Wages for Facebook

In January 2014, the website “Wages for Facebook” was launched. The single-page maximalist manifesto slowly scrolls by in large blocky caps, beginning with the declaration that:

“THEY SAY IT’S FRIENDSHIP. WE SAY IT’S UNWAGED WORK. WITH EVERY LIKE, CHAT, TAG OR POKE OUR SUBJECTIVITY TURNS THEM A PROFIT. THEY CALL IT SHARING. WE CALL IT STEALING…”

The text is a rewriting of key passages from “Wages Against Housework,” a pamphlet central to a feminist campaign in the 1970s condemning the unpaid labor of housework and caregiving. The theoretical import of the 1970s campaign was huge at its time – “Wages Against Housework” challenged certain historical materialisms that relegated power and social reproduction to a superstructural level altogether separate from the material base of production. Extending the “social factory” approach to value production, this materialist feminism demonstrated why the cultural, corporeal, and subjective dimensions of social reproduction are just as fundamental to the material structure of capitalism as economics.

Stacks on Stacks on Stacks

What if governments, institutions, and NGOs treated us as users? Borrowing conservative jurist Carl Schmitt’s notion “nomos,” which describes the interactive forces of political geography, jurisdiction, and sovereignty as a whole, theorist Benjamin Bratton argues that planetary-scale computing is reconfiguring subjectivity. Schmitt’s conservative project was a lament for the nomos of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, a legal order that helped European nations consolidate into states and facilitate the golden age of colonialism. Bratton agrees that there is a new nomos on the way, but it is a nomos of the stack.