{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title":"DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780415896948","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","uuid":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title":"DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY","normalized_title":"digitallabortheinternetasplaygroundandfactory","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780415896948","isbns":["9780415896948","9780415896955","9780203145791"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":267,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/DIGITAL%20LABOR%20THE%20INTERNET%20AS%20PLAYGROUND%20AND%20FACTORY","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/search"},"page":{"printed_page":15,"pdf_page":22,"physical_index":22,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"40c2aebd099e0296458b280e6f16f4e4050b3607ebb5b4f3cfa467789988a036"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"Creatives who have been knocked to the ground by the recent Great Recession feel pressured to sign up with this kindof word factory when, increasingly, it is the only game in town that pays. After all, the alternative to churning out junk product for a content farmis to play the reputation game by posting for free, like the Huffington Post bloggers. The former option involves the kind of routine toil that is anathema to aspiring creative professionals. The latter option promises the kind ofunalienated expression of thought that is closer to their ideal. Yet only one of these willguarantee food on the table.\n\nOn the face of it, this does not appear to be a new dilemma. Creatives have been facing this kind of choice since the eighteenth century, when the onset of commercial culture markets offered them the choice of eking out a living with the scribblers on Pope's Grub Street or of building a name-recognition relationship with the fickle public. Literary agents, unions, and other professional organizations sprang up or evolved in order to protect their livelihoods from the rough justice of the marketplace, and while the explosive growth of new media has outpaced and outsmarted the traditional agents of bargaining and regulation (such as the press unions), ever-fresher versions are likely to emerge. The Freelancers Union, for example, was foundedin 2001 specifically to respond to the needs of the self-employed, and it has been the fastest-growing union in the United States in recent years. Its members are learning how to acquire an ever-larger share of social insurance and political clout while surfing each new wave that washes over the ever-mutating creative/digital landscape. Beginning in the 1990s, WashTech pioneered the business of labor protection for permatemps in the tech industry and other Communications Workers ofAmerica (CWA) localsare followingsuit in their efforts to recruit independent contractors.\n\nBut it would be wrong to conclude that in the realm of digital labor there is nothing new under the sun. On the contrary, each rollout of online tools has offered ever more ingenious ways of extracting cheaper, discount work from users and participants. The transition from web 1.0 to social web was a quantum leap in this regard. The youthful zeal that went into the first generation of web designs was bought with cappuccinos and beaming admiration from clueless elders. Building the pioneer environment of the web was like a massive barn raising, largely dependent on uncoordinated volunteer effort. Its successor also trades on the openness ofyouth, but the sophisticated operations of its hidden labor economy bear as much resemblance to the block-building of web 1.0 as the exotic derivatives of today's Wall Street do to the origins of pork belly trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The social platforms, web crawlers, personalized algorithms, and other data mining techniques of recent years are engineered to suck valuable, or monetizable, information out of almost every one of our online activities. Whether all this activity can or should be classified as labor according to any traditional criteria of political economy is a case in point, and one of the themes of this book. To address the question more fully, as I will do in the pages that follow, involves delving far below the visible surface of the digital landscape on which the Huffington affair was exposed.\n\nIn Search of the Lost Paycheck\n\n15","previous_page":null,"next_page":16}