"Software forges modalities of experience - sensoriums through which the world is made and known. As a product of 'immaterial labour' software is a social, technical and aesthetic relation that is embodied - and that is at once productive of more relations. That the production of value has moved so firmly into the terrain of immaterial labour, machine embodied intelligence, style as factory, the production of subjectivity, makes the evolution of what was previously sectioned as 'culture' so much more valuable to play for - potentially always as sabotage - but , as a development of the means of mutation, most compellingly as synthesis."
"It is important to remember that the gift economy, as part of a larger digital economy, is itself, beyond the moment of commodification, an important force within the reproduction of the labor force in late capitalism as a whole." from "Free labor: producing culture for the digital economy", Social Text 63, Vol 18, No 2.
"Free software" could almost be described as proof of Negri's concept of the "social factory", handed to him on a plate. "Social factory" means a kind of society where capital's process of extracting surplus values spreads along the network of reproduction of labour and re-orients it for its own ends. Every aspect of life becomes work.
"Style as factory" - what better a phrase to describe something like Amazon.Com, where you are exhorted to enter your user preferences ("for your own good") so that the re-styling of the online bookstore can become both an attempt to capture you (you are defined by the your mouse clicks as transformed by the heuristics of Amazon.Com's user preferences prediction system) in a reflected image of "yourself", and also a process of maximising the output of surplus value per unit time (potentially every mouse click on the WWW site should lead to increased profits for the online book-borg!).
Of course, Slashdotters would object, since they see "free software" as a tool - something to make your life easier. The definition of ease, however, remains absent. In practice, software engineers occupy a very particular place - their labour is precisely directed towards the process of intensifying labour. Certainly no one, not even a Slashdotter, could argue that free software increases leisure. Rather, the software production as "immaterial labour" remains labour directed towards establishing, reproducing relations - relations between the common use base of software whose ultimate reason for existence remains opaque.
Beyond this - the geek revolt against the commodity form of software, software as something produced and sold at value + surplus value - how to get beyond that revolt? Ultimately, we discover, that revolt leaves us within the "planetary work machine". So, a couple of questions:
* What is the "free software" equivalent of sabotaging the production line?
* Are "free software" geeks subject to the law of value? Or is immaterial labour by definition not compensated by value, and thus not accountable (both in the economic sense and in the 'moral' sense)?
* If so, what will we make of this? How does one revolt against the law
of value if it does not apply?
* What is the relation between "material labour", traded at (or somehow
around) value, and "immaterial labour", traded at a price unrelated to
value?
* etc....
Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844