Capital experimentation with person/a formation: how Facebook's monetization refigures the relationship between property, personhood and protest

ABSTRACT

This article examines the conditions of possibility for protest that are shaped when we open our browsers and are immediately tracked by Facebook. It points to the significance of tracking in the making of contemporary personhood showing how the relationship between property and personhood is being currently reconfigured as Facebook experiments with ways to accrue maximum profit. It outlines in detail the different ways by which Facebook operates financially, arguing that it is better understood as a powerful advertising oligopoly that lubricates the circulation of capital rather than just as a social network. By charting the movement from the liberal ‘possessive individual’, to the neo-liberal ‘subject of value' into the present disaggregated ‘dividual', it reveals inherent contradictions as Facebook builds its financializing and monetizing capacity. We show how the contemporary neo-liberal imperative to perform and authorize one's value in public is more likely to produce a curated persona rather than the ‘authentic’ self-demanded by Facebook, making accurate dividuation more difficult to achieve. We draw on our research project funded by Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), UK, on the relationship between values and value, which uses custom-built software to track Facebook's tracking. Our research revealed how Facebook drew clear distinctions between high net worth users and the remainder, making the protesting bourgeois ‘subject of value’ much more likely to be subject to expropriation. We ask: what does it mean if the communicative networks for protest are just another opportunity for profit making and lubricating financialization?

KEYWORDS:

• Facebook
• software
• personhood
• protest
• monetization
• labour

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the organizers of the ICS Protest Ecologies Conference in Alghero, to Dan Mercer, Laura Iannelli and Brian Loader and for the excellent comments from referees.

Notes on contributors

Beverley Skeggs is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is an ethnographer who researches the relationship between values and values through different aspects of social life, including class, space, violence, sexuality, reality TV and subject formation. [email: [email protected]]

Dr Simon Yuill is a software designer, postdoc researcher and artist. He has won many arts awards. His PhD was on software, legality and urbanism and he has done research on free and open source software cultures and relations between digital privacy and workplace activism. [email: [email protected]]

ORCID

Beverley Skeggs http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9354-5381

Notes

1 Although we did make significant alliances that have sustained over time (see http://podacademy.org/podcasts/pits-perverts-revisited/), the film Pride and The Grunwick Strike.

2 See: Patrick Wintour http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/oct/15/trade-union-bill-social-media-vetting-plan-dread-fear-police#img-1

3 See: Guy Adams http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/an-app-for-workers-rights-employee-at-apple-starts-union-bid-2297095.html

4 See: http://www.statista.com/statistics/289505/social-networks-value-per-active-user/

5 Source: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=FB

6 Source: http://newsroom.fb.com/companyinfo

7 As Strathern (1988) demonstrates, gift economies are often systems of exploitation in which those who control the vectors of exchange extract most value. See also Wark (2004) and Barbrook and Cameron (1996).

8 See: https://values.doc.gold.ac.uk/blog/17/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council under GrantES/KO10786/1.