Last week, we published five excerpt of Adam Arvidsson’s new book on the Ethical Economy, which is also available at the P2P Foundation wiki.

Here, Adam is summarizing the argument of the second chapter.

The Value of Values?

To summarize. Under fordism, labour power consisted in such actions that could function as an appendage to the General Intellect socialized within the machine or media system: labour was programmed. Under post-Fordism, the free appropriation and autonomous use of General Intellect, mass intellectuality becomes instead a potential source of value. The value of MySpace builds on the user-creativity that is a programmed feature of the site (…), the value of a Reality Show is premised on the affective loop, reaching deep into the everyday existence of viewers, that the program is able to construct. But not all forms of free appropriation of General Intellect are valuable. Only such freedoms that can potentially be subject to management and control can potentially function as valuable labour power. The first step to valorization of productive autonomy is thus the construction of controlled biopolitical spaces where freedom can evolve in a managed way. These can be physical spaces, like brandscapes or the branded City (where the point is to stimulate the production of a particular affective climate: one that promotes creativity and attracts the ‘Creative Class’), but they can also be mediatic: the social media of Web 2.0 and the coming mobile internet are particularly well adapted to this purpose in their ability of fusing private and public and making every action and communication subject to management and control. Increasingly, as in augmented spaces, some combination of the physical and the mediatic is used. The use value of media capital is thus less a matter of its ability to mobilize attention, and more a matter of its ability to organize patterns of communication and interaction so that they unfold in particualr ways (cf. Lash..). In this context the point of managerial intervention is not the individual as much as the values that prevail in the particular biopolitical context. ‘Value’ – in the sense of corporate value or brand value- is thus an abstraction of a particular affective milieu: in their materiality, values are biopolitical [affective, or ethical] capital. Their use value, as in recent managerial debates on the Return on Values, lies in their ability to streamline processes of cooperation or , to ‘organize patterns of communication and interaction so tha they unfold in particular ways’.

But how is the value of values measured? This issue points at a conflict within informational capitalism which still awaits its resolution and which has potentially very important political implications: There are basically two ways in which the value of values are currently measured. The first way is premised on a proliferation of measurement points in which the overall performance of a particular affective environment is estimated. This can be a matter of the proliferation of quality control points and the manifold points of quantification that permeate the quality oriented organization: be this a factory, hospital or university. Here the performance of the organization’s values are continuously measured in terms of a series of output variables, like customer satisfaction, performance benchmarks or numbers of errors. Usually, such measured performance is linked to some form of concrete value stream and/or system of sanctions: forom individual renumeration to institutional financing, as in the British QEA and REA exercises. Brand valuation works in similar ways. The performance of a particular set of brand values is measured against a number of performance estimates, like bar-code scans, consumer surveys or the status of the brand in market and trend indexes. These values are used as a proxy for determining the overall marketing performance of the brand. (It is interesting to note that this performance, like the performance of the value based organization, is not only measured quantitatively, as in sales or productivity output, but also qualitatively as in accumulation of trust, standing or other forms of affective capital, to be capitalized on mainly on financial markets). This system of ubiquitous quantification is coherent with contemporary managerial drives towards inscribing control and surveillance systems within the environment of action. In its drive towards keeping freedom under tight control it often risks limiting the productivity of mass intellectuality. It is possible for users to be creative and innovative, but such creativity risks scoring badly on measurement cards.

A second emerging valuation system builds on what is known as ‘folksonomies’. Value here is based on some form of agglomeration of the ratings produced by immaterial producers themselves. Google works this way. Its ranking (effectively a hierarchy of value) is based on an agglomeration of user generated estimates of the utility of a particular site in relation to their specific productive pursuit.) De.licio.us is another example. P2P systems use forms of folksonomy in determining the value of the contribution of particular co-producers- mainly in terms of immaterial reward systems like ‘respect’. There are indications that similar principles are entering the corporate world. The Danish Actics system for ethics management is an innovative start up that builds on folksonomy-like techniques for measuring the ethical performance of individual co-producers. The crucial thing with such folksonomy techniques is that they do not rely on centralized definitions of value, but rather encourage the formation of autonomous circuits of valorization. While taxonomies are part of an effort to keep mass intellectuality within the fold of a single logic of capital (or perhaps, Empire), folksonomies encourage further self-organization of the productive forces. In other words, the conflict between taxonomy and folksonomy is a conflict between a system that attempts to centralize command over mass intellectuality and a system that encourages autonomoy not only of production process but also of command and value.