I was just thinking about this watching the above and haven't worked it out formally or anything, but I'd like to propose it as a place to start investigating the challenges presented to LTV by the extraction of "rents" from commodified data, which requires (nearly) no labor input to reproduce.
Do y'all see any promise to this? Is the knowledge of your shopping habits a form of para-constant capital? It certainly behaves like constant capital in many ways. How does the use-value just simply get monetized without the price of the labor, all the way down the value chain, that lurks behind physical machinery? It appears that that's what happens. The whole cost of the thing is artificial (ie, not something that "bare" market forces would do) via specialization - the data sources are not where it's used. So are Google, Facebook and etc. just interrupting the normalization that would otherwise render the gain of relative surplus value for those who use the data moot? In that case it's not like constant capital at all though, is it?
edit: actually in the latter case it still behaves exactly like constant capital, doesn't it.. just with the interruption of one tangential process
Edited by kcnaofficial ()
Perhaps this is not quite the analysis you are interested in but I have found this article helpful in my reading on Big Data: Big Other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization
The author suggests thinking of Big Data as Big Other as new logic of accumulation
commodified data can include, let's say, data about past actions, data about how you interact with others, data about preferences, etc. all that is the result of both mental and physical labour, i.e. spending time considering who is your friend, what you want, what your opinions are, what website you want to visit, and then entering it into the great machine of the internet. which is of course just a collection of metal and plastic assembled by asian sweatshop workers etc.
having a preference or opinion isn't necessarily labour but if you wouldn't have formed that thought in that way without being prompted, i would say it is. and codifying it into the system certainly is, informing the capitalist machine about yourself is. it may be small but i think it's more than we'd like to admit, and multiplied over millions of people it is probably a hell of a lot of labour.
(also collating huge datasets and making them legible to capital is a pretty big amount of math labour, even if it's machine-reproduceable after the first time you do it, often it has to be tweaked a little for every new dataset)
Belphegor posted:Perhaps this is not quite the analysis you are interested in but I have found this article helpful in my reading on Big Data: Big Other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization
The author suggests thinking of Big Data as Big Other as new logic of accumulation
article is Cool and Goode
drwhat posted:I don't know anything about theory really & I'm on a train and haven't watched the video yet, but I feel like your first premise, "this basically requires near-zero labour" isn't really true.
commodified data can include, let's say, data about past actions, data about how you interact with others, data about preferences, etc. all that is the result of both mental and physical labour, i.e. spending time considering who is your friend, what you want, what your opinions are, what website you want to visit, and then entering it into the great machine of the internet. which is of course just a collection of metal and plastic assembled by asian sweatshop workers etc.
having a preference or opinion isn't necessarily labour but if you wouldn't have formed that thought in that way without being prompted, i would say it is. and codifying it into the system certainly is, informing the capitalist machine about yourself is. it may be small but i think it's more than we'd like to admit, and multiplied over millions of people it is probably a hell of a lot of labour.
(also collating huge datasets and making them legible to capital is a pretty big amount of math labour, even if it's machine-reproduceable after the first time you do it, often it has to be tweaked a little for every new dataset)
I agree it takes labor to produce the stuff, but what I meant was that, once produced, it takes virtually no labor to copy. Like you don't need all the labor that goes into building a new machine when selling the data to companies X, Y and Z. Then the fact that there's relatively few entities (Google, FB etc) with access to the data prevents the price from going down in approach to the amount of labor-power
edit: I think I got this backwards
Even though it does take labor to produce the data, it's quite different from the normal process of wage labor. You're not paying the people who put the data in. The cost to reproduce their labor is satisfied some other way (their job) so you don't have the normal exchange of cost to reproduce their labor. So, the normal process by which a commodity's exchange value represents socially nessisary labor time doesn't really apply here. Shouldn't this disrupt the whole process of surplus-value extraction?
I suppose it would only disrupt it by making it cheaper...
Edited by kcnaofficial ()
kcnaofficial posted:I agree it takes labor to produce the stuff, but what I meant was that, once produced, it takes virtually no labor to copy. Like you don't need all the labor that goes into building a new machine when selling the data to companies X, Y and Z. Then the fact that there's relatively few entities (Google, FB etc) with access to the data prevents the price from going down in approach to the amount of labor-power
edit: I think I got this backwards
Even though it does take labor to produce the data, it's quite different from the normal process of wage labor. You're not paying the people who put the data in. The cost to reproduce their labor is satisfied some other way (their job) so you don't have the normal exchange of cost to reproduce their labor. So, the normal process by which a commodity's exchange value represents socially nessisary labor time doesn't really apply here. Shouldn't this disrupt the whole process of surplus-value extraction?
I suppose it would only disrupt it by making it cheaper...
i think that marketing has conditioned us to think of market relations that involve the internet (or computers in general) as special or different and it's all quasi-magical and we can never possibly bring the social relations of digital production into human terms so let's just give up and just let the experts handle it, essentially. that's not meant to be a burn on you personally but just to say i think we have to cast off a lot of bullshit to try and zero in on what's really going on.
inside the capitalist framework, no one "gets a copy" of the data actually. they're "sold licenses" or "use an interface", which is just a way to mystify the fact that the owner of the capital is providing a service. for an example, company X asks someone with data, let's say Facebook, "what do people in my city want to buy these days?"
as i described above, all Facebook's users (or in the case of, e.g., ad companies or Google, virtually all the internet's users) have invested masses of (spread-out) real labour time in creating this huge machine, essentially -- information capital -- that Facebook uses to provide this service to company X. they will never sell the machine itself, that is, all the raw data, all the source code, etc. they produce answers with it and sell them, and as lay bystanders we are forced to conclude that this is a magical new asset, the old rules don't apply, production cost is zero, etc. but it's not any different than any other capital asset (i.e. factory machine) used in the provision of a service, and in fact it's treated more or less identically by the "generally accepted accounting" rules.
as a side note it's absolutely irrelevant that "you're not paying the people who put the data in". tons of labour happens without compensation, that doesn't make it less real. when you see valuations of facebook (367.26B$ US as of right now on the stock market), that is essentially the commonly-agreed upon value of this machine we're describing plus all the value of the allegiance of the 1.71 billion unpaid employees who provide regular data on themselves and their friends and interests and locations and activities and ...
drwhat posted:i think that marketing has conditioned us to think of market relations that involve the internet (or computers in general) as special or different and it's all quasi-magical and we can never possibly bring the social relations of digital production into human terms so let's just give up and just let the experts handle it, essentially. that's not meant to be a burn on you personally but just to say i think we have to cast off a lot of bullshit to try and zero in on what's really going on.
inside the capitalist framework, no one "gets a copy" of the data actually. they're "sold licenses" or "use an interface", which is just a way to mystify the fact that the owner of the capital is providing a service. for an example, company X asks someone with data, let's say Facebook, "what do people in my city want to buy these days?"
I think I confused myself by just looking at where the data is being used. What I meant by making a copy wasn't literally making copies, but that distributing the data doesn't involve re-doing the process by which people make the data. But, as you pointed out...
drwhat posted:as a side note it's absolutely irrelevant that "you're not paying the people who put the data in". tons of labour happens without compensation, that doesn't make it less real. when you see valuations of facebook (367.26B$ US as of right now on the stock market), that is essentially the commonly-agreed upon value of this machine we're describing plus all the value of the allegiance of the 1.71 billion unpaid employees who provide regular data on themselves and their friends and interests and locations and activities and ...
...really all that means is that FB doesn't have to worry about variable capital outlay, at least for this specifically. Hence why I edited it.
(now you all know why I wanna re-read Capital after all these years)
Also the dyatopian smart city... The only guy who I know writes about it is unfortunately not Marxist.
And something else which I forgot.... It'll come back to me
and as Lenin talked about 100 years ago, a monopoly means that you can inflate prices for a commodity beyond what they'd be if they were subject to competition on the free market. take a company like Disney -- they build their massive empire on intellectual property, the ownership of recognizable and popular creations like Mickey Mouse. but what if the copyright expired on Mickey, like it almost did before Disney lobbied the US govt to change copyright laws? then anyone and everyone could produce their own Mickey-themed commodities. and assuming the quality of those commodities are pretty equivalent, then it becomes a race to the bottom for producers, seeing who can produce things the cheapest. see: Capital, Volume 1 for further details
you are absolutely correct that any digital commodity would seemingly have no exchange-value, since one can make countless digital copies for virtually no cost. but that's only possible because IP laws make it possible. for a counter example of the dramatic effects that digitization can have on a products exchange value, take a look at music in the post-Napster era.* the music industry almost completely collapsed, and it took drastic legal and business maneuvers just to keep it on life support. but it's a sinkhole -- Warner Music, for example, hasn't turned a profit in over a decade.
Big Data is slightly different, but follows the same logic. its value is derived from the fact that these companies have a monopoly on the data-collecting processes they use. that's in addition to the web of legal (ie, state-enforced) methods they use to protect their own data, from proprietary information laws to non-disclosure agreements among their employees.
but there's only so much they can do in the face of advancing technology. as it becomes easier and easier to code and script, the barrier of entry gets lower and lower. as much as Silicon Valley loves to crow about "disruption" it's inevitable that these things will eventually be easy enough that you'll have assembly lines of 8 year old Bangladeshis writing data collection scripts for pennies on the hour.
personally, i cannot wait until this becomes so commonplace that i can download my Tinder date's porn browsing history to my VR headset, only $6.99 if you deduct it directly from the funds in your Mark of the Beast bio-implant chip
"but there's only so much they can do in the face of advancing technology. as it becomes easier and easier to code and script, the barrier of entry gets lower and lower. as much as Silicon Valley loves to crow about "disruption" it's inevitable that these things will eventually be easy enough that you'll have assembly lines of 8 year old Bangladeshis writing data collection scripts for pennies on the hour. "
you would think that the coding contractors working for amazon would look at the warehouse contractors and get an idea of how the company would treat them if their skills became commonplace
drwhat posted:as a side note it's absolutely irrelevant that "you're not paying the people who put the data in". tons of labour happens without compensation, that doesn't make it less real. when you see valuations of facebook (367.26B$ US as of right now on the stock market), that is essentially the commonly-agreed upon value of this machine we're describing plus all the value of the allegiance of the 1.71 billion unpaid employees who provide regular data on themselves and their friends and interests and locations and activities and ...
https://mathbabe.org/2016/10/21/facebooks-child-workforce/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/facebook-backed-school-software-shows-promise--and-raises-privacy-concerns/2016/10/11/2580f9fe-80c6-11e6-b002-307601806392_story.html
A joint project of Facebook and the high-performing charter-school network Summit Public Schools, Basecamp is an example of an increasingly popular education trend — data-driven “personalized learning.” Its most fervent backers have framed it as the next big thing in education, re-imagining how classrooms work and allowing teachers to reach students across a wide spectrum.
Tavenner said Summit’s success — especially with low-income children, who account for half of its students — has drawn a steady stream of educators who want to duplicate it.
The team accesses student data sometimes, Sego said, but only to improve the software.
But the Basecamp terms also require disputes to be resolved through arbitration, essentially barring a student’s family from suing if they think data has been misused. In other realms, including banking and health care, such binding arbitration clauses have been criticized as stripping consumers of their rights.
“We’re offering this for free to people,” she said. “If we don’t protect the organization, anyone could sue us for anything — which seems crazy to me.”
Edited by Bablu ()
swirlsofhistory posted:If a worker is entitled to the full value of his labor does this mean his child can become his slave? Because it takes labor (fucking) to make a child, and the full value of sexual labor would be a child slave.
Sure because after the sperm and the egg fuse, all the ingredients for an adult person are assembled and there is no food or information intake necessary until adulthood. So that make sense 
swirlsofhistory posted:it takes labor (fucking) to make a child
catchphrase
I reckon they think it's genius and DEMOLISHES marxism with one simple trick
swampman posted:swirlsofhistory posted:
If a worker is entitled to the full value of his labor does this mean his child can become his slave? Because it takes labor (fucking) to make a child, and the full value of sexual labor would be a child slave.
Sure because after the sperm and the egg fuse, all the ingredients for an adult person are assembled and there is no food or information intake necessary until adulthood. So that make sense
right, you don't own their adult selves, you just own their baby selves. this explains the communist baby black market
anyway my tip when thinking about these kinds of issues is to resist the mystification of anything cyber-related, just because we're dealing with non-material products doesn't mean there's no labour involved or indeed a lot of material goods required to support these operations, and the usual principles apply when assessing them.