Futurist Alvin Toffler and critical theorist and historian Michel Foucault both referenced the interface of consumption and production --'prosumption'--around 1980 in considerably different ways. Whereas Toffler focused on the empirical basis of prosumption at a time of structural unemployment and customised demand, Foucault's rendition was discursive and focused on the subjective dimension of prosumption under neoliberal governance. This article engages both contextual and subjective dimensions of prosumption in the context of digital life in the new millennium. Literature to date has emphasised prosumption from the vantage point of digital consumers, whose daily internet activity produces profit for firms while consumers receive no compensation for the data they produce and thereby are dispossessed of the fruits of their free labour--a perverse dimension of prosumption in the digital era. I extend the notion of dispossessed prosumption from the realm of digital consumers to digital producers--those who seek a wage through digital means--to permit an overarching conceptualisation of the digital regime of work, recognising important similarities and differences in the processes by which digital subjects experience dispossessed prosumption. I argue that for-profit crowdsourcing is the salient corporate strategy in the digital era regarding capital-labour relations, encompassing both digital consumers and producers, although it is covert regarding the former and overt regarding the latter. I explain how dispossessed prosumption uniquely configures for digital producers with reference to the requirement for self-capitalisation in a context of deepened precarity, while producers' aspirations for a stable career and consumer lifestyle sustain the process. Although the processes by which digital producers and consumers are dispossessed differ relative to digital value chains, both digital consumers and producers nonetheless share vulnerability to digital addiction. Crucially, despite different strategies of resistance to date between digital consumers and producers, all resistance strategies are rooted in common sensibilities, which potentially can be weaponised towards transcending the dated consumption/production divide to realise an effective coalitional movement.
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Both contextual and subjective elements of prosumption warrant critical attention in the new millennium because the dynamics of prosumption have changed to encompass a perverse dimension. (6) Beyond the persistence of DIY and consumer designs in the context of customised demand, digital consumers do not necessarily consume what they have produced--thus a case of dispossessed prosumption by which digital consumers are alienated from the rewards of their role in digital production. (7) Firms covertly collect, aggregate, code, and subsequently transform into algorithms data gleaned from digital subjects' internet activity such as web surfing, online purchases, as well as self-curated activity that can range from self-production on social media to the production of photos and videos for online audiences. (8) All these types of internet activity inform firms about actions to take on the consumer population, thereby shaping digital practices, subjectivities and choice. (9) Ironically, the algorithms firms use to govern digital life are based on the web activity of digital subjects; hence, digital governance is a recursive process. (10) Some consumers are aware of their role in the new corporate profitability and others are not, but all are unpaid for their implicit data 'donations,' giving new meaning to 'wageless life' (11) and underscoring Tiziana Terranova's declaration of 'free labour' in the digital economy. (12)
Despite the daunting contextual and subjective constraints on consumer and producer crowdworkers, dispossessed prosumption in the digital era is far from final as critical, reflexive subjects have forged a new frontier of digital resistance. Beyond traditional protests such as petitions and on-the-ground strikes, critical producer and consumer crowdworkers have strategised to subvert the affordances of the digital infrastructure by configuring them to work for civic society rather than big-tech firms. (51) One specifically digital mode of resistance among producer crowdworkers engaged in both online work and gig economies has entailed the development of platform cooperatives, which aim to eliminate corporate mediation, the mode by which firms access workers. Members of platform cooperatives self-organise, self-market, and self-fund to illuminate democratic principles and maintain autonomy. Consumer crowdworkers--digital subjects not seeking a wage--have developed wide-ranging strategies, including obfuscation and disruption; the development and maintenance of socio-political connections in cyberspace that thwart problems of alienation; the production of metadata to serve counterpublics; and various tactics to achieve and preserve privacy such as the use of free and open-source software (F/OSS) to eliminate their role as implicit workers in the digital value chain while embracing communitarian values. Recently, cooperative platforms that function as non-profit marketplaces have emerged in the health sector (e.g. Midata, Savvy.coop) and financial sector (e.g. Datavest) to enable consumers to maintain control of their personal data while connecting with professionals.
Although producer and consumer crowdwork differ, as do their intentions regarding income generation, and resistance has followed different paths relative to different concerns--to change conditions of work and to eliminate their position in the digital value chain, respectively--general sensibilities among producer and consumer crowdworkers who resist the constraints of the new regime nonetheless share important similarities. For example, despite differences in intention regarding a wage, platform cooperatives developed among producer and consumer crowdworkers bear similar concerns as those among consumer crowdworkers who develop and sustain the free and opensource software movement (F/OSS): autonomy, preservation of privacy, protection from corporate invasiveness, and embrace of democratic and collaborative principles. Such similarities constitute at least an enabling condition for coalitional action across the traditional consumer/producer divide. The emergence in recent years of 'open cooperatism,' which links commons-based peer production (as in Wikipedia) with entrepreneurs aiming to earn a living wage while producing for the public good is hopeful. (53) Further, the context in which we live is changing rapidly. At this juncture in the digital economy, automation in North America and most of Western Europe lags behind South Korea, Singapore, Germany, and Japan while the rate of growth of automation in China appears highest. (54) Although full automation is unlikely in the near future and automation may create new jobs, firms worldwide increasingly will engage automation as a basic competitive strategy, thereby increasing the rate of worker displacement, especially those with low to medium-level skills. (55) As automation and the rate of worker displacement increase across wide-ranging industries, the relative percentage of people seeking wages through digital means likely will increase, along with a critical consciousness of the problems of dispossessed prosumption they confront as both producer and consumer crowdworkers.
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