DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY

Digital Labor
The Internet as Playground and
Factory

Edited by Trebor Scholz

ISBN 978-0-415-89694-8

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

9780415"896948

www.routledge.com • an informa business

DIGITAL LABOR

The Internet as Playground and Factory

Edited by Trebor Scholz 常 州大 字 藏 书 章

ROUTLEDGE Routledge Taylor & Francis Group NEW YORKAND LONDON

First published 2013
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
2Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Digital labor : the Internet as playground and factory / edited by Trebor Scholz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Internet-Social aspects. 2. Information society. I. Scholz, Trebor. HM851.D538 2013 302.23'1-dc23

2012012133

ISBN: 978-0-415-89694-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-89695-5(pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-14579-1 (ebk)

Typeset in ApexBembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

DIGITAL LABOR

Digital Labor calls on the reader to examine the shifting sites of labor markets to the Internet through the lens of their political, technological, and historical making. Internet users currently create most of the content that makes up the web: they search, link, tweet, and post updates—leaving their “deep" data exposed. Meanwhile, governments listen in, and big corporations track, analyze, and predict users’ interests and habits.

This unique collection of essays provides a wide-ranging account of the dark side of the Internet. It claims that the divide between leisure time and work has vanished so that every aspect of life drives the digital economy. The book reveals the anatomy of playbor (play/labor), the lure of exploitation and the potential for empowerment. Ultimately, the 14 thought-provoking chapters in this volume ask how users can politicize their troubled complicity, create public alternatives to the centralized social web, and thrive online.

Trebor Scholz is Associate Professor of Culture and Media at The New School.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks go to a great many people. I am indebted to my colleagues at The New School, a university in New York City, who have generously and enthusiastically supported my work, specifically The Politics of Digital Culture conference series that I started there in 2009.

Nearly three years have passed since I convened The Internet as Playground and Factory conference that led to the publication of this book. I wish to recognize and thank the participants of this conference who have contributed chapters to this book.

I would like to particularly thank mó colleague McKenzie Wark for his intellectual fire and many helpful critical comments. Also working with Erica Wetter at Routledge has been a pleasure.

I would like to thank the following friends and colleagues, for thoughtprovoking debates, challenging and constructive comments, practical help with the conference, and putting this book together: Frank Pasquale, Neil Gordon, Gabriella Coleman, Shannon Mattern, Laura De Nardis, Mark Greif, Sven Travis, Joel Towers, Jenny Perlin and the students in my spring 2012 seminar “Play and Toilin the Digital Sweatshop."

In addition, I would also like to thank the members of the mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity for the six-month-long pre-conference discussion on the commercial geographies of unsung digital labor, value, and the fight for fairness and economic democracy.

I dedicate this book to the memory of my grandmother Herta Fritzsche, who was born in 1917 and labored as a home worker most of her life.

R. Trebor Scholz

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Why Does Digital Labor Matter Now? 1
Trebor Scholz
PART I
The Shifting Sites of Labor Markets 11
1 In Search of the Lost Paycheck 13
Andrew Ross
2 Free Labor 33
Tiziana Terranova
3 The Political Economy of Cosmopolis 58
Sean Cubitt
4 Considerations on a Hacker Manifesto 69
McKenzie Wark
PART II
Interrogating Modes of Digital Labor 77
5 Return of the Crowds: Mechanical Turk and
Neoliberal States of Exception 79
Ayhan Aytes
vi Contents
6 Fandom as Free Labor 98
Abigail De Kosnik
7 The Digital, Labor, and Measure Beyond Biopolitics 112
Patricia Ticineto Clough
8 Whatever Blogging 127
Jodi Dean
PART III
The Violence of Participation 147
9 Estranged Free Labor 149
Mark Andrejevic
10 Digitality and the Media of Dispossession 165
Jonathan Beller
11 Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization
of Labor in World of Warcraft 187
Lisa Nakamura
PART IV
Organized Networks in an Age of
Vulnerable Publics 205
12 Thesis on Digital Labor in an Emerging P2P Economy 207
Michel Bauwens
13 Class and Exploitation on the Internet 211
Christian Fuchs
14 Acts of Translation: Organized Networks as Algorithmic
Technologies of the Common 225
Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle
FurtherReading 241
Contributors 247
Index 251

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Why Does Digital Labor Matter Now?

Trebor Scholz

In 2009, the Internet as Playground and Factory conference at The NewSchool, a universityin New York City with a rich history of critical theory and student activism, asked whether Marxist labor theory, with its concept of exploitation of labor, is still applicable to emerging modes of value capture on the Internet. This book is a result of this international conference that I convened.

What does it mean to be a digital worker today? The Internet has become a simple-to-join, anyone-can-play system where the sites and practices ofwork and play increasingly wield people as a resource for economic amelioration by a handful of oligarchic owners. Social life on the Internet has become the “standing reserve," the site for the creation of value through ever more inscrutable channels of commercial surveillance. This inquiry has important ramifications for struggles around privacy, intellectual property rights, youth culture, and media literacy.

To this collection of essays the authors bring a common commitment to understanding the complex implications of new forms of waged and unwaged digital labor. Throughout this publication, you will find the consistent analysis of digital labor as a continuation of the social relations surrounding the traditional workplace. While also exploring discontinuities, shifts of labor markets to the Internet are described as an intensification of traditional economies of unpaid work.

Over the past six years, web-based work environments have emerged that are devoid of the worker protections of even the most precarious working-class jobs. Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk is only one example. These are new forms of labor but old forms of exploitation. There are no minimum wages or health insurance, and so far federal and state regulators have not intervened. Digital labor matters; such underpaid, waged occupations must not be ignored when thinking about cognitive capitalism.

2 Introduction

But several authors in this book are also thinking about unwaged labor, the activation ofour behavior on the social web as monetizable labor. This argument is frequently challenged because in opposition to traditional labor, casual digital labor looks merely like the expenditure of cognitive surplus, the act of being a speaker within communication systems. Itdoesn'tfeel, look, or smell like labor at all. This digital labor is much akin to those less visible, unsung forms of traditional women's labor such as child care, housework, and surrogacy.

In 2011, the value of Facebook was pegged at \$100 billion, which can be linked to vast financial speculation but also the company's collection of user data over a seven-year time span. Intimate forms of human sociability are being rendered profitablefor Facebook, which makesit such a big-ticket company. Facebook sells its user data to its customers, which are mostly third-party advertisers. The social web appears to be free for us to use, but there are hefty social costs; oligarchs capture and financialize our productive expression and take flight with our data. We, the “users," are sold as the product. The loss of our privacy, with all its psychological and political consequences, buys us the convenience of “free," innovative services. All of life is put to work, unfairly harnessing implicit participation for wild profits.

But can we really understand labor as a value-producing activity that is based on sharing creative expression? Harry Potter fans produce fan fiction and give their creative work away for free in exchange for being ignored by the corporation that owns the original content. Such unpaidlabor practices also include “game modding" and the submission of “captchas." Does it really make sense to think of these activities or the updating and “liking" ofstatus updates as labor? Many contemporary discussions on productivity take as a starting point the ubiquity of pleasure online and relate thisto the eroding distinction between work and play. Alexander Galloway writes that it is impossible to differentiate cleanly between nonproductive leisure activity existing within the sphere of play andproductive activity existing within the field of the workplace.

On whichever side of this argument you may fall as a reader, the topic of digital labor is an invitation to dust off arguments about the perilous state of privacy, unequal wealth distribution, and the private exploitation of the public Internet.

One significant event in this debate occurred in 1867, when Karl Marx distinguished between necessary labor time and surplus labor time. The former is labor that is entirely aimed at the worker's survival,while the latter is meant to describe any additional labor time. In1966, Norbert Wiener warned that responsive machines would intensify the exploitation of workers and even replace them altogether. In 1981, Dallas Smythe suggested that audiences are produced and sold to advertisers as a commodity. The audience, Smythe wrote, commits unpaid time and in return can watch a program along with ads. Twenty years later, Maurizio Lazzarato defined such immaterial labor as an activity that produces the cultural content of the commodity. Already in 2000, Tiziana Terranova examined new forms ofcapitalist exploitation of unwaged free labor, thinking about the viewers of broadcast media and the burgeoning Internet.