[ICTs-and-Society] Blogpost about Google’s “New“ Terms of Use and Privacy Policy: Old Exploitation and User Commodification in a New Ideological Skin

[Jonathan Beller]

Christian, James, All,

This is a significant, lucid discussion and Christian's last post moves it a decisive step forward: "being productive in the corporate internet factory is being exploited" -- there should be no back-peddling here. 

Indeed, this is what I argued in The Cinematic Mode of Production: cinema brings the industrial revolution to the eye, to look is to labor, the attention theory of value, etc. Today, the internet, as means of production, is both pre-condition and paradigm for the screen mediated social factory. Currently, this social-factory is capitalist and it functions through the expropriation of labor. And labor has changed its form. Expropriation, as you all will no doubt recall, is dyssemtrical exchange, the worker gives more to his/her capitalist then s/he receives -- indeed the wage is leveraged down so that the worker receives subsistence and the rest of the workers' product accrues to the capitalist as profit. There have been some attempts to work out what this looks like mathematically, but I will leave that for another time. At any rate, we are all familiar with the various cognates that, with differing emphasis name this phenomenon: immaterial labor, attention, prosumer, playbour, cognitive capitalism, virtuosity, etc.

The point I want to make, which is also a challenge to the category of "advertising" has to do precisely with the idea of real subsumption that is implicit in the post-fordist model of production indicated above. Although it is necessary to insist upon the role of the screen in organizing the relations of post-fordist production, it is a mistake to think that once one leaves the light of the screen, work grinds to a halt. The point of virtuosity is that the cognitive-linguistic has been commandeered by capitalist production -- one thinks and speaks capital and constantly cooperates in productive processes everywhere to purchase survival. WIth a slightly different emphasis, this is also the ultimate point of Flusser's work on the photographic apparatus, namely the camera, which is a collection of programs that fundamentally alters the character of  language and sociality but also of history and metaphysics, and of Steigler's current work on Political economy in which he remarks on  the “grammatization of gesture” by industry, and of audiovisual perception and cognition by what he calls “retentional systems”, meaning media technologies (Stiegler, FNCPE,10).  THis latter harnesses the libido and institutes a "proletarianization of the nervous system." Therefore, the screen, while a command-control nexus, continues to organize the social factory even in the apparent absence of said screen: it organizes places like the imagination as well as the planet of slums.

Which is to say, in other words, that "advertising" has become a general condition, the real name for informatic throughput in capitalism. Data mining is a vast uptake of the commons, of our common practices, designed to intensify the imposition of an advertisarial relationship on everything. Real subsumption marks the conversion of representation itself to advertising: after all, virtuosity means that we speak for capital which is precisely the role of advertising. It also happens to be the role of the news and of the state.

So my point here is not to disagree with Christian, nor to undercut his policy recommendations. However, the difficulty here is with the us/them perspective: it is a disturbing possibility that we are them. Remember, "they" program "our" language and "our" imagination, "we" speak "their" thought -- indeed that is our work, or rather, our labor. As capital did to its colonies and colonial subjects, we make ourselves over in their image. This is particularly true if one considers the material conditions (race, class, nationality, education, language, etc) of the participants in this discussion. Without submitting ourselves and our own aspirations to radical critique we run the risk of merely trying to set up a competing corporation with a new business model, particularly if we do not think about the materiality of social production from top to bottom: class, yes, but also race, nation, gender. The lumpen, that is, the two-billion living on two dollars a day, also labor to survive in the post-fordist social factory. However, from the standpoint of capital, their role is to serve as substrate for image-production and semiosis. Starving hordes, irrational populations, subjects for policing, encampment and bombing, these excess populations are troped to organize (via the screen) to organize military production, national policy, and market projections. Any programme that does not admit this excluded planet into dialogue is still floating in the realm of the ruling ideas. And these ideas are the ones whose density and weight threatens to crush the post-modern poor out of not just representation but of existence. It should be clear, that banning advertising on the internet is not adequate to address these issues of representation and social justice.

To conclude for the moment: the forms of sociality which are the condition of possibility for internet run through every sector and register of planetary life. The internet, while recognizable, as a cause and effect of contemporary planetary production, cannot be considered in isolation if it's historical role is to be properly understood. To do so is a form of platform fetishism that disavows both the histories and material conditions of its emergence, which are, in short, the capitalist suppression of global democracy -- meaning, of course, economic democracy. To ban advertising is a good start, but what if the whole thing is advertising?


Un saludo,
Jon






Jonathan Beller
Professor
Humanities and Media Studies
Critical and Visual Studies
Pratt Institute
jbeller at pratt.edu
718-636-3573 (office fax)		
				



On Mar 1, 2012, at 5:50 AM, Christian Fuchs wrote:

> Dear James,
> 
> Thank you for the thoughtfull discussion about Google.
> 
> I agree that the question is what the limit of the use of personal information for advertising should be. I think I have a somewhat different answer than you have.
> 
> For me the question is what the role and effects of advertising culture are in society.
> 
> I am not at all arguing for opt-out advertising, but rather for a worldwide legal provision that makes opt-in advertising mandatory and outlaws opt-out. I agree with Oscar Gandy that personalised ads are a form of panoptic sorting and of social discrimination.
> 
> The problem is not data processing as such, the problem are the class relations into which Google services (and other corporate Internet services) are embedded.
> 
> Google's unification of terms simplifies and joins up the economic surveillance of users, as you say. From Google's business interests, this is a logical step because it promises more profits. At the same time, Google wants to ideologically sell this step as bringing about more user privacy, control etc, which it does not.
> 
> I do think that advertising culture, the existence of advertising, is problematic and that it is the outgrowth of the commodification and commercialization of the world. We were better off with a world without advertising. I think for Critical Internet Studies, we also need (among a lot of things) Critical Advertising and Consumer Culture Studies.
> 
> In the case of advertising-based audience commodification (as with Google), advertising is not only a privacy-violation, but - and this is my crucial point - it is the exploitation of user labour.
> 
> I have problems with self-regulatory data protection, where companies choose whatever they want to do with user data and one tells users: oh, here are some great ways of how you can reduce the amount of data we use about you (opt-outs, privacy settings where the standard option is always the high use of user data for advertising, privacy-enhancing technologies, etc). THe thing is that for consumer privacy protection, it should not be required for the user/consumer to take action for not having ones data processed for advertising purposes, companies should in the first place not use data for such purposes and should be obliged to in the first place use no advertising. If a user wants his/her data to be used for advertising, then s/he should have the possibility to enable it, but the standard should be "no advertising". These are questions of choice, power, action, negative and positive freedom.
> 
> I would not argue for keeping the user data of different Google services separate and not joining them up for advertising. I think this is too short-sighted. It is like not working in one factory and being exploited there for 8 hours and monitored by workplace CCTV, but working in 4 different factories 2 hours a day, being monitored by workplace CCTV, but not allowing the factories to compare the recorded data. I am in favour of not letting them exchange the data, but much more I think that the problem is that the workers is forced/has to work in these factories in order to survive. So what I am questioning is factory life as exploited life as such and that we should limit the commodification of everything, which requires legally limiting targeted advertising possibilities.
> 
> And the Internet is a factory of surplus-value generation, Google being one of the primary Internet factories, in which we all work and create economic value. And in this factory, advertising culture has become a productive space, depends on a high-level of total instantenous real-time economic surveilallance of online activities and the transformation of all (or a lot of) online time into labour time. But being productive in the corporate Internet factory means being exploited.
> 
> There is a difference between work and labour, the latter is value-generating and exploited. We work on Wikipedia and Diaspora, we labour on Google and Facebook. What I am questioning is the existence of the Internet factory, the labour it requires and the total commodification of online activities. Advertising is at the heart of the problem.
> 
> Best, Christian
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
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