Wages for Facebook? Feminist Perspectives on Valuing Data

• In Event: Back to Work: New Theories of Work

Abstract

This paper will draw on feminist theories of housework, reproductive, and “clinical” labor in order to intervene in contemporary debates about “surveillance capitalism” and the “future of work.” Since 2017, more of global GDP has come from the flow of data than from physical goods. The availability of ever cheaper computational power and data storage has enabled the tech industry to develop apparently novel forms of accumulation. As Shoshana Zuboff has argued, the decoupling of these forms of corporate accumulation from work has profound consequences for the relationship that liberalism has historically presumed between markets and democracies. But the nature of the activities through which human subjects generate data remain to be theorized. Many scholars, calling data the “new oil,” have characterized what tech companies do as a novel form of natural resource extraction. Others have compared it to colonialism and feudalism. Still others have proposed that generating data should be regarded as a form of labor, and proposed that online platforms offer micropayments to remunerate users or that governments set up markets on which users can sell buy and sell their data.


This conversation, like related conversations about automation and universal basic income, has almost completely elided decades of work by feminists concerned with similarly ambiguous activities: housework, reproductive labor, care work, and so on. I will argue that user activities on advertising-driven online platforms is most productively analogized to these. At the same time, drawing on Wages for Housework, Donna Haraway, and Melinda Cooper, I propose that neither existing frame--data as resource, data as labor--is quite adequate. Rather, surveillance capitalism presses us to recognize the historicity of the categories of “work” and “nature” themselves--and that new demands are needed. The paper will conclude by showing how this reframing of the data economy can speak to current debates about the future of work and why, in a moment of crisis for many democracies, certain kinds of work come to be privileged over others.

Author

• Moira Weigel, Harvard Society of Fellows