Tiziana Terranova

On the internet's transformation from communication tool to computational infrastructure. The internet is no more. If it still exists, it does so only as a residual technology, still effective in the present but less intelligible as such. After nearly two decades and a couple of financial crises, it has become the almost imperceptible background of today’s Corporate Platform Complex (CPC)—a pervasive planetary technological infrastructure that meshes communication with computation. In the essays collected in this book, written mostly between the mid-2000s and the late 2010s, Tiziana Terranova bears witness to this monstrous transformation. Mobilizing theories of cognitive capitalism, neo-monadology, and sympathetic cooperation, considering ideas such as the attention economy and its psychopathologies, and evoking the relation between algorithmic automation and the Common, she provides real-time takes on the mutations that have changed the technological, cultural, and economic ethos of the Internet. Mostly conceived, elaborated, and discussed in collective activist spaces, After the Internet is neither apocalyptic lamentation nor melancholic “rise and fall” story of betrayed great expectations. On the contrary, it looks within the folds of the recent past to unfold the potential futurities that the post-digital computational present still entails.

Digital Networks between Capital and the Common

After the Internet

The essay from which this quotation was written in 2013, which must have been about the time when there was a story in the news about a lawyer who had billed her client for "thinking about the case while having a bath." I pointed out at the time that, although ridiculous on the surface, it was entirely reasonable. What, after all, constitutes 'downtime' in a 24/7 world where you can work from anywhere?

(Page reference is actually pp.89-91 but I can't enter that in the small box)

Doug Belshaw

The theory of cognitive capitalism, then, specifically addresses the ways in which capitalism no longer simply exploits the capacity of the human body to perform manual, repetitive work in the assembly line but increasingly mobilizes its cognitive capacities. Inasmuch as knowledge production is by its nature not subject to the same kind of homogeneous measurement that grounds the law of value in industrial capitalism, it produces something that exceed and a tension in relation to industrial capitalist extraction of surplus value. In the terms provided by this theory, cognitive labor undermines the classical law of value, inasmuch as its productivity can no longer be measured through the arithmetic instrument of the working hour or confined to the time and space of work. While one can measure the productivity of manual labor performed in the assembly line by counting the number of items assembled in a given time, the problem of cognitive capitalism becomes that of measuring the cognitive labor performed by a scientist, an artist, a teacher, a designer, or a writer. Do they ever really stop working, that is, thinking? Furthermore, the notion of cognitive labor suggests that this type of value-creation is not confined to those who would be classed as “cognitive workers” from a sociological point of view, but affects the global mass of living labor—including activities performed in leisure time such as posting comments, photographs or videos to social networking platforms or inventing a new fashion style that only later will be picked up by the industry. For Christian Marazzi, the creation of value is thus increasingly unlinked from direct processes of production, spreading through externalized networks ranging “from outsourcing to crowdsourcing.” “We work for free any moment of the day, there is a continuous transfer of unpaid labor onto the consumer. We can think about the banking system with online banking, the postal system, not to talk about IKEA (which forces you to assemble everything yourself at home) or Google.” Consumption thus increasingly identified as constituting a creative activity actualizing new worlds by socializing tastes, values, and judgments. More radically, according to example to Maurizio Lazzarato, the end of the hegemony and centrality of factory work to the accumulation of value implies a crisis of political economy reactualizing the potential of a neo-Tardean “economic psychology” that reveals the underlying social nature of value. As a result, it is argued that contemporary capitalism is characterized by a strong tension between the social features of production and the private character of accumulation. Inasmuch as the immaterial commons of knowledge required by this type of economy, it enacts a self-destructive cycle. As an economy of debt and austerity displaces the economy of credit that fueled the digital economy of the nineties and aughts, we witness the “becoming rent of profit,” evident in the increasing amount of surplus value generated by financialization, real estate speculation, and the enforcement of intellectual property regimes and copyright.”

Doug Belshaw &
After the Internet by Tiziana Terranova

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Doug Belshaw &After the Internet by Tiziana Terranova

Highlights

Join the club

Doug Belshaw &
After the Internet by Tiziana Terranova