The Universal Digital Union

In the lexicon of the digital economy, one deceptive word dominates: user. The term user suggests passivity, consumption, marginal use of a service. But the so-called user, in the reality of contemporary digital infrastructure, is not merely a consumer. They are a producer of value.1

Every gesture made in digital space — writing, searching, reading, scrolling, commenting, watching, dwelling — generates data. Each piece of data feeds machine learning systems, predictive models, advertising and financial infrastructures. Every micro-fragment of human behaviour becomes economic material.

What is called the universe of platforms is nothing other than an immense diffuse factory, in which billions of individuals work without wages, without contracts, and often without awareness.2

The great economic transformation of the twenty-first century consists precisely in this: the systematic capture of the generality of human experience as raw material, as means of production, as economic and financial value.3

The need for a universal digital union

Every historical form of labour has generated, sooner or later, forms of collective organisation. The industrial factory gave rise to the trade union and mutual aid societies. The digital being too must take this decisive step of self-defence of its own class — a step that coincides with the safeguarding and survival of the entire species. The digital society demands a universal union of producers of informational value. This union cannot be national. Digital infrastructures are transnational, and therefore the union we invoke must be a universal digital union.4 Its function is not simply defensive. It must redefine the relationship between human societies and technological infrastructures, between individuals and collectivities, between economic value and social value, between property and impropriety, between the public sphere and the private sphere.

Explore the initiatives to learn more.

  1. On the conceptualisation of digital labour and the user as an unwaged “producer of value”, the foundational analysis is Terranova, T. (2000), Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy, in “Social Text”. ↩︎

  2. The idea of the universe of platforms as a “diffuse factory” (social factory) in which individuals labour unknowingly is extensively deconstructed in Scholz, T. (2013), Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, Routledge. ↩︎

  3. The concept of the systematic extraction of human experience as raw material is the nucleus of the well-known theory set out in Zuboff, S. (2019), The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Profile Books. ↩︎

  4. On the urgency and necessity of new forms of transnational claim-making for information workers and cooperative digital platforms, cf. Woodcock, J. & Graham, M. (2020), The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction, Polity Press. ↩︎