DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY

In the context of these sociocultural premises of the network society, it is possible to consider time arbitrage as an actualization of the allochronic temporality of the Western anthropological discourse as it casts the “other"within an always-on machinic zone of temporality. According to Mazzarella, the periodization of crowds to the global South is partly established by its allochronic quality, a term borrowed from Johannes Fabian for the description of a particular discourse built inWestern anthropology and intellectual tradition in order to cast the “other" outside of Western historical time. According to Fabian (2002), allochronic discourse is a vehicle for domination and for maintaining global inequalities. In this case, the crowds of the global South are materially configured within the machinic always-on time of the networks through their immaterial labor in order to fuel the linear material progress that characterizes Western temporality. In other words, the Western allochronic discourse has been reified in the form of temporal arbitrage as an apparatus of a neoliberal system of exception.

I argue that the geographical and temporal detachments of the cognitive worker from the immediate cultural products of her labor, which eventually inform social relations on the other side of the globe, creates another state of exception that I call a cultural state of exception. As a result of this detachment, the cultural and the informational content of the produced commoditó is consumed outside of the social context of the cognitive worker and thus does not directly alter her sociocultural conditions as a consumer/communicator. It is crucial to remind ourselves that this particular aspect of the cognitive labor apparatus was enabled by the process of disembodiment of information, which was a creation of postwar cybernetics. Corporeal decontextualization of information brought by cybernetics has had significant ideological presumptions—for example, an Anglo-American preference for digital information over context-dependent analoginformation (Marvin 1987). Carolyn Marvin has suggested that this preference mainly means an “ideological call for born-again unity in a clean and rigidly uniform world, a world morelike ours than anyone else's"(Marvin 1987: 61). Precisely because of such ideological implications, the network Gastarbeiter have become much more attractive to the neoliberal agenda within the context of the post-9/11 fear rhetoric.

Concluding Remarks

If the digital network is the assembly line of cognitive labor, then the Mechanical Turk is its model apparatus. As the network shifts the object of control from the bodies to the collective mind, the Mechanical Turk achieves this objective by foreclosing the mode of collective cultural production to cognitive workers and confining them within the legislative, temporal, and cultural states of exception.

AMT divides cognitive tasks into discrete pieces so that the completion of tasks is not dependent on the cooperation of the workers themselves but is organized

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from outside by information and communication technologies industries. By th elimination of the cooperation aspect of the cognitive work, the labor power be comes a variable capital as it creates value only after the activation and organiza tion of the capital.

As a result of the fragmentation of cognitive tasks, crowdsourced workers no only produce the desired information for the task algorithm, but they are, ir turn, produced by the algorithm, disciplined by its process flows into a particula cognitive mode and problem solving that eventually determines the efficiency o their labor and thus their livelihood. This effect becomes more significant wher we consider the fact that the processes that require the fulfilling of tasks by mean of the Mechanical Turk system are mostly the culture-producing algorithms tha constantly feed the production/consumption cycle of the network economy. Thi is the source of the innermost paradox of the system: a gradual reduction of th differences that define the economic value of its information as a product by ap proximating the unpredictable global variety of tastes, expressions, metaphors, ano conceptual affinities into a singular ontology of the multitude.

Notes

1 In order to describe the particular type of immaterial labor that characterizes the indus trial production of sómbolic-analótical services, I prefer to use the term cognitive laboi This distinction is helpful to avoid the perceived emphasis on the immateriality of th immaterial labor under consideration, although various authors have carefully pointe out that the term does not denote solely immaterial processes in terms of productior or consumption. However, I believe that immaterial labor still has the traces of some o the conventional assumptions about the processes of mind as separate from the body Cognitive labor marks an epistemological and discursive culmination point in postin dustrialism that is apparent in the academic, military, and socioeconomic prominence o the parallel systematization of the concept. As Mateo Pasquinelli describes, “Cognitive labour produces machines of all kinds, not only software: electronic machines, narrativ machines, advertising machines, mediatic machines, acting machines, psychic machines social machines, libidinous machines. In the XIXth century the definition of machin referred to a device transforming energy. In the XXth century Turing's machine—th foundation of all computing—starts interpreting information in the form of sequence of 0 and 1”(Pasquinelli 2004). Another critical advantage of using the concept of cog nitive labor for a critical analysis is that by means of its embodied and distributed characteristics, it is possible to talk about the historical relationship between the particula sociotechnical systems and constitutive subjectivities

2 Non-U.S. workers do not need to pay tax to the U.S. government for their income Incomes of the U.S.-based workers are taxed if the total annual amount earned from requester exceeds the tax reporting threshold defined by the Internal Revenue Service

3 “Amazon.com Help:Mechanical Turk,"http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/ display.html?nodeId=16465291.

4 In its various uses by Nick Dyer-Witheford, Paolo Virno, and Yann Moulier Boulang, the term cognitive capitalism refers to the accumulation of capital primarily characterized by post-Fordist modes of production and consumption of information in the network society

5 According to Zizek, “Today, immaterial labor is ‘hegemonic' in the precise sense in which Marx proclaimed that, in the 19th century capitalism, large industrial production is hegemonic, as the specific color giving its tone to the totality—not quantitatively, but playing the key, emblematic structural role." See Slavoj Zizek, Objet a as Inherent Limit to Capitalism: On Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Fall 2005, http://www.lacan.com/ zizmultitude.htm.

6 Ann Stoler, in her work Race and the Education of Desire, has highlighted the oversight of racial Others in Foucault's historíography, particularly in Foucault's “The History of Sexuality," by focusing on the colonial facts in Dutch archival records (Stoler 1995).

7 In Europe until the 19th century, the term Turk was used interchangeably with Muslim, referring to the subjects of the Ottoman Empire, while the Ottomans never considered themselves as Turks. Ottoman elites used the term to disparage the nomadic tribes in Anatolia.

8 Cognitive scientist Donald Norman uses the term affordance to describe the perceived quality of an object in relation to its utility (Norman 1990).

9 W. R. Hamilton, ed., Works of Thomas Reid (Edinburgh, 1846); quote appears in Schaffer (1983).

10 Windisch emphasizes the boldness of the idea that the automaton conveys as one of its intended effects. “He represented it for merely what it is; a machine, which is not without merit as to its mechanism, but the effects of which appear so wonderful, only from the boldness of the idea, and the fortunate choice of means which he employs to carry on the illusion" (Windisch 1874: Letter V).

11 Kempelen was aware of the importance of self-regulating mechanisms and patented a steam turbine that was very similar to James Watt's famous invention. The governor mechanism of Watt’s steam turbine is considered to be the archetópe of self-regulating systems.

12 Gottfried Leibniz, Dissertio de Arte Combinatoria (1666); quoted in Ronald Chrisley and Sander Begeer, Artificial Intelligence: Critical Concepts (London: Taylor & Francis, 2000), 14.

13 Poe published “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” in 1849.

14 Foucault explains this term in his interview published in Michel Foucault, Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. C. Gordon ([City: Publisher]), 194–8. Deleuze (1992) prefers the term social apparatus in his translation of dispositive.

15 However, this assumption may not always reflect the entire reality. Mechanical Turk has recently gained some attention in the U.S. media, particularly after the 2008 economic crisis, through the aired stories by people who work for AMT. Although the kind of income that could be produced in Mechanical Turk may not entirely compensate for an income lost from a traditional full-time job for a worker based in the United States, many Turkers still see it as convenient and flexible work that could pay \$8 to \$15 per day.

16 Rajesh Mago, “Review of Mturk after Working with Them as Worker | PC Tips and Tricks," http://www.pctipstricks.com/my-review-of-amazon-mturk-after-workingpart-time-as-worker-for-few-months/.

17Ibid.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 2009. "What Is an Apparatus?" and Other Essays. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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FANDOM AS FREE LABOR

Abigail De Kosnik

Fanatics or Workers?

Historically, fanactivity has been derided as frivolous, irrelevant, and even pathological. In his book Textual Poachers, Henry Jenkins traces the uses of the word fan from its originsin the Latin word fanaticus, which bore connotations of (Jenkins cites the Oxford Latin Dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary) “orgiastic rites and enthusiastic frenzy," “excessive and mistaken enthusiasm,"and “possession by a deity or demon."The associations between fandom and insanity persisted into the late 20th century, Jenkins argued:

[T]he fan still constitutes a scandalous category in contemporary culture, one alternately the target of ridicule and anxiety, of dread and desire. Whether viewed as a religious fanatic, a psychopathic killer, a neurotic fantasist, or a lust-crazed groupie, the fan remains a “fanatic" or false worshipper, whose interests are fundamentally alien to the realm of “normal” cultural experience and whose mentality is dangerously out of touchwith reality.

In the two decades since Textual Poachers was published, the increasing processing power of personal computers, thedecreasing costs of digital authoring tools, and the ease of publishing on the Internet have facilitated a boomin fan activity Today, fan websites, blogs, and message boards are common, and fan groups have organized on every social media site; in these online communities, fans post their works: commentary and close readings, stories and poems, songs andvideos, reenactments and animations and mash-ups, wallpapers and screen shots and icons. Fan productions permeate the Internet. This flow of audio, visual, and textual material from fans into the realm of public consumption has not greatly altered some cultural critics' negative assessment of fandom. Rather, the abundance of fan content online has led some to disparage fans as prolific amateurs who make nothing of importance or value. Andrew Keen writes in The Cult of the Amateur, referring to T. H. Huxley's theory that matching up aninfinite number ofmonkeys with an infinite number of typewriters will eventually yield a masterpiece:

Today's technology hooks all those monkeys up with all those typewriters. Except in our Web 2.0 world, the typewriters aren't quite typewriters, but rather networked personal computers, and the monkeys aren't quite monkeys, but rather Internet users. And instead of creating masterpieces, these millions and millions of exuberant monkeys—many with no more talent in the creative arts than our primate cousins—are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity.2

But fans' profuse contributions to the Internet can be regarded otherwise: as labor, Online fan productions constitute unauthorized marketing for a wide variety of commodities—almost every kind of product has attracted a fandom of some kind. This chapter will argue that fan activity, instead of being dismissed as insignificant and a waste of time at best and pathological at worst, should be valued as a new form of publicity and advertising, authored by volunteers, that corporations badly need in an era of market fragmentation. In other words, fan production is a category of work.

To date, the vast majority of fans' work has been unpaid. Like many creative activities that produce content for the Internet, fandom is a form of what Tiziana Terranova calls free labor. Terranova writes:

We call this excessive activity that makes the Internet a thriving and hyperactive medium “free labour"—a feature of the cultural economy at large, and animportant, yet unacknowledged, source of value inadvanced capitalist societies.... Far from being an “unreal", empty space, the Internet is animated by cultural and technical labour through and through, a continuous production of value which is completely immanent in the flows of the network society at large.3

At the start of the second decade of the 21st century, asthe question of pay for creative online labor is becoming critical for a wide variety of industries, including journalism and higher education, and as creative workers' organizations such as the Writers Guild of America and the Freelancers Union loudly campaign for more recognition of online production as deserving of payment, we are at a ripe moment for establishing the fact that fandom is a form of free labor and for calling uponfans, scholars, and the corporations that benefit from fan activity to seriously consider the question of whether fans should be compensated for their work.

Hebdige: Subcultural Style

This chapter's primary objective is to make clear that fan activity constitutes a kind of work. To that end, we will review key works in cultural studies, particularly scholarship on subcultures and fan communities, which argue that fandom is a form of active production, not passive reception.

In his landmark book Subculture, Dick Hebdige points out how queer subcultures and youth subcultures (teddy boys, punk rockers, biker gangs)transform ordinary objects into signifiers of style—style that marks the difference, the distinction, of the subculture's members from (what constitutes in the subculture's view) normative, homogeneous, dominant society. Hebdige writes:

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[O]bjects are made to mean and mean again as “style"in subculture.... [T]his process begins with a crime against the natural order—the cultivation of a quiff, the acquisition of a scooter or a record or a certain type of suit. But it ends in the construction of a style, in a gesture of defiance or contempt, in a smile or a sneer. It signals a Refusal.4

Affinity groups, Hebdige says, collectively act upon everyday commodities, such as scooters or records or suits, and infuse those objects with a certain sensibility that is reflectiveof the group's values and interests; the commodities come to "mean and mean again" as the affinity groups reconfigure and redefine their meanings. A safety pininthe hand of a housewife is not the same as a safety pin in the cheek of apunk rocker. "[T]he most mundane objects—a safety pin, a pointed shoe, a motor cycle—... take on a symbolio dimension.... [T]hese objects become signs of forbidden identity, sources of value." Without affinity groups'specialized uses and recontextualizations of these “"most mundane objects," which are commodities readily available in the marketplace, the objects would never acquire their symbolic dimension and would not be“sources of value;that is, they would not possessmultiple values, they would not be valuable to different groups in different ways—they would not be special objects.6

Hebdige's work is thus an early articulation of the type of labor that this chapter calls fan labor. Fans act upon commodities and imbue them with worth via their performances, which consist of displays of certain expressions and specific actions, which can all be summed up in the concept of attitude. Fans start to regard certain physical objects, manners of dress and hairstyles, and behaviors as integral components of the attitude that marks their difference from other groups and from what they consider to be the mainstream. In Hebdige's study, the work performed by subcultures on commodities, the work of meaning-making, the work of recontextualizing commodities as crucial components of their performances ofattitude and style, is undertaken in self-interest, for subcultures wish more than anything to be visibly distinctive and apart fromthe restof society. An affinity group invests time, effort, and imagination in everyday objects in order to make those objects serve their needs, which include helping to consolidate and represent the group's collective identity, which often stands in clear opposition to societal norms.

An irony that does not surface in subcultural and fan studies until decades after Hebdige's work is that affinity groups, by endowing ordinary things with special meanings, actually increase those things' market value; in other words, subcultures work on objects in order to make them markers of their nonconformist attitudes and values, but their work confers on objects new value and appeal, and so is effectively a type of advertising. The work of even the most rebellious subcultures therefore conforms to one of the most significant social norms of all, the norm of capitalist labor: all who live under capital's regime must labor to promote, sell, and consume commodities

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Thornton: Taste Cultures

While Hebdige draws attention to affinity groups' reworking of things into artifacts of style, Sarah Thornton, in her study of the 1990s British techno music dance club and rave scene called Club Cultures, highlights the ways that subcultures use everyday objects to create new modes of social engagement. In the present day, as it becomes increasingly common for people to join online communities via social media sites, the observation that subcultures create entertaining forms of group participation may seem obvious. But Thornton lays out a set of concepts and terms that prove as useful today for understanding how subcultures create modes of online interactivity as they were fifteen years ago for comprehending the face-to-face techno club and rave scene.

Thornton categorizes club culture as a type of “taste culture." Taste cultures, Thornton writes, "congregate on the basis of their shared taste. . . , their consumption of common media and, most importantly, their preference for people with similar tastes to themselves." Taking part in a particular taste culture “socializ[es] participants into a knowledge of (and frequently a belief in) the likes and dislikes, meanings and values of the culture." These cultures are not often permanent institutions of affiliation; rather, they are “ad hoc communities with fluid boundaries which may come together and dissolve over a single summer or endure for a few years."Also, taste cultures are “riddled with cultural hierarchies," such as, in the example of club cultures, the privileging of what is considered authentic over what is deemed phoney, the hip over the mainstream, and the underground over the media.7

What Thornton describes here are the social innovations of fandoms. Thornton's taste cultures can also be called fan cultures, and these types of groups coalesce around certain objects, which can be “common media" such as music, films, television programs, and comic books but can also be other types of commodities. Around these commodities, fans build societies with particular hierarchies, values, and belief systems. A great deal of the work of fans consists of the construction of the rules and codes of participating in fan cultures; fans moderate the interactions of other fans, establish the terms of the fans' discussions and play (e.g., make clear what is authentic versus phoney), and initiate and teach newcomers to the fandom. Status games—the struggle for newbies to become “big name fans" or moderators in a community, or the struggle for a faction of fans who wish to modify the group's value system to gain recognition—are common in fandoms and provide a great deal of the emotional interest and entertainment for community

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members. Thornton's was one of the first studies to shed light on the importance of the social dimension of fandom. She reveals that a great deal of effort and time goes into the constitution of and participation in fan communities (although tha participation may be fleeting), and she emphasizes that without activities such a the learning and policing of rules, the gaining and losing of status, the adhering to or breaking from shared belief systems, ordinary commodities would not holo much interest for many people. In other words, the community-building labor o fans endows objects with much of their appeal. Without fanlabor, there woulc be little or no social aspect to consuming; buyers of things would not associate those things with the pleasures of joining and taking part in societies comprising people with similar tastes and values.

Jenkins: Fascination/Frustration

Hebdige and Thornton's early theorizations of fan labor are complemented by Jenkins's and Matt Hills's analyses of fan labor's contradictions and complexities Jenkins notes that fans choose to work on objects (he studies primarily fans of television productions) because they experience a multiplicity of affect when engaging with the objects:

The fans' response typically involves not simply fascination or adoration but also frustration and antagonism, and it is the combination of the twe responses, which motivates their active engagement with the media. Because popular narratives often fail to satisfy, fans must struggle with them, to try to articulate to themselves and others unrealized possibilities within the original works. Because the texts continue to fascinate, fans cannot dismiss them from their attention but rather must try to find ways to salvage them for theirinterests.8

Jenkinsilluminates that the internal emotional confict that fans feel toward the objects of their interest—bothfascination and frustration, affection and loathing drives fans to work on those commodities. Media fans, Jenkins observes, write fan fiction and fan commentary, and make art and music and videos, as a way to create their version of a text, the text as they would like it to be, the text that serves their needs best. From Jenkins, we learn that fan labor is often the work of customization, the making of mass-produced things into things that serve individuals particular and peculiar desires and wishes.

We also learn that fandom is not devotion, or rather, that it is not only devotion but also antagonism, and that fans feel they must labor—that is, dedicate time attention, creativity, intellect, and energy to commodities—to make those things be what they want them to be. Fans work on objects in order to master them Jenkins writes, "Far from syncopathic, fans actively assert their mastery over the mass-produced texts which provide the raw materials for their own cultural productions and the basis for their social interactions."9 So, far from the notion of the fan as slavishly enthralled by commodities, we here find the concept of the fan as an individual who asserts her or his mastery over commodities by forcibly altering those objects to better serve them. The fan regards commodities as “raw materials for their own cultural productions"—echoing Hebdige's writing on subcultures’ making over of ordinary things into icons of style and props of public performance—and as “the basis for their social interactions"—just as Thornton claims (four years after Jenkins) that taste cultures constitute communities that engage individuals with status games and unique value systems.