Devaluing Binaries: Marxist Feminism and the Value of Consumer Labour

Abstract

Consumer activity has increasingly been theorized as work that contributes inputs necessary to the economic calculations of digital media companies. Users provide unpaid labour that generates content in the form of video uploads, meme sharing, status updates, game play and the affective investment rendering commercial digital media pleasurable and meaningful. Consumer interactions also actively and passively generate data that are captured by the economic systems of such sites, with clickstream records and taste information being sold to advertisers and marketing companies. There is a growing body of literature establishing the value-creating and exploited nature of this kind of work, sparked initially by the insights of Tiziana Terranova (2000) and Nick Dyer-Witheford (1999), but expanded and detailed by Christian Fuchs (2008; 2009; 2014a; 2014b; see also Scholz 2009; (ed.) 2013; Petersen 2008; Andrejevic 2011; 2013). These analyses typically cast the products of such work as alienated from the user, resulting in a reduced capacity for individuals to self-actualize through their productive consumption activity. These arguments are not without their critics, based either in close interrogation of Marxist definitions of productive labour — see contributors to this volume, for instance — or in empirical studies of consumer practices that do not establish their alienating effects. The analysis of consumer labour is consequently shot through with a series of binaries: productive/unproductive, alienation/agency, economy/culture.