{"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":37,"pdf_page":44,"physical_index":44,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"9feb3a08b7df10d02c0c81ab018533b99de26315e5e362ea1df147e6c87cd744"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"The volunteers for America Online, the netslaves and the amateur web designers, did not work only because capital wanted them to, but they were acting out a desire for affective and cultural production, which was nonetheless real just because it was socially shaped. The cultural, technical, and creative work that supported the digital economy had been made possible by the development of capital beyond the early industrial and Fordist modes of production and therefore is particularly abundant in those areas where post-Fordism has been at work for a few decades. In the overdeveloped countries, the end of the factory has spelled out the obsolescence of the old working class, but it has also produced generations of workers who have been repeatedly addressed as active consumers of meaningful commodities. Free labor is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into excess productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited.\n\nManagement theory is also increasingly concerned with the question of knowledge work, that indefinable quality that is essential to the processes of stimulating innovation and achieving the goals of competitiveness. For example, Don Tapscott, in a classic example of New Economy managerial literature, The Digital Economy, wrote about a “new economy based on the networking of human intelligence.”\"15 Human intelligence provides the much-needed added value, whichis essential to the economic health of the organization. Human intelligence, however, also poses a problem: it cannot be managed in quite the same way as more traditional types of labor. Knowledge workers need open organizational structures in order to produce, because the production of knowledge is rooted in collaboration; this is what Barbrook had defined as the “gift economy”:\n\nThe concept of supervision and management is changing to team-based structures. Anyone responsible for managing knowledge workers knows they cannot be “managed” in the traditional sense. Often they have specialized knowledge and skills that cannot be matched or even understood by management. A new challenge to management is first to attract and retain these assets by marketing the organization to them, and second to provide the creative and open communications environment where such workers can effectively apply and enhance their knowledge.16\n\nFor Tapscott, therefore, the digital economy magically resolves the contradictions of industrial societies, such as class struggle: whereas in the industrial economy, the “worker tried to achieve fulfillment through leisure [and].. . was alienated from the means of production which were owned and controlled by someone else, in the digital economy, the worker achieves fulfillment through work and finds in her brain her own, unalienated means of production.17 Such means of production need to be cultivated by encouraging the worker to participate in a culture of exchange whose flows are mainly kept within the company but also need to involve an “outside,\"a contact with the fast-moving world of knowledge in general. The convention, the exhibition, and the conference—the more traditional ways of supporting this general exchange—are supplemented by network technologies both inside and outside the company. Although the traffic of these flows of knowledge needs to be monitored (hence, the corporate concerns about the use of intranets), the Internet effectively functions as a channel through which human intelligence renews its capacitó to produce.\n\nFree Labor\n\n37","previous_page":null,"next_page":38}