Consumption, Capital, and Class in Digital Space: The Political Economy of Pay-per-Click Business Models

Abstract

Theories of digital capitalism explore two interrelated conceptual problems: how seemingly “free” use of social-networking websites is compatible with capitalist commodity production and how the Marxian class-exploitation conceptual apparatus can be extended to understand newly emerging digital social relations. This essay’s dialectical approach problematizes digital production in relation to digital consumption, connecting these two moments to the organization of the surplus in digital space via a fundamental and subsumed class framework. A link is shown between capitalist and noncapitalist human activity in digital space, distinguishing between commodity and noncommodity forms and displaying the dialectic of free versus forced consumption. This identification is nonneutral to how we conceptualize digital production and class relations. While clients consume commodities, users are lured into providing the conditions of existence (network formation; e.g., Facebook) necessary for this concrete form of capital to accumulate, globally extracting unpaid surpluses from direct producers via capitalist as well as noncapitalist modes of appropriation and distribution.

Key Words:

• Audience Labor
• Digital Capitalism
• Karl Marx
• Immaterial Labor
• Value Theory

Acknowledgments

The essay has benefitted enormously from the comments of Zoe Sherman, David Kristjanson-Gural, and Ian Seda-Irizarry.

Notes

1 See Facebook, Inc., 2017 Annual Report, 1 February 2018, p. 5, http://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReportArchive/f/NASDAQ_FB_2017.pdf.

2 Throughout this essay, I use Facebook as an archetypical example of the pay-per-click (PPC) business model. This is due to the fact that this business model (network generation → monetization through promotion), although popularized by Facebook, is in fact being used by numerous digital corporations (Google and its platform YouTube being other examples).

3 “The best points in my book are: (1) the two-fold character of labor, according to whether it is expressed in use value or exchange value. (All understanding of the facts depends upon this.) It is emphasized immediately, in the first chapter; (2) the treatment of surplus value independently of its particular forms as profit, interest, ground rent, etc.” (Marx 2020).

4 I focus here only on the revenue side of this equation due to space limitations.