Informational Cognitive Exploitation, Digital Labour and the Double Freedom of Knowledge: On the Capitalist Exploitation of Non-For Profit Software, Contents and Data Producers

Abstract

During the last decades, Capitalism has been undergoing a metamorphosis, resulting in a change of stage, from Industrial Capitalism to Cognitive (Boutang, 2000; Vercellone, 2012) or Informational (Castells, 1996; Fuchs, 2013) Capitalism. Within this context, the widespread opposition to the dramatic expansion of intellectual property -and particularly to the copyright transmogrificationhelped to boost the diffusion and legitimacy of concepts such as “free knowledge”, “intellectual commons”, “open access”, “p2p production”. Along with the emergence and growth of the General Public License (GPL), Creative Commons (CC), and other licenses, this phenomenon has had a wellknown consequence: the growth of a quasi-public sphere of non-commercial informational goods (Benkler, 2005; Ostrom and Hess, 2006; Bauwens, 2006). Nevertheless, the flows of “free knowledge” also enabled the development of a (partially) unexplored region of the private and for-profit sphere. A new kind of business method is being shaped, and the management literature has already offered a warm welcome to this novelty (Tapscott& Williams, 2005; Leadbeater, 2007; Anderson, 2009). Somehow, it is based on the disguised exploitation of unpaid digital labour, carried out mostly during leisure time, with non-commercial purposes. This `exploitation side has only received specific attention recently (Pasquinelli, 2008; Petersen, 2008; Van Dijck and Nieborg, 2009; 2006; Langlois et. al., 2009; Lovink & Rossiter, 2010; Fuchs, 2013, Scholz, 2013).