Tim O’Reilly’s discussions of Web 2.0 can easily be dismissed as corporate attempts to claim control over the information democracy arising on the internet. Yet, within his corporatize, we find the complexities of what we consider valuable in the information age, both commodity and metric. The complex relationship between agent and labor is changing as more and more of our life is wired. Ultimately, by shifting the location of value from commodity to labor, the information economy justifies such fan practices as piracy and reappropriation.
In the era of Web 2.0, both humans and technology have assumed the role of agent, in relation to data. As data-agents, we harvest data, as well as organize and analyze it. Take, for example, a crowdsourcing research approach to Twitter. The initial data-set is created by a large number of human agents, each providing their own perspective on the issue. Subsequently, a computer scans these millions of self-standing data-pieces into a cogent trend, which can then be sold to a marketing firm. Finally, a human agent bends this large data-set into a series of profitable statements, which can then be converted into something of value, i.e. an advertising campaign. When we discuss O’Reilly’s vaunted “collective intelligence,” we tend to privilege the first agents alone, the data-providers. Yet, the digital agent, the data-analysis software, serves as an equally important component of the larger system, and thus functions on an equal plane with the human data-providers, as well as the human data-receivers.
While some might argue that this shift dehumanizes people, we could equally claim that data-culture encourages a broader perspective of who (and what) can be considered an agent. O’Reilly pays lip-service to concerns about dehumanization in his second article, but ultimately dismisses such problems with banal claims concerning expanded communication and shared identities: “There are many who worry about the dehumanizing effect of technology. We share that worry, but also see the counter-trend, that communication binds us together, gives us shared context, and ultimately shared identity” (web2summit.com 9). By heralding the wonder of communication, O’Reilly distracts from the central concern of dehumanization. Web 2.0 is not about communication, it is about data-processing; Web 1.0 was about communication. The sort of collaboration encouraged by Web 2.0 is not person to person, but person to technology. In fact, O’Reilly points to the elevation of the technological as agent when he declares humans the “partner” of sensory equipment (web2summit.com 8). Ultimately, if we choose to consider ourselves part of a larger collective intelligence, then we must choose to recognize our partners in such endeavors as our equals, and not our servants.
In effect, the labor of the new economy lies in data-collection and data-analysis; the capital is the hard data itself. O’Reilly asserts that “the era of Web 2.0, therefore, [is] a race to acquire and control data assets” (web2summit.com 3). Yet, he stresses that some data-analysis systems should not be monopolized, for such tactics prevent innovation (ibid). This is an extremely complex argument concerning the nature of capital in the new economy. For O’Reilly, the larger data set is the only thing that the corporation can ethically control; even the algorithms used to collect that data should be available for all to see, and potentially use. The Web 2.0 corporation need not worry about somebody else “stealing” its capability to produce data, because that capability is not merely the labor of the machine; it is the joint labor of the machine and the large base of user/data-providers. Google, for example, could share their search algorithm with the world, without a worry that somebody else could detract from their profits, because the algorithm requires the gigantic database developed by billions of searches, a database wholly owned by Google.
In the new economy, value is produced entirely out of labor, with little attention to capital itself. This is not to suggest that Google’s database, a massive conglomeration of capital, is of little value; in fact, it is one of the most valuable assets in the world. But, the value of the database does not rely on the specific data-pieces contained by the database, but instead in the labor-process of accruing such a vast collection of data. Hence, Google’s database is more valuable to marketing firms than Bing’s, because Google’s database is larger, and thus produces more effective and complete information. We must be careful, though, to distinguish between the value that Web 2.0 services provide for users versus the value they provide for end-capitalists. The Web 2.0 company must provide a dual service: they must provide complex databases that they can sell to the end-capitalists, such as marketing firms, etc.; they must also provide innovative and useful services to the front-end data-producers, to keep them providing data. Thus, even though Google appears to have a dominant grasp of the search engine industry, they could potentially lose out, if another data-analysis agent could provide a more innovative and interesting way for the users to provide data. Again, we see that the total value provided by the Web 2.0 company lies in the data-collection and data-analysis labor that they provide, not the data itself.
Because the value produced by the Web 2.0 company lies in the collection and analysis of huge sets of data, each piece of raw data retains a value that cannot be ethically collected. Take, for example, MySpace’s controversial attempt to lay claim to any and all creative material that is posted on their website. While general consensus has not condemned Google’s collection of search data, for the value they produce is in their methods, MySpace violated the user trust, for they created value in the traditional sense: they exploited labor into creating a product that they can sell at a grossly inflated price. Data collection and analysis systems are not inherently exploitive of data-producers, because they provide a necessary service that the labor cannot in any way provide on their own. The database itself is what holds value, not the solitary data-pieces. Thus, a song posted on YouTube remains the possession of the person who produced it; even the specific data for that song remains public domain (thus, the easily visible hit-recorder). All YouTube can claim from the specific data-piece is the right to incorporate it into their larger database and analysis system. The production of data, be it a single search, a music video on YouTube, or a social network on Facebook, derives its value from the labor of production.
Thus we see that the rising problematic nature of fan-appropriation has its roots in a changing notion of how value is produced in the new economy. Media companies generally consider themselves old-economy stand-bys. They exploit artistic production to produce exchange value in an art commodity; for example, a record label might claim the rights to all the songs produced by a given artist. In such a paradigm, when a fan covers that song, the copyright holder can claim that said fan has stolen their product and detracted from its value. In the Web 2.0 paradigm that O’Reilly presents, that fan has the right to reproduce the song, for he is contributing labor to the market and producing knowledge of said song. Thus we see the argument that media companies should become promoters rather than copyright holders, and thus continue to profit despite rampant piracy on the internet. In the new economy, piracy is a value-producing activity, which will allow data-collectors to produce valuable database commodities, as well as provide the copyright holder with a greater public awareness, which can be converted into a saleable, labor-intensive product, such as a concert. By attempting to retain their position in the old economy, media conglomerates are quickly forcing themselves into irrelevance.
Anyone, though, who would claim that old economy-style production will fade away, ignores the continuing relevance of the commodity economy in certain industries, such as food and energy production. Certainly, awareness of a certain agriculture company will not provide them with the value that they deserve for producing their food; similarly, pharmaceutical companies do not gain by allowing other companies to produce the drugs that they spent huge amounts of money developing. The information economy is relevant only for certain industries, and thus cannot be seen as universal; we cannot demand that non-information technology companies play by the same rules as the information industry. Thus, sneaking into a movie theater, and thus stealing the product of a non-information company (the theater) can be considered morally wrong, while downloading the film onto your computer, and gaining access to information belonging to an information company (the producers/distributors), remains moral.
The problem with our current approach to the misappropriation of value by consumers comes when we realize that few to no regulations have been developed to distinguish between the information economy and the classical, commodity economy. Some large corporations, like Microsoft, try to have it both ways, keeping their source-code private, as if the software were a commodity, but also demanding that other companies function on their standards, as if their product was an information technology that gains value with more users. If we consider fan-practices to be the precursor to modern technological practices, we see that users are willing to trade their personal data for access; tech companies that attempt to drown out their user base run the risk of alienating the very thing that makes them strong.
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