i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which Karl Marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment.

Carmen Hermosillo, Alias Humdog, Pandora’s Vox: On Community in Cyberspace (1994)

According to the Autonomist Marxism, with the emergence of knowledge economies (10.9), a number of changes take place in the economic sphere. First, immaterial labor becomes the basis of capitalist production. Second, the “mass worker” (the name given by Negri, Panzieri and Tronti to the Fordist factory worker) is replaced by a “socialized worker” whose production is largely cultural, affective and intellectual. And third, the factory becomes diffuse and begins to cover the whole of society. This new type of factory, argue the autonomists, is possible because information and communication technologies allow it to be “disseminated into society, deterritorializing, dispersing, and decentralizing its operations.”¹ The result is a “factory without walls” inhabited by the newly socialized workers that are easily exploited.

The autonomist concept of the “diffuse factory” coincides with the sublimation of the walls of the hunting park in the legal (7), economic (8) and media (9) spheres and their digital consolidation in the virtual paradeisos (10). In our time, the most representative expression of this diffuse factory is social networks. To understand the functioning of social networks as “factories without walls” it is essential to understand the autonomists’ definition of immaterial labor. This new type of work comprises the two poles of the labor that emerged from knowledge economies: “the ‘informational content of the commodity,’ and the affective labour that produces the social and ‘cultural content of the commodity’.”² It is this latter type of affective labor (our lives) that all of us socialized workers do when producing content on networks such as Facebook or Instagram. This labor is then commoditized as advertising or transformed into affective communication directed to potential consumers through [online] social interaction.³ These activities account for 90% of the revenues of a network such as Facebook—which by the fourth quarter of 2013 had already reached 2,585 billion dollars—and for which the users receive no compensation at all.

It was this circumstance that made me quit Facebook some eight years ago. Indeed, the anecdote I told on item 5.17, in which a friend seemed to be sponsoring a well-known brand of chocolate bars, is one of Facebook’s socialized labor strategies in which the network uses

a user’s interaction with a Like Page and target members of the rest of the user’s social network who have not yet connected with said Page but have expressed interests and interactions that fit a Page’s target demographic.⁴

This form of affective labor makes us prisoners of a capitalist dynamic that turns social interaction and inner experience into money while simultaneously turning us into unpaid labor, unwitting slaves of an economic model bent on squeezing every last drop of its raw material to continue accumulating wealth. A maquila of affective labor for the global middle class.

The issue here is not that we should be compensated for our immaterial labor, but that, in addition to being the raw material of surveillance capitalism, we are also the unconscious, “socialized” workers of a system that hides its accumulation and valorization logic behind a wall of code. Like a vortex, surveillance capitalism absorbs our emotional energy, turning us into raw material, labor force and product; a commodity from beginning to end.

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1. Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and circuits of struggle in high technology capitalism, 80. ↩︎
2. David Siekanowicz, “The Labourization of Social Activity,” 4. ↩︎
3. Ibid., 9. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 11.  ↩︎