Howard's post got me thinking about the need to tighten up an understanding of what we might mean by the term "exploitation." The very broad sense in which it is often used -- to indicate that someone else benefits from our labor -- isn't a particularly useful one. Theoretically it remains amorphous (how might it distinguish between collaborative labor and working in a sweat shop?) and practically it isn't much of a rallying cry ("Help, I'm being exploited because the value of my neighbor's house went up when I painted mine!").
I'd suggest (as a preliminary foray) that a meaningful political sense of the term (one that allows us to critique exploitation) would have to include at least two aspects:
1) a sense of loss of control over the results of our own productive activity (especially when these are turned back against us) and
2) structured relations of power that compel this loss of control, even when it looks like the result of "free" exchange.
I don't feel a loss of control over my own productive activity when I contribute to a Wikipedia entry that may benefit others. On the other hand, I might be more likely to feel this loss of control when I discover, say, that details of my online activity have been collected, sorted, and packaged as a commodity for sale to people who may use it to deny me access to a job or to manipulate me based on perceived vulnerabilities, fears, and other personal details about my mental or physical well being. If I find myself in a position wherein I have to submit to this kind of monitoring as a condition of access to resources that I need to earn my livelihood or maintain my social relations in a networked era, I might be more likely to think of this situation as a truly exploitative one.
When it starts to become tricky -- at least conceptually -- is when my work on Wikipedia (or tagging, or participating in other forms of UGC production) gets folded into the demographic/psychographic/geographic/(eventually biometric) forms of profiling that form the basis for the emerging online commercial economy. Still a meaningful conception of exploitation might help distinguish between the different productive roles of our online activity -- and between infrastructures that are more or less exploitative.
