Beyond the break, theory on a dramatic scale

Abstract

Ours is a time of epistemological break that requires a dramatic shift in our theorizing of the socioeconomic relationship of internet-articulated writers to data-mining corporations before we may formulate liberatory pedagogies and practices of internet writing. In the past, Computers and Writing (C&W) theorists joined others in describing a relationship that takes various names: surveillance capitalism, algorithmic capitalism, platform capitalism. Yet, to advance beyond the break, we posit that C&W theorists must recognize data mining as an exploitation belonging instead to a feudal mode of production. Unable to exploit the labors of proletarianized producers, capitalists on the internet transitioned to feudalism by enclosing the digital commons; distributing the commons as universal private property; using the rent form to alienate digicultural producers; subsuming producers’ sociolinguistic behaviors under the feudal mode; appropriating surplus labors of the class of unwaged labor; and placing heterogeneous, differentiated agents on the internet into two economic classes: peasants and lords. In this condition, the peasant class of digicultural producers cannot distance themselves through regulation, volunteerism, cloaking, and shielding. Their subsumed sociolinguistic activities cannot relieve exploitation because the two-sided act of languaging becomes three-sided with the addition of computer programs and AI acting as agents of digital lords.