Cognitive capitalism - sometimes referred to as 'third capitalism, ' after mercantilism and industrial capitalism - is an increasingly significant theory, given its focus on the socio-economic changes caused by Internet and Web 2.0 technologies that have transformed the mode of production and the nature of labor. The theory of cognitive capitalism has its origins in French and Italian thinkers, particularly Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari'sCapitalism and Schizophrenia, Michel Foucault's work on the birth of biopower and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire and Multitude, as well as the Italian Autonomist Marxist movement that had its origins in the Italian operaismo (workerism) of the 1960s. In this collection, leading international scholars explore the significance of cognitive capitalism for education, especially focusing on the question of digital labor.

Mainstream economists and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs claim that unfettered capitalism and digital technology can unlock a future of unbounded prosperity, create endless high paying jobs, and solve the world’s vast social and ecological problems. Realizing this future of abundance purportedly rests in the transformation of human potential into innovative human capital through new 21st century forms of education. In this new book Alex Means challenges this view. Stagnating economic growth and runaway inequality have emerged as the ‘normal’ condition of advanced capitalism. Simultaneously, there has been a worldwide educational expansion and a growing surplus of college-educated workers relative to their demand in the world economy. This surplus is complicated by an emerging digital revolution driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning that generates worker displacing innovations and immaterial forms of labor and valorization. Learning to Save the Future argues that rather than fostering mass intellectuality, educational development is being constrained by a value structure subordinated to 21st century capitalism and technology. Human capabilities from creativity, design, engineering, to communication are conceived narrowly as human capital, valued in terms of economic productivity and growth. Similarly, global problems such as the erosion of employment and climate change are conceived as educational problems to be addressed through business solutions and the digitalization of education. This thought-provoking account provides a cognitive map of this condition, offering alternatives through critical analyses of education and political economy, technology and labor, creativity and value, power and ecology.

This book argues that we are undergoing a transition from industrial capitalism to a new form of capitalism - what the author calls & lsquo; cognitive capitalism & rsquo;

'Digital Labor' asks whether life on the Internet is mostly work, or play. We tweet, we tag photos, we link, we review books, we comment on blogs, we remix media and we upload video to create much of the content that makes up the web.

The attention economy is a notion that explains the growing value of human attention in societies characterised by post-industrial modes of production. In a world in which information and knowledge become central to the valorisation process of capital, human attention becomes a scarce and hence increasingly valuable commodity. To what degree is the attention economy a specific form of capitalist production? How does the attention economy differ from the industrial mode of production in which Marx developed his critique of capitalism? How can Marx’s theory be used today despite the historical differences that separate industrial from post-industrial capitalism? The Attention Economy argues that human attention is a new form of labour that can only be understood through a systematic reinterpretation of Marx. It argues that the attention economy belongs to a general shift in capitalism in which subjectivity itself becomes the territory of production and exploitation of value as well as the territory of the reproduction of capitalist power relations.

This book argues that, as industrial capitalism enters a period of prolonged crisis, a new paradigm of ‘industrious modernity’ is emerging. Based on small-scale, commons-based and market-oriented entrepreneurship, this industrious modernity is being pioneered by the many outcasts that no longer find a place within a crumbling industrial modernity. This new industriousness draws on the new planetary commons that have been generated by the globalization of industrial capitalism itself. The outsourcing of material production to global supply chains has made the skills necessary to engage in commodity production generic and common, and the globalization of media culture and the internet have generated new knowledge commons. Together these new commons have radically reduced the capital requirements to engage in economic activity, and are providing new, highly efficient tools of productive organization at little cost. This timely analysis of the new forces of change in our societies today will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the impact of digital technologies and the future of capitalism.

An exploration of a new division of labor between machines and humans, in which people provide value to the economy with little or no compensation. The computerization of the economy—and everyday life—has transformed the division of labor between humans and machines, shifting many people into work that is hidden, poorly compensated, or accepted as part of being a “user” of digital technology. Through our clicks and swipes, logins and profiles, emails and posts, we are, more or less willingly, participating in digital activities that yield economic value to others but little or no return to us. Hamid Ekbia and Bonnie Nardi call this kind of participation—the extraction of economic value from low-cost or free labor in computer-mediated networks—“heteromation.” In this book, they explore the social and technological processes through which economic value is extracted from digitally mediated work, the nature of the value created, and what prompts people to participate in the process. Arguing that heteromation is a new logic of capital accumulation, Ekbia and Nardi consider different kinds of heteromated labor: communicative labor, seen in user-generated content on social media; cognitive labor, including microwork and self-service; creative labor, from gaming environments to literary productions; emotional labor, often hidden within paid jobs; and organizing labor, made up of collaborative groups such as citizen scientists. Ekbia and Nardi then offer a utopian vision: heteromation refigured to bring end users more fully into the prosperity of capitalism.

Published on the occasion of the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI) conference in 2013, this volume collects papers presented at the first Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism conference in Los Angeles (2012). Philosophers, critical theorists, media theorists, art historians, architects and artists including Jonathan Beller, Franco Bifo Berardi, Arne de Boever, Jodi Dean, Warren Neidich, Patricia Pisters, Jason Smith, Tiziana Terranova, and Bruce Wexler discuss cognitive capitalism as it relates to the conditions of mind and brain in the world of advanced telecommunication, data mining and social relations.

There is a contradiction at the heart of digital media. We use commercial platforms to express our identity, to build community and to engage politically. At the same time, our status updates, tweets, videos, photographs and music files are free content for these sites. We are also generating an almost endless supply of user data that can be mined, re-purposed and sold to advertisers. As users of the commercial web, we are socially and creatively engaged, but also labourers, exploited by the companies that provide our communication platforms. How do we reconcile these contradictions? Feminism, Labour and Digital Media argues for using the work of Marxist feminist theorists about the role of domestic work in capitalism to explore these competing dynamics of consumer labour. It uses the concept of the Digital Housewife to outline the relationship between the work we do online and the unpaid sphere of social reproduction. It demonstrates how feminist perspectives expand our critique of consumer labour in digital media. In doing so, the Digital Housewife returns feminist inquiry from the margins and places it at the heart of critical digital media analysis.

Beginning from the premise that a range of Marxist theoretical tendencies, or Marxisms, inform recent critical scholarship in education, this volume reaffirms, rearticulates, and interrogates central philosophical and practical commitments in this tradition. Chapters engage important issues confronting the field in the present conjuncture in global capitalism, including the meaning of democratic education, neoliberalism’s ideological and material assault on teaching and learning, relationships between race and class in schooling and society, models for critical and emancipatory pedagogy, the implication of education in imperialism and colonialism, and links between education and revolutionary organizations and movements. Rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive view of the field, this volume presents a diverse set of crucial interventions that take up foundational as well as contemporary developments in Marxist theory and consider their implications for the field of education. The chapters in this book were originally published as journal articles by Taylor and Francis.