After the Internet by Tiziana Terranova;

Author:Tiziana Terranova; [Terranova, Tiziana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2022-11-21T00:00:00+00:00

Algorithms, Capital and Automation

Discussions about the potential of computational networks in enabling a postcapitalist economy tend to revolve around concepts of the commons or the common. Writings about commons-based peer production tend to privilege the notion of commons as a good, mostly drawing on Elinor Ostrom's framework, thus suggesting that peer production is primarily enabled by the specific character of information as a nonrival good—a good that can be enjoyed in common.5 In his early essay about “peer production,” for example, Yochai Benkler draws a difference between “commons-based peer production” and “peer production” as involving a difference in regimes of property. Peer production, for Benkler, refers to “instances of socially productive behavior” or “large- and medium-scale collaborations among individuals that are organized without markets or managerial hierarchies.” 6 He characterizes commons-based peer production in the classic terms provided by literature on natural commons, and redeploys them to deal with knowledge commons: “non-proprietary regimes” or “absence of exclusion”; whether the use of the commons is open to anybody in the world or limited; whether it is self-regulated or not; according to the means of provisioning and allocating resources. Theorists of the common, however, argue that in Ostrom's theory of the commons “what remains as a central element defining common goods is the particular nature of certain goods, in continuity with the ahistorical and static approach to classification of goods (private, public, common, belonging to a club) driven by neoclassical inspired economic theory.” 7 Drawing on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Carlo Vercellone and his co-authors argue that the common is the “socially and historically determinate activity that incessantly produces new institutions, which are at the same time the conditions and result of ‘common’ itself.” 8 As such, while the notion of the commons is dependent on a classification of different types of goods (private, public, and common), the concept of the common refers to “cognitive labor and knowledge […] as the common element that establishes and renders possible the social structure of any type of commons, independently of the nature of the goods, whether they be material or immaterial, subject to the constraints of scarcity or abundant.” 9 Thus for theorists of the common, the matter is not identifying which goods seem to qualify best for “commons-based peer production,” but how the common as a political concept indicates the centrality of bio-cognitive labor and social cooperation to value production and the necessity of conceiving new political horizons that acknowledge the increasingly social nature of production in ways that reward and sustain it.

Looking at algorithms from a perspective that seeks the constitution of a new political rationality around the concept of the common means engaging with the ways in which algorithms are deeply implicated in the changing nature of automation. If what Vercellone, Fumagalli, and others call “biocognitive capitalism” intensifies the cooperative nature of labor, then algorithms become signs of a new mode of automation with relation to the industrial model described by Marx. Marx describes automation as a process of absorption into the machine of

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