The term “crowdsourcing” is a play on the more familiar term “outsourcing.” The first article heralds “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” (Howe 2006), and the subtitle reads, “Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R&D” (Howe 2006).
Thus, the article anchors the rationale of network production in the ability to tap into a “pool of cheap labor” and mobilize it for one’s production needs. This statement makes a distinction between outsourcing and crowdsourcing but at the same time uncovers how similar they are: in outsourcing, cheap labor is based on differentials in space; with crowdsourcing, cheap labor is based on differentials in time. The new source of cheap labor, this statement suggests, is predicated and conditioned on time that is deemed unproductive—“spare cycles” in the language of the article—that is, time that is not easily translatable to money and capital.
But what is the mechanism, or “trick,” by which productive forces, harnessed for the project of capital accumulation, can nevertheless be conceived as unproductive (as “spare cycles”) and hence be partially or wholly unpaid? Presumably the trick is technological—this is made possible by network technology. But the trick is also discursive: the trick is that this labor is construed in the digital discourse to be done by “everyday people,” rather than by professional, tenured, “in-house” workers. In other words, it is labor done by amateurs during their free time as an expression of personal interest and passion, not labor done by professionals as an expression of the more mundane attempt to make a living. No wonder that the teaser for the article on the front cover of Wired proclaims, “Crowdsourcing: A billion amateurs want your job” (Cover 2006, emphasis mine). The threat is clear: one’s position in the work force is threatened not so much by other workers but by a new class of workers: a new reserve army of (this time around) amateurs.
Network Production
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