ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the different ways in which the Italian and Spanish activists, who had been greatly affected by precarious working conditions and unemployment, were critically reflecting on the issue of digital labor. The creation of the World Wide Web, as Curran argued, was a turning point in the history of the internet that radically transformed and influenced the way information on the internet was accessed, shared, and organized worldwide. The book contributes to the existing literature on movements media practices by exploring tension between activists' democratic needs on the one hand and structures of digital capitalism on the other. It argues that activists critical awareness of changing technological structures and capitalist exploitation on the web provides with important insights on the social complexity of contemporary web practices and on the relationship between digital capitalism and everyday political critique.
