Data and “digital labour": selling yourself for a search

In Postcapitalism, Paul Mason dissects the challenges facing the late capitalist system and explains how contradictions in its inner workings could lead to its total collapse. One of the key ideas he expresses is that the economies of developed countries are increasingly trying to sell things that we are not used to selling – personal care, basic errand-running, and, most pressingly, information. The sale of things that are infinitely replicable, from machine blueprints to open source software, poses a serious issue for the capitalist system. This is because these “goods” touch on the idea of “zero marginal cost”: the idea that it costs no more to produce 1 copy than it does to produce 1000, and costs for 1 copy trend towards zero as renewable energies grow more efficient. This looks a lot like the onset of what the cool kids called “fully automated luxury communism”: as things steadily require less and less labour value to produce, their costs tend towards zero, and if the theoretical costs of producing something are nothing, then no one has to work to produce it - and we can sit back and relax.

But throughout history, capitalism has contested this. During he industrial revolution, the efficiencies of heavy machinery were contested with a vast increase in the urban working population. Later, the efficiencies of computerisation saw humans trading invisible stocks and handling intangible registers. Labour value continued to control production and provide an axis for the cost of goods, even if it brought about dull, monotonous and occasionally unnecessary jobs. Now, however, it seems far harder to figure out how labour could possibly be injected into data. Data is constantly generated, and a large proportion of it can be generated for free. Regardless, once it’s created, it can be spread forever without requiring any further labour cost. In the past, the only similarly replicable "good" has been the idea - and capitalists have pushed those back into the economic model through patents and the fragile notion of intellectual property. However, there is resistance to this push-back; pirate software that puts data back in the public domain. So perhaps we can imagine a world where there is no value placed on software, or anything made using it; that its ubiquity could lead to the collapse of supply and demand, building a world built on sharing instead of barter.

But the IPPR – of all places – suggests otherwise. Their report on “digital labour” is presenting a new concept: that whenever we browse the internet, we give away our data, for free. Why not place a tax on this, and label it “digital labour”? Companies pay into the people’s purse every time they sap from the people’s heads. It seems fair enough, hardly insidious, and even equitable – the IPPR use it to advocate for a 30-day week. But the most sincere problem with this idea is that it attempts to assign an economic value to data, something that is inevitably produced freely, with the intent of stemming its flow. Putting a price on data would make the companies that absorb it more reluctant to seek out individuals’ web-bound wishes. That is bad for the postcapitalist thesis, because  assigning a value to data makes it much easier to integrate into a capitalist model. This digital labour would be the equivalent of patents for ideas. No longer could the free exchange of data liberate us from the capitalist system, because that exchange of data is no longer free; its collection is subject to the system.

If I had my way, I'd favour an internet built on encryption, where information from the user was shared with the specific instance of the service they are using and not shared any further. I’m happy for Facebook to use what I say on Messenger to recommend me a music festival, for example, but I don’t want that causal link to be used for advertising, nor do I want it taken anywhere beyond my unique instance of the application. Cache as much on me as you like, but don’t send it to your superiors, or worse, your stakeholders. And then we wouldn’t need to be paid for producing data, because it wouldn’t be serving some malicious, unspoken “greater purpose” for the company we feed; it would be for us alone, our own instances of private machine learning under our own power.

On the other hand, if we abandon the idea of encryption and embrace this "digital labour", we’re not just penalising big companies, but also cookie-collecting do-gooders. There’s Facebook, Amazon and Alphabet in one corner and small, individual websites on the other. The former group has huge revenues but often still runs on slim profits – part of the reason why these companies avoid tax is because that evasion helps keeping their books in the black. These businesses were built to foster innovation and attempt to improve our way of life, and they could pursue venture capital on that basis. Nowadays they work on the basis of dopamine lifts and addictive systems in order to keep the numbers ticking up. The data they mine is not mined for the greater good, nor does it necessarily inform a better system for those who use it; the objective is user retention - engagement, not enjoyment. As for the websites that don’t draw a specific financial benefit from the data they receive, paying out for digital labour would simply seem punitive. It’s also worth considering that larger web-bound companies will find it easier to bear this cost than smaller ones, leading to smaller web enterprises struggling to provide services that are reliant on cookies - the most benign kind of user data. Creating barriers to entry for data collection is, in my view, worse than encrypting it as I've detailed above.

Regardless of how you think data should be deployed, we wouldn’t need our data collected and then fed back for ad revenue if we had a better social safety net. Internet services are not becoming more profitable; they are becoming more desperate. But individuals who make their lives on the internet are looking beyond ads: full-time creatives on Youtube are shifting slowly towards user subscription services like Patreon and Ko.fi as advertising revenues dwindle. This virtual tip jar is becoming the new safety net, a warped version of welfare that is reliant on a continued parasocial relationship. But right now, it’s paid for by the minority that can afford to fund what grassroots culture we have left. By far the easiest way to resolve the problem of how we "pay" people for providing data would be to completely abandon the system. It's not a given that services provided on the internet have to be profitable; maybe we would appreciate their added value in terms of social benefit if they didn't. What if we moved towards a society with a Universal Basic Income? Then, tech entrepreneurs could focus on building services that help connect people and inspire ideas. We could close the circle currently patched by venture capital (dangerous) and targeted ads (problematic). We could step a touch closer to the utopia that cyberspace’s pioneers imagined. But we do not get there by normalising the idea that people should sell their data. Unless I’ve missed it, and the clocks are already striking thirteen.