1. Dyer-Witheford understands Marx and Engels depiction of capital (‘all that solid melts into air’), as a vortex.
‘The vertical and horizontal vectors of production and circulation provide the basic dynamic of the value vortex. Its moving force field is, however, unstable. In production, the upward siphoning off of value tends towards a downward pressure on wages, but in circulation, holding down wages limits consumption. At the same time, as we will discuss at greater detail in a moment, the machinic intensification of value extraction reduces the quantities of living labour transformed into surplus value, undoing the basic energy transfer that forms the vortex’.
a) How can we come to understand this analogy, in light of the 2008 Wall Street crash? Is this chaos and turbulence, in some way, modern?
2. In “Mobile”, Dyer-Witheford depicts the production of the mobile phone as a five phase process: extraction, assembly, service and disassembly. At the start of this process lies ‘the most brutal levels of mobile proletarianization’, where ‘indigenous miners pick-and-shovel heavy black ore nuggets out of mines scattered throughout the jungle’.
a)In paying close attention to immaterial labour, are we in some sense ignoring the very material labour involved in digital capitalism?
b) How might Debord's The Society of Spectacle help us understand how we become desensitised and blind to the exploitation accumulated in a mobile phone.
3.In the chapter “Aftermath”, Dyer-Witheford details the ever-expanding ‘app-economy’ in digital capitalism. “When in 2007 Steve Jobs announced that Apple would open the iPhone to outside app developers this was hailed as a radical democratization of software development”.
a) In what way is the rhetoric of democracy responsible in the emergence of immaterial labour and exploitation? In this case, is Steve Jobs the fatherly patron of digital creativity, or simply manipulating labourers to do his work for him?