The House Always Wins
YouTube, TikTok, Instagram etc. as capitalism in miniature
Here's the broad picture:
- Videos posted by some people go viral, they make money as per the rules of, say, YouTube (you can substitute the name of any other video-hosting digital platform), depending on various terms and conditions related to advertisements, brand stores, promotions, and affiliate marketing (I won't go into the details of the various modes of earning money on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.; the companies themselves prominently display the information, and for those interested, there are thousands of websites advising on monetization strategies)
- Other folks open accounts/channels and start posting videos in the hope of going viral and making a lot of money; they gradually invest in fancy setups and post more and more videos in the hope of "making it"
- The ratio of video uploaders who make decent income to those who make very little or nothing at all is tiny
- Each time the platform company fine-tunes the criteria for algorithmically promoting videos (which satisfy those criteria), some "viral" uploaders fall off the radar, some others suddenly go viral; but the proportion of uploaders making decent money always remains tiny
- The company, whether Google or Meta or ByteDance or ..., keeps making enormous profits, irrespective of which subset of video uploaders is going viral
- The company is able to generate enormous profits because a large proportion of the world's population keeps making and uploading videos, and an even larger proportion keeps viewing at least a fraction of those videos
- The gargantuan viewership, the platform company's fine-grained knowledge of viewer demographics and viewing patterns, and their presumed ability to algorithmically target an advertisement at the viewer demographic most likely to buy the product advertised—these factors together attract a huge number of advertisers; the payments by these advertisers to the platform and to the uploaders form the foundation of the digital economy (if the number of uploaders or viewers drops drastically, it will likely lead to a death spiral for the platform company)
- Last, but not the least, the uploaders have practically zero rights vis-a-vis the company; based on their (often opaque) rules, the company can kick any uploader off their platform and terminate their account/channel, even if they have subscriber count and view count in the millions
The above picture is capitalism in miniature. Essentially, the company gets the profits accruing from the free labour of hundreds of millions in exchange for hosting a digital platform and providing it to those people. The company's platform ownership is equivalent to corporations owning the means of production. In fact, one can think of the internet as the digital commons and the emergence of the mega-platforms as an enclosure of the commons.
And similar to workers in the larger capitalist setup, almost all video uploaders slog relentlessly in the hope of becoming wealthy, but only a tiny proportion of the sloggers become even moderately rich. And there's no guarantee that they stay rich, even if they slog harder and harder. Only the owners and the top management of the platforms, a negligible fraction of the population, manage to stay ultra-wealthy. And because they own and control the digital platforms, they can arbitrarily and abruptly deny a digital labourer the right to access one of the platforms.
Unionized workers, over more than a century of struggle against their corporate employers, won themselves many rights—collective bargaining, fair wages, overtime pay, eight-hour day, five-day or six-day week, annual leave, family and medical leave, hazard-free working conditions, mandatory advance notice prior to termination of contract, etc. (Of course, they have to vigilantly keep guarding these rights; the corporations and the corporate states are always keen to roll them back at the slightest excuse, they often succeed, and then the workers have to again fight to win them back.) Will the digital labourers learn their lessons from this history, and fight for something similar? Will they go a step further and collectively own and manage the digital realm?