This paper discusses the varying and often disparate approaches that Canadian associations representing intellectual and creative labourers have taken to copyright policy. Copyright policies are important to intellectual and creative workers as they set the framework for their rights and obligations with respect to the works and performances they create, and to the intellectual goods they utilize in their own production processes. Copyright is now in a state of transition as policymakers grapple with the effects that technological, cultural and economic changes have had on established business models and practices in education and in the entertainment and publishing industries. Although the relationship of creators to the fruits of their labour varies in different settings, it is increasingly tenuous. While resulting rights are retained in some situations, in many others the creator is alienated from their rights at the outset, and in yet others they are subsequently assigned away. In comparing the differences in approach to copyright issues taken by different intellectual and creative labour groups, the paper asks what accounts for these disparities, and how they might be ameliorated to the benefit of a progressive politics of digital labour.

Since the hybrid producer-consumer – the prosumer – was conceptualized three decades ago, prosumption has been embraced by both mainstream and progressive analysts. With digital technologies enabling more people to engage in an array of online prosumption activities, one shared claim is particularly striking: the empowering and humanizing implications of prosumption will mark the end of human alienation. In this paper, I assess this extraordinary prediction by, first, establishing that the core of Marx’s conceptualization of alienation is capital’s dominance over human relations, compelling people to become mere tools of the production process. Second, I assess both general and specific digital prosumption developments in light of this understanding of alienation. Third, my analysis concludes that people will participate in prosumption in at least three discernible ways: most will remain relatively powerless tools of capital; some will act as capital’s creative tools; and a minority (those possessing extraordinary capabilities) will have the potential to employ prosumption in ways that redress their alienation.

This paper re-examines the work of Dallas Smythe in light of the popularization of Internet-enabled mobile devices (IMD). In an era of ubiquitous connectivity Smythe’s prescient analysis of audience ‘work’ offers a historical continuum in which to understand the proliferation of IMDs in everyday life. Following Smythe’s line of analysis, this paper argues that the expansion of waged and unwaged digital labour facilitated by these devices contributes to the overall mobilization of communicative, cognitive and co-operative capacities – capacities central to the accumulation strategies of ‘informational capitalism’. As such, the rapid uptake of these devices globally is an integral component in this mobilization and subsumption. In the case of Smythe’s provocative (and somewhat controversial) concept of the audience commodity the work of the audience is materially embedded in the capitalist
application of communication technologies. Consonant with Smythe’s emphasis on the centrality of communication and related technologies in the critical analysis of contemporary political economies, this paper elaborates upon the concept of digital labour by rethinking Smythe’s theory of the audience commodity as a central principle organizing the technical and social evolution of IMDs.

The ‘knowledge society’ is a concept of importance in India’s current neoliberal path of development. This article argues for a critical conception of the ‘public’ as a means to combat the neoliberal excesses of the Indian knowledge society. A dialectic of the Indian knowledge society is proposed, which exposes the contradictions of India’s current development discourse, in order to give insights into more progressive and public-oriented alternatives. Examples of revitalized public information infrastructure and from India’s informal grassroots sector are explored as ways to enhance the public good in the knowledge society. This exploration highlights some of the challenges, contradictions, and areas of resistance in the ongoing struggle against neoliberal hegemony.

Contemporary mainstream narratives about the relationship between technology and development often rhetorically construct technology as a symbol of modernity and a catalyst for further development. The argument developed in the pages that follow posits that revisiting the distinction between carriage and content as analytical constructs offers a useful means of investigating the power struggles at play in efforts to define what constitutes knowledge labour vis-à-vis the ICT sector in countries with restricted media environments. By extension, these power struggles over what constitutes ‘productive’ labour represent contesting views about development in general. Drawing on Malaysia as a case study, we examine how this distinction plays out on the ground and assess its implications for local knowledge labour.

While much of autonomist theory privileges the most developed sector of capitalism (the digital online media and communication industries), this paper asks us to turn our attention to a revived ‘pre-capitalist’ form of cultural production. This article analyzes the recent resurgence of DIY craft culture around the following themes: 1) immaterial and affective labour; 2) gender and the home; 3) time and capitalism’s historicity. It challenges the periodisation of immateriality by highlighting the informational and communicative practices embedded in craft culture. In so doing, we can rethink the temporality of capitalism by teasing out a labour thread that passes through capitalism without being reduced to its purview. The gendered dimension of digital labour displays affective and immaterial qualities that have persisted resiliently before, during, and, in time, after capitalism. Craft as power (the capacity to act) is an ontological accumulation of species-being that pushes us to rethink the ‘organizing’ of subjects. Craft, tied to what Nick Dyer-Witheford calls species-being resurgent, provides a key example of the ontological development of subjective powers, ones that become ever more resonant in the crisis and ruins of capitalism.

In the absence of a professional body, code of ethics, or any other successful form of regulation, web designers deploy a range of strategies to self-regulate their own professional practices. These include the web standards movement and initiatives relating to web accessibility for users with disabilities. Indeed, with regard to accessibility, self-regulation has arguably been more effective than limited attempts to regulate web accessibility that have their origins outside the collective selves of web designers. The success of these selfregulatory strategies calls into question some of the negative readings of selfregulation in the growing body of literature about the cultural industries. What’s more, the ethical foundations of web designers’ self-regulation in relation to standards and accessibility suggest that, in this context, self-blaming (as one form of self-regulation) does not represent an absence of social critique, as has been suggested. Rather, self-blame is social critique.

A dominant theme of recent critical analysis of digital media, user-generated content and cultural industries is that they involve unpaid work (‘free labour’) on the part of participants. This theme has been developed alongside other critical studies of labour in the cultural and IT industries, which focuses more on professional and semi-professional work. Critiques of free labour have provided some stimulating and necessary interventions against complacent celebrations of cultural-industry work, and of the relations between production and consumption in the digital era, but some significant conceptual issues concerning capitalism, exploitation, power and freedom remain underexplored. In addition, these critiques potentially serve (unintentionally) to marginalise the political importance of the conditions of professional cultural labour. After locating the critiques of free labour in the context of autonomist Marxist thought, the article a) argues that the frequent pairing of the term ‘free labour’ with the concept of exploitation is unconvincing and rather incoherent, at least as so far developed by the most-cited analysts; b) explores what political demands might and might not coherently be derived from critical accounts of free labour (and argues that the internship system is by far the most significant example of free labour in the contemporary cultural industries; c) assesses a previous critical attempt to address questions of unpaid labour, involving the concept of the ‘audience commodity’, and judges that it takes a much more pessimistic view of populations than that of free labour, but shares a lack of engagement with lived experience and political pragmatics; d) argues for the continuing political importance of the conditions of professional cultural production, against the implicit marginalisation of that importance in some versions of the free labour debates, and summarises conclusions from some recent research on the subject.