People now provide free labor for companies by using things without payment, but as I’ve learned in Economics, nothing is really ‘free’. You are being paid in terms of entertainment or some sort of satisfaction. ‘Free Labor’ in the sense of the class, was defined as labor that people do freely, and was put in the context of social media networks, more or less. But hearing free labor and the collective ‘you’ reminded me of the idea of credit cards, which isn’t far from digital media but is not 100% aligned with SNS.
Credit cards are magical. You can spend money that you don’t have as log as you have it by the time that you need to pay it back – if you don’t, you can still have it! You’ll just have to pay interest and end up paying a lot more than you would have. It’s a system of trust. This is what credit card companies are giving you – the trust that you will pay them back. But the notion of ‘you’ is a collective you. You are not seen as an individual. You are within the collective when looking at how credit card companies earn money. And with this collective ‘you’, they collect data. You are giving them data, creating data for them as you use the card. And what do you get? Trust and time. Something that’s not tangible but works greatly to your advantage in your relationship with the credit card company in using money that you don’t have in hand, but you ultimately pay for everything. So can this then be called ‘free’ labor?
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[…] and multiplicity of “YOU”, the collective consumer of today. I definitely agree with this blog post that the work consumers do by being a datapoint in the cloud of big datasets isn’t exactly […]