{"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":27,"pdf_page":34,"physical_index":34,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"84611bb6b34c9f71e6682c8673a0ecc39f9968150ab438865d80944698fd9dea"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"Are they not the arbiters of their own exploitation? To argue otherwise is to come close to charging them with “false consciousness.\"”\n\nOn the question of the general intellect, there is little dispute that some highgrowth industrial sectors are increasingly dependent on ideas and creative talent, and that capital has had to grant some concessions in order to guarantee a supply of cognitive skills. As long as their control over intellectual property is assured, capital owners have been willing to cede some ground over labor discipline; the creative work landscape now hosts multiple forms of autonomy and self-organization, at a far remove from the Taylorist rules of standardization and deskilling. Yet the copyfight over intellectual property is a fraught terrain, featuring running skirmishes with the commons-loving hacker fractions of the cognitive classover the policing of digital rights management. So, too, the exposure of capital to open knowledge networks for sources of profit carries its own risks; investments in technically specific business models can go south rapidly when access to the same knowledge is widely available at no cost. In the case of free inputs, the hand that gives is also the hand that takes.\n\nThe least we can say, then, about capital's dependence on the general intellect is that the outcome is a field of engagement within which contests can crop up virtually anywhere. In this respect, we are far beyond the confrontation at the factory gates—thecustomary location of the wage earner's efforts to negotiate the sale of labor power—or the bargaining of a wage contract—which is the legal or symbolic effort to limit this confrontation. Indeed, as Angela McRobbie has recently pointed out, the cognitives or creativeswho quarry the general intellect are often less consumed by struggles over compensation than by other political causes. They often invest more of their time and energy in fights over schooling, community development, food sovereignty, racism, sexism, and homophobia on the information landscape or other issues affected by unfair distribution.24\n\nIt would be naive, however, to conclude, as some advocates of immaterial labor do, that capital has been weakened or outsmarted by the need to forage far and wide, and on especially uncertain and hostile terrain, for cognitive inputs and surpluses. The evidence fromthe current rent-extraction boom is that profits from new markets are far from soft, whether for jumbo monopolists like Google and Facebook or rapidly expanding content farms like Demand Media and Associated Content or for the army of smaller content aggregators. Moreover, their business modelsare highly quantitative and are very precisely tied to the measurable value of inputs from users or contributors. In this regard, itis by no means clear that the increasingly sophisticated Internet metrics industry represents a significant departure from the gainful calculusof the labor theory of value. Far from transforming the conventions of worker productivity and rewards beyond recognition, the digital labor system, as Chris Lehman suggests, has “merely sent the rewards further down the fee stream to unscrupulous collectors.\"25\n\nNor should the dizzying pace of development in the information sector lead us to conclude that factory gates are no longer important flashpoints. Virtually all of the technological infrastructure for this sector is manufactured in the workshops of the world in East Asia, where harsh factory conditions give rise to high-intensity labor conflicts on a regular basis. Where the creative use, say,of a notebook computer involves a highly customized work experience, emblematic of the fluid flexible, self-organized profile of post-Fordism, the conditions of its manufacture could not be more different. Factories employing hundreds of thousands of workers are more and more common in the electronics production chain, and the most recent tendency in the industry is to integrate all the component operations under one roof, as opposed to contracting out to suppliers in different parts of the world. The result looks something like Fordism on steroids.\n\nIn Search of the Lost Paycheck\n\n27","previous_page":26,"next_page":28}