Recognizing and overcoming capitalist exploitation in creative networks of collaboration and production

Abstract

Industrialism as a dehumanizing scourge has been seen since the early twentieth century (if not before) as something to be overcome. The road to overcome the mechanical coldness of the machines of iron, explosion, smoke and strength, fueled by alienating work, has been touted as a "return" to the organic, to production systems that are seen as more flexible, more natural, made of meat, blood, warmth and lightness. The functioning model of biological life systems has subsidized the development of information and communication technologies and these systems have been used as examples to explain a certain "nature" of computer networks as self-organizing, evolutionary and emerging systems. This article aims to discuss the analogy of biological computing systems as developed by Tiziana Terranova, taken as the typical way of managing creative networks. We use ethnographic field research on digital laboratories and other collaborative production environments and add to that political reflections on economic relations of exploitation that happen in these environments. The technoutopian imaginary, which acts as a backdrop to these laboratories and other creative environments, says information technology can be used as tools to combat bureaucratization and alienation in society. However, this paper seeks to go beyond these images  – questioning their origins and naturalized assumptions  – while claiming that resistance and reinvention are possible against the informational capitalism cyber matrix. We explore the possibility of an ambiguous relationship between attempts by capitalist management to control and extract value from horizontal and emerging spaces and the establishment of parallel and independent ways of life within capitalist society. Nowadays, information networks are being used as production machines with emergent and  decentralized behavior, therefore creative. Can they be concurrently set up as spaces for life outside (and beyond) capitalism?