Iris Schfer Synopsis Terranova: Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy In Free Labor, Terranova

a writes about how free labor free in the sense of not financially rewarded and willingly given (51) relates to a digital economy. Her aim is to show that a digital economy based on free labor, or user-generated content, does neither constitute a continuation nor a clean break of modernist capital, but rather a mutation (54), in which capitalist structures are altered and transformed, though not abandoned in a digital environment. Starting from an understanding of labor and capital rooted in Marxist theory, she examines the complications introduced into these concepts by postmodernism and the postindustrial society. She asserts that, as argued in Marxist and Feminist theory, labor does not equate employment or waged labor and creates a concept of free labor that encompasses forms of labor that are not conventionally seen as such, like chats or organizing mailing lists. These forms of labor along with more conventional ideas of immaterial labor (Lazzarato in Terranova 41), such as amateur webdesign or the open source movement are sustained and exploited by postindustrial capitalism. Whereas Barbrook believes that collaborative free labor, or what he calls a gift economy (35), stands in opposition to market forces who invade the free space of the web, Terranova argues that the gift economy is part of a postindustrial capitalist structure. The anthropomorphized capital uses the free cultural labor to generate profit (e.g. through traffic and consequential ad revenue from a site reliant on user-generated content), but is also interested in maintaining a skilled reserve force for waged labor, who engage in collaborative free labor to continuously reskill themselves and remain active in the economy. This continuous reskilling is one of her core features of this mutated postindustrial labor. The collaborative nature of free labor and the continuous updating and adapting of products as well as users foreground process over product as the product is never finished and static, but undergoes a continuous process of creation. It follows from there, that the digital economy is preoccupied with the act and the abundance of production (53), rather than the moral value of the product foregrounded in television, which relies on a more structured form of free labor. I thought that Terranova introduces interesting concepts for user-generated content/audience participation in terms of value, but her text makes me wonder in how far the (digital) economy based on free labor has developed in the ten years since the article was published. I feel that her points may have been complicated by the extreme deconstruction of

people show frameworks by MTV for example or by the phenomenon of professional fans who signify a much more direct intervention into the free labor of fandom by the industry, than can be found in Free Labor online as well as offline.