Exploitation and Domination in the Digital Economy

The offer of (free-of-charge) services like Google and Facebook or GenAI chatbots is at the same time beneficial and exploitative, because these services concern unreciprocated gains made possible by a position of domination. Internet users are dominated by private tech companies as they depend on them for their private, work and social life. Exploitation happens at two levels: at the collective level, companies exploit the work of public (informal) agencies like research institutes, schools, families etc. by extracting an unreciprocated gain from the cognitive skills and knowledge created by them; at the individual level, companies exploit the free labour of platform users who produce the traffic and content that make these platforms successful and economically valuable. While the exploitation of distributed cognitive skills and knowledge is captured by the literature on “cognitive capitalism”, the exploitation of the individual users is best captured by a more orthodox Marxist reading of the digital economy, integrated by so-called “audience labour” theory. A modified version of a famous saying is proposed: if you’re not paying for the product, then you are the worker. The final part of the paper sketches some directions to regain freedom in a world increasingly dominated by big tech companies.

Part of panel Philosophy of Technology meets Political Economy: Reflections in the context of the Technical University.