The Factory in your Pocket
Words: Robbie Warin
Images: Lena Yokoyama
The internet allows us to access a number of incredible technologies. Whilst most people are still required to pay for their hardware and internet connection, once these costs are paid, there are a huge number of services that you can access without any further direct payments. GPS maps guide us to places we have never been, social media platforms allow us to connect with millions of people across the globe, and translation tools allow us to communicate with people who do not speak our language.
We tend to understand our relationship with these web services as one of user and provider. Privately owned companies provide the infrastructure and maintain the platforms that allow us to access them as users. But this conceptualisation of our relationship with the technology companies that run these services misses out on certain dynamics within it. When a service is free, the question you have to ask is, how is this platform turning a profit?
If a company is not gaining revenue from its users through payments to use their service, the ability for the company to remain profitable and survive is prefaced on their ability to attract revenue from other sources. In almost all cases, this involves extracting value from those using the platform and selling this on to third parties. The actual product that is being produced is not the service itself, rather this is the tool that companies use to produce their actual commodity — its user base. This can most clearly be seen with the use of advertising. Gmail, for example, provides an email service allowing people to connect with others across the world. Its product though is not this platform, but the captive attention of the people who use this service, which it then sells to companies in the form of advertising space, using the data it gathers on us to personalise these adverts, making them more effective and allowing them to command higher prices.
Whilst Alphabet (formerly Google), which runs Gmail, is a technology company involved in producing different communication tools, the product which Alphabet is producing is not Gmail, but our conscious engagement with advertising. It’s customers are the advertising companies who provide the revenue that allows Alphabet to operate as a profitable business.
Instead of seeing yourself as simply a user of a web based platform, it is your labour which allows the companies that run them to extract value. Every click, keystroke or swipe; every advert glanced over, clicked on or ignored, provides the material by which these companies are able to turn a profit. Instead of thinking of ourselves as users, we should understand our relationship as one of worker and employer, with use of a service constituting your wages, with the real users being the companies that place adverts, pay to lodge cookies and purchase data sets. Just as workers in a factory produce products which they don’t own, we are workers, engaged in an act of industrial labour, producing a product which we don’t own. The same structural relationship which exists within the factory also exists with our relationship to the online services we use. This is a factory which lives in our pockets, on our laps and at our desks. It is a factory that follows us around as we navigate the world.
Of course this same understanding applies to other forms of commercial media as well. Our engagement with TV advertising is the product that TV channels sell, the shows themselves are your wages. But there are novel aspects related to the way that we interact with internet based media and services. With social media platforms, like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, you are not just a consumer but a producer as well, with the commodification of your social relations providing the means by which these companies attract people to their sites. You are provided with the platform to connect with others, but the actual content is produced by you, your friends and family.
Whilst TV and radio companies are almost entirely dependent on revenue from advertising, the owners of online platforms are able to extract value in a range of different ways. In many cases your labour is extracted in ways that are not immediately obvious. Google’s reCaptcha service, for example, uses the labour of its users to digitise books and create data sets to train autonomous vehicles. Duolingo, in addition to selling advertising space, uses its users as a crowdsourced translation service.
Data collected about us whilst we use different online services is also sold, providing a source of income beyond advertising space. The traffic app Waze, for example, uses the geolocation data from those using the app to create its live traffic updates, data which it then sells on. This data is largely used by companies to better target their adverts and command higher value without expanding the space assigned to advertising, just as the techniques of Taylorism — the measurement and quantification of workplace tasks — have been used to expand the amount of value extracted from workers without extending the working day.
What does this reconceptualisation of our relationship with tech platforms do? Many of us like accessing these services for free and would be unwilling or unable to pay for them. To argue that we need to see ourselves as workers, rather than simply users, lets us argue for a fundamental shift in how this relationship is structured. Rather, it allows us to see the power we all hold and facilitates the leverage of this power to dictate the terms of this relationship. Just as trade unions have been doing for hundreds of years, understanding the centrality of our labour to the business models of these companies allows us to collective to ensure the conditions we hold webs platforms to are fair and transparent.
Social media, for example, is made deliberately addictive to maximise the amount of time people spend on the sites and allow the companies to sell more advertising space. A workplace that was made deliberately addictive to facilitate over time would not be tolerated. Online platforms are increasingly involved in the functioning of democracy within our societies, but we have given away any semblance of control over how this occurs. The Cambridge Analytica scandal which unfolded in the last year was an international news story and provoked public anger at the power these companies have in shaping politics. The large scale collection of our personal data is used in a myriad of ways which we are neither able to view or shape. Yet we remain unable to shape their practises in a meaningful way. For most of us, this data collection is used to shape our behaviour and influence us as consumers, but for others it can be used in ways which restrict our liberties. The U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been shown to use data collected from social media platforms in the profiling and identification of migrants for deportation. Yet we remain unable to choose who has access to our personal data and how it is used.
Seeing ourselves as workers allows us to argue for greater rights, shaping the conditions within which we work and imagine the entities which we could use to fight for these rights. It allows us to imagine alternative means of ownership, just as workers cooperatives have been challenging notions of who should run a business. It is time we as citizens were able to exert effective power over the way in which these companies function and what they do with our personal information.
