MICHAELYNCH.

COM

MICHAEL LYNCH
Immaterial Labour

Biopolitical Power

and the Web 2.0

UNDER THE INSTRUCTION OF DR. BRIAN BROWN, THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO
Hear the call of independ-
ence: “waged labour and
direct subjugation (to
organization) no longer
constitute the principal
form of contractual rela-
tionship between capi-
talist and worker. A poly-
morphous self-employed
autonomous work has
emerged as a dominant
form...”(Lazarrato 138)
PREFACE

“...part of our role as theorists is as inventors of concepts adequate to our

times... we need ‘words to talk about what is happening to us’” (Brophy 620)

The emergence of immaterial labour has revealed the continuous presence

of capitalism resonating from the post-Fordist industry, however, the system that
immaterial labour is founded on, the communication network made possible by
the Web 2.0 is there for the taking. Now and in the coming years there will be a
shift in power among the worker-employer relationship either allowing capital-
ists to subsume the individuality of the immaterial labourer under the production
process, or the immaterial labourer will realize their independence and branch
out from the neo-classical capitalist system, recomposing themselves and creat-
ing a new, revolutionary economic system. The conflict I am describing is very
real and has already begun to have it’s affect. The problems I will be referring to
are of my own, my colleagues and of all future labourers. I very much wish to em-
phasize the importance of this recognition and inspire the socialized worker to
take appropriate action in securing their own individuality.

INTRODUCTION

Unlike the mass worker, where “the mass worker had been conceptualized
and had become a reality just when it’s period of existence was in fact about
to end,” (Negri 75) the socialized worker has acknowledged their presence and
potential in the midst of evolution: “We have gone beyond Marx, and the social-
ized worker has become a reality... we... experience the actuality of the concept”
(Negri 84). Rather than wait for capital to further impose it’s force on the Web
2.0, socialized workers must rise to the occasion, and use their collective force to
re-appropriate power, diminish the control of capitalism and better the quality
of life. I have witnessed capitalist tradition in the lives of my parents and grand-
parents and even in today’s Web 2.0. It’s presence must be seen as a barrier to
economic evolution. In a world where $700 billion has been given to feed and
repair the errors of capitalism, rather than use that money to train individuals for
the future they’ll occupy, and better a way of life that has not been changed for
over a century, I make it my goal to make known the presence of capitalism in the
Web 2.0 and the steps we must take to get rid of it. I emphasize that, as Antonio
Negri boldly states, “destruction is as important as innovation” (Negri 79). To make
this clear, I shall explore the exploitation of a socialized worker in regards to the
freelancing professional and several websites that both help and hinder their
work process. I shall complement my observations with examples that I find to be
successful and productive, outside of the capitalist model. By noting the features
and implications of websites that do and do not represent the Web 2.0 initia-
tive, I hope to inspire my readers to interpret websites with a new lens, one that
can distinguish the limitations of capitalism and the rising force of the collective
intelligence. Ultimately, I want for them to use that intelligence in changing the
wage relationship and on a broader magnitude, to better the quality of life for all
of humanity.

A BRIEF HISTORY

“Men are much more likely to discover easier and readier methods of at-
taining any object, when the whole attention of their minds is directed
towards a single object” (Smith 6)

I will begin by describing the history of the industrial worker, the division of
labour and the cycles of struggle that have taken place in the last century. In the
early nineteen hundreds there began a series of economic transitions and three
major cycles of struggle for the working class. As Negri points out, the cycles of
struggle represent a shift in thought where ”an adequate theory of value can be
reconstructed,” where the worker evidently had “an important element of class
consciousness” (Negri 76-77). Understanding the past two struggles will help
frame the struggle workers face today.

The first struggle was a result of industrialization and the factory that trans-
formed professionals into mass workers. Professionals, considered masters of
their craft, were made obsolete as capitalists absorbed them into the factory con-
fines and effectively deskilled them by divorcing the product they made with the
manufacturing process itself. Success was found in “decomposing the working
class power by destroying the technical base of the professional worker’s power
and cutting them off from the growing mass of industrial labour” (Dyer-Withe-
ford, 73). Workers no longer needed to be professionals, but only required the
knowledge to perform simplified and repetitive tasks. The new born mass worker
became confined to the factory, which “spatially concentrate[d] huge quanti-
ties of de-qualified labour subjected to the brutality of continuous automated
machine pacing” (Dyer-Witheford, 73). As Frederich Engels puts it, “the victory
of machine-work over hand-work... was won” (Engels 41) and consequently, “the
population reduced to the two opposing elements, workers and capitalists” (En-
gels 50). At this point in time, “the mass worker fights not to uphold the dignity
of a trade, but to make capital pay for lives vanishingly meaninglessly down the
assembly line” (Dyer-Witheford 73).

To maximize capitalist efforts, work needed to be divided. As Harry Braver-

man points out, “the most common mode of cheapening labour power is exem-
plified by the Babbage principle: break it up into it’s simplest elements” (Braver-
man 57). The mass worker called for a very definitive division of labour where
“not only are the operations separated from each other, but they are assigned
to different workers” - what Braverman calls “the creation of the detailed worker”
(Braverman 54). Such division of labour required strict management, a system
that eventually formed with the research done by Frederik Winslow Taylor. His
work amounted to a system called Scientific Management: “an attempt to apply
the methods of science to the increasingly complex problems of the control of
labour in rapidly growing capitalist enterprises” (Braverman 59). Further, “it’s core
is the organized study of work, the analysis of work into it’s simplest elements
and the systematic improvements of the worker’s performance of each of these
elements” whereby its results are visible and readily measured (Braverman 61). In
detail, Scientific Management, or Taylorism, was “the gathering together of the
workers in a workshop and the dictation of the working day; the supervision of
workers to ensure diligent, intense, or uninterrupted, application, the enforce-
ment of rules against distraction [and] ...the setting of production minimums”
(Braverman 62). Scientific Management boils down to three necessary principles:
1) the dissociation of labour from skill 2) the separation of conception from ex-
ecution and 3) the use of knowledge to control each step of the labour process
and it’s mode of execution (Braverman 78-83). These three principles, while in
effect, solidified the presence of the mass worker and the scientific management
that was required to maintain such workers.

Despite the success of Scientific Management, there eventually came an

end to such intimate control over the worker. The reason was that “when large
capital had become necessary for carrying on work independently, the work-
ing class came, for the first time, an integral, permanent part of the population”
(Engels 51). Put simply, the working class held collective power and that power
was recognized: “mass workers increasingly refuse[d] to restrain wage demands
within limits functional to capitalist growth or to tolerate conditions accepted by
their unions” (Dyer-Witheford, 75). Astonishingly, “an enormous exfoliation, di-
versification, and multiplication of demands, created by the revolt of previously
subordinated and superexploited sectors of labour” caused “a destabilization of
the entire capitalist organization of society as a mechanism of surplus extraction”
(Dyer-Witheford 75 – 76). In response, “information revolutionaries” emerged
creating “a reorganization of production based on new models of universal com-
munication, launching a new phase of development subject to manipulation
over the flows of information,” or what some call “cybernetic command” (Dyer-
Witheford 77). Lazarrato defines two different schools of thought in obtaining
cybernetic command: “one is the extension of neo-classical analysis; the other is
that of systems theory” (Lazarrato 138). The first is rooted in a “general equilib-
rium” whereas “in more developed systemic theories, organization is conceived as
an ensemble of factors, both material and immaterial, both individual and col-
lective” (Lazarrato 138). On one side, “mass media and new communication tech-
niques are deployed in depth to measure, massage, poll, and propagandize pub-
lic opinion preparatory to policy change” (Dyer-Witheford 78). At the same time,
workers go through a third transformation from the “working class massified in
direct production in the factory, to the social labour power” (Dyer-Witheford 80).
The socialized worker is born, situated in “the factory without walls” and is held
account for an array of social responsibilities: “The activities of people not just as
workers but as students, consumers, shoppers, and television viewers are now
directly integrated into the production process” and ultimately, “the whole of so-
ciety is placed at the disposal of profit” (Dyer-Witheford 80-81). We are witnesses
to “the struggle in cyberspace between activists who have diverted global com-
puter networking into an unprecedented form of collective intellect, and capital’s
attempt to colonize it for commercial purposes” (Dyer-Witheford 87).

Hardt and Negri have illustrated this idea very well using the term ‘Biopoliti-
cal power’: “In the biopolitical context capital might be said to subsume not just
the labor but society as a whole or, really, social life itself, since life is both what is
put to work in biopolitical production and what is produced” (Hardt & Negri 142).
To better demonstrate this, a more thorough definition of immaterial labour – the
work made by the socialized worker – is in order. It is important to understand
both the disadvantages immaterial labour faces and also the advantages it ben-
efits from the Web 2.0.
THE BURDEN OF THE SOCIALIZED WORKER

Immaterial labour is the labour that is being wrongfully ignored, or rather

subsumed by modern capitalists. It is “the labour that produces the informational
and cultural content of the commodity” (Lazzarato, 132). As mentioned, we live
in an age of “cybernetics and computer control,” whereby the immaterial labour
done by the socialized worker involves “a series of activities that are not normally
recognized as ‘work’... the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cul-
tural and artistic standards: fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and more strategi-
cally, public opinion” (Lazarrato, 132). To accomplish such activities, “workers are
expected to become ‘active subjects’ in the coordination of the various functions
of production, instead of being subjected to it as simple command” (Lazzarato
134). Socialized workers change “the recognition of the centrality” and are now
heavily involved in decision making (Lazzarato 133). The emergence of the so-
cialized worker has changed the way in which work is to be done: capitalists are
now mere “facilitators” of the increasing burden taken on by that of the socialized
worker (Lazarrato 135).

The burden being described should be understood as all of the social as-
pects that contribute towards a product or service, most notably for digital free-
lancers, the requirement of communication. To put it clearly, “jobs now require
cooperation and collective coordination... the subjects of that production must
be capable of communication – they must be active participants within a work
team... The subject becomes a simple relayer of codification and decodification,
whose messages must be clear and free of ambiguity” (Lazarrato 134). In sum, the
socializer worker produces multiple social relationships, and “only if it succeeds in
this production does it’s activity have an economic value” (Lazarrato 137). Com-
munication then, is an imperative asset for the socializer worker. But that is not
all the socializer worker must excel in. The socialized worker must posses intel-
lectual skills, manual skills, and entrepreneurial skills to compete in “the basin
of immaterial labour” (Lazarrato 136). As these skills extend outside any sort of
factory, “it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish leisure time from work
time. In a sense, life becomes inseparable from work” (Lazarrato 137) - and this is
the burden a socialized worker must face and challenge; we must recognize the
effect immaterial labour can have and the ways in which it is wrongfully being
subsumed by the wage relation.

THE CONDITIONS OF THE SOCIALIZED WORKER

Recall, “...work has become diffused throughout the entire society... it is car-
ried on both within and outside the factory” (Negri 77) and the diffuse factory
“represents a massive operation... which facilitates coordination and integration
over the entire surface of the earth” (Negri 77). Within this system the socialized
worker forms ‘cooperative networks’ whereby “...it is by virtue of the high degree
of cooperation that this person is productive” (Negri 79).

But just as there is a heavy burden placed on the socialized worker, there
is also a new advantage that allows them to cope with such difficulty: the so-
cialized worker is his or her own boss (Negri 81). Scientific management is now
largely something of the past mainly because “the productivity of biopolitcal
power, and specifically the creativity involved in biopolitical production, requires
the freedom of the producers to organize their own time” (Hardt and Negri, 147).
Independence has allowed “information workers [to]... better able navigate inter-
mittent employment” for “they are largely self taught... self motivated, and [pos-
ses] very individualized skills” (Brophy 629). Negri optimistically declares, “revo-
lutionary theory and the utopian appeal are not only possible but present and
increasingly effective” (Negri 83). This idea of revolution can be realized in Marx’s
autonomist theory: understanding that the labourer is free to be independent.
Acknowledging autonomy is key to succeeding as a socialized worker.
After all, much like the professional worker and the mass worker, the socialized
worker too faces their own capitalist conflict.

Independence is indeed comforting, although being independent comes

with it’s problems as immaterial labour is made to be precarious labour. Capital-
ist use precarity as “a mechanism of control that determines the temporality of
workers... requiring workers not to work all the time but to be constantly be avail-
able for work” (Hardt & Negri, 146). Hardt and Negri define precarity as a kind of
“temporal poverty” where “workers are deprived control of their time” (Hardt and
Negri 146). Brophy describes how precarity incorporates “a range of different
relationships to labour and subsistence: informal and part-time work; short term
contracts – or not contract at all; self employment; little, if any, job security; vola-
tile shifts; lack of unionization; no benefits; and more” (Brophy 621). It is the “the
insecurity brought on by the flexible management of the global work force...” - a
capitalist attempt in controlling intellectual and immaterial labour (Brophy 621).

Enda Brophy notes in regards to the precarity found in the ‘perma-temp’

culture of Microsoft employees during the late nineties that there is an exclusion
between contract workers and FTE’s (full time employees) where there are cer-
tain benefits that contract workers are denied such as health care, paid vacation
and sick leave (Brophy 624). The success in solving this problem as seen by union
aid from organizations like TaxPayer and WashTech must be seen as progressive
efforts in securing the individuality of the socializer worker. While some believe
that “the constant change in jobs can have advantages... including new challeng-
es, less chance of boredom, and a set limit of hours worked per week,” independ-
ence actually means that “you’re constantly having to pitch yourself” (Brophy
630). Some precarious workers wish to unionize, however, as Brophy explains,
given current law, that is much easier said than done.
THE CONFLICT OF THE SOCIALIZED WORKER

“Intellectual labour has become subjected to the norms of capitalist

production” (Lazzarato, 133)

Michel Foucault, in his studies on the subject and power, makes known that
“what we need is a new economy of power relations” (Foucault 328). To do this,
he argues, we must “bring to light power relations, locate their position, find out
their point of application and the methods used” (Foucault 329). The problem
is that “power relations are rooted in the whole network of the social” (Foucault
345). I aim to seek out such problems faced by the socialized worker so that we
may integrate new power relations. Specifically, the problems I will refer to are
those referring to the digital freelancer and are pertaining to capitalist interven-
tion in the Web 2.0.

To begin with, it is important to understand that, as Dyer-Witheford states,

“capitalism persists in paying only for a tiny segment of the life activity it expro-
priates” (Dyer-Witheford 81) and yet “what modern management techniques
are looking for is for ‘the worker’s soul to become part of the factory’” (Lazzarto
133). In other words, the capitalist does not recognize the extent of the socialized
worker – the work that is completed outside of the wage relationship. I wish to
demonstrate this in my own experience as a freelance web developer.

As a web developer, I have a rate attached to different design and develop-

ment services, which in effect, is a representation of a number of things. In a lit-
eral sense, one is paying for the actual time I am taking to complete the project
and the rate must reflect that, as it is expressed in an hourly unit (this is the basis
of the wage relation). But there is so much more involved in the process. The web
designer must learn development coding languages and software. This requires
time, effort and often paid training. More so, the web designer must be creative
in a very competitive market. The aesthetic of a design is very subjective, and in
that sense, it is an art with infinite definitions and indefinable success rates. The
person hiring must rely on the artistic ability of the freelancer and while creativ-
ity is largely considered natural, it is often inspired by many other aspects of life
and work. In other words, it can be learned. It is only reasonable then to assume
that the more initiative a freelancer takes in exposing him or herself to their work
field, whether that involves completing tutorials, reading magazines, contribut-
ing and practising design work, or simply being actively passionate and aware of
the design community, the more creative, versatile and consequently, success-
ful the freelance designer will be. The more life experiences they have - the more
social connections they make) and even better, the more directly relevant experi-
ences to design one has, the more the freelancer is able to offer. Consequently,
it must be understood that immaterial labour can only be defined by taking into
consideration every facet of life. The rate then must account not just for the time
of the web designer to complete the work, but for their technical skill, education
(directly relevant and transferably relevant), ability to communicate and individu-
al creativity – all of which are highly subjective and difficult to calculate. The rate
is essentially summing up several components of a socialized worker, where the
work involved is very complex and is composed of various skills and personality
traits that cover a range of life experiences. Since this is the case, freelancing pro-
fessionals are often undermined and quite frankly, vulnerable to exploitation.

To make this idea more clear, I wish to explain a real life scenario in which I
have witnessed the opportunity to exploit a freelancer and lessen the credibility
of the profession all together.

To focus on what I do best, front-end web design and development, I

thought it would be beneficial to find a freelancer specializing in back-end devel-
opment - someone I could exchange work with in making a more whole product
(clients often request both front-end design and back-end functionality working
together). To do this I posted an ad on Craigslist in the Toronto Arts/Media sec-
tion. To my surprise, within 24 hours I had received over 30 replies. Even more
surprising was who they were from and what they could offer. More than half of
the responses came from offshore companies and individuals most notably from
India. The biggest surprise however was the range in rates being offered for the
same type of work (PHP development). While residents from Toronto and other
parts of Ontario listed a rate around $40-45/hour, offshore companies listed a
rate 50% lower than that, falling in the $20-25/hour range.

I should be clear that this type of work involves writing code. There is very
little creativity in this type of work (depending on the instruction given) and for
the most part, it is often considered objective, material labour because of the
strict limitations coding languages possess. As treasurer for WashTech, Margaret
Bartley notes, technical skill has gone from being an asset of a scientist to the
mere academic achievements of a routine technician (Brophy 629). If this work is
to be considered so objective, there should not be any difference in rates being
offered. It is obvious then that the results given from my Craigslist ad describe a
major difference in thought.

One must realize that this objective work does involve a type of subjective,
immaterial labour, something that perhaps the Canadians I encountered and my-
self understood more so than the offshore companies. This kind of work involves
communication (primarily email and phone calls), organization, outside research,
and various forms of problem solving (social, cultural and technical). Additionally,
the worker must endure temporal poverty made necessary by the nature of the
job. The difference in thought then is that the offshore companies view the end
product as the total service, whereas those with the higher rate recognize the
process - the immaterial labour - as part of the product. This is presumably what
the higher rate takes into account and rightfully so. To make things worse, defin-
ing the totality of the service being offered by a digital freelancer extends to a
much larger capacity and is much harder to regulate on websites such as
getafreelancer.com.

CASE ANALYSIS: GETAFREELANCER.COM

Getafreelancer.com is “a global outsourcing solution and freelance jobs

website.” I wish to make known the current way in which the model of work it
promotes is being practised (the ways in which it is failing), but more impor-
tantly, the solution, the way it ought to be used. The website primarily functions
on the idea that digital freelancers bid on potential work completely online and
without strict regulation. At first, it sounds fair and resourceful. The problem is, is
that by having users bid on the projects, it has, in one way, become a race to the
bottom, whereby the capitalist is inclined to hire the freelancer with the cheapest
rate. Competition has a twofold effect: it allows for the survival of the fittest, as
in privatization of the free market, but also simultaneously compels freelancers,
often argued amateurs, to sway the balance of capital and output, devaluing the
work and complicating the market. The person hiring, if in accordance with capi-
talist techniques, is searching for maximum efficiency in obtaining the most out-
put while using the least capital, something that is reflected in the balance of the
quality of work and accompanying rate of the freelancer. This often encourages
other freelancers, not to excel or better their craft, but to degrade their work and
lower their rate for the sake of having work at all, and in this sense, the employer
has the advantage of competition in the global market.

Instead, users should be increasing their rates to new standards collectively

recognizing the skills required of the socialized work they do – the time, effort
and money that encompasses the ‘macro skill-set’ being used to execute their
trade in providing individualized results. This process requires an ‘all or nothing’
strategy, for if one group of freelancers insist on devaluing the quality of their
work, then the capitalist will seek out this opportunity to exploit them and inevi-
tably encourage others to fall into the same trap. Seeing as this would be a dif-
ficult task, I believe the website itself needs to impose certain standards and de-
fine the lowest possible rate as one that is reasonable; the website needs to act as
an informal union. Bids over the lowest rate will be considered true reflections of
the better quality being offered by the individual and that will be made obvious
to the buyer. In addition to the basic rate, the website could integrate Creative
Commons licenses to ensure rightful ownership of the media being produced.
This will standardize a rate equivalent to the maintenance of subsistence and also
lend the opportunity to gain future royalties on cultural commodities. I am con-
fident there will be those that hire at the standardized lowest rate, a reasonable
rate for tolerable design and development process, but also those that wish to
hire for a much better work relationship and product and who are willing to pay a
better rate for it.

THE ADVANTAGES OF THE WEB 2.0

I mentioned that just as socialized workers who produce immaterial labour

face their disadvantages seen by biopolitical power (precarity, temporal poverty,
exploitation, competition, etc.), they also have their advantages. The advantages I
speak of are those made available by the Web 2.0 and the first is found in the new
business models it promotes.

Tim O’Reilly writes of new design patterns and business models in the Web
2.0, first stating the trend seen in the dot come bubble of 2005: what the success
of all surviving companies had in common was this kind of turning point (O’Reilly
1). He emphasizes that the Web 2.0 is often misunderstood and that some people
understand it to be a mere “marketing buzz word.” Instead, he describes it as “a
set of principles and practices” where “many ideas radiate out from the Web 2.0
core” (O’Reilly 4). He gives one example of the success in Google over Netscape.
While Netscape built a business model based on “the web as a platform”, Google
had “no scheduled software releases, just continuous improvement. No licensing
or sale, just usage” (O’Reilly 4). Consequently, Google’s business model helped
prove that “the value of the software is proportional to the scale and dynamism
of the data it helps to manage” (O’Reilly). We must understand that indeed “Mi-
crosoft has successfully played the platform card” but ultimately, “Windows repre-
sents the pinnacle of proprietary control via software API’s” (O’Reilly). As one edi-
torial noted, “Microsoft’s business model depends on everyone upgrading their
computing environment every two to three years. Google’s depends on everyone
exploring what’s new in their computing environment every day” (O’Reilly 12).
Simply put, the Web 2.0 has no room for platform computing.

O’Reilly also learns from Google the power of Chris Anderson’s long tail, “the
collective of the small sites that make up the bulk of the web’s content” (O’Reilly).
Essentially, the long tail argument states that smaller, less popular products can
become, collectively, more popular then the most popular products themselves.
Google used this methodology to acknowledge the company’s power held in the
usage it received; the amount of websites it could aggregate and the amount of
users that used their system to get to those websites.

In an age of customization, people seek to find new products that will help
individualize and distinguish them apart from others. Amazon.com, the original
inspiration behind the long tail argument, has a feature enabling users to view
related products that the user might be interested in. This is a complex data man-
agement system that collects personal information; online behaviour is recorded
and used to accurately display products of interest.

Another example of long tail success is in the videogames industry. At this

year’s DIG conference (Digital Interactive Gaming) in London, Ontario, Jesse
Divnich, Director of Analyst Services at Electronic Entertainment Design and
Research (EEDAR), discussed the current ‘fad and hit’ methodology in the vide-
ogames industry. In sum, one popular game is all it takes to spawn a trend in the-
matically similar games to be made and made popular (the last part being most
important). This too is the long tail argument at work: the spin off titles becomes
as popular as the hit title.

Examples such as these demonstrate O’Reilly’s urge to “leverage customer

self service” because “the service automatically gets better the more people use
it” (O’Reilly). It is in our best interest then to “decentralize” the internet acknowl-
edging that “every client is also a server”, “users are treated as co-developers” and
companies must “engage users as real-time testers” (O’Reilly). The success of com-
panies in the both Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 “have embraced the power of the web
to harness collective intelligence” and in this model, socialized workers make up
“the architecture of participation” (O’Reilly).

Realize that the Web 2.0 has forced capitalism to re-evaluate the working
class made up of socialized workers and has developed a system of capital based
on user behaviour and content. The socialized worker benefits from these new
business models because they are given power to help dictate the market: “user
contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era” (O’Reilly). In
addition to the advantages found to having Web 2.0 business models, socialized
workers are able to use these companies to better their own work. Part of this
process involves taking advantage of the blogosphere.

BLOGGING

“...with each transformation of the technical composition of labor, work-

ers use the means at their disposal to invent new forms of revolt and
autonomy from capital... today we are arriving at another such moment
of crisis” (Hardt & Negri 144)
 The next advantage of the Web 2.0 I will encourage my readers to acknowl-
edge is the power of blogs. The profit model blogs have created is based on
the Web 2.0 business model described by O’Reilly: it is a system that realizes it’s
power is held in the data it manages and the users that use it. Blogs “drive an
entirely different delivery, advertising and value chain” (O’Reilly 7). It is a system
where the user receives free content, the supplier is financially encouraged to
have quality content and the advertiser is exposed to a highly relevant, recep-
tive and large audience. Websites like buysellads.com and alexa.com can make
this system clear, as they help to determine the audience a blog receives. Essen-
tially, buysellads.com connects bloggers to advertisers. The site allows the user to
make their own rates, however, on their profile is listed their audience in quanti-
tative terms. Alexa.com is one website that gathers traffic and search results data
on websites such as blogs and ranks them in relation to every other website. The
Alexa rank a website has can help determine the value of the website, along with
the number of RSS subscribers, Twitter followers, Facebook followers it has and
as well as how many people Digg, Tweet or reference their articles in any way
or form. This information is listed at buysellads.com to regulate blog audiences
numerically. Although the numerical ranking in audience isn’t perfect, as it may
not take into consideration niche blogs that have quality material but just aren’t
popular, it does give a sort of majority rule that is worth something.

Most important in this system is the the blogger who is encouraged to

maintain rich content. At rapid rates, bloggers are uploading quality information,
such as software tutorials that can help educate individuals in bettering their
trade for free, or contributing to political discourse and changing the way a coun-
try operates. There has traditionally been understood an idea of the common,
“the bounty of nature available to humanity” (Hardt & Negri 139). Blogs belong
to everyone and are considered part of the common for “the common is not only
the earth we share but also the languages we create, the social practices we es-
tablish, the modes of sociality that define our relationships and so forth” (Hardt
& Negri 139). As Neoliberal accumulation involves expropriation of the common,
O’Reilly believes that “mainstream media may see blogs as competitors” and that
really, there remains “a competition of business models” (O’Reilly 9). My conclu-
sion: the power of the Web 2.0 must be harnessed to put forth the kinds of busi-
ness models employed by blogs.

O’Reilly writes about how blogs on the Web 2.0 are successful. Part of their
success can be seen in RSS, the permalink and trackbacks. RSS allows users to
subscribe to content and receive notifications of when that content is updated
(desktop applications are available to collect and view subscribed content). Per-
malinks and trackbacks “turned webblogs from an ease-of-publishing phenom-
enon into a conversational mess of overlapping communities,” and essentially
created the two-way link (O’Reilly 8).

These kinds of features have proved that a bloggers true success is “pay-
ing attention to other bloggers” as that will “magnify their visibility and power”
(O’Reilly 9). The more a blogger interacts with other users and blogs (using per-
malinks and trackbacks and commenting on other blogs), the more attraction
they will generate towards their own blog. An active participant is a successful
blogger. As Adam Smith remarked, “man has almost constant occasion for the
help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence
only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self love in his fa-
vour... the charity of well disposed people, indeed, supplies him with the whole
fund of his subsistence” (Smith12). Cooperation becomes a necessity. O’Reilly
maintains this idea by saying that “users pursuing their own selfish interests build
collective value as an automatic byproduct” (O’Reilly). Web 2.0 is the grounds for
cooperation and we must realize that cooperation is in the best interest of every-
one, independently and collectively.
The ways in which we should use the Web 2.0, that is, the best ways we are to
communicate and collaborate to employ new power relations, is best best under-
stood using Hardt and Negri’s idea of ‘the multitude.’

THE MULTITUDE

“...all forms of labor are today socially productive, they produce com-
mon, and share too a common potential to resist the domination of cap-
ital... Think of it as equal opportunity of resistance”
(Hardt and Negri Multitude, 107)

Hardt and Negri explain that there is a distinction between calling a popula-
tion ‘the people’ and calling them ‘the multitude’: as the people is one, the multi-
tude, by contrast, suggests plurality. The multitude is a term implying a collective
of individuals who negate their differences and work together to refuse the rule
of capital and ultimately, to rule themselves (Hardt & Negri Multitude, 106). As
we have learned, “capital wants to make the multitude an organic unity, just as
a state wants to make it into a people” (Hardt & Negri Multitude, 111). We must
acknowledge this distinction as Hardt and Negri declare that only ‘the multitude’
can achieve true democracy (Hardt & Negri Multitude, 100). We must use the idea
of the multitude to save our individuality. We must, on common ground, fight for
better working conditions, and more so, a better social life.

I will reiterate that the struggles of the past must be acknowledged to un-
derstand the present struggle found in the socialized worker: similarly to how
how mass workers needed to be industrialized, “today labor and society have to
informationalize, become intelligent, become communicative and become af-
fective” (Hardt & Negri Multitude, 109). Just as in the industrial era, “the essential
role of the capitalist in the production process... is to provide cooperation... bring
workers together in the factory, give them the tools to work together, furnish a
plan to cooperate, and enforce their cooperation” (Hardt & Negri 140). The social-
ized worker is autonomous working outside of the factory but communication
and cooperation remain vital to success. We have gone from the professional
to the mass worker, and have evolved into a socialized worker in which capital-
ism attempts to bind to the wage relation using biopolitical power and subsume
individuality under the production process. The struggle involves removing capi-
talist business models from the web and employing a set of new power relations
– relations that acknowledge the immaterial labour done by socialized workers. I
have explained the problem of deregulation as seen on getafreelancer.com and
how blogs are gradually using the Web 2.0 as a means of removing capitalism
and implementing a new economic model that encourages participation, con-
tributions toward public discourse, and overall a genuine ROI. These practices
that involve data management applications and distribution of information can
change the wage relation. Let us realize the faults in traditional capitalist tech-
niques, the independence of the socialized worker and the ways in which we can
better the quality of life.

WORKS CITED

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Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. Commonwealth. “Metamorphoses of the

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