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Dead Labor, Dead Speech – What happens when culture becomes an industry's raw...

What happens when culture becomes an industry's raw material.

Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and all the other social networks that emerged in their wake were the web’s plantation owners, controlling vast tracts of internet real estate. They lent each of their member-tenants a little plot of virtual land, along with a set of software tools, to cultivate an online identity, and then they reaped the monetary value of the resulting content by affixing advertisements to it. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial.

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