Subjectivity in the ecologies of P2P production

Social theorists including Hardt and Negri (2001), Boutang (2008), Lazzarato (1996), and Virno (2002) discuss new technologies’ appropriation of work as an immaterial and conceptual (and sometimes slavish) activity. The extraction of surplus value from work in the creative and cultural industries, as well as from any employment relationship built on new technologies, is a new and unique category of potential exploitation. This is interestingly also less bounded to the Fordist piece rate work structures of management and the wage relation. The appropriation of the self, of the hegemony of the subject involved, is part of the neoliberal capitalist project. This can also be seen in education and employment policy, as I have demonstrated in my 2010 book (Moore, 2010). There I claim that governments and the elite transnational capitalist class struggles to adapt to, and subsume, potential revolutionary factions within the knowledge and information economy.