'Wages for Facebook' Action Debrief

So, as you can see, the majority of individuals we interviewed as part of our mini-intervention -‘Wages for Facebook’ - laughed off the concept of a wage for our social networking, let alone considered their time on social networks as labour. This, however, was the expected response.

Social networks profit directly from the data we generate, turning this into an act of ‘friendship' or flirtation. By denying this a wage, capital has gained the upper hand in a plethora of ways. First and foremost, it has managed to deceive us into working for free. But also, far from struggling against this unwaged labour, we seek it as the most preferable thing on the internet, and as means of ‘killing time’ on our or lunch breaks or those early morning commutes. Our relationship with Facebook is completely mystified. We have been well and truly alienated from this process of unwaged labour, left blissfully unaware of our own subjugation.

The demand for a Facebook wage would acknowledge that our social networking is, in fact, work. Once we have our feet in the door, we have the ability to struggle around the terms and volume of that work.

To quote Tronti, "if the conditions of capital are in the hands of the workers, if there is no active life in capital without the living activity of labour power...", then one can conclude that from its inception, Facebook is in fact subordinate to us: the workers.

Once our labour is visible, we can begin to refuse it in all its guises…

Wages for Facebook is a revolutionary demand. It does not, by itself, destroy capitalism, but it forces capital to restructure social relations in terms more favourable to us.

“WAGES FOR FACEBOOK IS ONLY THE BEGINNING, BUT ITS MESSAGE IS CLEAR: FROM NOW ON THEY HAVE TO PAY US BECAUSE AS USERS WE DO NOT GUARANTEE ANYTHING ANY LONGER. WE WANT TO CALL WORK WHAT IS WORK SO THAT EVENTUALLY WE MIGHT REDISCOVER WHAT FRIENDSHIP IS.”









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