Reference
Fuchs, Christian. 2009. “Information and Communication Technologies and Society A Contribution to the Critique of the Political Economy of the Internet.” European Journal of Communication 24 (March): 69–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323108098947.
In this article Fuchs introduces “Critical Internet Theory” as a foundation for analyzing the Internet and society based on a Marxian critique. He illustrates Critical Internet Theory (hereinafter CIT for brevity) using the emergence of the so-called Web 2.0 as an Internet gift commodity strategy, wherein users produce content on free platforms, which commodify the content to increase their advertising revenues. Fuchs introduces the concept of the “Internet prosumer commodity” to describe this “free” exchange of labor and value. This strategy, he writes, “functions as a legitimizing ideology” (69).
Fuchs analysis seems a more fully formed explication of the phrase “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product,” which originally applied to commercial broadcasting. Today this aptly describes the “bargain” made by billions of people who use and are used by the internet to extract informational resources for use in capitalistic accumulation by the large technology companies who own the platforms and set the terms of exchange.
The imbalance of trade, so to speak, has only become more tilted toward the tech companies since 2009, when this article was published. Fuchs focuses on internet users as an audience for advertising, with their creative energies appropriated as content. He discusses the use of personalized advertising made “possible by surveilling, storing and assessing user activities with the help of computers and databases” (p.82). Missing from the critique here is the large-scale trade of users’ personal information among tech corporations, retail companies, banking, insurance, and many other commercial and government entities, facilitated by a multi-billion dollar data brokerage industry. The commodification of personal data across industries and enterprises is not a new phenomenon, and Fuchs even cites Oscar Gandy, who has been documenting and writing about “the panopticon sort” since will before the advent of the world wide web (Gandy 1993).
Regardless, Fuchs establishes a highly useful theoretical framework for critical analysis of the multifarious ways internet platforms are now designed and used to exploit and oppress certain classes of people at the expense of others. I doubt he would disagree that the now-massive business of personal data commodification and brokerage would further illustrate the need for CIT.
Critical Internet Theory and the philosophical dimensions of the Marxian critique
Early in the article Fuchs outlines theoretical aspects of the internet’s political economy, beginning with three philosophical dimensions of Marxian critical theory. While he frames these points in terms of CIT, it is clear he is talking about critical theory in general.
Ontology and “dynamic materialism”
Marxian critique doesn’t address societal phenomena from a standpoint of “absolute ideas and predetermined society development,” but rather with a focus on social struggles and distribution of resources: private property, ownership, power, control of resources, domination and exploitation (p.70). This “materialistic analysis” looks for “antagonisms” meaning contradictory forces or tendencies related to a given phenomenon or social problem, and which can only be resolved through fundamental systemic change. For example, the contradiction between an internet designed and run for the benefit of the liberation and well-being of people, and the actually existing internet run for the benefit of corporate hegemony and profit. Fuchs says research addressing this “negativity” requires a focus on the totality or macro scale.
Epistemology – dialectical materialism
Critical theory is concerned with analysis, description, and potential human transformation of the material world. Rather than focusing on philosophical conceptions of reality, it deals with observable social phenomena in the actually existing world, and can be described as a realist approach.
In looking for the “essence of social existence” and core contradictions, a critical theory analysis cannot rely on one-dimensional, instrumental logic. Social phenomena are complex, dynamic, and contain contradictory tendencies with both positive and negative potentials as they are shaped by social practices. “Dialectic analysis in this context means complex dynamic thinking; realism an analysis of real possibilities and a dialectic of pessimism and optimism” (p.71). In my view Fuchs’ description of dialectical analysis has a clear resonance with Giddens’ theory of structuration:
“Phenomena are analysed in terms of the dialectics of agency and structures, discontinuity and continuity, the one and the many, potentiality and actuality, global and local, virtual and real, optimism and pessimism, essence and existence, immanence and transcendence, etc.” (p.71).
Axiology – negating the negative
As the term axiology implies, critical theory is rooted in values of inhuman liberation and social equity. Critical theory analyses adopt an unambiguous positionality from the standpoint of exploited or oppressed classes, and making judgment about structures of oppression which benefit or privilege some classes to the disadvantage of others. Fuchs’ statement about this could not be more clear:
“Critical theory does not accept existing social structures as they are, it is not interested in society as it is, but in what it society could be and could become. It deconstructs ideologies that claim that something cannot be changed and shows potential countertendencies and alternative modes of development” (p.71).
And further:
“Critical theory is interested in why there is a difference between actuality and potentiality, existence and essence, and aims at finding ways of bridging this difference. It aims at the establishment of a cooperative, participatory society and asks ‘basic moral questions of justice, equity and the public good’ (Murdock and Golding, 2005: 61)” (p.72).
Critical Internet Theory as a form of Critical Theory
Fuchs develops CIT as part of the overall Marxian theoretical canon concerning communication and society. He is not interested in the internet as an object, but as an expression of the dynamics of a capitalist society. He suggests CIT is useful as an umbrella term for other Marxian forms of analysis of the internet and society. Class antagonisms, power relations, and unequal access to resources are central to CIT analysis.
As the internet is embedded in the antagonisms and conflicts of capitalist society, it must be analyzed within that context:
“Based on the insight that the basic resources are highly unequally divided in contemporary society, to construct a critical theory of Internet and society means showing how the Internet is related to questions concerning ownership, private property, resource distribution, social struggles, power, resource control, exploitation and domination” (p.74).
À la Giddens and also Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, the internet is shaped by and also shapes the antagonisms and contradictions of society. This is the dialectic that centers efforts to both transform the internet and transcend capitalism. “Critical Internet research grounds the necessity of a cooperative and participatory societal totality and the contribution that the Internet can make in this context” (p.74).
Again concerning axiology/values, the standpoint of Fuchs is unambiguous:
“A standpoint theory of Internet and society shows how the two competing forces of competition and cooperation result in class formation and produce potentials for the dissolution of exploitation and oppression. It is based on the judgment that cooperation is more desirable than competition, which is just another way of saying that structures of exploitation and oppression need to be questioned, criticized and sublated” (p.75).
Fuch also addresses a larger question in language that may be helpful for anyone seeking to understand social and critical theory, and how theory relates to empirical research:
“If a theory is understood as a logically interconnected set of systematic hypotheses that describe worldly phenomena and the latter’s foundation, structure, causes, effects and dynamics, and empiricism as the observation and collection of data for constructing systematic and reflected knowledge, then one arrives at two levels of science. There is no theory that is not grounded in empirical observations and no empirical research that does not make some theoretical assumptions. However, there can be a different stress of the two factors, and hence one can distinguish between theoretical research (primarily theoretically informed) and empirical research (primarily empirically informed)” (p.75).
Fuchs then discussed the importance of social theory for internet research, and lays out an agenda for CIT:
“The emergence of the Internet has resulted in a plurality of concepts such as Internet economy, digital democracy, cyberculture, virtual community, cyberlove, eParticipation, eGovernment, eGovernance, online journalism, social software, Web 2.0 and so forth. There is no clear meaning of these terms; some of them remain very vague or contradictory. The task of Critical Internet Theory is to discuss how the fundamental concepts that characterize modern society and its negation can be applied to the relationship of Internet and society so that they function as critical categories” (p.75).
Competition vs Cooperation
There are long-standing arguments (or in Fuchs terms, antagonisms) concerning the role of the internet in society. The early years of digital networking can be characterized by (military funded) academic research that yielded functional components of internet architecture, such as http and TCP/IP. During this time, developers and users viewed the internet as a zone of collaboration and cooperation. Its utility as an extension of capitalistic enterprise was not initially recognized.
Many people continue to view the internet as a public network that should be freely accessible and open for creativity, sharing, and community-building. It should empower people as autonomous human beings, and allow them to build a true information society “in which knowledge is available to all for free and is coproduced in cooperation processes” (p.78).
Of course that is not the internet we have today. As Fuchs describes, the internet and information in general “has become an important productive force that favours new forms of capital accumulation. Information is today not treated as a public good, rather as a commodity. There is an antagonism between information as a public good and as a commodity” (p.78). The internet today is dominated by corporations for profit-making activities and increasing capital accumulation, and the resulting hegemonic social and political control. As Fuchs writes:
“Corporate power allows the control of worldviews, labour and quality standards, markets, political power, prices, technological standards and consumer behaviour. Proprietary models that aim at accumulating capital with the help of media like the Internet form the dominant reality of informational capitalism” (p.78).
In the commercial model of the internet, people are viewed as commodities. The internet becomes a global digital surveillance system that increasingly reaches into every zone of private and public life. Personal data is expropriated and aggregated to build “profiles” that abstract individual lives into informational objects that can be bought and sold, resulting in a multi-billion dollar data brokerage industry. It is used by for targeted advertising, disinformation, and political manipulation.
Yet the potential remains to counter the corporate domination model of the internet, and Fuchs includes a discussion of peer-to-peer networks, file sharing, and free and open source software as examples of the non-commodified internet, referring to this as the “informational gift economy.” Today’s internet may be dominated by corporate power and interests, but the purpose of critical internet theory is to address its role in perpetuating the existing forms of social domination, exploitation, and oppression. Critical internet theory should not just analyze the specifics of corporate control of the internet in the context of informational capitalism, but identify how it may be countered. As he writes:
“information and informational networks like the Internet are hard to control and are embedded in social struggles over the public or private character of information. The two poles of a dialectic are not only separated and different, they are also entangled and meshed” (pp.79-80).
The dialectic continues, and the story of the internet is not over.
Citations
Gandy, Oscar H. 1993. The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information. Critical Studies in Communication and in the Cultural Industries. Boulder: Westview Press, Inc.
Adventures in Information Science 