{"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":25,"pdf_page":32,"physical_index":32,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"e24e6569f90084f3cc4bb9cdf3f44e822098908ebc63dfc90ff02fc77f184e3e"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"The internship is particularly relevant to our overall discussion because most interns do not see themselves as hard done by. In this respect, it is one more example of the twisted mentality of self-exploitation that has marched on to the killing fields of employment. Today, there is fairly broad agreement on what constitutes fair labor in the waged workplace of industry, or, to be more accurate, there are limits to the range of disagreement on the topic. People understand, more or less, what a sweatshop is, and also recognize that its conditions are unfair. By contrast, we have very few yardsticks for judging fairness in the salaried or freelancing sectors of the new, deregulated jobs economy, where any effort to draw a crisp line around work and pay (not to mention work and play) seems to be increasingly ineffectual.\n\nMarx or Not?\n\nCapital owners have long sought to transfer work from the producer to the consumer oruser, or from the formal site of production to decentralized points of consumption. Michael Palm's account of the rise of self-service (a major component of this history of work transfer) begins with Bell's elimination of telephone operators in favor of customer dialing. Persuading phone customers to take on the additional work of dialing for themselves required a great deal of cajoling, not to mention practical education.18 In retrospect, of course, dialing for ourselves is very small beer compared to the much more challenging tasks we have taken over from producers in the intervening century. Think of the massive amount of buyer's time and energy that goes into researching and assembling consumer products, or the growing volume of user input that is considered mandatory for customer services of all sorts. Because these time soaks are palpable, especially those involving customer service, they are the ones that irritate us most, and so we end up venting our anger on robo-voices or on hapless call center employees in Bangalore.\n\nBut these burdens are only the most tangible evidence of what Italian operaismo theorists such as Mario Tronti called the “socialfactory.\"According to this thesis, the work discipline of the factoryis exported far beyond its bounded walls, and a large share of the work of production is subsequently and increasingly performed, without remuneration, in our daily social doings. Consequently, the entire content of our everyday lives—our net subjectivity—and not just our workplace toil becomes raw material for capital accumulation. In the mid-1970s when this thesis was put forth, it was an avant-garde analysis of the efforts of capital owners to liberate themselves from factory-bound conflicts with unionized and often militant workers organizations. The transfer of work outside ofthe traditional sites of production was only part of capital’s response. Another was to relocate to cheaper, union-free locations, and a third was to casualize workforces wherever possible. Today, offshore outsourcing is a fait accompli, and the forced march of temping into most professions seems to be unstoppable. Nor is there anything avant-garde about the concept of social factory, at least not when business strategies to extract rents through social web platforms and crowdsourcing techniques are openly discussed and urged in the pages of Businessweek.19\n\nIn Search of the Lost Paycheck\n\n25","previous_page":null,"next_page":26}