Hybrid Assignment 6
Terranova explains that is not that capitalism is swooping down on subcultures to exploit their efforts for profit, rather that once a subculture that has been incorporated, it is at the end of it’s creative cultural development. Though the subculture was originally volunteered into the creative commons, once it is mainstream it is no longer an organic development by the persons who initially created it and is at this point a product adopted by mass culture that is marketed and sold. The best way to understand what Terranova means by saying that such movements are not appropriated by capital from the outside it that culture cannot be created in a vacuum, therefore since capital exists and culture exists (or once it is created) it should be understood that all creative culture is created in the realm of capital. Though just because a subculture is created and capital exists, this in no way guarantees that all culture will be incorporated into the mainstream of capital, rather that everything created has the potential to be incorporated because the platform exists for exposure of culture to lead to the path of capital. In other words, capital practices can adopt a subculture but a subculture does not exist in a world without capital.
Subcultures sustain and grow on the idea of Terranova’s definition of digital economy in which social and cultural knowledge is pooled and shared, in effect its own type of labor not for monetary gains but personal interest in sharing and the growth of cultural industry. However, as this collective knowledge (the subculture) is shared and developed it has the potential to turn into a monetary value and then adopted into the mainstream culture and then turned into forms of capital. Once a subculture, or element of a subculture, is incorporated into the mainstream the element is no longer part of its original cultural development and has transformed into a new phase of culture. Terranova believes that this last mainstream phase of collective labor is not so much “selling out” as it is a transformation because of cultural experimentation, a new element of our digital history.
