{"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":153,"pdf_page":160,"physical_index":160,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"f813d821615c0d539c17cdce32cdf2b8e1bddbaf9efde70488a4ec95b68637d1"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"One of the challenges of mobilizing the notion of exploitation in online contexts is thatit takes a critical concept traditionally associated with industrial labor's sweatshop conditions and transposes it into a realm of relative affluence and prosperity—that is, a realm inhabited by those with the time and access to participate in online activities. For good reason, it is harder to get worked up about the allegedly exploitative conditions of user-generated content sites than about the depredations of sweatshop labor and workforce exploitation. In the case of user-generated content, we are talking in many cases about affluent consumers engaging in what might be described as optional activities: you don't have to join Facebook or Twitter, it is not necessary for survival in contemporary society (yet?) to get a Gmail account or to shop online.\n\nThus, rejoinders to critiques of exploitation in such contexts typically invoke both the lack of coercion and the pleasures of participation. As Nancy Baym and Robert Burnett (2008) put it in their account of the promotional work done by indie music fans: “We areloath to dismiss their claims of affective pleasure and the desire they feel to spread what brings them joy as evidence of exploitation.\"12 Their study invokes the claim, so familiar to accounts of the promise of interactive technology, that the fans’activities recapture the pleasures of pre-mass society: “Their social response to the pleasures of music is situated in deeply meaningful social phenomena that hearken back to much earlier phases of musical history, phases before there was an industry, when music was always performed in communities by locals for locals rather than by distant celebrities for adoring fans.\"13 Such forms of enjoyment are, then, allegedly, incompatible with the notion that fans are being exploited: “To claim that these people are exploited is to ignore how much these other forms of capital matter in the well being ofwellrounded humans.\"14\n\nIt is not clear, however, that the Marxist-inflected critiques of exploitation invoked by such accounts are incompatible with a sense of enjoyment or pleasure. The fact of exploitation need not prevent workers from taking pleasure in their craft or in the success of a collaborative effort well done. Nor is it the case that accounts of exploitation necessarily denigrate the activities or the meanings they may have for those who participate in them rather than the social relations that underwrite expropriation and alienation. The point of a critique of exploitation is neither to disparage the pleasures of workers nor the value of the tasks being undertaken. To argue otherwise is to stumble into a kind of category confusion: an attempt to reframe structural conditions as questions of individual pleasure and desire. The critique of exploitation does not devalue individual pleasureanymore than such pleasures nullify exploitative social relations. More workneeds to be done to define what might be meant by exploitation in nonwage labor contexts\n\nEstranged Free Labor\n\n153","previous_page":null,"next_page":null}