If you are selling a product, you HAVE to provide more value to customers than what you are asking those customers to pay. If you don’t, customers won’t buy your product.

Another way to look at this is: As a member of this economy you try to create value for others and you try to keep some of that value for yourself in exchange for your work. The ethics around what percentage of value should goes to each side seems to be a difficult question. I have no idea how to define that.

There’s an interesting take on this by Rob Horning–whose blog often asks these sorts of questions: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/blogs/marginal-utility/ –over at n+1, where he likens Facebook labor to the fast fashion world of the likes of Forever 21. http://nplusonemag.com/the-accidental-bricoleurs

(I consider myself a socialist politically but certainly not a Marxian economically.  My mum was an antiques dealer until she retired; she always maintains that to say something had an absolute value is incorrect; something is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it at that very moment.)

With regards to Facebook and other social networks, the only question for most users is whether what they are getting out is worth what they are putting in, not what anyone else is getting out of what they put in.  I think it’s too soon to say we understand for certain the larger social and political implications of this, especially in terms of the creation of multinational monopolies.

This reminds me of Mackenzie Wark’s Hacker Manifesto: http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html which is a lot like a Marxist analysis of this broad phenomenon (though as with much writing on the internet, parts of it are very dated – and I think it was written before facebook). In Wark’s framework, the “hacker class” is anyone who produces anything – content, creative writing, code, crafts, youtube videos, art, music, or even as in this case, personal information – and the “vectoralist class,” through privatization and corporatization, exploits hackers by controlling and profiting off of the flow of the content that they produce.