Common Factory
= "‘common factory’ is a synthesis of the concept of Social Factory (the extension of the factory to the whole of society) and digital commons (as core of a new form of distributed commodification with the blockchain).
Description
Felix Fritsch:
"While acknowledging Marxist scholars’ point that prosumption constitutes digital labour that should be rewarded, the Crypto Social Networks under scrutiny all embrace commodification as their preferred means to overcome exploitation. Their promise to dissolve corporate platform ownership to the benefit of its users thus comes at the cost of total subsumption of sociality under the regime of an ever more omniferous social factory, as conceptualized and loathed by Italian Autonomists Mario Tronti (1966), Antonio Negri (1989), Nick Dyer-Witheford (1999) or Paolo Virno (2004). The resulting ‘common factory’, collectively controlled by its users, may overcome central modes of accumulation through exploitation, but it remains organized according to logics of productivity that pursue a totalitarian vision of Homo Economicus (Atzori 2015). At the same time as it cedes centralized control, the prerogative of capital becomes inscribed into a platforms’ very foundations, the blockchain infrastructure. And yet, the platforms built on top employ considerably different approaches to digitally engineering sociality (van Dijck 2012 and 2013; Atzori 2015; Atzori and Ulieru 2017) that result in specific constellations of power and revenue distribution. While not overcoming commodification as such, these differences are worth researching both for their impact on such constellations and for their wider transformative potential vis-a-vis centralized incumbents.
In light of these considerations, this paper may also be seen as the starting point of both a theoretical exercise to conceptualize ‘common factory’ as synthesis of social factory and digital commons and an empirical exploration of commonalities and differences of its implementation in dApps."
More information
Read the article:
- The Common Factory: Governance and Incentive Systems of Blockchain-Based Social Networks. By Felix Fritsch. Conference Paper, June 2019