Herbert Marcuse and Social Media
4.2. Herbert Marcuse and the Computer 1. The Computer as a Tool of Control, Domination
4.3.7. Six Dialectics
Marcuse understood Hegelian dialectics as a) the dialectic of the subject and the object, b) the dialectic of the individual and society, c) the dialectic of the subjective and the objective dialectic of capitalism, d) the dialectic of chance and necessity, e) the dialectic of essence and appearance, f) the dialectic of essence and existence. These dialectics can also be found in the realm of con-temporary social media.
a) The Dialectic of the Subject and the Object
Human beings as subjects use social media technologies for creating, sharing and communicating information online and for engaging in collaborative work and the formation of communities. Through these subjective practices, they create and recreate an objective world: they objectify information that is stored on computers, servers, cloud storage devices, etc. and that is communicated to others. It thereby brings about new meanings and joint understandings and misunderstandings of the world. These objective changes of the world con-dition, i.e. enable and constrain, further human practices that are organised offline, online and in converging social spaces. Social media are based on a dialectic of human practices and the social structures that these practices cre-ate and recrecre-ate so that structures condition practices and practices produce structures.
b) The Dialectic of the Individual and Society
In capitalism, individual use-value, i.e. the satisfaction of human needs, can mainly be achieved by purchasing commodities, which necessitates exchange-value, money and the selling of one’s labour power. Individual satisfaction of needs can only be achieved by entering social relations of exchange and exploi-tation. Capitalism’s antagonism between use-value and exchange-value is an antagonism between individual needs and the social class relations. On cor-porate social media, the relationship of the individual and the social is highly antagonistic: social media exist only through social relationships that enable sharing, communication, collaboration, and community. But these social relations are today at the heart of the realisation of neoliberal performance principles that render social media platforms perfect tools for individual self-presentation, individualistic competition, and the individual accumulation of reputation and contacts. It is no accident that ‘social’ media are called YouTube, MySpace and Facebook and not OurTube, CollectiveSpace and Groupbook. It is all about ‘you’ as an individual and not ‘us’ as a collective. The individualistic private property character of social media – the fact that user data is sold as a commodity to advertisers – is hidden behind social media’s social appear-ance: you do not pay for accessing Twitter, Facebook, Google or YouTube. The obtained use-value seems to be the immediate social experience these plat-forms enable. The commodity character of personal data does not become immediately apparent because there is no exchange of money for use-values that the user experiences. The commodity fetishism thereby becomes inverted (Fuchs 2014a, chapter 11): the social seems the immediate positive experience on social media, whereas the individualistic logic of money and the commodity remains hidden from the users.
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c) The Dialectic of the Subjective and the Objective Dialectic of Capitalism Social media is embedded into the dialectic of capitalism’s objective and sub-jective dialectics. It reflects capitalism’s obsub-jective contradictions. One of these antagonisms is the one between real and fictitious value. Financialisation can easily result in the divergence of stock market values and profits. Such a diver-gence was at the heart of the 2000 crisis of the ‘new economy’. Financialisation is a response to contradictions of capitalism that result in capitalists’ attempts to achieve spatial (global outsourcing) and temporal (financialisation) fixes to problems associated with overaccumulation, overproduction, underconsump-tion, falling profit rates, profit squeezes, and class struggles (Harvey 2003, 89;
Harvey 2005, 115). The ideological hype of the emergence of a ‘Web 2.0’ and
‘social media’ that communicated the existence of a radially new Internet was primarily aimed at restoring confidence of venture capital to invest in the Inter-net economy. The rise of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Weibo and related tar-geted advertising-based platforms created a new round of financialisation of the Internet economy with its own objective contradiction: in a situation of global capitalist crisis corporate social media attract advertising investments because companies think targeted advertising is more secure and efficient than conventional advertising (Fuchs 2014c). Financial investors share these hopes and believe in social media’s growing profits and dividends, which spurs their investments of financial capital in social media corporations. The click-through-rate (the share of ads that users click on in the total number of pre-sented ads) is however on average just 0.1 per cent (Fuchs 2014c), which means that on average only one out of 1,000 targeted ads yields actual profits. And even in these cases it is uncertain if users will buy commodities on the pages the targeted ads direct them to. The social media economy involves high levels of uncertainty and risk. A social media finance bubble is continuously build-ing itself up. If a specific bankruptcy or other event triggers a downfall of the stock market value of an important social media company, the bubble could suddenly explode because investors may lose confidence in the business model and this may quickly spread and intensify. Financial crises involve complex dialectics of objective contradictions and subjective behaviour.
d) The Dialectic of Chance and Necessity
Capitalism’s objective contradictions with necessity bring about crises. The exact causes and times of crises are however contingent and therefore not pre-determined. This means for the capitalist Internet economy that its next crisis will come, but that the point of time and users’ reactions to it are not prede-termined. Marcuse’s notion of determined negation as determinate choice is of particular importance in this respect: The next crisis of the Internet economy
will come and may result in new qualities of the Internet. We do, however, not know how these changes will look like. They depend on the choices that users collectively make in the situation of crisis. The future of the Internet is depend-ent on the outcomes of class struggles. If users let themselves be fooled by the ideologies advanced by marketing gurus, capitalists, the business press, neo-liberal politicians, and scholars celebrating every new capitalist hype, then no alternatives to the capitalist Internet may be in sight in and after the next crisis of the Internet. If they, however, struggle for an alternative, non-commercial, non-capitalist, non-profit, commons-based and therefore truly social Internet, then alternatives may become possible.
These examples suffice to show the relevance of Marcuse’s Hegel interpre-tation for a critical-dialectical understanding of the contemporary Internet. I will discuss dimensions e) the dialectic of essence and appearance and f) the dialectic of essence and existence in more detail in sections 5 (ideology) and 6 (essence).
4.4. Herbert Marcuse and Digital Labour on Social Media