Ayhan Aytes, in his chapter, poses that if the digital network is the assembly line of cognitive labor, then the Mechanical Turk is its model apparatus. Crowdsourcing, for Aytes, is a hybrid concept that merges the neoliberal outsourcing paradigm with the crowds on the digital networks. He continues that the unregulated nature of the emerging global cognitive labor market evokes the Gastarbeiter (guest worker) program of the economic wonder years of postwar Germany. This German Gastarbeiter program has been a prominent model for establishing a legislative immigration system without rights.
Abigail De Kosnik investigates the work of fan moderators, writers, and artists who post and comment on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. Their number is in the millions, and their free labor activities contribute to far more massive corporate revenues than the \$7 million monthly garnered by AOL, mentioned also in Tiziana Terranova's chapter. The abundant contributions of fans to the Internet can be regarded as labor, she writes. Fan labor can ramp up the buzz and reputation of a product, and fans are booted into this emerging labor market. De Kosnik concludes that corporations should value fan labor as a new form of publicity and advertising. They should compensate fans who could understand their work as the first rung on the reputation ladderfor aspiring creative professionals.
Jodi Dean contemplates blogging. As bloggers, she writes, we expose ourselves, our feelings and experiences, loves and hates, desires and aversions, but we need to be reminded of our exposure, our visibility, vulnerability, and ultimate lack of control. Access to my friend is a way of getting access to me, Jodi Dean notes. For Dean, publicity is the ideology of communicative capitalism, which suggests work without work (work without pay or work that is fun) and play without play (play for which one is paid and play for which one pays with enjoyment). Convenience trumps commitment. Dean concludes that in this economy, a lucky few will get nearly everything, but most will get very little, almost nothing.
In the third part, “The Violence of Participation,"Mark Andrejevic reports from the new frontiers of data mining. He makes the case that the commercial appropriation of information meets an abstract definition of exploitation. Andrejevic argues that it is indeed the sign of a certain kind of material luxury to be able to be exploited online—to have the leisure time and resources toengage in the activities that are monitoredand tracked. Google tracks its 1 billion unremunerated users and sells their data to advertising clients, who consequently target users with ads. The intertwining of labor, leisure, consumption, production, and play complicates the understanding of exploitation, but Andrejevic remarked that the potential usefulness of an exploitation-based critique of online monitoring is that it invites us to reframe questions of individual choice and personal pleasure in terms of social relations.
Why Does Digital Labor MatterNow?
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