Values & Value

  • Visualization of interactions between users and posts within one participant’s Facebook account plotted over time along the horizontal axis. User activity is juxtaposed with internal Facebook advertising and advertising and tracking activity. This image shows the very dense interactions of a highly engaged user.

  • Visualization of interactions. This image shows a much sparser diagram of a less engaged user.

  • Visualization of posts appearing in a user's Facebook newsfeed. Each post is shown as a coloured square with the vertical order matching how they are placed in the web-page. Coloured lines trace the appearance of a post over time, showing how it moves up and down the newsfeed. This user spends a lot of time scanning deep into older posts that are ranked more lowly rather than simply focusing on new ones that Facebook has ranked at the top.

  • Visualization of Facebook tracking a user as they visit other sites across the Internet. The sites are listed in the column on the left, with those being the most heavily tracked at the top.

Facebook represents a new form of capitalist capture, one based on monopolization and rent that shapes our current connectivity as it monetises us and opens us up to forms of financialization, including increased indebtedness. This form of capitalist capture moves us into a new regime of accumulation, of profit without production, in which the command of surplus value is via the control of surplus information.
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FOOTNOTES