current developments support Lazzarato

I agree with Choonghee’s comments that Lazzarato seems central to our discussions of immaterial labor. Lazzarato identifies two aspects of immaterial labor that seem important to understanding it—the central role of communication (as both a constituent of immaterial labor and as its target or commodity-product) and the ways that immaterial labor makes social relations into capital relations. Lazzarato seems to be saying that immaterial labor is not just capital’s taking advantage of the human need/desire for communication, but that it actively infiltrates and transforms human communicative activity into a process from which surplus value can be extracted. I thought this was going too far until I thought about yesterday’s news about the small internet phone start up which will be offering free phone service in exchange for the consumer allowing the phone conversations to be monitored to produce advertising targeted to that consumer’s conversations.