Technocapitalism and the Commodification of Knowledge: An “Adornian” Perspective on Online Education

Almost any discussion of online and distance education today is essentially a discussion of technology. Technology as an antidote to rising costs in higher education; as a facilitator of knowledge; as a utopian tool to rebuild formal education; as a means to enlightened state of knowing and being. Herewith, I would like to try and shift the attention from technology to political economy by drawing attention to an issue that remains surprisingly under-analyzed by contemporary critical theorists: the commodification of knowledge via online education. I argue that the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, and Theodor W. Adorno in particular, has a significant contribution to make to discussions on technology in education, and online education more specifically. Furthermore, borrowing from Kellner (1999) and Pyati (2006), I frame my argument about the commodification of the educational experience within the discourse on technocapitalism, which points both to the increasingly important role of technology and continued primacy of capitalist relations of production in the present organization of society (Kellner, 1999) and in, extension, educational institutions.

Theodor W. Adorno

Before moving further into the discussion, it is important to spell out what Adorno meant by both education and commodification, since these terms can have multiple meanings. Adorno certainly strived for ‘ultimate knowledge’ in the Platonian sense, which ties learning to virtue and the quality of life. Phrases like “people’s last possibility of experiencing themselves” and “working to gain self-awareness” and words like ‘catharsis’ and ‘fulfillment’ in the short passage “Always speak of it, never think of it” that constitutes part of Minima Moralia (Adorno, 2006), reveal a longing for knowledge that goes way beyond the learning of skill or the accumulation of information. Adorno was particularly preoccupied with the ‘Fortschritt des Bewußtseins’ or, freely, the self-development of the individual and saw no possibilities for it within the realms of traditional education (Adorno, 1959). Self-reflection, critical thinking, and the willingness to resist “material and symbolic forces of domination” (Giroux, 2004, p.13) all play a major role in Adorno’s conception of the ideal type education. In fact resistance, in a typical Marxist fashion, constitutes a central theme, ultimately aiming at a freedom that will manifest itself in the ability to “think critically and act courageously, even when confronted with the limits of one’s own knowledge”18. Overall, the Enlightenment ideas of learning as realization of spirit, life, and emancipation of humanity, strongly influenced Adorno’s understanding of the purpose and use of knowledge.

But he also understood that critical thinking was not sufficient to address the impact of capitalism on thought and character. Instead, critical knowledge had to be reproduced and put into practice. In that sense, he was very much in line with Paulo Freire, the most famous perhaps representative of critical pedagogy, who argued that instead of an a priori technique that can be imposed on all, education is a set of political and moral practices which, apart from enabling students to expands their critical abilities, also expand and deepen their active participation in the promise of a true democracy (Giroux, 2010) . Adorno argued that critical ideas gain relevance only as far as they enable students “to participate in both the worldly sphere of self-criticism and the publicness of everyday life” (Giroux, 2004, p.18). In other words, critical reflection was what he considered to be the essence of both genuine education and politics.

Link to source

The problem with understanding knowledge as a commodity, however, is that within such a discourse, ideas that promote knowledge as an instrument of enlightenment, empowerment or democratic decision-making, become obsolete. Rather, the focus is shifted towards knowledge as “a kind of service, utility or good to be bought and sold, used, enhanced and re-used” (Friesen, 2008). It is transformed into a “super commodity” that has similar value to physical commodities. Thus, knowledge becomes something quite different from it is understood by Adorno or even Habermas – as being emancipatory and motivated by multiple human “constitutive interests”. This interested character of knowledge is essentially erased and replaced by performative knowledge, guided by an effort to subject learning to marketing practices, return on investment and capital accumulation, without regards to learning and scholarship. That is, knowledge is solely judged by performance: by its ability, in other words, to add value (Friesen, 2008).

In online education, commodification is not only reflected in branding and expectations, but also in the way courses are produced, organized and delivered. The temptation, it seems, in the virtual world where one is trying to develop income via the economies of scale, is that one is producing a standardized product and generic content which can be used anywhere and by anyone. Course materials (syllabi, lectures, quizzes etc.) are alienated from their producers, the instructors, and assembled as courses, which – with few exceptions – come to life independent of and apart from those who created them. As Noble (1998) has argued, this alienation of ownership of and ownership over course material is the most crucial step in commodity formation. Further, once the course assemblage is finished, the courses are sold for profit and delivered as well as evaluated by individuals who may or may not have any relationship to the original creators. Thus, instructional designers become commodity producers and instructors commodity deliverers, while students become consumers of those commodities, all at the expense of the integrity of the educational process. The final educational product is completely divorced from the ideals of self-reflection, self-awareness and self-actualization that we saw earlier, and committed to little beyond the creation of profit.

Link to source

Another aspect of online courses that relates to the commodified character of education, and which relates to course design as well as content, is that of pseudo-individualization. “Pseudo-individualization” is a phenomenon of mass-culture observed by Adorno that can easily be applied to mass-produced education. While Adorno’s original utilization of the concept in the context of popular music could be argued to be elitist due to his distinction between high and low art, it is nevertheless a useful concept for thinking about and criticizing the “personalized” character learning that online education is believed to promote. According to Adorno (2005), “the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardized production of consumption goods” (p. 40) yet the “the manipulation of taste and the official culture's pretense of individualism” (ibid.) conceals the fact. In other words, while consumers are under the impression that every commodity or product they purchase is tailored to their personal preference or needs, they are purchasing only a slightly modified version of the “original”. Similarly, in distance learning while the curriculum of a degree or certificate can be designed to fit the needs of the individual participant, and while the participant can mix-match between institutions or even choose to only attend a single course in a specific area of interest, the flexibility within a given course is very limited. Surely, the student might be able to “attend” class from anywhere, anytime, but the actual course content, the lectures, assignments, quizzes and so on, are just as inflexible as in a traditional course. What’s more, online courses for different institutions may be created using the same platform, with branding creating much of the differentialization in consumer eyes.

With the rapid growth of online education, mass education is fast becoming a major vehicle through which the global landscape is being formed. To make the educational product competitive among global educational consumers and in turn maximize financial returns, higher education providers are forced to produce and export ‘knowledge’ cheaply. Thus, while knowledge, information, and education appear to be playing a more important role than ever before in the organization of contemporary society, it is capital - restructuring itself through the implementation of new technologies into every sphere of life – that is in fact the major player. Pointing both to the increasingly important role of technology and continued primacy of capitalist relations of production, Kellner (1999) has proposed the term “technocapitalism” to describe the synthesis of capital and technology in the present organization of society. As we saw earlier, technocapitalism involves the commodification of knowledge in faster and more diverse ways than at any previous time in human history (Pyati, 2012). But as a commodity, education, rather than augmenting the realm of knowledge, only serves as a fancy alternative to vocational training, focusing on transmitting the skills and knowledge that capital needs to grow (Kellner, 1999).

My point in applying critical theory to critique online education is not to say that it is intrinsically flawed or evil. I also do not deny that online has many potential benefits related to access, cost, flexibility and student learning. Rather, my argument is that despite their many outward appearances of being radical and democratic, online courses are built on and around capitalist structures that are helping form popular understandings of education as a commodity to be purchased versus a route to emancipation and self-actualization.

References

Adorno, T. (1959). Theorie der Halbbildung. Retrieved from http://www2.ibw.uni-heidelberg.de/~gerstner/adorno_halbbildung.pdf

Adorno, T. (2005) The Culture Industry:Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London: Routledge.

Adorno, T. (2006). Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged. London: Verso

Friesen, N. (2008). Critical theory: Ideology critique and the myths of e-learning. Ubiquity, 2008 (June), 2.

Giroux, H. A. (2004). What might education mean after Abu Ghraib: Revisiting Adorno's politics of education. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 24(1), 3-22.

Giroux, H. A. (2010). Rethinking Education as the Practice of Freedom: Paulo Freire and the promise of critical pedagogy. Policy Futures in Education, 8(6), 715-721.

Kellner, D. (1999). 10 New Technologies: Technocities and the Prospects for Democratization. Technocities: The Culture and Political Economy of the Digital Revolution, 186.

Noble, D. F. (1998). Digital diploma mills: The automation of higher education.Science as culture, 7(3), 355-368.

Pyati, A. K. (2009). Critical Theory and Information Studies: A Marcusian Infusion. Marcuse's Challenge to Education, 181.

“How Do our Cultural Resources Get Online?” A Critical Approach to Digital Collections

by Robert D. Montoya

Online digital repositories are an increasingly vital part of our academic and educational landscape. Digital library collections are integral components of instruction at all levels, ranging from K-12 schools to graduate level coursework within the college or university (Gilliland-Swetland; Malkmus). Particularly significant efforts have been made to utilize digitized primary sources to enhance undergraduate research skills within the university classroom, providing students with the literacies necessary to negotiate and interrogate these online repositories (Krause; Mitchell, Seiden, and Taraba). In this brief post I begin to examine how these online collections come into being and how representative they are—or are not—of the institutional collections from which they are digitized. To do so I will utilize a “critical information literacy praxis” approach, which examines library repositories, technologies, and seeking infrastructures as “culturally-situated phenomenon, embedded within specific social, political, and economic systems, subject to … the power relations and ideologies that define particular moments in history” (Accardi, Drabinski, and Kumbier ix). In addition, I will use Ajit Piyati’s “critical theory of technology” approach to tease out how the digital library space is not “neutral” and standalone as an entity, but rather must be examined within the larger economic and social forces in play in the physical library environment (Pyati). I propose an examination of digital library repositories that takes into consideration the impetus for their digitization. The existence of one digital object over another in any given online repository is dependent upon funding and this model can bias online collections to the preferences of those that have economic power within these cultural institutions. As such, digital repositories exemplify not necessarily the most significant holdings from any given library collection, but holdings whose value has been decided by those with more financial resources.

Online digital collections of cultural materials are becoming more widespread and growing astronomically in scope. The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) celebrated its one-year anniversary on April 18, 2014, and since then has become a significant player in the dissemination of cultural collections made digitally available by institutions across the United States (DPLA). Since it’s inception, the DPLA has attracted contributions from over 1,300 organizations, “attracted over 1 million unique visitors to its website,” and aggregated over 7 million items searchable through its interface (DPLA). The DPLA has rightly been hailed as a “potentially transformative initiative,” creating a vital platform by which libraries and other similar cultural institutions can push their cultural heritage material into the public realm (Drucker). The importance of online digital collections cannot be understated, especially as educational institutions of all levels increasingly rely on these resources to bridge the classroom with primary source material otherwise unavailable for consult. Calisphere, a University of California sponsored program designed to integrate primary source documents into “sets that support California Content Standard in History-Social Sciences, English-Language Arts, and Visual Arts for use in K-12 classrooms,” is a prime example of how digitized material can essentially transform the way educators frame a student’s relationship to the material artifact of cultural production (University of California).

It is precisely because of this rising social significance of digital repositories that I argue for an increased transparency in how these digital objects find their way into repositories at the local level. University libraries are complex organizations and the reasons why material is digitized in these environments and deposited into an online digital collection are even more complicated. Digitizing costs are hefty, involving not only the labor-time of actual scanning or photography, but also quality control, the application of metadata to digital surrogates, project management, the workflows to shepherd these files into long-term storage, and the maintenance of technical infrastructure to preserve these digital objects (Schaffner, Snyder, and Supple). The source of funding for any particular digital project, or what we might call the economy of digitization, is a key piece of information to understand how a digital library object fits within the larger institutional structure from whence it came. In Figure 1, below, I have identified six possible (not exhaustive) impetuses for the digitization of library material: patron-generated requests, instructional digitization, donor-driven, collections identified as culturally or institutionally significant, preservation digitization, and foundation supported. Each of these categories represents a different source of funding, and thus, has vastly different motivations for why an object might get digitized and placed online in the first place. In this way, the digital library environment mirrors the economies of power already present in the physical library environment.

These six categories can roughly be separated into two groups: curated and ad hoc. ‘Ad hoc’ digitizing consists of patron-generated requests, donor-driven projects, and institutionally specific digitization projects that typically arise without advanced internal planning. ‘Curated’ digitizing are projects that require more foresight and institutional selection, and are broadly defined as preservation digitization, foundation-supported digitization, and the scanning of collections deemed culturally significant.

Ad hoc digitizing is not necessarily pre-planned by the institution, but is rather spurred on by requests that arise from public use of the collection. Patron-generated digital projects are often, but not always, smaller in scale and particular to the research project of the requesting entity. Scanning or photography is often fragmentary—of particular pages within a book, or a selection of documents within collections—and thus are not representative of the larger corpus from which they were captured. Depending on the staffing at some institutions, some choose to apply full-scale metadata to the surrogates created, deciding to ingest the generated image/s into their local digital library, while others deliver the image to the user and keep no copy of the file within their repository (Schaffner, Snyder, and Supple 8). Instructional digitization projects are those that arise from engagement with classrooms as part of library teaching and learning initiatives, often from student requests for scanning as part of given assignment, the creation of scans for classroom presentations by staff, or the digitization of items for exhibits generated as part of group projects. Instructional projects are significant because they are in-line with university teaching missions and are the fruits of engagement between faculty, library staff, and students. Indicating which classes these digital surrogates arise from is important contextual information for researchers utilizing these resources. Finally, donor-driven duplication often arises from requests by donors who require portions of their collection for personal use. Many donors, but of course not all donors, have the financial means to request such (often) larger scale digitizing. Donors with more financial resources are better equipped to prompt institutions to scan more of their material. If digitized material finds its way into online repositories by any of these means it is important for repository users to understand that it was not the institution that decided to scan these items, but rather that they are a product of the course of research. Material of this nature is less likely to represent the collection development policies adopted by repositories because of this fact.

Curated digitizing, on the other hand, is often (but not exclusively) planned, larger-scale scanning by the institution. Foundation supported scanning might limit duplication of material by subject, format, etc., but institutions either (1) applied for a grant acknowledging the importance of digitizing a particular portion of a collection, or (2) have latitude in what collections they can digitize within broad guidelines. Preservation digitizing is performed on the most fragile items within a collection. Large institutions with significant holdings and limited financial resources, however, often have a great deal of fragile material and must choose only those items that are most significant for teaching or research—in either case, the university can weigh research value against preservation digitizing at ay given point, scanning only those items that meet particular requirements. Finally, universities also digitize material because they are deemed culturally significant or of high research value (regardless of condition). For example, a special collections institution might scan a collection because it gets heavy use in the reading room, thereby providing broader access to the material or alleviating stress on the material items from repeated use. These curated modes of digitizing have much more institutional control and are more likely to fall in-line with established collection development policies at the local site. As such, users of online digital repositories might find it helpful to know that there was purposive selection in regard to these items.

It should be noted that the categories above are not static or rigid, nor are they exclusive of each other—one might imagine a case where a foundation will initiate support for only a particular collection, thus biasing digitization to their cultural preferences. The categories created are merely outlined to illustrate that all digitization is not equal—an individual or funding entity has the tangible economic power to bias online collections in any number of directions depending on the amount of resources they are willing to allocate toward the purpose. What might otherwise be seen as a neutral “universal good,” the digital repository is emblematic of how we need to critically understand technological structures as expansions of already-existing bureaucratic structures where exertions of economic power are daily happenstance in order to make apparent the inequalities of representation within the system (Pyati 87–88).

Transparency at the institutional level would help alleviate this ambiguity in the digital library, exposing the economic circumstances that brought a particular digital item broader exposure in the digital library. But how might this be done? One solution might be the uniform addition of a metadata line such as was done here:

This example from the UCLA Digital Library indicates, under “Description,” that this particular map titled, "California, the golden state," was digitized as part of the California Cultures Project (and thus ingested into the Calisphere project previously mentioned in this post). Why is this important? Precisely because this scanning project took place within the context of a pedagogical project: a curriculum compatible K-12 initiative meant to connect primary resources into the classroom. The user is not left to assume this map’s importance within the UCLA collection purely on the basis that it was digitized at all, but immediately understands that this map is important within the context of the California Cultures project in particular. However, the “Description” metadata field is not uniformly used for such purposes, and few repositories outside of UCLA include such contextual information.

Another solution to foster transparency in digital collections would be the adoption of clear digital collection development policies, such as those drafted by a number of physical archival institutions. These development policies would include notes on how items find their way in the digital library, elucidation of local institutional selection practices for the creation of digital objects, as well as any large-scale initiatives underway at a given institution (such as foundation support). Such documentation would help, not only researchers, but also teachers and librarians, convey a particular digital item's importance within the context of the digital collection, as well as within the context of the entire local archival collection itself.

I acknowledge that applying metadata is expensive, time-intensive work—it takes real intellectual energy with real institutional costs. That said, there is a great deal that institutions can do quite easily to expose the economies of digitization at play within their local repositories. This transparency will only become more important as entities such as the DPLA continue to grow in prominence and bring to light the myriad (often free) cultural resources our American cultural institutions have available for learners and scholars at all levels. Interrogating our online digital repositories more critically with an eye toward the social structures that bring them into being will help make for more transparent, valuable, and ethical repositories, and help users of these resources to understand not only the strengths of online collections but also the limitations they represent.

Sources

Accardi, Maria T., Emily Drabinski, and Alana Kumbier, eds. Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods. Duluth, MN: Library Juice Press, 2010. Print.

DPLA. “Digital Public Library of America Celebrates Its First Birthday with the Arrival of Six New Partners, Over 7 Million Items, and a Growing Community.” Digital Public Library of America. N. p., 17 Apr. 2014. Print.

Drucker, Johanna. “Pixel Dust: Illusions of Innovation in Scholarly Publishing.” Los Angeles Review of Books. N. p., 16 Jan. 2014. Web. 3 Feb. 2014.

Gilliland-Swetland, Anne. “An Exploration of K-12 User Needs for Digital Primary Source Materials.” American Archivist 61.1 (1998): 136–157. Print.

Krause, Magia G. “‘It Makes History Alive for Them’: The Role of Archivists and Special Collections Librarians in Instructing Undergraduates.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 36.5 (2010): 401–411. CrossRef. Web. 23 Apr. 2014.

Malkmus, Doris J. “Primary Source Research and the Undergraduate: A Transforming Landscape.” Journal of Archival Organization 6.1-2 (2008): 47–70. CrossRef. Web. 23 Apr. 2014.

Mitchell, Eleanor, Peggy Seiden, and Suzy Taraba, eds. Past or Portal?: Enhancing Undergraduate Learning through Special Collections and Archives. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association, 2012. Print.

Pyati, Ajit K. “Critical Theory and Information Studies: A Marcusean Infusion.” Policy Futures in Education 4.1 (2006): 83. CrossRef. Web. 24 Apr. 2014.

Schaffner, Jennifer, Francine Snyder, and Shannon Supple. “Scan and Deliver: Managing User-Initiated Digitization in Special Collections and Archives.” 2011. Web. 21 Apr. 2014.

University of California. “Calisphere: A World of Primary Sources.” Calishphere. N. p., 2014. Web. 21 Apr. 2014.

Social Mobility and the Google Bus Protests: Interventions for Affordable Housing

For the past several months, a network of bay area activists and artists have been staging protests surrounding a fleet of luxury coach buses. These private buses regularly use public bus stops to pick up hi-tech employees from San Francisco and shuttle them to Silicon Valley. The buses are used by a range of tech companies, but the protests have become known as the “Google Bus” protests.

 

google bus protests, 2014, link to source

Following the initial protests, local officials were relatively quick to come to an agreement that involved the shuttle companies paying the city a one dollar fee for every time a bus uses a public bus stop. The particular details of this private-bus-on-public-bus-stop situation are somewhat banal, to the extent that most highways and roads in the US, could be described as public infrastructure that supports the use of private automobiles. But such a reading, fails to get to the heart of the matter, nor does it allow one to fully appreciate why the “Google Bus” is a fascinating object to put at the center this discussion.

 As a site of protest and class antagonism, the “Google Bus” functions as both a literal expression of privatized infrastructure, and a symbolic expression of economic inequality. Through this lens, the buses should be read as one small part of a complex set of entangled systems, that define the current conditions and flow of urban life. While an account of the these systems would include food, education, healthcare, waste management, water and power, communications, and transportation, it is housing, or housing policy, that is arguably at the center of this discussion. While there are a range of rent control and preservation policies that are unique to San Francisco, the unbridled “success” of the one percent, the suppression of real wages for working and middle class households, and a failure of civic imagination, are national trends, and have directly translated into rising rent and greater precariousness for working people. The average rental costs, for most major US cities, has exceeded the recommended 30% mark of  household income. In Los Angeles, where I’m writing from, the median rent has increased by 25% in the last 12 years, and more than half of the population pays rent that exceed 30% of their income. Across California, roughly 20% of households spend more than 50% of their income on rent.

 The architect-artist Teddy Cruz argues that we have entered into an era of “urban crisis,” where most major cities around the world are characterized by dramatic social-economic inequality. In a collaborative lecture with political scientist Fonna Forman, the two argue that historic notions of happiness have directly translated into the design of cities. From Aristotle's conception that happiness coming from our capacity to collaborate with our peers, to modernist notions of happiness coming from personal pleasure; the urban landscape has shifted from cities that centered around public commons, to enclaves of private space. For Forman and Cruz, this spatial architectural shift, is accompanied by the decline of “civic imagination,” and our sense of social responsibility.

 

Teddy Cruz, Urban Crisis 2013   

In San Francisco, like many other cities, the social contracts of solidarity have long been broken. Whether it be personal stories of senior citizens and longtime residents being evicted, or the gradual erosion of opportunity for working people, the Google bus protests mark the continuation of working class protest and struggle. While one could situate, some of the more expressive moments of the Google bus protests within a genealogy of activist art, or regional traditions of San Francisco pranksters and interventionists, the critical themes motivating the work has a strong connection to the history of rent strikes. While the labour movement has been largely organized to combat worker exploitation - abolition of child labour, promotion healthier work conditions, fair wages, job security et cetera; residential rent is also one of the major ways wealth is extracted from the working class. 

The history and logic of urban life can largely be understood as an expression of class hierarchy and antagonism. The very systems that support and manage urban life, often reinforce the socio-economic divisions of privilege and oppression. Reflecting this structural dynamic, there is a history of socialist and union organized residential rent strikes. In the UK and other social democracies, rent strikes are identified as part of the historic prelude to the formation of publicly owned social housing. In the US, rent strikes played a direct role in the short-term lowering of rents and the promotion of regional rent protection laws.

 

Rent Strike, New York Times, 1919.

 In the case of the recent bus protests, locating the protests along the transportation system, foregrounds an intuitive understanding that urban life is defined by an assemblage of related systems. When taken to its rational conclusion, one will inevitably arrive at a socio-ecological orientation. That is to say, the accounting of corporate profits, doesn’t acknowledge the true social and environmental costs enabling business as usual to happen. A holistic account of urban life is a prerequisite of a more equitable “civic imagination.”

 In California, many have been quick to present a supply-and-demand analysis of the “rental crisis,” but a free-market approach is not going to resolve the layered problems we face. For one, there is little incentive for for-profit real-estate developers and landlords to undo the very market conditions that are creating substantial profits. Nationally, the US federal government should make considerable investments in affordable housing, to be released as regional grants. Regionally, the combination of a affordable housing trusts, that would keep large collections of housing stock outside of the market, along with universal rent control, and the creation of rent-to-own policies, or the expansion of subsidized mortgages for the remaining private housing stock, are a few possibilities for addressing the issue of affordable housing.

I want to conclude this text, by directing our attention to the “Freedom Budget,” a comprehensive proposal written by civil rights and labour activists in 1965. The “Freedom Budget” summarized its goals with the following list:

 1) the abolition of poverty
2) guaranteed full employment
3) full production and high economic growth
4) adequate minimum wages
5) farm income parity
6) guaranteed incomes for all unable to work
7) a decent home for every American family
8) modern health services for all
9) full educational opportunity for all
10) updated social security and welfare programs
11) and equitable tax and money policies



References

Dewan, Shaila. "In Many Cities, Rent Is Rising Out of Reach of Middle Class." The New York Times. The New York Times, 14 Apr. 2014. Web. 18 Apr. 2014.

"Freedom Budget." - Social Justice Wiki. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Apr. 2014. http://socialjustice.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/index.php/Freedom_Budget#The_Budget.27s_Proposals 

Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. New York: Verso, 2012. Print.

"High Rent, Few Options: Rising Rents and Short Supply Have Angelenos Weighing Their Choices | 89.3 KPCC." High Rent, Few Options: Rising Rents and Short Supply Have Angelenos Weighing Their Choices | 89.3 KPCC. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Apr. 2014. KPCC in Los Angeles, produced an interactive map illustrating the rental costs and income ratio for the greater LA region. http://projects.scpr.org/static/longreads/high-rent-few-options/

"How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained) | TechCrunch." TechCrunch. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Apr. 2014. An overview of the regional dynamics and history of San Francisco's housing crisis. http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/

 Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Print.

Nichols, John. The S Word: A Short History of an American Tradition... Socialism. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2011. Print.

"The Urbanization of Happiness and the Decline of Civic Imagination with Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz." YouTube. YouTube, 14 Apr. 2014. Web. 18 Apr. 2014. Lecture about the history of happiness and urbanization https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK33-qDLCow

"Why the Private Market Can Never Solve SF's Housing Crisis - 48 Hills." 48 Hills. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Apr. 2014. SF housing crisis and affordable housing alternatives. http://48hillsonline.org/2014/04/14/private-market-can-never-solve-sfs-housing-crisis/

Javier Garibay -- Blog Post #1

“[…] labour, is the worker’s own life-activity, the manifestation of his own life. And this life-activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of subsistence” (Marx 204)

On April 7^th, 2014, a group of anarchists positioned themselves outside of the home of Kevin Rose, a partner at Google Ventures. Their demands? 3 billion dollars. Why? Because venture capitalists like Kevin Rose “literally design and implement [an] entire exploitive system”. The anarchists expressed grievances of being part of the situation of dehumanizing menial labour that techies and other entrepreneurs have created in the Bay Area through gentrification. “Tech is now about creating and selling the new indispensable commodity that everyone must have in order to be less bored, less lost, less ridden with anxiety.”

It should come as no surprise that economic relations like those mentioned by Karl Marx are part of this inescapable reality and commands the daily lives of ordinary working people. Furthermore, it can be argued that such relations are so profoundly rooted within a capitalist society such as ours that they account for the foundation of class struggle, and penetrate into our political realm. Who is to blame for the state of relations between different social classes? How is the value of the labor produced by the worker determined?

            Karl Marx formulates an ideology about society, economics, and politics with the wage laborer (proletariat) at the focus undergoing class struggle with the capitalist class (bourgeoisie). Marxism, as it is known, asserts that all history has been a history of the struggle between the exploited and exploiting; only by overthrowing the capitalist class and giving power to the proletariat will the world be freed from their exploitation (Marx 472). Until then, the worker “works in order to live,” and sees labor not “as part of his life, […] [but] rather a sacrifice of his life” (Marx 204). The capitalist class will continue to “buy their labour with money” and the proletariat will sell to the capitalist “their labor for money” at the price that is “required for maintaining the worker as a worker and of developing him into a worker” (Marx 204-6).

            Marx wrote “Wage Labor and Capital,” and “The Communist Manifesto” during the mid and late-19^th century, respectively, in a time where the worker accumulated wages through physical labor. Since then, there have been vast transformations of industries, including that of the technological. We have been introduced to a new economy – the digital economy – whereby new types of workers and technologies have emerged and reimagined our means of communication, as well as the means of capital accumulation through knowledge production. The question by the capitalists then becomes, how can we extract value from the collective intelligence? And from that, can Marxist theory tell us anything about the new work that is being performed by technology workers? According to authors such as Soren Mork Petersen in “Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation,” while Web 2.0 has fostered “democracy, participation, joy, [and] creativity,” it has also enabled companies to “piggyback on user generated content” (Petersen). Free labor by the users comes in the form of the social relations that they publicly establish by way of social media platforms. “We need to acknowledge that relations of subjectivity, everyday life, technology, media and publics also are related to dimensions of capitalism” (Petersen). Arvidsson and Colleoni grapple with recent application of Marxism’s theory of value in examining online prosumer practices in their article, “Value in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet”. They argue that the theory is difficult to apply to these practices due to its poor relation to time and the differentiation between accumulated value of social media in financial markets rather than direct commodity exchange (Arvidsson and Colleoni 135). Anyone who produces content online becomes part of a common exploited class by companies such as Google or Facebook, which depend highly on the activity of their users; “value creation in informational capitalism builds ever more on the ability of corporations to appropriate […] common resources. (Arvidsson and Colleoni 136). While the authors disagree that the labor theory of value is completely applicable to their argument, they drew on some of it’s elements that could be incorporated. Tiziana Terranova, in her article “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy” argues that the notion of “free labor” relies on external actors that will not be paid for what they do such as create content on social media sites. Of free labor, Marx similarly wrote, “Labour was not always wage labour, that is, free labour. The slave did not sell his labour power any more to the slave owner, any more than the ox sells its services to the peasant” (Marx 205). While all of these authors provide some reference to Marxian concepts with regards to wage/free labor, they acknowledge that particular factors prevent an overall application of the theory into their arguments.

            Marx does a thorough job of creating a worker-centered theory that critically examines the world through the perspective of the proletariat. While it provides an effective alternative understanding to political and economic relations between social classes, like the other authors we read for this week, there are certainly exceptions to Marxist theory on the value of wage labor.

Source: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2338440/anarchists-will-drop-anti-google-anti-capital-campaign-for-usd3bn