The real not-capital is labor.
—Karl Marx, Grundrisse
Working in the digital media industry is not as much fun as it is made out
to be. The “NetSlaves” of the eponymous Webzine are becoming increas-
ingly vociferous about the shamelessly exploitative nature of the job, its
punishing work rhythms, and its ruthless casualization (www.dis-
obey.com/netslaves). They talk about “24–7 electronic sweatshops” and
complain about the ninety-hour weeks and the “moronic management of
new media companies.” In early 1999, seven of the fifteen thousand “vol-
unteers” of America Online (AOL) rocked the info-loveboat by asking the
Department of Labor to investigate whether AOL owes them back wages
for the years of playing chathosts for free.1 They used to work long hours
and love it; now they are starting to feel the pain of being burned by dig-
ital media.
These events point to a necessary backlash against the glamorization
of digital labor, which highlights its continuities with the modern sweat-
shop and points to the increasing degradation of knowledge work. Yet the
question of labor in a “digital economy” is not so easily dismissed as an
innovative development of the familiar logic of capitalist exploitation. The
NetSlaves are not simply a typical form of labor on the Internet; they
also embody a complex relation to labor that is widespread in late capital-
ist societies.
In this essay I understand this relationship as a provision of “free
labor,” a trait of the cultural economy at large, and an important, and yet
undervalued, force in advanced capitalist societies. By looking at the Inter-
net as a specific instance of the fundamental role played by free labor, this
essay also tries to highlight the connections between the “digital economy”
and what the Italian autonomists have called the “social factory.” The
“social factory” describes a process whereby “work processes have shifted
from the factory to society, thereby setting in motion a truly complex
machine.”2 Simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and
exploited, free labor on the Net includes the activity of building Web sites,
modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing lists,
and building virtual spaces on MUDs and MOOs. Far from being an
Tiziana Terranova
Free Labor
PRODUCING CULTURE FOR THE DIGITAL ECONOMY
Social Text 63, Vol. 18, No. 2, Summer 2000. Copyright © 2000 by Duke University Press.
2. Terranova 4/24/00 11:22 AM Page 33
“unreal,” empty space, the Internet is animated by cultural and technical
labor through and through, a continuous production of value that is com-
pletely immanent to the flows of the network society at large.
Support for this argument, however, is immediately complicated by
the recent history of critical theory. How to speak of labor, especially cul-
tural and technical labor, after the demolition job carried out by thirty
years of postmodernism? The postmodern socialist feminism of Donna
Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” spelled out some of the reasons behind
the antipathy of 1980s critical theory for Marxist analyses of labor. Har-
away explicitly rejected the humanistic tendencies of theorists who see
labor as the “pre-eminently privileged category enabling the Marxist to
overcome illusion and find that point of view which is necessary for
changing the world.”3 Paul Gilroy similarly expressed his discontent at the
inadequacy of Marxist analyses of labor to describe the culture of the
descendants of slaves, who value artistic expression as “the means towards
both individual self-fashioning and communal liberation.”4 If labor is “the
humanizing activity that makes [white] man,” then, surely, humanizing
labor does not really belong in the age of networked, posthuman intelli-
gence.
However, the “informatics of domination” that Haraway describes in
the “Manifesto” is certainly preoccupied with the relation between cyber-
netics, labor, and capital. In the fifteen years since its publication, this tri-
angulation has become even more evident. The expansion of the Internet
has given ideological and material support to contemporary trends toward
increased flexibility of the workforce, continuous reskilling, freelance
work, and the diffusion of practices such as “supplementing” (bringing
supplementary work home from the conventional office).5 Advertising
campaigns and business manuals suggest that the Internet is not only a
site of disintermediation (embodying the famous death of the middle man,
from bookshops to travel agencies to computer stores), but also the means
through which a flexible, collective intelligence has come into being.
This essay does not seek to offer a judgment on the “effects” of the
Internet, but rather to map the way in which the Internet connects to the
autonomist “social factory.” I am concerned with how the “outernet”–—
the network of social, cultural, and economic relationships that criss-
crosses and exceeds the Internet–—surrounds and connects the latter to
larger flows of labor, culture, and power. It is fundamental to move
beyond the notion that cyberspace is about escaping reality in order to
understand how the reality of the Internet is deeply connected to the
development of late postindustrial societies as a whole.
Cultural and technical work is central to the Internet but is also a
widespread activity throughout advanced capitalist societies. I argue that
34 Tiziana Terranova
2. Terranova 4/24/00 11:22 AM Page 34
such labor is not exclusive to the so-called knowledge workers, but is a
pervasive feature of the postindustrial economy. The pervasiveness of
such production questions the legitimacy of a fixed distinction between
production and consumption, labor and culture. It also undermines
Gilroy’s distinction between work as “servitude, misery and subordina-
tion” and artistic expression as the means to self-fashioning and commu-
nal liberation. The increasingly blurred territory between production and
consumption, work and cultural expression, however, does not signal the
recomposition of the alienated Marxist worker. The Internet does not
automatically turn every user into an active producer, and every worker
into a creative subject. The process whereby production and consumption
are reconfigured within the category of free labor signals the unfolding of
a different (rather than completely new) logic of value, whose operations
need careful analysis.6
The Digital Economy
The term digital economy has recently emerged as a way to summarize
some of the processes described above. As a term, it seems to describe a
formation that intersects on the one hand with the postmodern cultural
economy (the media, the university, and the arts) and on the other hand
with the information industry (the information and communication com-
plex). Such an intersection of two different fields of production consti-
tutes a challenge to a theoretical and practical engagement with the ques-
tion of labor, a question that has become marginal for media studies as
compared with questions of ownership (within political economy) and
consumption (within cultural studies).
In Richard Barbrook’s definition, the digital economy is characterized
by the emergence of new technologies (computer networks) and new
types of workers (the digital artisans).7 According to Barbrook, the digital
economy is a mixed economy: it includes a public element (the state’s
funding of the original research that produced Arpanet, the financial sup-
port to academic activities that had a substantial role in shaping the cul-
ture of the Internet); a market-driven element (a latecomer that tries to
appropriate the digital economy by reintroducing commodification); and
a gift economy element, the true expression of the cutting edge of capi-
talist production that prepares its eventual overcoming into a future “anar-
cho-communism”:
Within the developed world, most politicians and corporate leaders believe
that the future of capitalism lies in the commodification of information. . . .
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2. Terranova 4/24/00 11:22 AM Page 35
Yet at the “cutting-edge” of the emerging information society, money-com-
modity relations play a secondary role to those created by a really existing
form of anarcho-communism. For most of its users, the net is somewhere to
work, play, love, learn and discuss with other people. . . . Unrestricted by
physical distance, they collaborate with each other without the direct media-
tion of money and politics. Unconcerned about copyright, they give and
receive information without thought of payment. In the absence of states or
markets to mediate social bonds, network communities are instead formed
through the mutual obligations created by gifts of time and ideas.8
From a Marxist-Hegelian angle, Barbrook sees the high-tech gift economy
as a process of overcoming capitalism from the inside. The high-tech gift
economy is a pioneering moment that transcends both the purism of the
New Left do-it-yourself culture and the neoliberalism of the free market
ideologues: “money-commodity and gift relations are not just in conflict
with each other, but also co-exist in symbiosis.”9 Participants in the gift
economy are not reluctant to use market resources and government fund-
ing to pursue a potlatch economy of free exchange. However, the potlatch
and the economy ultimately remain irreconcilable, and the market econ-
omy is always threatening to reprivatize the common enclaves of the gift
economy. Commodification, the reimposition of a regime of property, is,
in Barbrook’s opinion, the main strategy through which capitalism tries to
reabsorb the anarcho-communism of the Net into its folds.
I believe that Barbrook overemphasizes the autonomy of the high-
tech gift economy from capitalism. The processes of exchange that char-
acterize the Internet are not simply the reemergence of communism
within the cutting edge of the economy, a repressed other that resurfaces
just at the moment when communism seems defeated. It is important to
remember that the gift economy, as part of a larger digital economy, is
itself an important force within the reproduction of the labor force in late
capitalism as a whole. The provision of “free labor,” as we will see later, is
a fundamental moment in the creation of value in the digital economies.
As will be made clear, the conditions that make free labor an important
element of the digital economy are based in a difficult, experimental com-
promise between the historically rooted cultural and affective desire for
creative production (of the kind more commonly associated with Gilroy’s
emphasis on “individual self-fashioning and communal liberation”) and
the current capitalist emphasis on knowledge as the main source of value-
added.
The volunteers for America Online, the NetSlaves, and the amateur
Web designers are not working only because capital wants them to; they
are acting out a desire for affective and cultural production that is
36 Tiziana Terranova
2. Terranova 4/24/00 11:22 AM Page 36
nonetheless real just because it is socially shaped. The cultural, technical,
and creative work that supports the digital economy has been made pos-
sible by the development of capital beyond the early industrial and Fordist
modes of production and therefore is particularly abundant in those areas
where post-Fordism has been at work for a few decades. In the overdevel-
oped countries, the end of the factory has spelled out the obsolescence of
the old working class, but it has also produced generations of workers who
have been repeatedly addressed as active consumers of meaningful com-
modities. Free labor is the moment where this knowledgeable consump-
tion of culture is translated into productive activities that are pleasurably
embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited.
Management theory is also increasingly concerned with the question
of knowledge work, that indefinable quality that is essential to the
processes of stimulating innovation and achieving the goals of competi-
tiveness. For example, Don Tapscott, in a classic example of managerial
literature, The Digital Economy, describes the digital economy as a “new
economy based on the networking of human intelligence.”10 Human intel-
ligence provides the much needed value-added, which is essential to the
economic health of the organization. Human intelligence, however, also
poses a problem: it cannot be managed in quite the same way as more tra-
ditional types of labor. Knowledge workers need open organizational
structures to produce, because the production of knowledge is rooted in
collaboration, that is, in what Barbrook defined as the “gift economy”:
The concept of supervision and management is changing to team-based
structures. Anyone responsible for managing knowledge workers knows they
cannot be “managed” in the traditional sense. Often they have specialized
knowledge and skills that cannot be matched or even understood by man-
agement. A new challenge to management is first to attract and retain these
assets by marketing the organization to them, and second to provide the cre-
ative and open communications environment where such workers can effectively
apply and enhance their knowledge.11
For Tapscott, therefore, the digital economy magically resolves the
contradictions of industrial societies, such as class struggle: while in the
industrial economy the “worker tried to achieve fulfillment through leisure
[and] . . . was alienated from the means of production which were owned
and controlled by someone else,” in the digital economy the worker
achieves fulfillment through work and finds in her brain her own, unalien-
ated means of production.12 Such means of production need to be culti-
vated by encouraging the worker to participate in a culture of exchange,
whose flows are mainly kept within the company but also need to involve
an “outside,” a contact with the fast-moving world of knowledge in gen-
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2. Terranova 4/24/00 11:22 AM Page 37
eral. The convention, the exhibition, and the conference—the more tradi-
tional ways of supporting this general exchange—are supplemented by
network technologies both inside and outside the company. Although the
traffic of these flows of knowledge needs to be monitored (hence the cor-
porate concerns about the use of intranets), the Internet effectively func-
tions as a channel through which “human intelligence” renews its capac-
ity to produce.
This essay looks beyond the totalizing hype of the managerial litera-
ture but also beyond some of the conceptual limits of Barbrook’s work. It
looks at some possible explanation for the coexistence, within the debate
about the digital economy, of discourses that see it as an oppositional
movement and others that see it as a functional development to new
mechanisms of extraction of value. Is the end of Marxist alienation wished
for by the manager guru the same thing as the gift economy heralded by
leftist discourse?
We can start undoing this deadlock by subtracting the label digital
economy from its exclusive anchorage within advanced forms of labor (we
can start then by depioneering it). This essay describes the digital econ-
omy as a specific mechanism of internal “capture” of larger pools of social
and cultural knowledge. The digital economy is an important area of
experimentation with value and free cultural/affective labor. It is about
specific forms of production (Web design, multimedia production, digital
services, and so on), but is also about forms of labor we do not immedi-
ately recognize as such: chat, real-life stories, mailing lists, amateur
newsletters, and so on. These types of cultural and technical labor are not
produced by capitalism in any direct, cause-and-effect fashion; that is,
they have not developed simply as an answer to the economic needs of
capital. However, they have developed in relation to the expansion of the
cultural industries and are part of a process of economic experimentation
with the creation of monetary value out of knowledge/culture/affect.
This process is different from that described by popular, left-wing
wisdom about the incorporation of authentic cultural moments: it is not,
then, about the bad boys of capital moving in on underground subcul-
tures/subordinate cultures and “incorporating” the fruits of their produc-
tion (styles, languages, music) into the media food chain. This process is
usually considered the end of a particular cultural formation, or at least
the end of its “authentic” phase. After incorporation, local cultures are
picked up and distributed globally, thus contributing to cultural hybridiza-
tion or cultural imperialism (depending on whom you listen to).
Rather than capital “incorporating” from the outside the authentic
fruits of the collective imagination, it seems more reasonable to think of
cultural flows as originating within a field that is always and already capi-
38 Tiziana Terranova
2. Terranova 4/24/00 11:22 AM Page 38
talism. Incorporation is not about capital descending on authentic culture
but a more immanent process of channeling collective labor (even as cul-
tural labor) into monetary flows and its structuration within capitalist
business practices.
Subcultural movements have stuffed the pockets of multinational cap-
italism for decades. Nurtured by the consumption of earlier cultural
moments, subcultures have provided the look, style, and sounds that sell
clothes, CDs, video games, films, and advertising slots on television. This
has often happened through the active participation of subcultural mem-
bers in the production of cultural goods (e.g., independent labels in
music, small designer shops in fashion).13 This participation is, as the
word suggests, a voluntary phenomenon, although it is regularly accom-
panied by cries of sellouts. The fruit of collective cultural labor has been
not simply appropriated, but voluntarily channeled and controversially
structured within capitalist business practices. The relation between cul-
ture, the cultural industry, and labor in these movements is much more
complex than the notion of incorporation suggests. In this sense, the dig-
ital economy is not a new phenomenon but simply a new phase of this
longer history of experimentation.
Knowledge Class and Immaterial Labor
In spite of the numerous, more or less disingenuous endorsements of the
democratic potential of the Internet, the links between it and capitalism
look a bit too tight for comfort to concerned political minds. It has been
very tempting to counteract the naive technological utopianism by point-
ing out how computer networks are the material and ideological heart of
informated capital. The Internet advertised on television and portrayed by
print media seems not just the latest incarnation of capital’s inexhaustible
search for new markets, but also a full consensus-creating machine, which
socializes the mass of proletarianized knowledge workers into the econ-
omy of continuous innovation.14 After all, if we do not get on-line soon,
the hype suggests, we will become obsolete, unnecessary, disposable. If we
do, we are promised, we will become part of the “hive mind,” the imma-
terial economy of networked, intelligent subjects in charge of speeding up
the rhythms of capital’s “incessant waves of branching innovations.”15
Multimedia artists, writers, journalists, software programmers, graphic
designers, and activists together with small and large companies are at the
core of this project. For some they are its cultural elite, for others a new
form of proletarianized labor.16 Accordingly, the digital workers are
described as resisting or supporting the project of capital, often in direct
If the population
of Internet users
is largely made
up of “knowledge
workers,” then it
matters whether
these are seen as
the owners of
elitist cultural and
economic power
or the avant-
ga