Corporate Capitalism's Use of Openness

Since at least the 1990s the sensation has been that digital technology, as with the printing press in the past, is transforming the whole information and communication chain in society: the production and distribution of information and data, and the adaptation and storing of it. The earlier analog model had one sender, a TV or radio station and many receivers, and it was dominated by unidirectional communication, which mirrored industrial society itself, dominated as it was by large companies, managed by elites of white-collar engineers and middle management, exploiting a working mass of blue-collar workers. This hierarchical media landscape was transformed, it was widely claimed, by digital technology and the popularization of the Internet and the web in the 1990s. On the web, interactivity, and two-way communication, was the rule. It was said to be inherent in Internet technology and its infrastructure. The earlier dichotomy between senders and receivers, between producers and consumers was loosened up and the categories started to merge with each other, giving rise to new possibilities according to intellectuals of the time. In this introduction we present this shift as a shift from industrialism’s profit from enclosures, like copyright law, to cognitive capitalism’s new business models built on profit from openness—an openness that always exists in hybrid combinations with new enclosures. The chapter provides an answer to why this is a matter of concern, and outlines the chapters of this book.

 Capitalism has been undergoing a metamorphosis over the last few decades, resulting in a change of phase from industrial capitalism to cognitive capitalism or informational capitalism. Some instead speak of a movement within capitalism from Fordism to post-Fordism that has changed capital’s regime of accumulation and the regulation of the capitalist system, transforming its reproduction. The profit from openness model, introduced in Chap. 1, emerged as a complement and alternative, both to the ideological opposition and to the practical limitations of the profit from enclosures model. It was greatly inspired by the success of the globally peer-produced Linux operating system and the so-called Web 2.0 in the first years of the new millennium. But, all talk of openness warrant a closer look: openness is often used as a synonym to freedom, but it is not. To be open is to be open for someone else’s freedom to act. The kind of openness that fosters commoning and the building of robust commons is one thing, and the openness that supports interoperability in a capitalist world is another thing. This difference is connected to classical ideologies. The study’s ideology analysis is elaborated in the chapter, followed by a presentation of the contemporary discussion about immaterial and digital labor with all its ramifications. Finally, the concepts of commons, peer production and platform are defined and clarified, before introducing the social actors and flows connected to the profit from openness model.

The Linux distributor Red Hat (acquired by IBM in 2018) makes a lot of money from free software, raking in more profit than its competitor Canonical from the more popular Ubuntu distribution. Ideologically it either conflates free software and open source software, or only speaks about open source and the open source community. The business model depends on four out of five business strategies for Free and open source software (FOSS), taking advantage of the various exceptions and the network loophole in the General Public License (GPL) that allow for several forms of hybrid mixes of open and enclosed software. Additionally, the company’s appropriation of the copyright to the collective work of the Linux distribution from the community is not carried out in the interests of the community, but in the interest of its shareholders and to facilitate the use of trademark law to partially enclose its products. Finally, a potentially open and horizontal community, the Fedora project, which could have distributed the freedoms to act in effective and thereby democratic forms, coordinated by a non-profit foundation, is legally and organizationally subsumed under a hierarchical business structure, through the Fedora Project Council that is legally controlled by Red Hat.

A total of 830,000 peer reviewers, of which a large part can be estimated to be unpaid or underpaid, are open to Elsevier’s and other commercial academic publishers’ exploitation. On top of that, Elsevier and other commercial academic publishers are prospering from research that is paid for by someone else, and that someone else (often the public) is in most cases paying the companies to publish the research. This is profit for free at its prime. The company Elsevier and other commercial open access (OA) publishers profit from openness in a direct way by charging Article Processing Charges (APCs) for its OA publishing, and by not reimbursing allocated articles (within Read & Publish agreements) that have not been published. It is also hard to control the company’s claim that it is not using the commercial strategy of double dipping in relation to hybrid journals. The system with hybrid journals, together with the engagement of company representatives, naturalizes the existence of high APCs. Finally, the analysis shows that Elsevier profits indirectly and ideologically from openness by open-washing enclosed and toll-accessed subscription articles in hybrid journals with its OA-publishing. Recently Elsevier has started to co-opt and commodify even green OA’s institutional repositories. This move, together with the many other platforms and services (like Mendeley, Scopus and CiteScore) that concern the whole of academic life, risks creating a closed system in which the universities become locked into and dependent on the company.

This chapter discusses profit from openness on audiovisual content platforms. Seven out of the ten most watched video platforms are based on the profit from openness business model. YouTube, our case study, leads this segment by any measure, but is also the second largest Internet site by traffic. As of January 2019, YouTube had 1.9 billion monthly active users worldwide, watching some 5 billion videos each day. The videos are uploaded by around 50 million producers worldwide whom the company calls “creators”. But users do not only watch the videos they search for, but also different kinds of advertising. Ads are the main driver of the revenues, approximately USD 20,000 billion, the platform cashed in during 2018. Ultimately, a good deal of this money can be traced back to the unfair remuneration (or completely unremunerated) for the contributions of authors of videos, and also to the exploitation of the data and attention of users. YouTube offers a “partner” program that allegedly shares income with so-called producers of videos. However, we show that the requisites for qualifying as a “partner” are not so easy to fulfill and, moreover, that 96.5% of “creators” do not make enough money to surpass the poverty line. To do so, more than 2 million views per month are needed. Moreover, views per uploaded video are shrinking, as more and more wannabe YouTubers jump on the bandwagon, attracted by ideological discourses. These powerful ideological discourses are built on references to entrepreneurialism, appetite for attention and de-laborization. Words such as “creator” and “partner” also play an important ideological role, and the ideas of community and openness are again cornerstones of this ideological edifice.

This chapter opens with a discussion of MOOCs (massive open online courses). In 2018 there were some 101 million enrolled “learners” in one or more of the 11,400 courses offered by these platforms. While there are several not-for-profit MOOCs, many of them are aimed at making money, and Coursera, our case study, is the leader of the pack. The company currently has some 37 million learners and made roughly USD 140 million in revenues in 2018. Revenues come from charging individuals, companies and universities for different services (such as certifications on the completion of freely accessible courses). Profits are to some extent based on unpaid knowledge delivered by teachers through online classes. In most cases teachers are paid once for these classes, or receive no additional payment at all, despite the fact that they are streamed several times to huge numbers of “learners”. Some 900 universities partner with Coursera and are positioned as middlemen: they lawfully provide the courses developed by their teachers, contribute with some kind of “trademark” and deliver recognition (the certification, degree, etc.) to the learners in exchange for some of Coursera’s revenues. This is only possible due to some intellectual property regulations and contracts that we discuss in detail. But for this exploitative relation to succeed, ideology is also needed. In this case, we analyze the role played by specific vocabulary (“learners”, “partners”, “instructors”), concepts (such as freedom, openness, community, peers) and the association between value and labor time.