are related to the notion of consumption (that is merged with production in the aforementioned term). On the one hand, consumption within capitalism means to buy something. However, we cannot for the most part say that the so-called Internet prosumers buy something in a technical sense. It can be argued that the prosumer pays for the free content with their attention, productive activities or data traces, but this is a notion that should be challenged. First of all, it portrays the relationship between the so-called prosumer and the platform-owner as equal market actors. Secondly, it gives the impression that money is changing hands in this transaction, when actually this happens in a later phase between the platform-owner and the advertiser (or mediated by an advertising company). On the other hand, and beyond capitalist social relations, consumption refers to using something so that the thing ceases to exist. So consumption is strongly associated with so-called rival goods, and specifically to physical goods. You can consume an apple, but you cannot consume an idea. Indeed, this notion of consumption does not seem particularly valid when it comes to knowledge commons or digital milieus, where file reproduction costs are negligible. Thus, it is at least debatable to say that knowledge, and specifically informational goods are consumed in all cases, as they do not cease to exist, whereas it seems quite appropriate to say that they are always used.
In sum, both reasons point to rejecting the notion of the prosumer: consumption is not adequate to describe the usage of informational goods, especially when this usage occurs outside capitalist relations or without monetary exchanges. Thus we are going to resort to the notion of consumption only to refer to the ingestion of ads by users. And, more importantly, we will use the concept of produsers instead of that of prosumers.
The concept of produsers was coined by Axel Bruns (2008), however, we use it here in a sense that differs from the one developed by Bruns, who (like Benkler, 2006; Shirky, 2008 and authors that used the concept of prosumers) wanted to challenge the strict division between producers and users. Specifically, he considered that in the context of Internet platforms there are no such things as production and usage, but only produsage; that is, the mix between the two.
Nonetheless, this approach has an ideological inner flaw: as it dissolves the differences between production and usage, it fails to distinguish that there are different shares of production and usage that characterize at least three different kinds of social actors: users, contribusers and produsers, as we shall discuss immediately. Some of them just use the platforms, giving away their data in exchange, others contribute with comments and sharing, while at the other end of the spectrum, some actors produce original and elaborate works of authorship for which they might arguably deserve more substantial compensation, even according to capitalist law. This failure functions ideologically first and foremost because it helps commercial platforms to neglect the value that some produsers hand over to them. Secondly, produsage in its original formulation fails to notice that in many (if not most) cases users are ad consuming audiences instead of active and creative produsers. Indeed, a mixture of production and usage does exist, but a one-size-fits-all concept misses the point; at least three categories should be distinguished. Finally, the original version of produsage pays no attention to the role wage labor plays in the platform-owner corporation or content developer-corporation plays in developing content. Produsage is important, but it is not sufficient to explain how platforms work. Therefore, produsers might be a powerful concept, if accompanied with a typology of other social actors. This is what we have tried to achieve.
- 55.
What is an original informational work? The three concepts could be grasped by common sense, though its definition might be quite complex. For the purposes of this book, informational refers of course to content that is materialized as digital information. In turn, original refers to a bare minimum of creativity and independent conception—in the sense that some copyright laws and rulings establish. Remarkably, work is the hardest concept to define. Most copyright laws and international treaties lack a definition of work, although this notion is the bedrock of every copyright system (Hughes, 2005). Judges define works through “framing”, zooming in or zooming out, but without establishing general universal rules or tests to decide what is a work (and qualifies for a copyright) and what is not. However, as Hughes convincingly argues, size matters. There is a certain minimum extension—which varies depending on the field referred to—that is required for a fixed informational and even original expression to be considered a work (Hughes, 2005).
- 56.
For example, a garage band that uploads their videos onto YouTube fits into the category of commercial produsers, even if they do not receive a single penny at that moment, as their goal is to eventually receive checks, sell concert tickets and so on. On the other hand, people that upload videos of, let’s say, a family party, are non-commercial produsers, as they share original content, but they do not expect any present or future economic returns from their activity.
- 57.
We advance here the concept of contribusers in order to conceptualize the many social actors that in several platforms produce more than just using content, ads and relinquishing their personal data, but less than complete works of authorship. Bruns’ (2008) examples regarding Wikipedia and other platforms are extremely useful to appraise the value of contributions that are too small to fit what is usually recognized as a work in copyright law. The notion of contribution aptly describes how Wikipedians and others see their collaborations, and we added the notion of usage to describe that these actors not only contribute but also use informational goods.
- 58.
There is an open debate regarding whether what produsers, contribusers and users do should be called productive or unproductive labor, or even if it should be called labor at all. We will discuss this topic below. In any case, it seems clear that in order to characterize their productive activities it is necessary to move beyond the classic production-consumption dichotomy.
- 59.
Detailed information can be found in the European Commission General Data Protection Regulation, articles 2, 4(1) and (5) and Recitals (14), (15), (26), (27), (29) and (30). Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection_en
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Lund, A., Zukerfeld, M. (2020). Profiting from Openness: A Critique of a New Business Model. In: Corporate Capitalism's Use of Openness. Dynamics of Virtual Work. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28219-6_2
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