Press Release. April 24, 2014. 

iSlaves and Social Media Capitalism: Christian Fuchs' New Book about Digital Labour and Class in the Age of Social Media

When we think of computers, laptops, mobile phones, the Internet or social media our first associations are often mobility, modernity, sociality, flexibility, communication. Christian Fuchs – professor of social media at the University of Westminster – shows in the book ''Digital Labour and Karl Marx'' that labour, class and exploitation are not concepts of the past, but are at the heart of computing and the Internet in capitalist society. He argues that we therefore need an engagement with Karl Marx’s theory to understand digital and social media today. 

The work shows that our use of digital media is grounded in old and new forms of exploited labour. Christian Fuchs argues, ''Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Weibo and other social media platforms are the largest advertising agencies in the world. They do not sell communication, but advertising space. And for doing so, they exploit users, who work without payment for social media companies and produce data that is used for targeting advertisements. Exploitation of various forms of labour is at the heart of digital capitalism''. Increasingly value-generation on the Internet relies on crowdsourcing labour to extremely low-paid or unpaid workers. Special platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, oDesk, PeoplePerHour or Elance have emerged for this purpose.

The book presents case studies that show that users’ activities on corporate social media is just one form of digital labour. Their usage is enabled by the labour of slaves and other highly exploited workers extracting minerals in developing countries, hardware assemblers in China, California and other parts of the world who face extremely hard working conditions that remind us of the industrial labour that Karl Marx described in 19th century Britain, low paid software engineers and information service workers in developing countries who provide labour for transnational ICT companies in the West, highly paid and highly stressed software engineers at Google and other Western ICT companies, or e-waste workers who disassemble computers under toxic conditions.

Apple is an integrated ICT company that sells hardware (Macs, iPhones, iPads, etc) operating systems, application software, hardware and entertainment content. Its profits amounted to more than 37 billion US$ in 2013. When advertising the iPhone 5, Apple said that this device is ''for the colorful''.  

The daily of those Chinese Foxconn workers who produce these devices is in contrast bleak, grey, toxic, dangerous, hard to stand and sometimes deadly as the suicides committed by young Foxconn workers who were mostly poor migrants from rural areas who could no longer stand the bad working conditions showed in 2010. Students and Scholars against Corporate Misbehaviour have recently argued that working conditions at Apple have not improved, although Apple claims so in its CSR reports.

The case studies in Fuchs’ book show that the profitability of ICT companies is built on the lives and deaths of a global class of exploited workers whose labour is anonymously connected an international division of digital labour. Fuchs, ''The devices and platforms hide the exploitation that is underlying them. What Marx called the fetish of commodities is the hideous and hidden reality of digital media''.  

The author says there are no easy solutions, ''Production and use of digital media are embedded into multiple forms of exploitation. The information society is first and foremost a capitalist class society. The only solution is that we become conscious as a new working class and find ways to overcome the realities of exploitation''.
 
Fuchs, Christian. 2014. Digital Labour and Karl Marx. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-71615-4. 
More information about the book:
http://fuchs.uti.at/books/digital-labour-and-karl-marx/ 

Contact: office@triple-c.at 

Order of a review copy:
http://www.routledge.com/resources/review_copy_request/%209780415716154/ 

Related articles by Christian Fuchs (conditional availability for re-print/re-publication):

http://fuchs.uti.at/1089/    
The 25th Anniversary of the WWW: Transition to Socialism or Regression into Barbarism?

http://fuchs.uti.at/952/ 
Do you love the new iPhone 5s/5c? Its production is not a labour of love… Why it is time for alternatives to Apple and the iPhone.

http://fuchs.uti.at/909/ 
Avoiding Avoidance: How to Put an End to Google’s Circumvention of Corporation Tax

http://fuchs.uti.at/1023/ 
(Un-)Freedom in the Age of Social Media

http://fuchs.uti.at/959/ 
An interview with Christian Fuchs

http://fuchs.uti.at/901/ 
Open Access Journals and Capitalism: An Interview with Christian Fuchs