Networks create a uniquely space for coercive control, reproduction of ideas, and communication that is exploited by powers—reject their calls for “cohesion”

Our time living within and across online settings, connecting with others, creating new knowledges and communication practices or building on the existing ones, generates in proportion with the numbers of interconnected populations a vast informational surplus, which is exploited in manifold ways. Our common interactions translate instantly into social network production, which includes online content and data – both traffic and personal. Informational surplus accrues from direct forms of original and derivative alike user-generated creative and generally cultural contributions (Lessig 2004, 2008; Jenkins 2006; Boyle 2008; Bruns 2008; Hayes 2008; Tushnet 2008; Jamar 2010; Fuchs 2015); from the indirect generation of content in the shape of communities coming together and taking form in shared social, cultural, knowledge exchange and even gaming spaces (Jenkins 2006; Benkler 2006); from ‘irregular, unpaid, precarious, outsourced, crowd-sourced, and click-worked digital labour’ on platforms, such as YouTube, LinkedIn and Pinterest, and through activities that include online reviews, surveys and improving online service performance (for example, reporting spam email) (Fuchs 2017, 71). Furthermore, Cohen (2017) discusses the non-stop production of a ‘biopolitical public domain’ of personal data, being harvested, refined and then distributed across data markets. Taking all this into consideration, there is a great deal of value deriving from endlessly flowing in information surplus, for the content industries (for example, promotion, appropriation of fandom, possible royalties); for the Internet media of all kinds and sizes (infrastructures, online services, content hosts, social media and so on); for corporations, benefiting from unpaid digital labour reducing their wage-sum to therefore increase profits (Fuchs 2017); and, of course, for advertisers.

The Internet becomes a most illustrative example of what Hardt and Negri envisage when arguing that ‘labor and value have become biopolitical in the sense that living and producing tend to be indistinguishable’ (2004, 148). This we may take further, in relation to the network society, and analyse down into two different components.

The first reflects on Foucault’s biopower and biopolitics conceptualisations. We have already discussed on various instances the connection between biological life and the online setting. The Internet context actualises the dispersal of power across the network; across uncountable infrastructures, knowledge structures, applications and online platforms. At the same time, the neoliberal shift is projected upon this context: states have important online presence and access to network infrastructure control, but the management and government (in Foucauldian terms) of everyday online life is mainly distributed across (and owned by) market forces and private entities. The network incorporates biopower in its (re)production of life; across the architecture of its operations and fundamentally within its makeup of computer code (Lessig 2006), it integrates norms, both social and regulatory, surveillance, optimisation and security mechanisms, in and through its various operations, controlling individuals towards a productive existence and thus forwarding the interconnected human species. Finally, it recreates the contours of political economy, where the horizon of productivity is realised through the production of life – in online terms: the production of information, by which life is otherwise sustained and organised.

The second component comes closer to Hardt’s and Negri’s contemplations, in recognition of the link they make between the Internet’s biopolitical production and the common. They use communication as an example to denote how the common is produced and it also becomes productive, by suggesting that we ‘communicate only on the basis of languages, symbols, ideas, and relationships we share in common, and in turn the results of our communication are new common languages, symbols, ideas, and relationships’ (2004, 197). The common denotes a raw material that is ‘not consumed in production but actually increases with use’ (2004, 147). Yet, Hardt and Negri warn that, the same way production of value is understood in terms of the common, where the common has become the locus of surplus value, its exploitation equals to its expropriation. Exploitation denotes ‘private appropriation of part or all of the value that has been produced as common’ (2004, 150), even if that refers to relations or communications that are common by their nature, and results in turning what is common into private property and controlling it. Hardt and Negri also note that most often we focus on conflicts between the common and private property, yet it is equally important to keep the common conceptually separate from the public, suggesting the (negative) example of institutional arrangements aiming to regulate common knowledge and culture (2011).