The Self-consuming Commodity: Audiences, Users, and the Riddle of Digital Labor

Abstract

This article reexamines the digital labor debate in light of its inheritance of the “audience commodity” problematic. It argues that prevailing approaches to the problem of digital labor proceed from a crucial misunderstanding of the economic status and function of advertising in general and in the social media industry in particular. To remedy this problem, it offers an analysis of social media systems as market monopolies that organize a self-defeating arms race among their customers. This arms race enables social networking sites (SNS) to extract large price surpluses, effectively exploiting their customers.