SIMON YUILL

There has been a great deal of interest in how capital has intervened in almost every area of life, leading some to propose new forms of labour and capital e.g. ‘immaterial labour’ and ‘emotional capitalism’, and others to suggest that processes of valuation are now the major method for understanding the social world. This has become particularly evident in the processes through which social media platforms, such as Facebook, generate immense financial value from the exchange of what for some people appears to be often mundane and value-less information. The relation between time and value (defined in various ways) is integral to the accumulation of capital in this context and it is evident that algorithms play an important mediating role. Analysis of this, however, has often been largely speculative due to the difficulties of obtaining empirical data. Furthermore, despite being a medium that is engaged with over time, and one that is often intimately intertwined with the rhythms of its users’ daily lives, platforms such as Facebook have rarely been studied from a temporal perspective.

As part of a study of the transformation of personal value into financial value through social media, the VALUES & VALUE project has developed a set of custom software tools that combine several intersecting perspectives of temporal activity across participants’ use of Facebook, how they are tracked by Facebook as they browse the web, and how it fits within their daily routine. The project has been able to gather forms of empirical data not previously utilised in such research. In analysing this, we propose that platforms such as Facebook effect an attunement between different temporal activities, from personal social interactions to speculative investments in advertising and the circulation of capital within financialisation. Capital is captured from interventions within these circulations rather than from direct production. This suggests a different relation between time, technicity and capital from that of the industrial factory and recent concepts of the social factory. This relation between time, technicity and capital as attunement is analysed through concepts drawn from Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis in which different rhythms interact with one another in ways that do not simply correlate but are rather conflictual and overdetermining. In doing so the project seeks to make more explicit the ways in which algorithms intervene in and constitute processes of the capture of value and circulation of capital.

In his contribution to DATA {PUBLICS}, SIMON YUILL presented the custom software tools that were created for the project, the approach to visualisation used within these, and how they relate to the larger themes of our analysis.

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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.

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.