The Political Economy of the Internet

Abstract

The privatization of the Internet meant not simply a passage from a state-logic organization to an economic one but something more complex. The year 1995 marked a disruption when the National Science Foundation (NSF), the public agency that controlled and exploited the network, transferred its regulatory responsibilities to the private sector. Despite the system’s provision of free access to information, the Internet’s entire economic logic was modified when advertising became the standard norm. The objective of this article is to summarize the history of the Internet and the points that are important to understanding its actual political and economic logic via an emphasis on social networking sites. Our argument also involves a Marxist critique of a theoretical element that Fuchs has contributed to this discussion.

Engels’s Theory of Social Murder and the Spectacle of Fascism: A Critical Enquiry into Digital Labour and its Alienation

“…They argue: "What is sold by Google, by the way, is not the users themselves […] because the advertiser does not buy any individual users or even their singular information. Advertisers buy only an amount of data about a target audience based on categories, as we have outlined" (Bolaño and Vieira 2015). A similar approach is shared by Robinson, who argues that advertising on the Web 2.0 actually helps "realize value produced elsewhere" rather than being the source of surplus-value itself (Robinson 2014, 50).…”

“…Kaan Kangal's critique argues that user information is already a commodity before it enters the Internet and thus users cannot be said to produce value, and argues that Fuchs' "exploitation thesis dislocates the source of profit made by media companies from selling the advertisement rights to the value production of Internet users" (Kangal 2016, 7). Bolaño and Vieira (2015) on argue that the concept of the audience commodity remains a valid analytical tool, but say that the idea of users performing labour needs to be criticised. They argue: "What is sold by Google, by the way, is not the users themselves […] because the advertiser does not buy any individual users or even their singular information.…”

Social media and platform work: Stories, practices, and workers’ organisation

“…In addition to the specificities of creator labour and media work, understanding social media as platform labour also has similarities with stream 1 in the sense that social media can be constantly updated in the long history of the ‘social factory’ (Jarrett, 2022). In addition to the tiring debates about free labour that dominated the first half of the 2010s (Bolano and Vieira, 2015; Fuchs, 2014; Jarrett 2015), understanding social media as platform labour means both aspirational work – which is also very feminised (Duffy, 2016) – regarding the spread of the use of social media as a marketplace. This is particularly strong for workers in Global South contexts in the commerce sector, where social media is an update of historical informal work (Grohmann et al, 2022b; Grohmann and Qiu, 2020).…”

Theorising Digital Dispossession: An Enquiry into the Datafication of Accumulation by Dispossession

“…The key argument made here is that 'value' is produced elsewhere and is appropriated through financialization on the platforms. The 'value' in question is the labour power of users and the digital media platforms simply performing an innovative form of targeted advertisement (Arvidsson and Colleoni 2012, Kangal 2016, Bolaño and Vieira 2015, Robinson 2014. The second draws upon Dallas Smythe's conceptualization of the 'audience commodity'.…”