To be sure, pure capitalism and pure communism cannot coexist, but with the rise of information-based labor, the very foundations of our capitalist society have drastically changed. Tiziana Terranova cites Richard Barbrook in terming this a “mixed economy.” For Barbrook, “the future of capitalism lies in the commodification of information,” but at the same time, “money-commodity relations play a secondary role to those created by a really existing form of anarcho-communism” in which laborers are free to “collaborate with each other without the direct mediation of money and politics” (qtd. in Terranova n.p.).
Looking at the breadth of choices in how we can “work” and/or “play” with the information available to us, Barbrook’s suggestion appears apposite. It involves a division between informational work and play, where one is allotted to sustaining capitalist pursuits and the other toward an antithetical, “high-tech gift economy” which will “overcom[e] capitalism from the inside” (Terranova). In this way, users’ appropriation and consumption of information technologies for their own personal ends subverts the capitalist aim of commodifying those technologies, and this can be seen as a communistic counter to the capitalist machine.
For Terranova, however, it is possible to see these seemingly disparate and oppositional forces operating dialectically. At times one appears to subvert the other, but all along, they are blending, conversing, and transacting as they develop and sustain an evolving economy. She describes free labor not as exploited, but rather as voluntary and participatory.
It is just as possible, though, that another alternative has come to be: namely that informational “play” and free labor appear to undermine capitalism by promoting the voluntary and unpaid, but "free" exchange of ideas and connection. This cannot be so. It does not account for the extreme limitations placed upon users in terms of what they can access to play with, in terms of what is made available to them. Yes, users are free to choose from an apparent wealth of information, but as Webster explains, “information will … be produced and made available only where it has the prospect of being sold at a profit” (135). On the surface, this seems incorrect: once users gain access to the information network, they can consume as much and whichever information they choose. However, based on “market criteria” (Webster 135), only certain kinds of information are available. Worse yet, the plethora of options simply deludes users into thinking they are choosing from all there is to choose from, rather than realizing that they are choosing from a very select set of options predetermined by corporate interests. We are free to consume as we please, but only what they choose to put forth. Even personal Youtube clips and blogs, seemingly independent of profit-making in their voluntary and free nature, actually support the narrowing of our information options and the maintenance of a capitalist system. Further, although users are free to access whatever they choose, it is implicit that they must first gain access. Could it be that hegemonic forces are not concerned with the details of what users freely consume as long as they pay into the existing system of information consumption?
There are, of course, strategies to overtly undermine the commodification of information, but all of these require buying into the system in the first place, and do not necessarily involve direct intervention in the path of technological innovation. Until the powers (particularly, the funding) for innovation are stripped from a narrow set of corporate and political interests and made available more democratically, our “free labor” will continue to be exploited without our really knowing it; capitalism will pretend to tolerate communism even as it feasts upon it.
Terranova, Tiziana. “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.” London
Webster, Frank. Theories of the Information Society. 3rd Ed. Routledge: London
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