[ICTs-and-Society] Fwd: Discussion post from m.andrejevic at uq.edu.au

[Matze Schmidt]

I would like to refer to old and dead media like telegraph systems which
had, regarding Facebook's and Google's business models, a very similar
concept of dispossession -- a technological and economical concept at
the same time of course -- that is the act of communication (nowadays
"agency" or the capacity to act in ICTs) has to be payed by the customer
directly and/or indirectly. We can find this as well in other networks
like electricity grids (remember Edison's monopoly model of controlling
the terminal and the provider). 

The notion that Google (and others) gains money from users' acts is
wrong (I am sorry), as the chain will never be just


users' act - money


but


users' act - data mining - selling of edited data (mining) to third
parties - money (realisation of value)


The part of waged work is never (even in automatic chains) excluded,
it's only (Foxconn assembly lines aside) shifted to a special intellect
here.

So taking this into account plus the oldish notion of _people buying the
service_ we could describe the field by getting a mediated or let's say
brokered »costless cost culture« which is since 1994 and earlier the
main problem for net companies, namely: how to make profit while giving
away the mass product (communication services, not algorithms) -- due to
historcial reasons -- created with or by waged work?

By selling data these firms have found (had to find!) a way how to
mediate literally dialectically the two realms: paying and not paying --
by masking the permanent payment* with nonpaying. The dispossession is
-- after Marx et al quite clear, it is a) the wage labor condition and
it is the macroeconomic b) disbalance of work here and appropriation
there -- since every single act of agency is already payed by a) plus b)
in the circulation of goods.

The virtual public of social plattforms is obviosuly a private one right
from the beginning of networked computers. Even Netscape was not
anti-private public domain, even Cern's WWW was private in the hands of
states. Eben the Arpanet was not public and democratic. So considering
some reasonings I am really concerned how a democratised military net or
any other democratised intranet could look like.
_____
* Enhanced notion of payment = wage labor, subventions, indirect funding
  of networks by taxes and paying simple bills paying the surplus.

All the best for the conference,

Matze Schmidt

Astrid Mager wrote:
> Even though I think the notion of exploitation
> is a valuable tool to explain how Google and others gain money from 
> users' activities and marketing purposes (as Christian explained in his 
> work very well)