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"Tiziana Terranova is well known for her thesis, formulated in the early 2000s, that the free labor of users is the source of economic value in the digital economy. Free labor is an ambivalent concept, rooted in Italian post-workerist labor theories of value, such as Paolo Virno's re-reading of Marx's notion of the general intellect, Antonio Negri's theory of the social factory, and Maurizio Lazzarato's concept of immaterial labor. It defines both the outcome of the 'refusal of work' of the 1960s and 1970s and the resulting investment of subjective needs and desires for expression into production (culture, technology, the arts); and its subsequent transformation into the engine of economic production in the post-Fordist economy first and the digital economy later (branding, marketing, social media). Free labor is both free as in 'free beer' (for digital entrepreneurs) and free as in free speech (for those who perform it voluntarily). It is no more of an illusion than industrial labor was, it is simply a new source of value and engine of production which is open to capture by the capitalist enterprise, but maintains a potential to express itself in new forms of economic organizations such as the p2p economy."
