Re: <nettime> The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?

[Ana Valdés <agora158@gmail.com>]

I apologize to go into the discussion so late but I am moderating this
month's discussion at -empyre and it feels the time and the writing skills
have indeed a limit :)
I was a user of Second Life and remember the discussions about the virtual
sweatshops where young Mexicans and Koreans worked for hours in dim or dark
places enlightened only for the computers screens making virtual things or
fighting wizards to get virtual weapons which could be sold in the real
life for real world.
Julian Dibell wrote a nice book about it, Play Money.
I am myself reading Bataille The Accursed Share and the books by Marcel
Mauss about the Gift. The concept of potlach is real interesting, the
symbolical exchange of wares and goods which makes wars and conflicts with
bloody consequences unnecesary or trivial.
The exchange fullfills the symbolical needs of giving and takings.
Ana


On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 4:08 PM, Brian Holmes
<bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>wrote:

> On 03/07/2012 12:57 AM, Mark Andrejevic wrote:
>
>  If you boil it down, the valuation of Facebook is based on the promise of
>> the power of the social graph and detailed forms of targeting and
>> data-mining to do what? To serve the needs of advertisers. What needs? To
>> move products and sell services. There may be all kinds of fascinating
>> networking going on, but in economic terms, Facebook is about selling
>> cars and iPads, mobile phones, diet supplements, beverages, and so on.
>
> Indeed. And to sell objects is, in our time, to directly command labor:
> both the labor of production in distant factories (often in Asia) and the
> closer labor of transportation, warehousing, delivery and sales, which
> accounts for an ever increasing portion of the hard, super-exploited work
> being done in and around the city where I live, Chicago. Because all six
> transcontinental rail lines cross in this city, it's the 3rd biggest
> container port in the US, an intershipment point for maritime cargo from
> both coasts. But almost no one knows this. Dazzled by Facebook and the
> like, people have simply forgotten about the manufacture of goods and the
> exploitation of largely undocumented labor forces.
 <...>

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