8
Capital as Power: Facebook and the Symbolic Monopoly Rent
The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to the debates on the question of economic valorization in the context of digital capitalism. My central argument is that the main approaches dealing with digital labor as a source of value within digital media are not able to propose an adequate critique of capitalism in the digital age. Based on a synthesis between the reexamination of Marx proposed by the value criticism current, the institutionalist political economy of advanced capitalism initiated by Thorstein Veblen as well as the Innisian theory of communication media in the constitution of knowledge monopolies, I will challenge the hypotheses stemming from the theories on digital labor, which postulate that value in digital capitalism would increasingly come from users’ unpaid work (Arvidsson and Colleoni 2012; Fuchs 2010, 2012).
Against these approaches, which are inspired in particular by the theorists of cognitive capitalism, I will first show that Marx does not seek to produce a positive theory of labor value, but that his approach consists rather of a critique of the categories of political economy, including commodities, value, labor and capital. In a second step, I will show the limits of traditional Marxist analysis to capture the institutional changes of advanced capitalism from the Veblenian institutionalist political economy approach. I would argue that the traditional Marxist approaches that digital labor theorists rely on do not generally take into account the institutional changes that have taken place within advanced capitalism since the late 19th Century. In this context, I will use the case of Facebook to demonstrate that accumulation within advanced capitalism is based on the ability of corporations to accumulate from a “symbolic monopoly rent”. In this sense, the process of capital accumulation does not consist so much in the accumulation of material wealth as in extra-economic mechanisms of “symbolic quantification of power”.
8.1. The debate on value production in social media: digital labor versus affective labor
The concept of digital labor is based on the assumptions of what could be called “traditional Marxism” (Kurz 2002; Postone 2009). This political economy ignores the Marxian approach, which consists of a real critique of political economy. The intention of Marx’s critique of political economy is to criticize the central categories of political economy – labor, commodity, value, capital – which, in his view, are not natural or economic categories, but social and cultural categories that belong only to a specific socio-historical period. These categories are not so much false as they are fetishized (Marx 1993), i.e. Marx, like Harold Innis (2009), as we will see below, proposes a materialist theory of the forms of human consciousness to the extent that the categories of political economy consist of mediations that are constitutive of forms of social objectivity and subjectivity. This means that Marx is not Ricardian in the sense that he is trying to produce a positive theory of value. Rather, it is intended to criticize the fact that work products have value. In this sense, the concept of digital labor is often based on a confusion between the Marxian categories of concrete labor and abstract labor, which is also confused with immaterial labor. Productive labor and unproductive labor are also confused, as are the concepts of wealth and value. The theory therefore unduly forces Marx’s categories of analysis when it is argued that value in digital social media would come from unpaid labor or user affects (Arvidsson and Coleoni 2012; Fuchs 2010). Value, according to Marx, can only come from the abstraction of social activity that allows the quantification of labor and its exchangeability for a salary. Unpaid work cannot produce value as defined by Marx; it is unproductive work since it does not produce surplus value. The exploitation of unpaid labor in digital social media is more in line with the rent category, i.e. it produces a commodity that has a price but no value. In this sense, digital capitalism is part of a fetishized dynamic, where concrete labor is carried out by algorithms and user data is reified so that it can be used as natural resources extracted through data mining techniques (Foley 2013).
Marxian analysis therefore aims to capture a fundamental contradiction within capitalist societies, since, if human labor solely produces value, replacing workers with machines or algorithms leads to a decrease in the unitary value of produced goods, hence the need to produce ever more goods in the same time unit in order to compensate for the tendency of the profit rate to fall (Postone 2009). In this logic of automating capitalism, the process of valorization becomes more and more difficult, or even impossible – since living labor is increasingly excluded – since it requires the institution of credit mediation as a condition of possibility to allow the reproduction of labor. Nevertheless, the Marxian hypothesis is set in the context of a liberal capitalism specific to the 19th Century. It is therefore necessary to take into account the nature of the institutional transformations that took place within capitalism at the turn of the 20th Century, in a context that some Marxists have called “monopoly capitalism”.
8.2. Capital as power: accumulation through symbolic monopoly rent
The contemporary deployment of what some call a “surveillance capitalism” (Bellamy Foster and McChesney 2014) fueled by megadata (Big Data) has its origins in the fundamental transformation of capitalism at the end of the 19th Century according to Thorstein Veblen (1932), namely the institutionalization of the corporation as the central figure of advanced capitalism. In advanced capitalism, the corporation replaces the classic figure of the bourgeois owner of the means of production as the central institution within this mode of production.
On the economic level, this institutional transformation has not been taken into account by Marxist economists and requires a reformulation of the analytical framework that was initially formulated by Marx in the context of liberal capitalism where price competition is the predominant form of constraint that is required, both on capitalists and proletarians. In a monopoly context, according to Marxist economists Baran and Sweezy (1968), it is necessary to take into account the contribution of institutionalist economists such as Veblen in the analysis of capitalism, since the tendency of the profit rate to fall is replaced by the all the more complicated problem of overaccumulation induced by oligopolistic competition.
In this context, capital accumulation is no longer achieved through price competition, but rather through what Veblen calls “differential accumulation strategies”, i.e. intellectual property rights, patents, trademarks and strategic alliances with other companies, or through formal and informal agreements with governments (Veblen 1932). In other words, in monopoly capitalism, the mediation of social relations through the market is replaced by planning within corporations whose power is based on their ability to capitalize on future income flows in the financial markets (Nitzan and Bichler 2012). The advent of the corporation induces a profound transformation of capitalism in that the whole economic process, from production to consumption, is based on the anticipation of future incomes through access to a credit currency produced by the financial system. It is a liquefaction of ownership – in short, an intangible or informational capitalism before the letter1 – insofar as it aims to generate liquidity based on a right regarding the company’s future income that takes the form of exchangeable financial securities (Nitzan and Bichler 2012). In this context, the function of mass culture disseminated by cultural industries is to ensure, particularly through advertising, that it produces an awareness adapted to the logic of overproduction of monopoly capitalism. The captain of the liberal capitalism industry thus became “captain of conscience” (Ewen 1983) whose role was to produce audiences that would be sold to advertisers (Smythe 1977), in order to link the logic of overproduction to that of overconsumption.
8.3. The institutional transformations of advanced capitalism: the financialization of the economy and the commodification of knowledge
It is in this context that it is possible to understand that digital capitalism is based on a capitalization process, i.e. the discounting of future profits at current value. To put it in Innissian terms, it is a control of historicity based on a presentist temporal regime made possible by the mediation of digital technologies (Innis 2009). The power of capital is thus characterized by its ability to institute a social imaginary (Castoriadis 1975). It is a power that is therefore based on the ability to quantify the unquantifiable through different political, technical and legal means, thus making it possible to transform the whole of social life into future income flows that can be captured. As Facebook shows, the process of capital accumulation is not so much based on the exploitation of users’ unpaid labor as on its ability to “symbolically quantify power” (Nitzan and Bichler 2012, p. 26)2.
In this context, Facebook uses various extra-economic strategies to produce a differential accumulation that consists of transferring surplus value from other sectors of productive activity into a rentier dynamic (Rigi and Prey 2015) and restricting access to income flows to other subordinate capitalists in order to exceed the normal financial rate of return.
In the case of Facebook, these means are: 1) an accumulation on intangible assets (patents); 2) control of communication risks; and 3) a strategy of imperial expansion of the knowledge monopoly through investment in education and research.
8.3.1. Accumulation on intangible assets and patents
The analysis of Facebook shows how differential accumulation strategies are part of a dynamic specific to financialized capitalism. First, it should be recalled that its initial public offering, which was described as a catastrophic disaster by financial analysts, was marked by rumors of insider trading fomented by Goldman Sachs (Ugueux 2011). Its value fell by US$19 billion in four days, mainly due to investors’ fears about the ability of the social network to monetize audiences who use mobile technologies such as tablets and smartphones. In response to this market pressure, Facebook will intensify the extractive activity of its users’ data in order to make its operations more profitable and meet its financial commitments.
Facebook’s differential accumulation strategy is based on extra-economic factors that have been made possible by the institutional complementarity between the new privatized knowledge production regime and the deregulation of the financial system (Orsi and Coriat 2006). Indeed, these two sectors complement each other institutionally insofar as stock market mechanisms are considered more reliable than bank financing, because they would make it possible to anticipate and assess the value of a company’s intangible assets (Mouhoud and Plihon 2009). According to public databases (Justia Patents 2008), Facebook has approved more than 8,000 patents on algorithms, which creates barriers to market entry for potential competitors. In addition, since its inception, Facebook has made more than 50 business acquisitions, the best known of which are Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus. According to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s acquisition strategy consists mainly of talent acquisition, i.e. the acquisition of patents that are held by competitors in order to ensure its monopoly on knowledge, patents that are mainly filed in Ireland, the number one tax haven for new technology companies (Colin and Colin 2013).
In this context, Facebook also contributes to the logic of the financialization of the daily lives of its users (Martin 2002). Indeed, in a context where the salary of the majority of the population has not increased for more than 30 years, they must finance their overconsumption by increasing the value of their financial assets (Toporowski 2009). Social reproduction no longer depends solely on the relationship of wage domination, but largely on the ability of households to obtain credit. This does not mean that labor as a central form of social mediation – and domination – has disappeared, but rather that its role has changed. The main function of employment is now to obtain a minimum wage salary in order to acquire sufficient financial credibility to access credit and repay part of one’s debts. In this sense, credit as a form of social mediation becomes a condition of possibility to allow the reproduction of labor. It is therefore an accumulation of capital in a completely fictitious futurized time, which is at the root of the crises in contemporary capitalism. To the extent that financial capital is based on the mediation of financial information, the informational traces left by users of digital social media are used to assess the financial credibility of consumers, locking them in a virtual debt prison (Manzerolle 2010). It is in this context that we can understand the agreement that Facebook signed in 2013 with the main data brokers such as Axciom, Datalogix and Epsilon. Facebook has also recently obtained a patent for an algorithm to authenticate and authorize users for a bank loan based on the financial credibility of their Facebook friends (Christl 2017).
8.3.2. Control of communication risks
In an increasingly volatile financial environment due to financial deregulation, risk management has become the main activity of a firm like Facebook. In a financialized economy, the value of companies’ assets is not so much about the products and services they produce as it is about their ability to control risks (LiPuma and Lee 2005). For Facebook, the risks are mainly based on potential privacy and tax evasion regulations, as well as reputational risks related to users’ loss of trust in the digital social network. Indeed, since the physical production of goods is no longer the main source of profits for companies – in fact Facebook produces nothing – it relies instead on the control of information, knowledge and image. In this sense, the main source of profit in digital capitalism is based less on the creative capacity and communicative exchanges of users, as argued by cognitive capitalism theorists, or on consumer affects (Arvidson and Coleoni 2012), than on the ability of corporations to accumulate from a “symbolic monopoly rent” (Mouhoud and Plihon 2009, p. 127). Hence, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in two days, $60 billion of Facebook’s market capitalization evaporated, as investors feared that any regulation on the use of personal data could harm their business model. “Stock market bubbles explode due to regulation”, investor Jeffrey Gundlach pointed out. “Nothing new is happening in the field of speculation”, Gundlach added, quoting famed 1920s investor Jesse Livermore. “What happened in the past will happen again and again” (Pressman 2018). Then, immediately after Mark Zuckerberg’s intervention in Congress, Facebook’s stock price rose by 4.5% after the poor representation of Congress members. The “philistine” questions asked by its members can be explained by the fact that lobbyists hired by Facebook have donated US$600,000 since 2013 to the parliamentarians who questioned it (West 2018). Facebook’s total spending on lobbying reached US$11 million in 2017 (Open Secret 2018).
We also learned from the newspapers that Kevin Chan, Director of Public Policy at Facebook Canada, had privileged access to several federal cabinet ministers, including the Minister of Finance, but did not register as a lobbyist. During his appearance before the Privacy Committee in Ottawa, Conservative MP Peter Kent said threats were allegedly made by Facebook representatives during a meeting with Canadian elected officials in Washington “regarding possible Canadian regulations to further protect Canadians’ private data online”. Mr. Kent noted: “During our visit, we were told that any new regulations could hurt Facebook’s investments in Canada, such as the artificial intelligence project in Montreal” (Baillargeon 2018).
8.3.3. Facebook and the imperial expansion logic of the knowledge monopoly
Facebook’s investment in artificial intelligence (AI) in Montreal is part of an imperial expansion strategy of a new knowledge monopoly. The new Quebec Research and Innovation Strategy (QRIS), and the latest budget of the Government of Quebec, which reserves 100 million Canadian dollars every five years for research, support for start-ups and even the creation of an industrial cluster dedicated to AI, expresses this submission to the imperial strategy of digital giants. The investments of Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Thales in Montreal, as well as the partnerships between the giants of GAFAM and the Universities of Montreal and McGill, are also part of this strategy (Sanfaçon 2018). For companies like Facebook, it is essentially a matter of outsourcing its research and development costs to publicly funded research, and then privatizing it in the form of a patent. According to researcher Joëlle Pineault, who heads the Facebook-funded laboratory in Montreal, “[t]he purpose of all this is not to improve Facebook products, but to do fundamental research on machine learning” (Lortie 2017).
From an Innissian perspective, this strategy can be said to endorse the submission of Canada’s (and Quebec’s) economic, political and cultural sovereignty to the American Empire. In other words, AI feeds on two things: computing power and a mountain of data. However, it is the GAFAMs that have the most gigantic computers to process large amounts of information. In this sense, the federal government’s attitude towards digital companies reflects an abdication of the very principle of sovereignty that was at the root of political modernity.
Hence, we could talk, following Harold Innis, about the emergence of a new knowledge monopoly that is being established with the domination of digital giants. Their domination is exercised through the mediation of cybernetic technologies that contribute to the reproduction of hegemonic categories of thought based on a form of quantifying abstraction. This new monopoly of knowledge is based on a form of symbolic quantification of power. The automated systems developed by Facebook have therefore transformed knowledge into digital data, and therefore into operational knowledge that produces mechanical knowledge that makes any critical and synthetic dimension that was at the root of scientific knowledge unnecessary (Andersen 2008).
This strategy of knowledge monopolization is also reflected in the Chan–Zuckerberg initiative, an organization set up to develop forms of personalized learning in American public schools:
“Our hope over the next decade is to help upgrade a majority of these schools to personalized learning and then start working globally as well, Mr. Zuckerberg told the audience. Giving a billion students a personalized education is a great thing to do” (Singer 2017).
Facebook’s Internet.org project to provide free access to the Internet, Facebook and a few other partner sites in developing countries is also part of an imperial expansion strategy of knowledge monopolization. This “voluntary” strategy mainly aims to capture the personal data of populations that are considered “unprofitable” in terms of advertising, mainly in order to capture their data to improve algorithms and thus create an entry barrier for potential competitors in this market (Cario 2016).
8.4. Conclusion: Facebook and the contradictions of capitalism in the digital age
In conclusion, it can be argued that Facebook condenses all the contradictions of capitalism in itself, contradictions that are well summarized by the title formula of the latest book co-written by media theorist Robert McChesney: People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy (McChesney and Nichols 2016).
A “citizenless democracy” on the one hand, because the algorithms developed by Facebook make it possible to model social regulation in a personalized way by anticipating the actions of individuals before they occur (Rouvroy and Berns 2013). The ability of citizens to deliberate in a reflective way on the normative orientations that life in society takes is then destroyed, or rather privatized (Stiegler 2015). The new technologies of personalization of consumption lead to a fragmentation and depoliticization of the old political communities articulated around the nation-state, which are composed into depoliticized virtual communities, gathered around particular lifestyles3. “Citizenless democracy”, on the other hand, because with the technological and scientific advances based on the cybernetic capacity for predictability, of which Big Data is an integral part, it is now possible to individualize the risk that had once been socialized within the framework of post-war democratic capitalism and that had allowed the construction of a middle class. It is therefore the end of the common world, which is a condition for the possibility of politics. In this sense, the fundamental political question in the digital age is to rebuild the common against the technological fetishism that locks us into “tautistic” bubbles (Sfez 1992).
This disaffection with policies leads correspondingly to its “consumerization”, since the same computerized data mining tools are used by politicians to collect detailed information on voters/consumers and to adjust their message according to the preferences of each specific group (Groshek and Al-Rawim 2013). In the era of digital social media, the common political culture is tending to dissolve in favor of particularist issues (Giroux 2011) and the production of “fake news”.
Moreover, McChesney and Nichols’ book refers to a “jobless economy” since the main corporations at the heart of digital capitalism – Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (GAFAM) – are accumulating value through rentier practices. This logic of rentier accumulation risks accentuating the extreme polarization of wealth between an extremely rich minority and a mass of precarious or even obsolete workers. As Paul Krugman (2012) argues:
“Smart machines may make higher GDP possible, but also reduce the demand for people – including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots”.
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Chapter written by Maxime OUELLET.
- 1 It is necessary to specify that capitalism is in its very nature immaterial since it is a social relationship and not a thing. In this sense, current theses on the intangible nature of so-called “informational” or “cognitive” capitalism are heuristically problematic. If capital is a “real abstraction”, it can be said that what is called informational capitalism results from a process of abstraction and quantification that is in the very nature of capitalist dynamics. It is therefore not a break with this logic.
- 2 In other words, in advanced capitalism, the process of capital appreciation is mainly carried out by the ability of corporations to make quantifiable what is not quantifiable by various extra-economic means. As we will try to show with the Facebook case study, capital appreciation results from a dynamic of political accumulation.
- 3 It is this depoliticized vision of society that the theorist and Web 2.0 guru Henry Jenkins defends in Convergence Culture (2006) and which is echoed by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook in his manifesto entitled Building Global Community (2017). On this subject, see (Ouellet 2017).