

Wages For Facebook - CaptainSwing
http://wagesforfacebook.com/

======
lotharbot
From a technical standpoint, I find the forced scrolling on this page
incredibly frustrating. I read faster than the vast majority of people, yet I
could not take control of the scroll bar to read the page at my own pace. I
gave up about a third of the way through.

(Yes, I'm aware of noscript and the like. I've chosen not to browse with it,
to have the same experience as the vast majority of the non-tech population
this site owner might want to reach.)

~~~
CaptainSwing
Here is the copy/pasted text for those those who cant be fucked with the auto-
scrolling website.

"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.We’ve been bound by their terms of service far too long—it’s time
for our terms.

To demand wages for facebook is to make it visible that our opinions and
emotions have all been distorted for a specific function online, and then have
been thrown back at us as a model to which we should all conform if we want to
be accepted in this society. Our fingertips have become distorted from so much
liking, our feelings have gotten lost from so many friendships.

Capital had to convince us that it is a natural, unavoidable and even
fulfilling activity to make us accept unwaged work. In its turn, the unwaged
condition of facebook has been a powerful weapon in reinforcing the common
assumption that facebook is not work, thus preventing us from struggling
against it. We are seen as users or potential friends, not workers in
struggle. We must admit that capital has been very successful in hiding our
work.

By denying our facebook time a wage while profiting directly from the data it
generates and transforming it into an act of friendship, capital has killed
many birds with one stone. First of all, it has got a hell of a lot of work
almost for free, and it has made sure that we, far from struggling against it,
would seek that work as the best thing online.

The difficulties and ambiguities in discussing wages for facebook stem from
the reduction of wages for facebook to a thing, a lump of money, instead of
viewing it as a political perspective. The difference between these two
standpoints is enormous. To view wages for facebook as a thing rather than a
perspective is to detach the end result of our struggle from the struggle
itself and to miss its significance in demystifying and subverting the role to
which we have been confined in capitalist society.

If we take wages for facebook as a political perspective, we can see that
struggling for it is going to produce a revolution in our lives and in our
social power. Not only is wages for facebook a revolutionary perspective, but
it is a revolutionary perspective from a contemporary viewpoint that points
towards class solidarity.

It is important to recognize that when we speak of facebook we are not
speaking of a job as other jobs, but we are speaking of the most pervasive
manipulation, the most subtle and mystified violence that capitalism has
recently perpetrated against us. True, under capitalism every worker is
manipulated and exploited and his/her relation to capital is totally
mystified.

The wage gives the impression of a fair deal: you work and you get paid, hence
you and your boss are equal; while in reality the wage, rather than paying for
the work you do, hides all the unpaid work that goes into profit. But the wage
at least recognizes that you are a worker, and you can bargain and struggle
around and against the terms and the quantity of that wage, the terms and the
quantity of that work.

To have a wage means to be part of a social contract, and there is no doubt
concerning its meaning: you work, not because you like it, or because it comes
naturally to you, but because it is the only condition under which you are
allowed to live. But exploited as you might be, You are not that work.

To ask for wages for facebook will by itself undermine the expectations
society has of us, since these expectations—the essence of our
socialization—are all functional to our wageless condition online. In this
sense, it is more apt to compare the struggle of women for wages than the
struggle of male workers in the factory for more wages. When we struggle for
wages we struggle unambiguously and directly against our social exploitation.
We struggle to break capital’s plan to monetize our friendship, feelings and
free time, through which it has been able to maintain its power.

Wages for facebook, then, is a revolutionary demand not because by itself it
destroys capital, but because it attacks capital and forces it to restructure
social relations in terms more favorable to us and consequently more favorable
to working class solidarity. In fact, to demand wages for facebook does not
mean to say that if we are paid we will continue to do it. It means precisely
the opposite.

To say that we want money for facebook is the first step towards refusing to
do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most
indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it. Against any
accusation of ‘economism’ we should remember that money is capital, i.e. it is
the power to command labour.

Therefore to reappropriate that money which is the fruit of our labour—and of
all our friends’ labour— means at the same time to undermine capital’s power
to command forced labour from us.

And from the viewpoint of work we can ask not one wage but many wages, because
we have been forced into many jobs at once—we also work for google, twitter,
microsoft, youtube and countless others. From now on we want money for each
moment of it, so that we can refuse some of it and eventually all of it.

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."

------
mlangdon
I feel like I need wages for putting up with that UI for 30 seconds.

~~~
nazca
+1. yikes. If you want to convince me of something, at least don't make it
painful to read.

In the little I gathered, it seems their argument is about as well thought out
as their UI.

------
ecaron
Can someone provide a tl;dr; for this? I'm not nearly on the inside enough
what audience this site is targeting...

~~~
varelse
Douglas Adams metaphorically summarized this a long time ago IMO:

MAJIKTHISE: We’ll go on strike!

VROOMFONDEL: That’s right. You’ll have a national philosopher’s strike on your
hands.

DEEP THOUGHT: Who will that inconvenience?

MAJIKTHISE: Never you mind who it’ll inconvenience you box of black legging
binary bits! It’ll hurt, buster! It’ll hurt!

------
jetru
As some of my smarter and richer friends tell me about stuff like this - "No
one gives a fuck".

------
svetly
#thegridcometh

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nutball
Social media is work, just like housework is work, and it's about as dull as
waged work too. Work is a relationship where some entity extracts surplus
value off your unpaid labor.

I like the forced, scrolling text: makes you slow down and pay attention, but
also not switch tabs halfway through and get distracted.

~~~
lotharbot
> _" slow down and pay attention"_

Why do people assume these are always the same thing?

If you read a book at 1/10 your normal speed, I imagine your reading
comprehension would drop significantly. It's harder to focus on something when
you're constantly distracted by its inappropriate speed, and it's harder to
get value out of it when you can't process it in a normal way because you're
constantly waiting for the next step.

