The “like economy”: many of the same metrics of reputation I applied to internet brands, like Facebook, above also apply to individual users and friend groups. Some reputation criteria may be indirect, intangible, or relatively arbitrary (non-specific “attention time”, clebrity, expertise, etc.) but many are explicit as numbers of “friends”, “likes”, shares, comments, views, click-throughs, etc. Explicit, tangible metrics are the easiest to capture but are not necessarily more relevant than other intangible and ambiguous influences. You often seem to be saying value is properly indicated either by one or the other.

The facts in the section on “Facebook and Finance” are not controversial except for raising the question of equitable distribution of this value stream.

“…the value of social media companies like Facebook does not primarily depend on the number of users that they have, nor on the time that users spend online. It depends on the strength of their brand which is an effect both of the number of users that they have, and on their ability to penetrate the lifeworld of those users ‘vertically’ so to speak.”

I would argue that user population times attention time *is* a primary factor if it is arguably the stronger of the only two factors described.

The chart on p 19 showing the lack of correlation between market valuation and user volume only shows that the market valuation process is still largely irrational and based on irrelevant assumptions and arbitrary conventions.

“If the suggestion is that internet platforms, or even ‘the internet’ as a whole, exploit users by attracting surplus value from their ‘audience labor’, and that consequently this surplus value ought to be redistributed in the form of a basic income, then, as we have seen on page x, there is not much to redistribute. This becomes a rather toothless argument.”

Only under certain assumptions some of which I have challenged. One implicit assumption seems to be that all users are equal with respect to quantity and quality of labor. In fact, the basic income distribution might be divided unequally among far fewer than “all” internet users.

“What needs to be re-distributed in a more equal fashion is not the value appropriated by social
media platforms, but the value that circulates on financial markets.”

Again a false either-or dichotomy. The answer is not one but both. Or better yet, the answer is all valid inputs and outputs with no artificial and arbitrary externalities. I am not confident that your analysis and recommendations are fully consistent with that degree of neutrality and comprehensiveness with respect to all inputs, outputs, and methods of valuation.

Poor Richard

And while some forms of added value are difficult to attribute to individual actors others are not.

So I can’t agree that “however the multitude is exploited in creating common resources, labor time is not a good measure of that exploitation.” I can only agree that it is not always the best measure. Those are very different conclusions.

“A third crucial precondition for the relevance of the labor theory of value is that the realization of
value occurs in direct commodity exchange on markets where there is a direct correspondence
between market price and the labor time necessary for commodity production.”

I think there is some obfuscation here. “Labor theory of value” (either ambiguous or pre-defined in a particular way), “direct commodity exchange”, and “direct correspondence” are all fairly tricky terms to navigate to arrive at a “crucial precondition for relevance.” Whats wrong with indirect exchanges and correspondences, for instance?

“…the rise of intangible assets as a component of the market value of companies implies that resources like brand, innovation, and flexibility, that are to a large extent appropriated from the self-organized productive practices of the multitude (at least within an ‘negrian’ theoretical framework), are directly evaluated on financial markets.” and “…value created in productive processes is more or less directly
channeled to financial markets. On financial markets this value is redistributed according to what
Marazzi call linguistic ‘conventions’…”

I’m with you there. That seems clear and uncontroversial as a matter of fact. As a matter of equity some question remains.

“This leads us to suggest that informational capitalism ever more deploys a reputational ‘law’ of value,
where the value of companies and their intangible assets are set not in relation to an objective measurement…”

What about numbers of eyeballs, users, keystrokes, hits, clicks, links, and numerous other objective measures of reputation?

Though I’m only half way through the paper and may be jumping the gun with some of my comments, it may be useful to the author to have a sense of a reader’s thoughts and reactions along the way to that half-way mark.

In fact I think the best general approach is to identify all inputs and all outputs of value and then, for each input and output stream, identify the various sources of the inputs and the receivers of the outputs. Only then can the aggregate value of a Facebook be calculated and the fairness of the distributions be judged.

I am not satisfied that “each Facebook user was a ‘victim of exploitation of surplus value’ to the extent of $ 0.7 a year” or that the “figure on the overall value created by audience participation on
the internet globally, $ 100 billion… becomes $ 59 per internet user per year.”

Not all internet users are anywhere equal in their contributions. Some internet users should be paying for their activity and others should be getting paid.

The only important fact I have noted so far is that one of the revenue streams that is not shared equitably by all the internet value producers is the wealth that a Facebook realizes from the financial markets, such as the appreciation of its stock value. That is an important point but it can be stated in one sentence.

Also, the arguments against Fuchs’ application of Marx raise some issues worth discussing but I don’t find Adam’s conclusions entirely persuasive. Whatever other means of determining a Facebook’s value might be important, I lave no doubt that labor has value and there is a lot of labor value flowing into the Facebook along with a giant sucking sound….