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# DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY

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Jenkins allows us to see that the fan's position is that no object of fandom is complete or perfect or whole in itself. Fans are eager to praise what is right about an object, point out what is wrong, and propose solutions and new directions for the development of that object because they think that fandom is what completes and perfects the object. The object is about the fan. It is not the fan who is devoted to the object so much as the object that serves the needs of the fan—and, initially, does not do a very good job of that; the fan must invest work into the object to customize the object to better suit the fan's wishes.

Jenkins also enables us to grasp that, from the fan’s perspective, there is a clear separation between his or her labor on a commodity and the labor of the official producers of that commodity. If fans must smooth out the rough edges of an object, if they must explore and actualize the unrealized possibilities of an object, then it is the official producers who are to blame for giving the object its undesirable attributes and suppressing its more interesting potentials. The fact that fans feel compelled to labor on things means that the labor that went into bringing that thing to the marketplace was shoddy or insufficient or, at best, left much to be desired. This distance between the fan laborer and the official producer is one reason that fans have not often regarded themselves as laborers. The fans’ efforts to customize mass commodities are for themselves and their fellow fans only, not for the marketplace and not for average consumers (i.e., nonfans). One might hypothesize that fans think of their activities as driven by an interest in unleashing the best and highest promise of their favored objects rather than being motivated by financial gain, as official producers are; many fans therefore think of their motives as purer than those of official producers and see themselves as above questions of market value, advertising, and sales. The frustration and antagonism that fans frequently feel toward official producers have largely prevented fans from regarding themselves as part of the same capitalist system within which official producers operate.

Hills: Fans and Exchange-Value

However, as Hills argues in Fan Cultures, fans are, in fact, essential components of the capitalist system within which official producers operate. Hills addresses the prevalent concept of the “resistive” fan, stating that “an expressed hostility within cult fandoms towards commercialisation and commodification... [has] led to the theorization of cult TV fandom (and other related media fandoms) as somehow anti-consumerist."10 But there is an inherent contradiction in fandom, Hills writes

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While simultaneously “resisting" norms of capitalist society and its rapid turnover of novel commodities, fans are also implicated in these very economic and cultural processes. Fans are, in one sense, “ideal consumers"since their consumption habits can be very highly predicted by the culture industry, and are likely to remain stable. But fans also express anti-commercial beliefs (or “ideologies", we might say, since these beliefs are not entirely in alignment with the cultural situation in which fans find themselves).11

Hills thus views the fan experience as having (at least) two competing aspects the “anti-commercial ideology” side and the “commodity-completist" side.

Hills's proposal of these two halves of fandom allows him to articulate, more clearly than the subculture and fanstudies scholars who preceded him, how fan labor adds value to commodities and why fans disavow or simply refuse to acknowledge that their value-adding activities constitute labor. Looking at the way that fans who have collected old, no-longer-manufactured items are able to sell them for sometimes quite high prices on eBay, Hills says,

Many commodities offered for sale on eBay should, according to the conventional logic of use and exchange-value, be almost worthless. However due to many of them having been intensely subjectively valued by fans such commodities take on a redefined “exchange-value".... [F]an-based “use-values" interact with systems which belong to the economy “proper” meaning that the existence of a marketplace for media-related collectibles is underpinned by the lived experiences of fandom.12

What gives these commodities value beyond their initial sales price is what fans add to them—the new uses to which fans put old things and the emotional landscapes that fans construct around them. Hills states that “fan ‘appropriations of texts or resistances' to consumption can always be reclaimed as new instances of exchange-value,"’13 and, conversely, we can say that without fan appropriations many commodities would have much lower exchange-value, a much shorter shelf life of value, and a much smaller base of potential consumers. Withoutfans working on them, many items would be, in Hills's words, “almost worthless" a short while after coming to market.

But fans and fan studies scholars have historically been reluctant to regard fans value-adding actions as labor since “fan identities are typically viewed against consumeridentities."14 Particularly relevant to this essay is Hills's observation, citing a study by Taylor and Willis,15 that fans criticize members of their own communities who do regard their activities as work worthy of compensation: “[F]ans whose practices are clearly linked with' dominant capitalist society (e.g. they may be trying to sell videos recorded off-air) are likely to be censured within the fan culture concerned."16 As I have written about elsewhere, using the example of the case of a Star Wars fan fiction author who briefly listed her fan novel on Amazon,17 fan communities frequently severely criticize members who attempt to sell theirfan works. Because fans generally conceive of their activities as “resistive" to consumerism, they refuse to consider that their works might constitute either promotional materials or ancillary products that increase the value of the objects of fandom and therefore might be deserving of compensation, either from official producers or from other consumers.

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Linking Hebdige's and Thornton's theories to Jenkins's and Hills's, then, we can discern that fans do not think of objects of fandom as commodities even though that is what they are, even though they spend a lot of money (in some cases, a great deal of money) acquiring those objects, and even though fandom is what gives those objects market value far greater than their initial sales price. Fans, therefore, do not regard their own activities as work that adds or creates exchangevalue (rather, they think of their efforts as adding personal use value) and do not seek compensation for their activities.

In the digital era, however, as fans circulate their works publicly to wider audiences than was possible with analog distribution technologies, it is evident that the energy and time that fans devote to making objects “mean and mean again" (as Hebdige would say) is labor, and the vast majority of this labor is performed for free. The issue of how the Internet consists primarily of free and voluntary creative labor has been worked through by scholars such as Tiziana Terranova and Andrew Ross

Terranova's concept of the continuous need for updating required by the digital economy maps well onto our discussion of fan labor. Terranova writes in Network Culture that the digital economy “challenged the postmodern assumption that labour 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 is extremely labour-intensive."18 She points to the work of web designers and maintainers to constantly update a website to ensure it is a “good” site, and the work of programmers to repeatedly update software to keep an application relevant and in use:

It is the labour of the designers and programmers that shows through a successful website and it is the spectacle of that labour changing its product that keeps the users coming back. The commodity, then, is only as good as the labour that goes into it.19

Similar to Terranova's examples is the work that fans put into existing products to update them, to contribute new material in the form of commentary, stories, videos, and music that refreshes the products and feeds (and creates) consumer demand for them.

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Terranova also addresses the contradiction inherent in affinity groups about which Hills writes—that is, the contradiction between communities' feeling that what they do is not work and does not warrant compensation versus the communities' creation of a great deal of real economic value. Terranova observes that “the sustainability of the Internet as a medium depends on massive amounts of labor (which is not equivalent to employment [.. . ]), only some of which was hypercompensated by the capricious logic ofventure capitalism (during the late 1990s dot-com boom). Ofthe incredible amount of laborwhich sustains the Internet as a whole (from mailing list traffic to websites toinfrastructural questions), we can guess that asubstantial amount of it is still freelabor."

Free 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 thereforefree, pleasurable, not imposed).20

The fact that members of self-organizing communities such as the first AOL chat groups did not mind giving away their labor mirrors the way that fans freely donate their time, energy, and creativity to makingfan productions that they then share online; both groups do it for the “pleasures of communication and exchange," and both groups feel their Internet labor is “not-imposed." Terranova refers to the Internet “gift economy"21 as one framework that affinity groups use to characterizetheir modes of exchange without pay, but the fact that groups do not regard what they voluntarily do as work does not make it less valueproducing. “[I]n 1996, at the peak of the volunteer moment [in AOL chat room moderation], over30,000community leaders' were helping AOL to generate at least \$7 million a month,"22 Terranova states. Today, the fan moderators, writers, and artists who post andcomment on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites number in the millions, and their activities contribute to far more massive corporate revenues than the \$7 million monthly garnered by AOL in the late1990s.

Ross, in his lecture “On the Digital Labor Question," builds on Terranova and Hills, emphasizing that the United States is transitioning to an "Internet-based economy based on the widespread use of non-paid oramateur user labor." For Ross, this transition raises numerous questions about fairness of wages and working conditions that both corporate employers and creative workers are, for the most part, ignoring. Ross writes:

In the world of new media, where unions have no foothold whatsoever, the formula of overwork, underpayment, and sacrificial labor is entirely normative. The blurring of the lines between work and leisure, the widespread use of amateur or user input on the Social Web or in open source, and the systematic expropriation of Tiziana Terranova first described as “free labor" has promptedsome commentators to ask whether the experience of digital environments should direct us to rethink entirely our basic understanding of labor and enterprise.23

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Ross sees this expropriation of Internet users' freelabor as a form of“selfexploitation among creative workers." What one of Ross'sinformants calls “work you just couldn't help doing," work that seems like play and recreation, is, states Ross, “value-adding work" that can be “digitally extend[ed]. .. into every waking moment of an employee's life"—and one need not even be an employee to perform this work. Applying Terranova's conclusions regarding 1990s-era AOL chat rooms to present-day social media sites, Ross claims that wage-free labor infuses all such sites with their financial value, which is a huge boon to the sites founders:

[F]or the business entrepreneur, [establishing a social networking site] is a virtually wage-free proposition. There are costs involved for bandwidth, hosting, and maintaining commercial platforms, but as far as the monetizable product goes, it is the users, or prosumers, as industry strategists call them, who create all the surplus value (which could be described as the difference between the value such free services offer to users and the value they create for business).²4

Ross, like Terranova, acknowledges that the “pleasures of communication and exchange"and the fact that fan labor is “not imposed"prevent fans from seeking compensation for their value-adding activities. For many fans, the donation of labor is willingly given in exchange for the opportunity to enjoy and play in à relativelyopen, unrestricted Internet. Ross clarifies this point of view in his writing:

[T]he role the social web is currently playing in new modes of capital accumulation is simply the price one pays for preserving a free medium of exchange whose scope of activity is large enough to outpace any government or corporate surveillance. It's another kind of trade-off, in other words, and the balance, for the time being, is still in favor of the commons. From this point of view, all of the interactive free labor that goes into user-generated value can be seen as a kind of tithe or tribute we pay to the Internet as a whole so that the expropriators stay away from the parts of it we really cherish.25

The fact that wealth is unevenly distributed between social media companies (and, we can add, all companies that benefit from social media sites) and the fans who produce content and value for those entities is willingly accepted by fans who regard their volunteering labor as a prerequisite for their attainment of the benefits of Internet participation.

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Fan Volunteerism

We can now postulate several reasons for fans' refusal to labor under anything other than a model of volunteerism.

As mentioned at the start of this chapter, the concept of fandom has, for a long while, borne connotations of madness, social marginalization, and abnormality, and inherent in those connotations is the assumption that fans are possessed— psychologically and emotionally enslaved—by particular objects and texts. This definition of fandom as a state of passive reception verging on, or tippinginto, insanity has undoubtedly set a low bar for what fans hope to define as their rights vis-à-vis larger society. When a group is categorized as deviant or subnormal, it typically strives for no more than the right to exist and to operate without interference. Moral panics have arisen around a number of medía fandoms, from comic book fans in the 1950s to rap and hip-hop fans in the 1990s, and social censure has been applied to a far greater range of fandoms, from Trekkies to soap opera viewers to video gamers; because so many fan groups have experienced rejection and criticism for their enthusiasms over the course of the last century, an integral part of fan sensibility is knowing when to conceal one's fannish interests and when to out oneself as a fan. The pseudonymity of online communication permits people to operate as fans discreetly, and this can be thought of as a form of closeting, for many people rarely discuss their Internet fan activities in their face-to-face social interactions. The Internet permits individuals to hide their fan identities, or rather, to protect their “real" identities and social spheres from any associations with fandom. A group that is largely closeted is usually far from eager to publicly organize and issue economic demands.

The notion of fandom has become a more accepted and privileged term in marketing and consumer circles—companies understand that their products need fans, followers, and friends online and in the real world—but even when considered a worthwhile use of time and money, fandom is regarded as a marginal, recreational, just-for-fun activity, not as central to a person's professional development or as a legitimate foundation for a career in the creative industries

In addition to the fact that fandom is widely categorized as pure leisure and completely outside the “serious" realms of people's lives, such as work, fans perception that what they do is explicitly anticommercial prevents them from considering what they do as warranting pay.Subcultures often organize in opposition to social norms, as Hebdige points out, and their members remake, rework, and find new uses for ordinary objects partly to defy those objects' advertised uses as a methodof disrupting society's habitual flows. Style can be a signal of disturbance, of breaking with the behaviors and beliefs that characterize the mainstream, and infusing commodities with nonnormative meanings to define a subculturalstyle is one way to reject capitalism's proclivity for treating everybody as exactly the same as everybody else, reducing all to equivalent, interchangeable consumers.

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Hills informs us that fans can also be “resistive"to the commodity aspect of their favorite texts and objects because they see their appropriative activities as pure of financial motives—fans are interested in specific things because they feel an emotional, intellectual, psychological, or artistic connection to them, not because fans wish to profit from them. In fact, fans often think that it is official producers' profit-seeking motives that lead them to make incorrect or less-than-optimal decisions about their products, leaving fans to salvage or modify the products to which they have become attached, spurred by love and frustration, not by money. The opposition between finances and fandom posited in a great deal of fan discourse and fan studies scholarship does not provide fertile ground for fans to consider lobbying to receive payment for the value they add to companies' products.

And Ross and Terranova claim that even when fans do think of their productivity as labor, they can justify giving away their time, energy, and creativity for free in ways that benefit corporations by regarding that donation as a necessary trade-off for the ability to participate in the Internet's largely unregulated social media sites. Their free labor buys them a free Internet.

The very idea of fans organizing officially, as a kind of labor union, is somewhat contrary to the underlying principles of fandom. For fans, although they do gather in groups around specific objects, do the work of customizing mass-produced things to fit their own unique desires and needs. The goal of most fan labor is to modify a commodity, which is made to suit everybody, so that it suits the fan laborer, and other fans who share the laborer's particular tastes, much better. It is unlikely that any sizeable number of fans would all come to agreement about the tópes of work they all wanted to perform on various corporate-made objectsand texts and propose some kind of pay schedule commensurate with clearly defined categories of production. Fan labor is, by nature, idiosyncratic, and each fan production arises from, and is shaped by, the peculiar interests of the fan producer.

Also, because it is unclear how much revenue is generated for companies by the brand extensions, publicity, and marketing materials created by fans, it would be difficult for fans to seek payment on a commission or revenue-sharing model. Fan-made videos, websites, commentary, posters and other artworks, stories, songs, and reviews merge with the stream of official advertising and promotion that surrounds any given product—fan labor can ramp up the buzz and reputation of the product, and it can reinforce the pull or allure that the product exerts on would-be consumers, but it would be impossible to tell what percentage of sales of the product had resulted from fans' efforts versus those of the paid corporate marketers.

Fan Compensation

However, as much as the digital economy relies on unpaid, user-generated labor, the Internet has also been the site ofsome innovations in compensation that might serve fans well in the future. Garnering revenue from advertising has proved

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110 Interrogating Modes of Digital Labor

feasible for bloggers and video makers who attract significant audiences; fan pro ducers couldsimilarly benefit from Google AdSense or the YouTube Partner Pro gram if companies would allow them to use copyrighted images, text, video, an sound, as most fan productions make use of proprietary media (companies coul give permission tacitly, by not suing fans or serving them with cease-and-desis letters for copyright infringement).

Another form of compensation that has benefited a few fans, and could benefi many more, is the elevation of fan laborers from amateurs to paid professionals Some companies have included fan works with their official products or hav used them as advertisements for the products, which have boosted those fan careers in the creative industries; other companies have hired talented artists, writ ers, and moderators whose works they first encountered on fan sites. Fan labo could eventually be regarded as the first rung on the reputation ladder for aspir ing creative professionals, with the highest rung on the ladder being full-tim employment.

The realization of any possibility for fans to earn payment for their labor woul depend on both fans and corporations acknowledging that fandomis a form o labor that adds value to mass-produced commodities and is worthy of compensa tion. The history of discourse about fandom, especially within fan communities makes such an acknowledgement unlikely. But if companies could begin to regar fan groups as the potential developers of their greatest promotional campaigns and if fans could start to see that their productions have, not just personal ust value, but market exchange-value, then fans could conceivably be one of the firs social groups to formulate workable solutions to the important questions of Internet labor and pay. In this scenario, fans would help to shape how creative labo is fairly compensated in the digital economy rather than being the economy marginalized victims.

Notes

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24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

References

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THE DIGITAL, LABOR, AND MEASURE BEYOND BIOPOLITICS

PatriciaTicineto Clough

This chapter turns to recent technoscientific developmentsin order to rethink the value of affective labor in relationship to mathematical (digital) forms of measure. I focus especially on the work of Luciana Parisi because my aims here, like hers are both to draw out the political, cultural, economic, and social implications of these developments and at least to sketch what transformation in thought, or in the thinking about thought (as well as the unthought) they may incite. As Parisi takes philosophical discourse both as a guide to critical analysis of technoscientific development andas the discourse to which she finally hopes to contribute, I hope to do so as well. While philosophies focused on process—those of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead especially—are those to which Parisi is drawn, I contrast those philosophies with speculative realist philosophies and object-oriented ontologies. I propose that this contrast shows that philosophy, even if unconsciously is being drawn to the implications of the technoscientific development of nanotechnology and the issue ofmeasure it raises in its effort to make productive the micro affects of matter. Or, to put it otherwise, philosophy presently is registering the reconfiguration of economy, affective labor, and biopolitical governance.

Nanotechnology and Measuring Matter's Affects

In her recent analysis of nanotechnology, Luciana Parisi has reported that the specific novelty of nanotechnologies is that nanomachines can“rearrange the very position of every atom" (2012: 48, n. 2).This means that “each atom canbe placed in a selected position to become an active or structural component of a living system that is being redesigned." In particular, this new capacity of controlling the position of atoms suggests that “the high speed oscillation and fuzziness of molecules, which was central to the discoveries of quantum physics, is no longer an absolute indeterminacy defined by atomic superposition between particles and waves." Rather, the fuzziness provides a chaotic instability that could be turned into a “weird dynamic productivity" (Parisi 2012: 49, n. 2). At the nanoscale, Parisi continues, “particles can become probability waves which leap across impenetrable barriers, occupy two places at the same time and anticipate future states" (Parisi 2012:33).

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