{"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":47,"pdf_page":54,"physical_index":54,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"122b08d3b44e4a21577c55f18bad0ca1449605b82f1a26e79ea8863efb3cf590"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"It is possible, however, that the disappearance of the commodity is not a material disappearance but its visible subordination to the quality of labor behind it. In this sense, the commodity does not disappear as such; it rather becomes increasingly ephemeral, its duration becomes compressed, and it becomes more of a process than a finished product. The role of continuous, creative, innovative labor as the ground of market value is crucial to the digital economy. The process of valorization (the production of monetary value) happens by foregrounding the quality of the labor that literally animates the commodity.\n\nThe digital economy, then, challenged the postmodern assumption that labor disappears while the commodity takes on and dissolves all meaning. In particular, the Internet foregrounds the extraction of value out of continuous, updateable work,and it is extremely labor-intensive. It is not enough to produce a good website; you need to update it continuously to maintain interest in it and fight off obsolescence. Furthermore, you need updateable equipment (the general intellect is always an assemblage of humans and their machines), which is, in its turn, propelledby the intense collective labor of programmers, designers, and workers. It is as if the acceleration of production has pushed to the point where commodities literally, turn into translucent objects. Commodities do not so much disappear as become more transparent, showing throughout their reliance on the labor that produces and sustains them. It is the labor of the designers and programmers that shows through a successful website, and it is the spectacle of that labor changing its product that keeps the users coming back. The commodity, then, is onlyas good as the labor that goes into it.\n\nAs a consequence, the sustainability of the Internet as a medium depends on massive amounts of labor (which is not equivalent to employment, as we said), only some of which is hópercompensated by the capricious logic of venture capitalism. Of the incredible amount of labor that sustains the Internet as a whole (from mailing list traffic to websites to infrastructural questions), we can guess that a substantial amount of it is still free labor.\n\nFree labor, however, is not necessarily exploited labor. Within the early virtual communities, we are told, labor was really free: the labor of building a community was not compensated by great financial rewards (it was, therefore, free, unpaid), but it was also willingly conceded in exchange for the pleasures of communication and exchange (it was therefore free, pleasurable, not imposed). In answer to members'requests, information was quickly posted and shared with a lack of mediation that the early netizens did not fail to appreciate. Howard Rheingold's book, somehow unfairly accused ofmiddle-class complacency, is the most well-known account of the good old times of the old Internet, before the net-tourist overcame the net-pioneer.46\n\nThe free labor that sustains the Internet is acknowledged within many different sections of the digital literature. Despite the volatile nature of the Internet economy (which yesterday was about community, today is about portals, and tomorrow who knows...?), the notion of users' labor maintains an ideological and material centrality that runs consistently throughout the turbulent succession of Internet fads. Commentators who would normally disagree, such as Howard Rheingold andRichard Hudson, concur on one thing: the best website, the best way to stay visible and thriving on the web, is to turn your site into a space that is not only accessed, but somehow built by its users.47Users keep a site alive through their labor, the cumulative hours of accessing the site (thus generating advertising), writing messages, participatingin conversations, and sometimes making the jump to collaborators. Out of the 15,000 volunteers who kept AOL running, only a handful turned against it, while the others stayed on. Such a feature seems endemic tothe Internet in ways that can be worked on by commercialization, but not substantially altered. The “open source\"movement, which relies on the free labor of Internet tinkers, is further evidence of this structural trend within the digital economy.\n\nFree Labor\n\n47","previous_page":46,"next_page":null}