--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "9780415896948" library_document_id: "a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7" source_sha256: "0c801028cb9dea99c6244337245529043047ec5c56b3ac35671aaf60c4927203" pdf_physical_page_count: 267 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 80 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7?start=80&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7.md?start=80&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7.md?start=70&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7.md?start=90&limit=10" --- # DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=80 | PRINTED_PAGE=73 This would be more like the model of a chain letter, for example. Long before the Occupy Wall Street movement, occupation literature circulated, and in the curious form of PDFfiles. They were designed to be transmitted, if not hand to hand, then e-mail to e-mail, to not be too readily searchable and retrievable by just anybody. Of course, vectoral power is already here. It is called viral marketing. The game is to imagine other uses to which such a strategy can be put—and to go beyond, to invent new kinds of relations. Who knows what a relation can be? We haven't seen anything yet. Lastly, I want to caution against three of the common modes of self-understanding that we have accepted a little too willingly without thinking it through. The first is the romance of the pirate.7 We are not pirates; we are hackers. And the distinction is this: The pirate is someone who takes another's property. Pirates take what does not belong to them. There is a romantic side to the pirate, but it is the romance of transgression. A transgression that, of course, mostly confirms the very notion of property in the act of coveting the property that belongs to another. Call it what you like. If not hacking, then something else. But not piracy. The pirate takes another's property. The hacker makes something new out of property that belongs to everyone in the first place. Informationwants to be free but is everywhere in chains. The figure of the pirate draws attention to the chains. The figure of the hacker insists that information is in its very being something that is free, that always escapes the property form. It is where we are and remain social beings. It is where, far from being on the run or in retreat, the game is only just begun. Not that the persona of the pirate is without its uses. In 2011, the Pirate Party won seats in Berlin's municipal elections on a platform that combined support for a guaranteed minimum income with the legalization of drug use and sophisticated positions on information rights.8 However, the future of progressive politics in the overdeveloped world may lie in a range of experiments in combining the interests of labor and the interests of the hacker class broadly defined—that is, if politics can be said to exist outside ofthe use of the vector for marketing purposes. Second,I want to caution against the rhetoric of gamification. This could most broadly be conceived of as getting people to do things without paying them by offering them symbolic rewards in exchange. These rewardsappeal by being rare and by being stratified. You can distinguish yourself by winning this symbolic token, which is ranked in relation to a wholehierarchy ofsuch tokens Superficially, this seems like the logic of the gift economy. You do something for nothing because you want to do it, not as labor grudgingly offered in exchange for wages or other incentives but for fun, as “playbor." The difference is that the gift is not to another, and not via another to the commons in general, and the reward is not recognition by others making the same gifts. Rather, what is offered is a bit of cognitive energy that performs a task some vectoral business requires, and the reward is only à formal and abstract kind of token and ranking. It is not Considerations on a Hacker Manifesto 73 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=81 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED 74 The ShiftingSites of Labor Markets the gift economy; it is a simulation of it. It isn't play that creates its own games; it is a game that extracts labor in the form of play. Gamification broadly conceived is the strategy of the vectoral class at its most sophisticated. It no longer cares all that much about mere images or stories or tunes as intellectual property. But that does not mean it has given up on property! Its interest, rather, is in two things. First, in its proprietary algorithms for managing networks. Second, in the data that can be extracted from those networks and that remains resolutely proprietary. In short, the vectoral class has brought the fabled general intellect into material existence and is doing its best to make it private property. The struggle moves onto a whole new terrain. Finally, the concept of the social factory. This has always seemed to me to relate to the special case quality of Italy in the seventies. Italy was the last major European country to shift its economy away from industrial labor processes. The struggles of that time were less a foretaste of what was to come for the rest of the overdeveloped world as a throwback to what had already passed. Indeed, it can be hard to find people in the overdeveloped world who have any idea of what factory labor was like. In these parts of the world, the factory is no longer the dominant form of the experience of labor, and hasn't been for a while.Rather than social factory, it might make sense to talk of the monetized boudoir. What were formerly qualities of private, affective, and intimate life are now the kinds of labor that can be commodified. One needs to present well, even to make coffee or sell shoes, not to mention negotiate the social maze of the office or take meetings that will result in temp contracts. But one thing the Italian experience really did identifythat permeates the overdeveloped world, particularly for young people, is precarity. Working conditions become temporary, with few or no benefits.Only a tiny handful of employees are to be considered permanent. Everyone else is just hired hands, or rather hands, eyes, brains, and so on. In such conditions, the question arises as to whether making labor more secure and rewarded or extending the social compact is the better strategy. It's a question with two dimensions. Which is more tactically feasible, but also which is more desirable in the first place?Do we want to focus on labor, and securing life through labor? Or do we want to secure the conditions of life itself? It is hard not to be pessimistic about both options. And it is also hard to argue against any and every opportunity that people might find to secure life against commodification wherever they can find it. But taking a step back, perhaps there’s something to be said for the struggle to secure the conditions of life directly. It is still something of a wake-up call for educated people in the overdeveloped world: what we do has finally been proletarianized. Logics of what Stiegler calls grammatization, or what I call abstraction, extend now to formerly white-collar and professional tasks. Meanwhile, information has escaped its embededness in any given materiality and can now be easily transferred from one material expression to another. The whole basis of an economy that sold information strapped to particular things has simply vanished, despite the efforts of the old culture industry to artificially restore it. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=82 | PRINTED_PAGE=75 Given those two conditions, restoring the prestige of intellectual endeavor seems as vain a project as restoring the privileges of the old craft guilds. All that is solid melts into air. After the era of cheap things comes the era of cheap information. That seems to me to shift attention to securing the conditions of life directly rather than indirectly as a reward for labor. Any particular labor for any particular firm or industry is always vulnerable, not least to competition now from the developing world. So why not struggle instead for securing life? We will consent to labor if we have to, or if we feel like it, but demand the right to live, to love, to create, to play, to struggle—to make the best of everyday life. We demand a living wage for all. We demand free education for all. We demand free heath care for all. We demand universal access to the infrastructure of life in all its forms. The rest we will makefor ourselves. Notes Considerations on a Hacker Manifesto 75 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=83 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=84 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED PART II Interrogating Modes of Digital Labor ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=85 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=86 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED RETURN OF THE CROWDS Mechanical Turk and Neoliberal States of Exception Ayhan Aytes One of the most ubiquitous examples of crowdsourcing application is a human authentication tool called captcha (von Ahn et al. 2003; see Figure 5.1). It could be described as a reverse Turing test, in that humans convince the machine that they are indeed humans and not a software robot crawling the web and filling out random forms for spam dissemination. Most of the time, the task required for a captcha authentication consists of reading a garbled text that is provided as an image file and then typing it into a text box. Re-captcha, a particular type of captcha, uses two sets of texts—one for the assessment purpose and the other for transcribing difficultto-read words that were captured during optical character recognition scans. As a result, re-captcha functions not only as a human authentication tool but also as a cognitive labor platform.¹ The crucial aspect of this process is that no single individual who completes a captcha will ever be able to know the overall meaning of the text that was transcribed because of its fragmentation into single words. In most crowdsourcing platforms, fragmentation of tasks disenfranchises cognitive workers by disconnecting them from the final intellectual work. In addition, most crowdsourcing systems maintain a transient, task-based, and limited-time relationship between the worker and the requester and do not support a direct communication between the parties, further erasing the connection between the cognitive labor and the resultant work. A similar type of disconnect characterizes Amazon.com's digital labor market, Mechanical Turk. Amazon Web Services established in November 2005 its digital labor market where workers from across the world and around the clock browse, choose, and complete human intelligence tasks (HITs) that are designed by corporate or individual contractors. The kind of labor required for each HIT varies: finding information and images about products and services, translating text from or to English, ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=87 | PRINTED_PAGE=80 transcribing audio, tagging images with descriptive text, or answering surveys on various topics. The products of this labor might serve many purposes ranging from spam generation to training machine learning algorithms that would eventually assume some of these human roles in the future. The payment amount per HIT ranges from one cent to several U.S. dollars, depending on the required time or difficulty of the task. Amazon.com's initial motivation to build Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) emerged after the failure of its artificial intelligence programs in the task of finding duplicate product pages on its retail website (Pontin 2007). After à series offutile and expensive attempts, the project engineers turned to humans to work behind computers within a streamlined web-based system. Later, AMT made this cognitive labor platform available to private contractors in return for a commission for each completed HIT. AMT's digital workshop emulates artificial intelligence systems by replacing computing with human brainpower. Driven by what AMT calls “artificial artificial intelligence," this sociotechnical system represents a crucial formation on a global scale as it facilitates the supply of cognitive labor needs of mainly Western information and communication technologies industries from a global workforce.² AMT explains the value of its labor market for the software industry asfollows: With Amazon Mechanical Turk, it may seem to your customers that your application is somehow using advanced artificial intelligence to accomplish tasks, but in reality it is the “Artificial Artificial Intelligence" of the Mechanical Turk workforce that is helping you effectively achieve your business objectives.3 According to Panos Iperiotis, approximately half of the AMT workers—or Turkers, as some of them prefer to call themselves—are from the United States, and the other half are from 66 different countries. Most of the non-U.S. Turkers are from India, representing 33% of the AMT workforce (Iperiotis, 2010). Ross et al. have demonstrated that the demographics of AMT are becoming increasingly international, highlighted by an expanding group of young, male, Indian workers who make less than US\$10,000 per year. About a third of Indian workers reported that they partly rely on AMT “to make basic ends meet" (Ross et al. 2010). 80 InterrogatingModes of Digital Labor ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=88 | PRINTED_PAGE=81 Amazon.com branded its micropayment-based crowdsourcing platform as the Mechanical Turk, borrowing one of the names of the 18th-century Automaton Chess Player as shorthand for the relationship that the system establishes between the cognitive labor force and the seemingly automated complex tasks. In both cases, the performance of the workers who animate the artifice is obscured by the spectacle of the machine. The idea of the chess-playing machine, which was realized by IBM's Deep Blue computer in 1997 has been a key conceptual apparatus for imagining the automatization of the operations of the human mind since the Enlightenment era. This metaphor was also central for the idealization of cybernetic discourse as a universal system during the first half of the 20th century, embodied by the postwar symbol processors, which later became the architectural basis of the contemporary computer (Bowker1993; Shannon1950). In this chapter, I will study a neoliberal reincarnation of the chess-playing automaton, Amazon's Mechanical Turk, in the light of its early-modern legacy of configuring the relationship between the division of cognitive labor and the automatic systems of computing and control Particularly, in both cases, in varying degrees and methods, the labor performance of intellectual workers is an integral element of the disciplinary structure of the corresponding socioeconomicapparatus. In the current configuration, this cognitive labor apparatus is situated within the neoliberal system of exception facilitated by the digital networks, taking advantage of legislative gray zones in the international labor regulations in order to maximize profits for multinational corporations (Ong 2006). Crowdsourcingis one of the most significantelements of this configuration that expands the reach of the neoliberal economy through cognitive capitalism,4 in which immaterial labor plays a key, structural role.⁵ Not surprisingly, this configuration also embodies some of the conflicts whose seeds are placed during the early modern conceptualizations of the mechanization of industrial labor through division ofcognitive labor. One of the most significant examples of this conceptualization was the chess-playing automaton that performed the insurmountable conflicts of the disciplining of the human mind for industrial production. Docile Automata Wolfgang von Kempelen's Chess Player Automaton was constructed and presented in 1770 at the court of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and gave the impression thatthe pipe-smoking Turk mannequin, controlled by a sophisticated mechanism under the cabinet, could play serious chess against human opponents (see Figure 5.2). However, the seemingly mechanical mind of the Turk was actually manipulated by Kempelen's chess master assistant, who was hidden beneath the pseudo-mechanism. The Automaton Chess Player was exhibited for 84 years in Europe and the Americas and attracted many notable challengers and spectators, such as Napoleon Bonaparte, Charles Babbage, and Benjamin Franklin (Carroll 1975; Windisch 1784). Return of the Crowds 81 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=89 | PRINTED_PAGE=82 In his book, Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault considers the 18th-century automata as models for human body and social order (Foucault 1977). Consequently, the mechanistic conception of human body needs to be read in two registers: the anatomico-metaphysical register as constitutedmainly through Cartesian mind/body duality, and the technico-political register that was constituted by empirical methods of the state for disciplining the operations of the body through the army, the school, and the hospital. In the context of these two registers, the 82 Interrogating Modes of Digital Labor 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7.md?start=90&limit=10)