27 Kasım 2016 Pazar

Dijital Çağ ve Kültür

https://newleftreview.org/II/92/emilie-bickerton-culture-after-google

Şu kısımlar çarpıcı:

"As Taylor pointedly notes, the main source of Facebook’s and Google’s profits is other firms’ advertising expenditure, an annual $700bn in the US; but this in turn depends on the surplus extracted from workers who produce ‘actual things’. The logic of advertising drives the tech giants’ voracious appetite for our data. In 2012 Google announced it would be collating information from its multiple services—Gmail, maps, search, YouTube, etc.—to combine the ‘knowledge person’ (search queries, click-stream data), the ‘social person’ (our email and social media networks) and the ‘embodied person’ (our physical whereabouts, tracked by the phones in our pockets) into a single ‘3D profile’, to which advertisers can buy access in real time. Facebook, which is now bundling users’ offline purchases with their profiles, ‘to make it easier for marketers to reach their customers’, as Mark Zuckerberg put it, had a market value of $104 billion on the day of its IPO. Without our ‘likes’ and comments, our photos and tweets, our product ratings or restaurant reviews, these companies would be worth nothing."

"If the corporations have prospered in the digital age, what of the relationship between creative labour and technological innovation? For the tech-utopians, the Web would be a paradise of collaborative creativity, with art and knowledge produced for sheer pleasure. Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class (2002) hailed the advent of the ‘information economy’, in which workers already controlled the means of production, as these were inside their heads. The tension between Protestant work ethic and Bohemian creativity would be dissolved, as profit-seeking and pleasure-seeking, mainstream and alternative morphed together. In reality, Taylor notes, the ideology of creativity has become increasingly useful for a profit-gouging economy. In a cruel twist, the ethos of the autonomous creator—the trope of the impoverished but spiritually fulfilled artist—has been repurposed to justify low pay and job insecurity. The ideal worker matches the traditional profile of the creative virtuoso: inventive, adaptable, putting in long hours and expecting little compensation in return. ‘Money shouldn’t be an issue when you’re employed at Apple’, shopworkers are informed. Graduate students are encouraged to think of themselves as comparable to painters or actors, the better to prepare themselves for impoverishment when tenure-track jobs fail to materialize."

"The ‘free culture’ internet ideology disguises sharply unequal social relations: the digital giants offer free apps, email and content as bait to hook an audience to sell to advertisers; struggling independent artists are supposed to provide their work on the same terms."

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