Terranova :: free labor



The “open source” movement, which relies on the free labor of 
Internet tinkers, is further evidence of this structural trend within the 
digital economy. 49


The open source movement is a variation of the old tradition of 
shareware and freeware software which substantially contributed to the 
technical development of the Internet. 49




Open source “refers to a model of software 
development in which the underlying code of a program—the source 
code, a.k.a. the crown jewels—is by definition made freely available to the 
general public for modification, alteration, and endless redistribution.” (Open season, Wired, 1999)


“because you must go open-source to get access to the benefits of the 
open-source development community—the near-instantaneous bug-fixes, 
the distributed intellectual resources of the Net, the increasingly large 
open-source code base.”


the open source ques- 
tion demonstrates the overreliance of the digital economy as such on free 
labor, both in the sense of not financially rewarded and willingly given. 
This includes AOL community leaders, the open source programmers, 
the amateur Web designers, mailing list editors, and the NetSlaves willing 
to “work for cappuccinos” just for the excitement and the dubious 
promises of digital work. 51




Free labor is a desire of 
labor immanent to late capitalism, and late capitalism is the field that both 
sustains free labor andexhausts it. It exhausts it by subtracting selectively 
but widely the means through which that labor can reproduce itself: from 
the burnout syndromes of Internet start-ups to underretribution and 
exploitation in the cultural economy at large. Late capitalism does not 
appropriate anything: it nurtures, exploits, and exhausts its labor force 
and its cultural and affective production. In this sense, it is technically 
impossible to separate neatly the digital economy of the Net from the larger 
network economy of late capitalism. Especially since 1994, the Internet is 
always and simultaneously a gift economy andan advanced capitalist econ- 
omy. 51 

>>problematic:: contradiction >>> gift economy and at the same time advanced capitalist economy


>>> surplus value engenderd by the digital economy >>> hyper production can only be partly reabsorved by capital.