Learned a new word today: prosumer. Apparently it's a term used in various places for a consumer who contributes something productive through her/his consumption patterns or choices. Business types like prosumers as a taste-defining market sector, but the person who used the term today was a Marxist who was describing the progressive elimination of paid work in our "jackpot economy," where everyone puts in many unpaid hours for a chance to be the winner of the competitive game of capitalist success. The larger point was that economists of all stripes see value as no longer the result only of wage labor and (or vs.) capital. Instead, much - perhaps most - of the value of commodities is generated in the "social economy," in the ways we - prosumers all - provide free labor in researching products, teaching ourselves how to use them, telling others about them and providing endless hours' worth of information for the data miners who squeeze marketing knowledge from social networking sites.But if this labor costs enterprises nothing, what will happen to wage labor? What will happen to the very concepts of work, of value? Is the open-source world of free software, collectively-written novels and endless Facebooking and tweeting the augur of a new economy, more collective and collaborative, or the superstructure to a change in the base which will impoverish all but a few? These questions were raised at a panel discussion which was a teaser for a conference one of my colleague has organized for November on the phenomenon of "digital labor." (I'll be moderating a panel, adding my free labor without any prosumptive qualifications!)
(The cartoon's from the most recent New Yorker.)
