Is Producing Data Labor? Ask Garrido #1

When we produce data through our technological devices, are we laboring?

Hey y’all. I am starting a series called ‘Ask Garrido’, where subscribers can shoot me questions on philosophy, Marxist theory, and geopolitics to answer through Substack. You can submit your questions on the comment section of my Substack posts.

Below is an email from a comrade with a great series of questions on my article about ‘Absolute and Triple Exploitation: Capital Accumulation in the Information Age’.

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“Hi Carlos! Great article today on your SubStack. Mind if I get your thoughts on a few points?

I was thinking about the actual labor that goes into creating data and I don't think it's Labor per se. It's almost as if data is an incidental, emergent property that has only been tapped into through modern technology. Maybe data is more like a natural resource?

Imagine if Disney installed piezoelectric walkways in their parks so that they could harvest the energy from visitors' footsteps. They'd then sell that energy to the state or an electric company. The energy from those footsteps was there the entire time – the "labor" (effort) was being expended the entire time – but only through technology was it able to be captured and sold. But Disney had to attract them there first, too.

A social network is basically doing the same thing. Providing an attraction then harvesting the latent "noise" that happens as a necessary part of interacting at all. Plenty of data does come from direct user entry, like how Facebook asks you your favorite movies and so on, but I'd wager that a vast majority of all data are these sort of incidental "clicked x, scrolled y, interacted with z" events.

If you look at how China is using the data their internet/apps/social-media are generating, it's geared less towards anarchistic private gain and more towards public infrastructure (smart cities), healthcare, increasing profitability of key sectors, etc. But the data is being generated regardless of what class is prevailing, so long as there is technology to gather it.

And projects like the Peoples Cloud are making this data accessible to the public alongside powerful tools to manipulate and analyze it.

So can data creation be considered Labor in the Marxist sense if it's happening whether I want it to or not? Can the money made from its sale really be considered surplus value?

I'd love to get your thoughts. I'm not sure if I'm really thinking clearly on this.

Hope all's well and you had a great Christmas and New Years!

-Jordan”

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These are excellent questions.

The way that I see it, data production is the exertion of human capacities (mental and physical) to various degrees of intensities and levels of consciousness (death scrolling, blogging, etc.) onto technological devices (which, of course, we know are produced by labor -actualized labor power- and all the other fixed capital the variable capital -labor- works on and with). Any human (or animal, for that matter) activity that, through an interaction with nature (and, if it is more advanced, with a combination of tools, machines, natural resources, etc.) produces something new (tangible or not) is labor.

It is clear, in my view, that while there are serious differences between data production and the wage labor that produces the surplus value Marx describes in the volumes of Capital, each qualifies as ‘labor’.

I don’t mean this simply because all of its components ‘fit’ into the Marxist definition of labor, but when looked at relationally – in its appropriate context – it is evidently an operation whereby society produces something (data) that, because of the relations it occurs in, obtains a use and exchange value in its commodification – a value which is then realized as profit by a small class of data gathering and selling capitalists. In a way, it is labor (the universal) often taking the particular form of leisure (although, of course, not everything we do that produces data is leisurely). It is one of the particular forms technological developments have allowed labor to take. And yes, just like the production of any other commodity, it requires workers who labor in moments after the original value has been added and which play an essential role in helping the capitalists to realize profit, often adding value themselves. For instance, these would be the programmers of the AI’s that gather and sell the data. Their work, in a way, could be considered an extension of the productive process that occurs within the sphere of circulation. These are not to be confused with the ‘pure agents of circulation’ Marx describes in volume two of Capital, those who merely facilitate the sale process, i.e., the change in form from money to commodity and vice versa.  

Even some of the terms we use to describe data production let us know that there is something being produced. For instance, we can say that our post generated x number of likes, views, etc. That creative (not in a strictly aesthetic sense) or generative activity is objectified in its product (data), which is controlled and profited off of by a section of the capitalist class.

In a socialist context, this social production of data could be utilized in the ways you hinted that China has done. It could be harvested by society for social good. It would be society’s production serving society itself – an essential component of the socialist mode of life.

While natural resources are operative in the process of data production and gathering (after all, materials are required to both create and store it once it is gathered – this is the ‘natural resource’ component of it), the creative activity is not a natural resource. It is an exertion of that power or capacity which makes, in commodity production, labor power such a mysterious thing – it is, as Engels notes, “a value-creating force, the source a value (this part it shares with nature), and, moreover, when properly treated, the source of more value than it possesses itself.” In the case of data production, most of the labor that produces the data is not previously bought as labor power by capitalists. Natural resources, while (as nature) a source of value, are not capable of creating value (only labor is). The value embodied in data is created by labor, principally those of the data producers, and secondarily, those of the programmers who set up the automatic mechanisms that gather and sell the data.

The Disney example is very interesting. The walkers through the piezoelectric walkways produce something which is used as a natural resource (energy), but that doesn’t mean the walking (activity that produced the energy) is a natural resource. For instance, lumberjacks are not a natural resource simply because the wood from the tree they chop down gets used as such in future productive enterprises, right? Although, of course, there are many differences in how the two are produced (these are similar to the differences operative in data producing labor and the wage labor subjected to primary exploitation).

I would say this, I am open to calling the value produced something other than ‘surplus,’ since the concept of surplus value is directly related to an understanding of necessary and surplus labor time. In data production this distinction falls apart since all of it is ‘surplus,’ no part of it comes back to us (this is what a socialist society could change). If there is a better way to refer to the value produced and sold for a profit in data production, I would be willing to adopt it. But for now, I think we could employ the concept of surplus value in so far as we have an understanding of the fact that there is nothing this value is a ‘surplus’ in relation to. Or maybe it is ‘pure surplus’? I don’t know, I am open to suggestions for better describing the value produced if ‘surplus’ seems unfit.

As was the case with the purity fetish at one point, I hope this is a concept that (if found helpful in understanding and explaining the phenomenon it addresses) can be refined and improved collectively through questions and discussions such as these.

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Author: Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube.