Lan Jiang: A Critique of Digital Labor from the Perspective of Historical Materialism
As developments in capitalism enter the stages of digital capitalism and platform capitalism, a practical question that contemporary Marxist researchers must confront is: how should we understand the new "capital-labor" relationship formed under the influence of new technologies such as digital technology and intelligent algorithms? This is the foundation for a critique of the political economy of digital capitalism, and it represents a highly valuable path for re-examining contemporary capitalist development through the lens of historical materialism. Before addressing the question of how data becomes capital, we must first discuss whether "digital labor" constitutes a form of genuine productive labor. Is it merely "cultural labor" or "immaterial labor," as suggested by some traditional cultural studies theories or Marxist theories—that is, a form of labor that does not directly produce economic value? In current Marxist research and critiques of new forms of capitalist development, the analysis and critique of digital labor have become indispensable components.
I. Is Digital Labor Immaterial Labor?
Regarding labor under digital production, an intuitive view is that digital labor is a form of "immaterial labor" or "cultural labor." The concepts of so-called "immaterial labor" and "cultural labor" are actually defined in contrast to the labor used to produce material commodities. It is traditionally held that only in concrete productive labor can value—as the congealment of undifferentiated human labor—be produced. However, in his Economic Manuscripts of 1861–1863, Marx also distinguished between productive and unproductive labor. Marx noted: "Wherever money is directly exchanged for labor that does not produce capital, i.e., unproductive labor, this labor is purchased as a service. The word 'service' is generally only an expression for the particular use-value provided by this labor, just as every other commodity provides its own particular use-value; but the specific use-value of this labor here receives the specific name 'service' because the labor does not provide its service as a thing (Sache), but as an activity (Tätigkeit)." 1
Marx observed that, beyond the labor engaged in the actual production of products in the capitalist's factory, other types of labor do indeed exist in capitalist society. Of course, the "unproductive labor" discussed here does not refer to production for oneself—for instance, a tailor sewing clothes for personal use—because Marx's discussion of productive and unproductive labor is situated at the level of social relations of production and relations of social intercourse. So, at the level of social production, what exactly is unproductive labor? The term Marx used in the Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858 [1] was "service"—a "service" that can be purchased. Such a service primarily possesses use-value, as it can generate a series of utility functions. However, this type of labor does not produce a "thing"; it does not produce a "physical entity" (物), but remains merely an activity. Marx illustrated this "unproductive labor" with an example: "A singer [2] who sells her song on her own account is an unproductive laborer." 1 Marx recognized the singer's singing, but this performance does not possess a product in the general sense; her performance exists in an "immaterial" form and is exchanged for the money of passersby. The singer's voice leaves behind no physical product. However, a relationship is formed with the passersby who stop to enjoy the performance—a specific social relationship formed by the song. This link, which possesses use-value (the use-value relationship between the singer and the listener is, in fact, an aesthetic relationship), depends entirely on the process of singing. Therefore, Marx stated explicitly: "The service a singer provides for me satisfies my aesthetic need; but what I enjoy is only an activity that is inseparable from the singer herself. As soon as his labor—the singing—ceases, my enjoyment ends; I enjoy the activity itself, the response of my sense of hearing to it." 1 The melody of this singing creates what Marx calls a "service" between the singer and the audience, which depends on a relationship that exists temporarily in a specific time and space. In Marx’s view, doctors and lawyers provide similar services; their value also produces service relationships between them and their patients or clients within specific times and spaces. This particular social relationship, generated by service activities, constitutes Marx’s "unproductive labor." However, Marx also keenly observed that "unproductive labor" is an ancillary form of labor that maintains a dependent relationship with "productive labor." While "unproductive labor" might predominate within a certain scope—perhaps in a particular nation or region—on a global scale, unproductive labor cannot shake the foundational status of productive labor. Thus, within Marx’s framework of political economy, unproductive labor is merely the result of productive labor reaching a highly developed stage; it cannot truly replace productive labor.
However, Italian Autonomism [3] clearly appropriated Marx’s "unproductive labor" in a different sense. They did not follow Marx’s definition in the Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858, but instead generalized it into a broad sense of "immaterial labor." Nevertheless, this distorted appropriation still borrowed another concept from Marx's so-called "Fragment on Machines": "general intellect." Marx’s original words were: "...to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process." 2 Marx used the English term "general intellect" here, clearly hoping to express general social knowledge, which also represents the intangible aspects appearing in the production process, such as knowledge, language, and affect. That is to say, from the very beginning, "general intellect" was distinct from the "unproductive labor" mentioned in the Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858. For Marx, productive and unproductive labor were two entirely different processes in social production and life; whereas in the concept of "general intellect," Marx referred to two different kinds of products existing within the production link: one is a visible, material product, and the other is an invisible product. As Paolo Virno later explained: "It is not by accident that the social individual appears in the same part of the Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858 where we find the concept of 'general intellect' as the general (or pre-individual) premise and the common configuration of the labor and life of the 'multitude.' The social aspect of the social individual is undoubtedly the general intellect, what Frege called 'thought without a subject.' However, it is also the direct inter-psychic, public aspect of human communication, which was recognized with great insight by Vygotsky." 3 Therefore, this "general intellect" forms an intangible totality of language, affect, wisdom, and cognition. This totality becomes a force more vital than actual material production and unites workers and the "multitude" [4] into a totality sufficient to oppose capitalism.
It was on this basis that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri proposed their famous concept of "immaterial labor." Hardt and Negri pointed out: "In the production of surplus value, the labor power of the mass of factory workers... once played a central role, but today that role is increasingly being taken over by intellectual, immaterial labor power in the field of communication. It is therefore necessary to develop a new political theory of value... The exploitation of living labor engaged in immaterial production, its most direct social dimension, integrates labor into all the factors that define social relations." 4 In the early 21st century, Hardt and Negri had already seen the dawn opened by electronic communication and digital technology. They observed that in the factories of major Western developed countries, production was gradually giving way to the intangible totality of the general intellect brought about by the revolution in communication and digital technologies. In this scenario, immaterial production gradually replaced the status of material production. Consequently, the capitalist's exploitation was no longer the exploitation of substantial material surplus value, but the exploitation of an intangible, immaterial general intellect.
In this way, we can understand the problem with interpreting labor in the digital age as "immaterial labor." When we use social media or video software, the key is not how many videos we upload, how many articles we forward, or how many posts we like or comment on. Rather, it lies in the fact that all these behaviors belong to a unified "general intellect." Hardt, Negri, and others believe that the reason these activities constitute immaterial labor or digital labor is simply that, on top of the actual material production process, we form a production of the general intellect. Hardt and Negri also call this "biopolitical production." This production is immaterial because digital labor has fundamentally become immaterial productive labor that produces the "general intellect." The problem with Hardt and Negri is not only that they identify production in the digital age as immaterial production, but that they believe this immaterial labor has thoroughly replaced the political economy of material production discussed by Marx in Capital. They argue: "The first tendency is the hegemony or leading role of immaterial production in the capitalist valorization process... for example, images, information, knowledge, affects, codes, and social relations in capitalist valorization all transcend tangible commodities or the material factors of commodities." 5 In other words, Hardt and Negri believe that in the context of digital capitalism, the engine of political economy is the production of a series of images, information, cognitions, and affects. Material production becomes unimportant under this immaterial production, so Marx’s critique of material commodities and capital gradually gives way to a critique of the immaterial general intellect.
It is not difficult to discover that Marx's...
There is a fundamental difference between "non-productive labor" and Hardt and Negri’s "immaterial labor." Marx’s "non-productive labor" is fundamentally a political-economic analysis of capitalist reality. Marx discovered that beyond the concrete material production process, there exist specific types of labor within social life that do not produce material products, but rather produce sensations, relations, cognitions, or services. However, the basis of Marx's analysis of "non-productive labor" remains the critique of political economy at the level of capitalist reality; its philosophical foundation is historical materialism—that is, the theoretical analysis is strictly based on real social production. While we cannot say that Hardt and Negri have detached themselves from social reality, in the process of assigning a new dominant status to "immaterial labor," they overlook a crucial fact: digitalization today is not simply about opening a music app on a smartphone to find a song or browsing videos uploaded by others. Rather, it is the comprehensive networking and digitalization of physical environments such as factories, ports, and logistics that allows us to "virtually" experience convenience and enjoyment at the immaterial level. In other words, the reverse side of the dematerialized digital labor seen by Hardt and Negri remains based on a vast amount of real material production, exchange, distribution, and transport. The political economy of material production has not vanished in the digital age; it has merely receded behind computer and mobile screens, misleading us into believing we are facing a digital, immaterial interface. Put differently, production in the digital age still possesses a massive foundation of material labor. To simply regard digital labor as immaterial labor, or to insist on an abstract distinction between material and immaterial labor, prevents us from truly understanding the fundamental changes in capitalism. Digital capitalism is by no means a "costume change" where capitalism merely swaps its cloak of material production for the production of immaterial information, digits, and images. We must return to Marx’s historical materialism to re-understand the truth of labor under digital capitalism.
II. Labor as a Historical Concept
In Marx’s The German Ideology, there is a famous passage:
"As soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic."10
This passage is frequently used to demonstrate Marx’s early descriptions and aspirations for a future communist society. However, many people do not actually understand why communist society involves "doing one thing today and another tomorrow, hunting in the morning, and fishing in the afternoon." What is the connection between this and the communist principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" mentioned later by Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Programme? The answer to this question directly involves the problem of how to understand labor from the perspective of historical materialism.
First, the primary issue Marx describes in this passage is the division of labor. Prior to this excerpt, Marx mentions a qualifying condition: "as soon as the distribution of labour [division of labor] comes into being." Once this occurs, our different human activities are divided into distinct types, such as hunting, fishing, herding, or engaging in criticism. If we reason backward, does this imply the existence of a state prior to the division of labor? In such a state, our human activities would not yet have become an "alien" power "independent of" us. Marx’s term here in the German is not "labor" (Arbeit), but "activity" (Tätigkeit)[5]. That is to say, before the division of labor, our various human "activities" were not fixed into concrete labor. In this sense, activity is not labor; it is not fixed, but can present itself in flexible and diverse forms. This is precisely the fundamental reason why one could hunt in the morning and fish in the afternoon. However, the social division of labor has thoroughly changed all this; our activities have been solidified into the labor of a specific division. Marx points out: "This fixation of social activity (Tätigkeit), this consolidation of our own product into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now."10
How should we understand this statement? For example, when a girl uses picked flowers to make a crown for her own head, she is not participating in the division of labor; she exists merely as a self-contained being for herself (für sich selbst). In this moment, the act of picking flowers and making a crown can hardly be distinguished from her other daily behaviors. Her behavior is her activity; the act of making does not isolate itself as a unique behavior in opposition to her other behaviors. Conversely, once the girl becomes a worker in a flower-crown workshop, her act of making is no longer part of her "being-for-self" behavior. Because a specific behavior has been separated from her other activities, it rules over her other activities as an "alien" power. In this sense, we can say the girl has been integrated into the system of the division of labor. Her "activity" (Tätigkeit) is forcibly partitioned into two parts: one is "labor" (Arbeit), an objective power that rules over her and thwarts any pleasant or romantic aspirations; the remaining activities become leisure or entertainment—the "non-productive" part. In other words, the social division of labor not only creates various industries like hunters, farmers, herdsmen, fishermen, and critics, but simultaneously effects a differentiation within every individual. it partitions concrete human activity into labor and other non-productive parts (or leisure). The part designated as labor, under the social relations of the division of labor, becomes an objective power that rules the subject; it becomes the "alien" power that solidifies flexible activity into labor.
Interestingly, Marx subsequently discusses the state of affairs under communist society. Once the existing state of the division of labor is transcended and communist society is entered, Marx points out that there exists a specific common "activity" (Tätigkeit) under communism. It seems we can understand it this way: for the Marx of The German Ideology period, once the division of labor and its corresponding unequal social relations are abolished, that alien power of objective domination over people will disappear. People will no longer be the products of labor fixed by the division of labor, but will reacquire a world-historical universal power—that is, they will regain the vitality of "activity." This is precisely the materialistic connotation of communism. It is also in this sense that Marx points out: "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."10 The "real movement which abolishes the present state of things" cited by Marx here does not mean the abolition of activities like hunting, fishing, herding, or criticizing. Rather, it means that these activities will still exist in communist society, but unlike in previous class societies characterized by an unequal division of labor, these activities will no longer be a fixed form of labor or an alien objective power over people’s activities. In communist society, these activities are once again integrated with other human activities; they no longer stand above other activities and are no longer a real power enslaving people.
Thus, we can seemingly draw a conclusion: so-called labor is not a naturally given concept, nor is it a transcendental concept; it is a historical concept. It is a product of human society reaching a certain stage of development. Only through a certain stage of the division of labor can we, within concrete social relations of production and relations of intercourse (Verkehrsformen)[6], separate specific activities with productive significance from other human activities to become an independent category. A child holding a bow and arrow who shoots a rabbit for the purpose of play is not performing labor, but rather an activity in a state prior to the division of labor, because the child has not yet entered the division of labor. Conversely, once the division of labor appears in human society, it is as if a power splits people in two, differentiating human time into work/labor time and rest/leisure time, or separating certain spaces as independent labor spaces, thereby allowing labor time and space to dominate other times and spaces. In this sense, human activity separated in time and space acquires a new concept—"labor" (Arbeit). Once labor is generated, it is abstract, because it does not naturally regard hunting, fishing, herding, and criticizing as human activities; rather, under the measure of a certain division of labor, specific human activities are solidified as "labor." From the perspective of Marx’s historical materialism, the definition and distinction of labor are not determined by natural human activity, but by the mode of social production and relations of intercourse at a certain historical stage. To be precise, labor becomes labor not only because it can create value, but more importantly because it subordinates humanity to a system of division of labor, thereby forming unequal class relations.
Capitalist society is the most unique historical stage within this unequal division of labor. In ancient and feudal societies, rulers appropriated the products of the division of labor through the most direct and violent means, thoroughly turning those engaged in labor into slaves or peasants. The uniqueness of capitalist society lies in its invention of a universal concept and magnitude, allowing all different types of labor—whether hunting, fishing, herding, making pots, or even creating art—to be measured under a unified scale: money. Thus, in capitalist society, labor is not only an objective power distinct from other human activities; more importantly, this objective power is measured through the abstract, universal magnitude of money. This allows all labor to be integrated into a massive system under the framework of a universal abstract magnitude. This scale, which can measure all labor and its products, becomes the god of this society. People worship before it, forming fetishes—whether commodity fetishism, money fetishism, or capital fetishism—all of which are essentially the consequence of placing concrete, divided labor onto a single scale of measurement. As the Canadian Marxist theorist Moishe Postone pointed out, Marx’s analysis of capitalism "is not conducted from the standpoint of labor; on the contrary, it is based on a critique of labor in capitalism. Marx’s critical theory seeks to show that labor in capitalism plays a unique historical role in mediating social relations and, at the same time, it elucidates the consequences of this form of mediation. His focus on labor in capitalism does not imply that the material process of production is necessarily more important than other spheres of social life. Rather, his analysis of the specificity of labor in capitalism shows that capitalist production is not a purely technical process, but is inextricably linked to, and shaped by, the basic social relations of that society."11 It is evident, then, that the question of "what is labor" is a concept formed under a specific historical mechanism. Under different social systems, and especially in capitalist society, due to concrete mechanisms of production and division of labor, certain human activities (primarily those related to production) are regarded as labor, while others are not. It is precisely through an abstract measurement relationship that productive labor is allowed to stand above other social activities of humanity to become a dominant objective power. The fact that productive labor or capitalist labor can acquire the power of social domination is ultimately the result of the historical development of social relations.
If we re-read Marx’s famous passage on communism in The German Ideology [7] from this perspective, it is not difficult to see that his core point lies in the elimination of the division of labor between various types of labor. That is to say, it involves reunifying solidified labor into a common "activity." Hunting, fishing, cattle-rearing, and criticism disappear as labor, but they do not disappear as total human activity. Within a structure that breaks the solidified historical division of labor, people can continuously restore the vitality of various human activities, thereby shaking off the shackles of capital and social domination without falling into the confines of hollow abstract criticism. Only at that moment—though humans still engage in hunting, fishing, production, and criticism—will these activities themselves cease to constitute an alien force. On the contrary, they will become one with human activity itself, serving as the condition for the well-rounded development of humanity.
Therefore, the perspective of Marx's historical materialism provides us with the best theoretical weapon for understanding contemporary digital labor. Whether it is material labor or immaterial labor, both are actually products of specific historical conditions. To be precise, Antonio Negri did not propose the concept of immaterial labor in the digital age; rather, he proposed it in the 1960s and 70s on the automated assembly lines of Italian Fiat factories. Thus, although immaterial labor appears in 21st-century works like Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth, the concept belongs to the 20th century—the era of reflexive and automated capitalist production—and is likewise closely related to the proletarian struggles of the neoliberal era that rose in the 1980s. However, the rise of the digital age and the resulting digital capitalism may be producing new types of labor. Briefly put, the advent of the digital era may be causing certain human activities to no longer be regarded as labor, while simultaneously transforming certain activities previously regarded as leisure and entertainment into digital labor. Digital labor is concrete; not all digital labor is cultural and immaterial. According to the method of historical materialism, digital labor can only be understood within the framework of new digital labor processes. Digital labor once again separates the components of labor from various human activities. Activities that previously could not create value within a monetary framework may shine brilliantly in a data and algorithmic environment, becoming the most important forms of digital labor. What we need to understand is no longer simple assembly-line operations, but the totality of various human activities integrated by the structures of data and algorithms.
III. A Critique of Digital Labor Under General Data Structures
After entering the digital age, people's understanding of labor has undergone a tremendous change. Creating a short video and uploading it to a website is labor; posting one's photos on WeChat Moments is labor; even clicking on a push notification on social media, giving a "like" (or a "dislike"), and forwarding content has become labor. Some gamers gallop across battlefields and fight with all their might in electronic games, which has also become a form of labor. Digital labor seems to have become a very broad concept; it seems that as soon as we pick up a phone or open a computer, we are engaged in a kind of digital labor. It appears that the dichotomy between entertainment and labor in the usual sense no longer exists in the digital age; any digital traces we leave in the interconnected digital world can be regarded as labor. Consequently, the British Marxist communication scholar Christian Fuchs has pointed out this situation today where "play" [8] and labor are indistinguishable: "Traditionally, play and labor were two separate spheres of activity, the former occurring in private leisure time and public time, and the latter occurring in factories and offices during working hours. 'Play' labor means the boundary area between play and labor is blurred: labor presents itself as play, while play becomes a form of value generation. Playing is a new management philosophy; for example, working in a 'Google' office looks like working in a playground, yet it is a high-pressure workspace with long-term overtime. The use of corporate social media ('Facebook', 'Google', 'Twitter', etc.) is all very fun, and using these platforms in 'play' hides this situation: these platforms are run by companies in order to earn more profit and exploit the labor of users." 14 Indeed, the boundary between usual leisure or play and work or labor has been broken by the new mediation of digital and algorithmic technologies. However, we cannot simply assume that the essence of digital labor is "play" or "immateriality." Instead, we need to consider this issue at the level of a new mode of production.
According to the theory of historical materialism analyzed previously, the scale that distinguishes human activity into labor and leisure does not lie in the activity itself, but in a historical standard—namely, the division of labor resulting from the mode of production at different historical stages. In the early stages of capitalist development, or the stage of civil society, this scale shifted from a hidden master-slave relationship [9] to an explicit value scale—that is, labor is always an activity under a certain "form of value generation." In other words, once human activity is reduced to a measurable quantity in terms of value-form, that activity can be regarded as labor. In this sense, labor is "undifferentiated human labor" congealed in commodities—that is, general abstract labor measured through the value-form. It is also in this sense that the abstract value-form reigns over our concrete activities, forcibly dividing human activities into two: one part consisting of activities capable of producing value becomes labor. It is precisely in this sense that Marx clearly pointed out: "Exchange value expressed in money, so this principle boils down to the value of commodities being determined by the value of labor, or the value of labor being the general measure of value." 7 Conversely, those human activities that cannot be measured by the general scale of value become leisure or entertainment. The human life-world is forcibly divided into two different parts: one part is the world of labor for production, and the other part is the leisure part that cannot be measured by the general scale of value. Only the former creates value, while the latter is the part for leisure and entertainment. Within this latter part, what Marx called "unproductive labor" [10] is also formed—that is, the value created through productive labor is redistributed in the leisure and entertainment part, forming recreational commercial and service activities that can also generate consumption and distribution. But for capitalist society as a whole, the labor that plays the dominant role remains productive labor that produces value. The high-speed train of capitalism runs on labor measured by the general scale of value; its radiant light also shines into the life-world of consumption and entertainment, bringing immense momentum to that world.
Although the status of the value of labor as the general scale still exists after entering the digital age, a different principle of distinction or division of labor has indeed emerged in the interconnected digital world: a production principle based on data. Nick Srnicek, the founder of Canadian Left Accelerationism, observed that beneath the level of labor value, a data layer has formed. He believes: "Simply put, we should treat data as a raw material that must be extracted; user activity is the natural source of this raw material. Like oil, data is a material that is extracted, refined, and used in various ways. The more data, the more uses." 15 Thus, in the digital age, data is a brand-new way of making distinctions. Previously, in the stage of civil society, all activities were divided into labor that generates value and leisure that cannot. Correspondingly, in the stage of digital capitalism, this distinction has become activities that can produce data versus activities that cannot leave data behind. For example, for the Siri software on an iPhone, it is not only a mobile butler that conducts intelligent dialogues with us, but it also extracts data from our interactions. It distinguishes activities in our daily life from which data can be extracted (such as driving, searching for restaurants, online shopping, foreign language translation, etc.) from other activities from which data cannot be extracted (such as an accidental sneeze). Precisely because our searches on shopping platforms or applications can create valuable data—data that can be used for back-end analysis and positioning by the platform—our search behavior is no longer leisure, but is reintegrated into the framework of labor. By definition, this labor differs from the definition of labor in the industrial labor stage because they belong to two different systems of distinction: one uses the general form of value as its scale, the other uses analyzable and extractable data as its scale. If we had the concept of "value in general" in the era of industrial capitalism, then in the era of digital capitalism, this concept has become "general data."
Therefore, although our activities have not changed much compared to the past—for example, buying vegetables at a wet market in the 1980s or 90s was a pure consumption activity that could not be defined as productive labor because the act of buying vegetables did not produce concrete value—today, in the digital age, our act of ordering vegetables on an online platform actually produces a large amount of data. This data is not used merely to analyze specific user information; once tens of thousands of data points are aggregated, they can provide effective guidance to the agricultural production sector. For instance, if citizens in a certain area have a certain volume of consumption for white radishes, then the total number of white radishes to be planted in the next production cycle is preset during the production process, thereby avoiding overproduction. Meanwhile, during the production process, the growth of every white radish can be monitored through data in its specific environment: how much sunlight, how much rain, and the nutritional status of the soil for one mu [11] of white radishes are all collected, analyzed, and classified as data. Thus, production and labor in the digital age based on data are by no means the "immaterial labor" mentioned by Negri and others, but a new type of labor closely integrated with actual material production. In the context of digital labor, the distinction between material and immaterial is no longer important. The collection and analysis of data have crossed the boundaries between leisure and production, material and immaterial. Instead, they directly use "dataizable" versus "non-dataizable" as the brand-new standard of distinction. Being "dataizable" also represents a standard of digitization—that is, conforming to the data exchange protocols in the corresponding network. Thus, an apparent activity is valuable only if it is converted into data exchanged in digital space through a digital interface under the parameters of certain digital protocols. Only then is it digital labor: the activity capable of creating such standardized digitized data.
In other words, the most fundamental criterion of digital labor does not lie in the activity itself, but in whether the activity can be included in a massive network of data collection, analysis, and exchange. This Big Data and algorithmic system constructed in the interconnected digital world, in turn, becomes an alien material force reigning over our activities. This time, it is no longer merely the general form of value that distinguishes our activities; rather, a massive data network is turning us into marionettes on a seamless data apparatus. Through digital labor, we have become appendages of this data apparatus, coexisting with it. Activities that cannot enter the data apparatus are gradually eliminated, and we gradually lose the sense of their existence. That is to say, if we are to escape this digitalized alien material force, the point does not lie in becoming beings who cannot be dataized. Rather, the foundation of the critique of digital labor lies in discovering the data apparatus hidden behind the distinction of all activities. It is precisely this data apparatus that turns "dataizable" humans into "Data People," and "Data People" constantly leave data traces on digital interfaces, forming digital labor.
However, this is not yet the entirety of the critique of digital labor. Digital labor is not individualistic; the mystery of digital labor does not lie in a process as simple as us clicking a link on a shopping website and then finding a package in a corrugated cardboard box waiting at our doorstep the next day. As the British scholar David...
Through an analysis of Amazon, David W. Hill discovered that beneath seemingly simple digital operations, many layers of digital labor are actually concealed. Hill notes: “The danger is that we cannot see the materiality behind online shopping; we only see our consumption experience, the clicks and the 'sweeping' of goods on the screen. You click your mouse and the goods arrive at the door; an online retailer like Amazon does not so much transcend as conceal the production interface.”[21] Hill observes that behind our clicks, there are a vast number of producers, warehousing enterprises, and logistics companies controlled by the vendors. These actors are also engaged in labor, and their activities are likewise datafied by massive algorithmic structures. Every instance of production, warehousing, and logistics leaves a trace in the digital network, but these traces are only visible to the Internet of Things (IoT) interface. We, sitting in front of our screens, actually have very little perception of these activities.
Therefore, we must reconceptualize the concept of digital labor from the perspective of a massive, datafied interface as a whole. That is to say, the clicks and browsing performed behind smartphone and computer screens are merely the individual manifestations of the digital labor system. Supporting these manifestations are the specific links of datafied material production, warehousing, exchange, logistics, and sales. Data connects these links with each of us behind our screens; while we share our data regarding reading, browsing, and purchasing, the production, warehousing, and logistics enterprises contribute the material connections that support the data network. The goods we purchase do not appear out of thin air; they belong to a production system highly dispatched by data and algorithms—a production system whose efficiency and control far exceed the productive capacity mobilized by currency and finance. This is the material reality hidden behind digital labor, which digital platforms transform into a series of clicks on a computer screen for the average person. Marx once criticized vulgar political economists for "turning men into hats"; [12] today, some vulgar digital political economists have gone further by "turning hats into data points of clicks or browsing." If the vulgar political economists used "hats" to obscure the social reality of capitalist inequality, today’s vulgar digital political economy is using the surface data of clicks and browsing to obscure the material dimension of contemporary digital capitalism—namely, the new, unequal relations of production structured within big data. Thus, from the perspective of historical materialism, a critique of digital labor in the digital age should not focus on clicks and page views on a screen, but rather on the material aspects of production and circulation concealed behind this data. Only by doing so can we establish a genuine critique of the political economy of digital labor in the digital age.
(Notes omitted) (Author’s affiliation: Department of Philosophy, Nanjing University) Online Editor: Zhang Jian Source: Studies on Marxiology (Makesizhuyi lilun xueke yanjiu) Issue 11, 2021