Digital capitalism profits from unpaid pleasurable user activity.

Evidence

As Tiziana Terranova has been analysing for more than a decade, the internet today offers capitalism a vast hunting ground which is teeming with FREE LABOUR. It freely provides the labour for ‘building websites, modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing lists, and building virtual spaces’: ‘free labour is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into excess productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited’. The magic of electrified attention presents us with boundless and virtually free riches; we work on these riches often with enchanted and generous jubilation; businesses have learned how to take advantage of this, profiting financially from our enchantment. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 197

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Terranova’s free labour theory, which anticipates the platform capitalism / gig economy critique literature. — connects to: Networked audiences force users into unpaid labor to keep their brand image pure — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 492; Social media participation constitutes unpaid labor from which platforms extract value — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 505; Tech companies promote personal openness because it drives their profits, not democracy — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 622 (+30 more)
• DEFINE: Defines free labour as pleasurable cultural consumption turned into exploited productive activity.

Broader Connections

• Voluntary user content creation constitutes unpaid labor enriching platform owners #corroborates (0.95) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 338
• Users freely did unpaid labor that increased Facebook’s own value #exemplifies (0.95) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1011
• Cloud capital’s key innovation is self-reproduction through unpaid user labor #corroborates (0.90) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 319
• Digital assistants convert inner life into calculable behavioral surplus for others’ profit #exemplifies (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 796