Search

The Linux distributor Red Hat (acquired by IBM in 2018) makes a lot of money from free software, raking in more profit than its competitor Canonical from the more popular Ubuntu distribution. Ideologically it either conflates free software and open source software, or only speaks about open source and the open source community. The business model depends on four out of five business strategies for Free and open source software (FOSS), taking advantage of the various exceptions and the network loophole in the General Public License (GPL) that allow for several forms of hybrid mixes of open and enclosed software. Additionally, the company’s appropriation of the copyright to the collective work of the Linux distribution from the community is not carried out in the interests of the community, but in the interest of its shareholders and to facilitate the use of trademark law to partially enclose its products. Finally, a potentially open and horizontal community, the Fedora project, which could have distributed the freedoms to act in effective and thereby democratic forms, coordinated by a non-profit foundation, is legally and organizationally subsumed under a hierarchical business structure, through the Fedora Project Council that is legally controlled by Red Hat.

This chapter opens with a discussion of MOOCs (massive open online courses). In 2018 there were some 101 million enrolled “learners” in one or more of the 11,400 courses offered by these platforms. While there are several not-for-profit MOOCs, many of them are aimed at making money, and Coursera, our case study, is the leader of the pack. The company currently has some 37 million learners and made roughly USD 140 million in revenues in 2018. Revenues come from charging individuals, companies and universities for different services (such as certifications on the completion of freely accessible courses). Profits are to some extent based on unpaid knowledge delivered by teachers through online classes. In most cases teachers are paid once for these classes, or receive no additional payment at all, despite the fact that they are streamed several times to huge numbers of “learners”. Some 900 universities partner with Coursera and are positioned as middlemen: they lawfully provide the courses developed by their teachers, contribute with some kind of “trademark” and deliver recognition (the certification, degree, etc.) to the learners in exchange for some of Coursera’s revenues. This is only possible due to some intellectual property regulations and contracts that we discuss in detail. But for this exploitative relation to succeed, ideology is also needed. In this case, we analyze the role played by specific vocabulary (“learners”, “partners”, “instructors”), concepts (such as freedom, openness, community, peers) and the association between value and labor time.

In this final chapter, we present a summary and a comparison of insights gained from the case studies done, followed by the presentation of four major strands of policy suggestions that challenge the for-profit perspective that has been criticized throughout this book. In so doing we are challenging liberal ideology from the point of view of socialism’s understanding of freedom as an effective power to act, an ideological position that logically and ideally is dependent on an effective openness that is not open for subsequent enclosures. Within this change of perspective we will prioritize horizontal ways of organizing production in more participatory and horizontal ways—as in the cases of cooperatives and commons-based peer production (CBPP)—that stress the importance of commoning together. This ideological position can in turn be tied to republicanism. We propose policies in four related sectors of cognitive capitalism in order to operationalize and structure this shift of perspective. The policies relate to economy, technical infrastructure, legal regulation (where we introduce the Commoners License Family) and alternative digital platforms.

Capitalism has been undergoing a metamorphosis over the last few decades, resulting in a change of phase from industrial capitalism to cognitive capitalism or informational capitalism. Some instead speak of a movement within capitalism from Fordism to post-Fordism that has changed capital’s regime of accumulation and the regulation of the capitalist system, transforming its reproduction. The profit from openness model, introduced in Chap. 1, emerged as a complement and alternative, both to the ideological opposition and to the practical limitations of the profit from enclosures model. It was greatly inspired by the success of the globally peer-produced Linux operating system and the so-called Web 2.0 in the first years of the new millennium. But, all talk of openness warrant a closer look: openness is often used as a synonym to freedom, but it is not. To be open is to be open for someone else’s freedom to act. The kind of openness that fosters commoning and the building of robust commons is one thing, and the openness that supports interoperability in a capitalist world is another thing. This difference is connected to classical ideologies. The study’s ideology analysis is elaborated in the chapter, followed by a presentation of the contemporary discussion about immaterial and digital labor with all its ramifications. Finally, the concepts of commons, peer production and platform are defined and clarified, before introducing the social actors and flows connected to the profit from openness model.

This chapter discusses profit from openness on audiovisual content platforms. Seven out of the ten most watched video platforms are based on the profit from openness business model. YouTube, our case study, leads this segment by any measure, but is also the second largest Internet site by traffic. As of January 2019, YouTube had 1.9 billion monthly active users worldwide, watching some 5 billion videos each day. The videos are uploaded by around 50 million producers worldwide whom the company calls “creators”. But users do not only watch the videos they search for, but also different kinds of advertising. Ads are the main driver of the revenues, approximately USD 20,000 billion, the platform cashed in during 2018. Ultimately, a good deal of this money can be traced back to the unfair remuneration (or completely unremunerated) for the contributions of authors of videos, and also to the exploitation of the data and attention of users. YouTube offers a “partner” program that allegedly shares income with so-called producers of videos. However, we show that the requisites for qualifying as a “partner” are not so easy to fulfill and, moreover, that 96.5% of “creators” do not make enough money to surpass the poverty line. To do so, more than 2 million views per month are needed. Moreover, views per uploaded video are shrinking, as more and more wannabe YouTubers jump on the bandwagon, attracted by ideological discourses. These powerful ideological discourses are built on references to entrepreneurialism, appetite for attention and de-laborization. Words such as “creator” and “partner” also play an important ideological role, and the ideas of community and openness are again cornerstones of this ideological edifice.

A total of 830,000 peer reviewers, of which a large part can be estimated to be unpaid or underpaid, are open to Elsevier’s and other commercial academic publishers’ exploitation. On top of that, Elsevier and other commercial academic publishers are prospering from research that is paid for by someone else, and that someone else (often the public) is in most cases paying the companies to publish the research. This is profit for free at its prime. The company Elsevier and other commercial open access (OA) publishers profit from openness in a direct way by charging Article Processing Charges (APCs) for its OA publishing, and by not reimbursing allocated articles (within Read & Publish agreements) that have not been published. It is also hard to control the company’s claim that it is not using the commercial strategy of double dipping in relation to hybrid journals. The system with hybrid journals, together with the engagement of company representatives, naturalizes the existence of high APCs. Finally, the analysis shows that Elsevier profits indirectly and ideologically from openness by open-washing enclosed and toll-accessed subscription articles in hybrid journals with its OA-publishing. Recently Elsevier has started to co-opt and commodify even green OA’s institutional repositories. This move, together with the many other platforms and services (like Mendeley, Scopus and CiteScore) that concern the whole of academic life, risks creating a closed system in which the universities become locked into and dependent on the company.

This chapter provides a theoretical perspective on contemporary cognitive capitalism. A Marxist analysis of the relation between the inside and outside of capital is presented; Marxist theories on cognitive capitalism and concepts such as capitalism of communism and communism of capital are explained, together with a presentation of the study’s methodology, the ideological analysis. Key models that structure the analysis on the micro level and in the comparisons of the concluding chapter are presented. Finally, the informants and applied interview methods are presented.

This chapter contains the empirical study of the Wikipedians’ perceptions of their activities on the micro level. Six relationships are investigated in the informants statements: the relations between playing and working, gaming’s relation to the other three main categories (playing, working and labouring), the relation between working and labouring, and, finally, the relationship between playing and labouring. These relationships structure an ideology analysis that aims to identify ideological positions in the empirical material.

This chapter provides a background to the encyclopaedic universe and presents encyclopaedias’ relation to oral and print culture, the analogue shift but foremost the digital history and revolution up until the birth of Wikipedia in 2001. The analogue shift was not of such importance to the encyclopaedias as the digital revolution, which had a great impact on the way that encyclopaedias are produced ever after.

This chapter focuses the analysis on the systemic level and the conceptions Wikipedians have of Wikipedia’s relation to capitalism. The analysis centres on five different dimensions in relation to capitalism: the various forms of crowdsourcing, the monetary, informational, and organisational relationships between businesses and Wikipedia, and peer production as an alternative to capitalism. Within these dimensions ideas about Wikipedia as a complement, revitalisation or alternative to capitalism are highlighted.

This chapter concludes the book with a comparison of the results of the analysis of the micro and macro level. Identified ideological positions are analysed on a more abstract level for patterns of ideological formations. Six ideological formations are identified. The comparison of these ideological formations contribute to an understanding of how the overarching systemic understanding relates to an understanding by the stakeholders of their micro-level activities, and vice versa; the analysis also provides “outside of the box” insights about the political potentials of Wikipedia, as well as the political threats to the project, by investigating the relations between the formations. Finally, an empirical evaluation of contemporary Marxist theories on cognitive capitalism is conducted, and the further relevance of the book is pointed out.

A commonist or communist internet and society require a multitude of different kinds of struggles. This contribution to the debate develops on the strategic alliances of peer production with capital, mainly the use of externally paid wage labour as a way to out-compete, in the long run, capitalism, rather than focusing on classical forms of class struggle. Empirical examples will be taken from a study of Swedish language version of Wikipedia. Capitalist controlled platforms using crowdsourcing of so called user generated content or data mining of the activities exploit the voluntarily engaged users to get a slice of the value production, theirs or the society’s depending on theoretical perspective. The process depends either on some kind of capture of unpaid value production or a kind of appropriation of redistributed value from other value producing sectors (which theoretically goes back to Marx thought of the equilibrium of the general profit ratio in society, money or investment flow to the crowdsourcing projects with low expenditure of variable capital and these projects get rewarded by un-proportionate profit relative the small amount of wage labour directly connected to them; the added value mostly being a kind of rent). Peer controlled platforms’ strategic alliances with capital, in the form of donations of money or abstract labour to the project, are different. Looking at it from a traditional critical point of view it could, as above, either be regarded as exploitation of unpaid abstract labour when a state institution or a company like IBM uses Wikipedians or free software programmers to develop their services or production, or as a new form of exploitation of their own wage labour with the help of voluntary engaged work, understood as concrete labour in the Marxian sense, by the peer producers. The differences here, once again, being if you stress the exploitation of the voluntary peers or the already hired labour force by the capitalist when it comes to value production (or a combination of both); or if you see the exploitation of unpaid work as a source of rent rather than value production. Both perspectives have been proposed within autonomist Marxism and by other Marxists. Yet, it is also possible to stress the emancipatory potentials of these alliances from the peer production’s viewpoint. Instead of different interpretations of communism of capital, as post-Fordist capitalism has been called by Paolo Virno, it is possible to talk of a capital of communism, but the perspective brings some apparent paradoxes to the radical analysis. Counter-production is stressed before counter-politics mediated by the content. In the case of Wikipedia the policy of neutral point of view is one of the biggest obstacles for company control and power. The policy is therefore a main disciplining tool within the peer community’s strategic alliance-work with a capital that wants more of subjective interactivity on the digital platforms for the construction of their customer relations. The policy of neutral point of view results in practice in a liberal point of view, which is even admitted by some wikipedians in the core of the project. But this liberal view comes with a twist and makes the peer project Wikipedia more competitive within a broader range of people than a progressive and radical encyclopaedia would have. To sum up: maybe peer production as a practice is more subversive than critical theory in today’s capitalism, but that does not mean that critical theory is without a mission. Critical theory is needed to supervise and guide the strategic work on the alliances with capital. Not all kinds of cooperation strengthen the peer production. How does Google’s presentation of central parts of Wikipedia articles, within their corporate search engines’ interface, affect the encyclopaedia? How does the increasing use of wage labour within the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as increasing sums of money from fundraising, affect the processes of peer producing? How does the increasing number of co-operations with institutional actors within the GLAM-sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) affect the peer production with its division of the community into an A- and B-team of participants? And where should a line be drawn up against companies contributions to “their” articles (knowing that company-related articles are suffering from bad quality and a lack of voluntary engagement in Wikipedia)? Is there realistic to organize courses, conferences and contests in editing for companies (as a way of controlling them)? And how should the peer producing community and its foundation react in relation to PR-consultant firms like Wiki-PR that helps firms to edit “their” articles? All these questions are questions for a new and revitalized critical theory to address. Some tentative answers from the study of the community behind the Swedish language version and its WMF-Sweden local organization, suggest that it comes down to finely tuned calibrations of the co-operation with the enemy, if these should result in the capital of communism rather than the communism of capital.

The relation between play and labour has been touched upon by many thinkers during the capitalist era. The concepts have been thought of as contradictory by some and as having certain constructive or creative attributes in common by others. For some conservative thinkers the political aim has been to maintain the two realms apart (Huizinga 1955) and some radicals in the 1960s wanted to infuse society, characterized by labour, with playing modes of life (Situationist International 1958; Debord 1967, 15, 113–117), while yet others have wanted to see a shrinking of the necessary hard labour and an increasing realm of freedom built on a synthesis of play and work into a higher unity characterized by attractive or pleasurable productivity (Marx 1909, 954–955; Marx 1973, 611–612, 711–712).