DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY

One of the challenges of mobilizing the notion of exploitation in online contexts is thatit takes a critical concept traditionally associated with industrial labor's sweatshop conditions and transposes it into a realm of relative affluence and prosperity—that is, a realm inhabited by those with the time and access to participate in online activities. For good reason, it is harder to get worked up about the allegedly exploitative conditions of user-generated content sites than about the depredations of sweatshop labor and workforce exploitation. In the case of user-generated content, we are talking in many cases about affluent consumers engaging in what might be described as optional activities: you don't have to join Facebook or Twitter, it is not necessary for survival in contemporary society (yet?) to get a Gmail account or to shop online.

Thus, rejoinders to critiques of exploitation in such contexts typically invoke both the lack of coercion and the pleasures of participation. As Nancy Baym and Robert Burnett (2008) put it in their account of the promotional work done by indie music fans: “We areloath to dismiss their claims of affective pleasure and the desire they feel to spread what brings them joy as evidence of exploitation."12 Their study invokes the claim, so familiar to accounts of the promise of interactive technology, that the fans’activities recapture the pleasures of pre-mass society: “Their social response to the pleasures of music is situated in deeply meaningful social phenomena that hearken back to much earlier phases of musical history, phases before there was an industry, when music was always performed in communities by locals for locals rather than by distant celebrities for adoring fans."13 Such forms of enjoyment are, then, allegedly, incompatible with the notion that fans are being exploited: “To claim that these people are exploited is to ignore how much these other forms of capital matter in the well being ofwellrounded humans."14

It is not clear, however, that the Marxist-inflected critiques of exploitation invoked by such accounts are incompatible with a sense of enjoyment or pleasure. The fact of exploitation need not prevent workers from taking pleasure in their craft or in the success of a collaborative effort well done. Nor is it the case that accounts of exploitation necessarily denigrate the activities or the meanings they may have for those who participate in them rather than the social relations that underwrite expropriation and alienation. The point of a critique of exploitation is neither to disparage the pleasures of workers nor the value of the tasks being undertaken. To argue otherwise is to stumble into a kind of category confusion: an attempt to reframe structural conditions as questions of individual pleasure and desire. The critique of exploitation does not devalue individual pleasureanymore than such pleasures nullify exploitative social relations. More workneeds to be done to define what might be meant by exploitation in nonwage labor contexts

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to bolster the critique of exploitation in the digital economy and to address the way in which it is so often dismissed (for failing to acknowledge the benefits and pleasures received by those engaged in various forms of free labor).

Digital Alienation

To what extent can analytic definitions of exploitation be applied to unwaged forms of participation that generate value appropriated by those who control the platforms upon which this participation relies? Holmstrom offers a clear summary ofa Marxist conception of exploitation: “The profits of capitalists, then, according to Marx's theory, are generated by surplus, unpaid and forced labor, the product of which the producers do not control."i5 Central to such an account is the notion that coercionis embedded in the relations that structure so-called free choices. That is to say, coercion does not require someone standing over the worker witha gun or some other threat of force. The further point to be made is that exploitation is not simply about profit, but also alienation. As Holmstrom puts it, “what workers really sell to the capitalists, according to Marx, is not labor, but the capacity to labor or labor power, which capitalists then use as they wish for the day."16 Alienation subsists notjustin the surrender of conscious control over productive activity but also, consequently, in its product. Exploitation, then, is not simply about a loss of monetary value, but also a loss of control over one's productive and creative activity. To push a bit further, it is the latter sense of exploitation that drives the critique, insofar as the deprivation of economic resources, in the end, is about reproducing the forms of scarcity that compel freely given submission.

In his critique of attempts to apply the notion of exploitation to free labor, David Hesmondhalgh invokes Erik Olin Wright's formulation of the three principles that define a Marxist understanding of exploitation:

First, exploitation occurs when the material welfare of one class is causally dependent upon the material deprivation ofanother. The capitalist classin modern societies could not exist without the deprivations of the working classes. Second, that causal dependence depends in turn on the exclusion of workers from key productive resources, especially property. Third, the mechanism through which both these features (causal dependence and exclusion) operate is appropriation of the labor of the exploited.17

Although Hesmondhalgh might disagree, I would argue that this definition highlights crucial aspects of the emerging online economy, perhaps most significantly the privatization of the infrastructure for new forms of creativity, communication, and information sharing. One of the things that is not at all new about digital media is the way in which it reproduces the logic of private ownership of productive resources. Even as it fosters new forms of creativity and participation, it does so on privately owned and controlled commercial platforms such as Facebookand YouTube.

Many sites are not commercially controlled, but they still rely on the commercial infrastructure of the Internet—one that is likely to become even more tightly administered as the technology for inspecting data that passes through private servers and routers continues to develop. Even in the world of bits and bytes, matter still matters—as does ownership and control of material resources. It's a bitof instrumental fiction to assert along with futurists such as Esther Dyson and Alvin Toffler that,

The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth—in the form of physical resources—has been losing value and significance. The powers of mind areeverywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.18

This is the digital ideology that masks the material infrastructure that supports the production and distribution of the fruits of the “powers of mind."

A critique of the exploitation of free labor, then, would highlight the very real ways in which control ofnew productive resources is concentrated in the hands of the few, allowing them to appropriate and profit from the activity of the many who must surrender their personalinformation to secure access to the productive and informational resources of the digital era

I suspect the sticking point for Hesmondhalgh would be the first element of Wright's formula: in particular, the “material deprivation" of the many. It is certainly possible to argue that lumping together the capture of personal data with other more physically severe forms of exploitation like sweatshop labor risks sensationalizing the former and trivializing the latter. It is also possible, however, to argue that, even though the effects in terms of immiseration are vastly different, there are structural, analytic similarities and, further, that this similarity cuts across and links capitalist class relations in ways that warrant concern and intervention in the name of socialjustice. The privatization and commercialization of the Internet is a form of material deprivation and enclosure insofar as it separates users from the infrastructure that supports their communicative activities. It reinforces and reproduces the structure of social relations wherein a small group controls the productive resources used by the many and allows economic advantages to accrue from this control. The ownership class that includes the founders of Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and soon could not exist without capturing andcontrolling components of the productive infrastructure. The value that they appropriate stems in large part from their ability to capture aspects of theactivity of those who access their resources, and their ability to do so is directly related to their ownership and control of these resources. Bluntly put, the ability to exploit this activity for commercial purposes for the economic benefit of the few would disappear if these resources were commonly owned and controlled.

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The obvious objection is that going online to converse, shop, explore, and network is clearly not a form of wage labor, even if people are in a sense compensated with free access to useful resources in exchange for submitting to detailed forms of value-generating monitoring. This activity is not a job (at least not for most of those who go online): they are not submitting their activity to the direct dictates of a supervisor, and they are not receiving wages. Exploitation can clearly take place in the absence of wages, but does it retain any meaning in a context in which users do not sacrifice control over their productive activity?The question is potentially misleading insofar as the digital environment facilitates what might be described as a redoubling of creative or productive activity. When we create a blog or post an item on Facebook or even purchase an item or view a web page, we do so in ways that are, in many cases, unsupervised and minimally controlled. At the same time, however, we generate information about our activities over which we sacrifice control in exchange for access to the infrastructure and the services it supports. In a sense, then, we lose control over some aspects of our online productivity even when this remains free from familiar forms of oversight and control.

Just as we sacrifice a degree of control over the use of our productive activity when we enter into a workspace, so too do we sacrifice a degree of control over how our activity is used when we agree to the terms of service for a particular website or online service (or even when we browse the Internet, which collects information about our activities without notifying us). Those who control the means of online sociability have the power to set the terms of access, and these terms include the establishment of certain rights over the information provided by users—rights that tend to be outlined in cursory, oftenincomprehensible and qualified fashion. Separation (the private control over online resources for sociability) begets separation (the establishment of rights of use over information generated by users). The various “terms of use” and end-user license agreements posted by social networking sites establish their rights over the use, sale, and transfer of information collected online.

That is to say, forms of socializing, interacting, and transacting that once relied upon other resources, as well as new forms of sociability, are increasingly dependent upon an infrastructure provided by a third party. This is not to say that the introduction of a third party is entirely novel. Certainly the phone company, for example, served as a for-profit intermediary (although not an advertising-supported one). In the current context, rather, we can identify an increasing tendency toward the use of a commercially supported mediatedinfrastructure for a growing range of activities: the replacement, for example, of a cash purchase in a store by an online purchase; the tendency to text a friend or a colleague in the next dorm room or office instead of knocking on his or her door; as well as the creation of new forms of socialitó that are integrally tied to developing commercial infrastructures (such as "friending"someone on Facebook), and so on. When we are separated from the means of socialization, this does not mean we do not have access to them; rather, we come to rely upon the provision by their parties of technologies for socialization that separate us from the information upon which our social lives rely. Crucial resources for interaction are no longer in our own hands (at least to the extent that they once were), but are stored in servers owned and controlled by commercial entities.

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We do not have to go far to figure out why people are so willing to use such sites: they provide a ready, convenient, and entertaining way of enriching, extending, and preserving our connections with others. What requires a bit more explanation is how we might discern, in a voluntary and rewarding activity, the traces of exploitation. The result of the form of separation facilitated by Facebook is not the dispossession of users, but rather the alienability of the product of their online social activity: the fact that the fruits of this activity can become a resource whose uses range far beyond their control. Or, given that the extraction of the value of information gatheredabout users relies on the same logic of resource enclosure and the consequent asymmetry of power relations that structure the "freely"agreed-upon surrender of control over personal information, the more salient question is why should we care?

The notion of exploitation is meant to invoke questions ofsocial justice. From a Marxian-inflected critical perspective, the charge of exploitation is both a term of critique and a call to action: exploitation is, as Holmstrom puts it, “evil" because it “involves force and domination in manifold ways and because it deprives workers of control that should be theirs."19 The force is not often directly manifested in the compulsion to surrender control over one's labor power, but is built into asómmetrical social relations and manifests itself overtly when these are challenged. Likewise, the privatization and commercialization of much of the digital media infrastructure does not take place by force, but merely reproduces existing property relations by extending them into the digital realm. The background of compulsion is built into the legal structure and regulatory regimes that enable the privatization process. We might note the indirect effects of compulsion by positing that, given the choice, users are more likely to prefer not having to submit to comprehensive forms of monitoring in order to access online and networked resources, as suggested by recent surveys that indicate opposition to monitoring-based profiling and high levels of concern about online information collection.2º They do not freely choose to exchange their personal information for convenience but do so under conditions structured by the private ownership of network resources and the attendant low level of awareness about actual tracking practices. If what concerns us about workplace exploitation is both the forms of compulsion that underwrite it and the toll it takes on workers in terms of physicalimmiseration (exhaustion and worse) and loss of control over their creative activity (what Holmstrom calls alienation), do these concerns carry over into critiques of the exploitation of free labor? Here we might note a distinction free labor does not carry with it the same physical toll as some forms of workplace exploitation, not least because users can stop when they wish without threat of losing their job (at least in some contexts). However, they do lose control of aspects of their productive activity in ways that are, in the terms suggested by the critique of alienation, turned back upon them. The goal of comprehensive surveillance is t discover those levers that allow marketers to channel consumer behavior accordin to commercial imperatives—to relegate the consumer to the role of feedback mecha nism in an accelerating cycle of production and consumption. As the founder c cybernetics put it in an embittered paean to the power of feedback-based marketin

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A certain precise mixture of religion, pornography, and pseudo-science wi sell an illustrated newspaper. .. To determine these, we have our machiner of fan-ratings, straw votes, opinion samplings and other psychological in vestigations with the common man as their object... .Luckily for us, thes merchants of lies, these exploiters of gullibility have not yet arrived at suc a pitch of perfection as to have things all their own way.21

The goal of marketers and other exploiters of gullibility is, of course, to realiz the implicit threat in Wiener'sformulation: to overcome the “not yet."

In more concrete terms, the goal of marketers is, as Ian Ayres puts it in his boo on data mining, to “predict what you will want and what you will do"—eve: when you yourself do not know or are unsure.22 This does not mean predictin some kind of inevitable future; it means learning how to manipulate condition appeals, and contexts in order to yield a desired behavior or action. It means usin the detailed information gathered about people to accelerate and channel th consumption process. It is only about serving consumers better if that means get ting them to believe that they must consume more copiously and expeditiousl The goal is to determine what triggers are most effective in stimulating consume behavior as well as how to getaround the reservations and concerns that migh forestall consumption. It is to discover what appeals—whether to one's insecuri ties, one's anxieties and health concerns—are most effective in driving behavio and what subconscious factors might influence behavior without consumers real izing what is taking place.

To the extent that consumers participate in generating the information tha feeds into the manipulation process, we might level the charge of exploita tion to highlight the wayin which the capture of personal information turn our own activity against ourselves. Marx describes this as estrangement o alienation:

The alienation ofthe worker in his product means not only that his labo becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, in dependently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes à power on it own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on th object confronts him as somethinghostile and alien.23

Although Marx is here talking about the product of wage labor in the contex of capitalist social relations, it is a formulation that illuminates the trajectory o information commodities generated by consumers and then turned back upon them for the purposes of manipulating their actions and desires.

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The alienated world envisioned by interactive marketers is one in which all of our actions (and the ways in which they are aggregated and sorted) are systematically turned back upon us. It is, in the end, a disturbing vision: an informational– ized world in which the very atmosphere through which we move has become privatized and commercialized. Every message we write, every video we post, every item we buy or view, our time-space paths and patterns of social interaction all become data points in algorithms for sorting, predicting, and managing our behavior. Some of these data points are spontaneous, the result of the intentional action of consumers; others are induced, the result of ongoing, randomized experiments. The complexity of the algorithm and the opacity of correlation render it all but impossible for those without access to the databases to determine why they may have been denied a loan, targeted for a particular political campaign message, or saturated with ads at a particular time and place when they have been revealed to be most vulnerable to marketing. Much will hinge on whether the power to predict can be translated into the ability to manage behavior, but this is the bet that marketers are making. Or, more accurately, this is the bet that à society makes when it turns to à monitoring-based system of data mining and predictive analytics as a means for supporting its information and communication infrastructure.

In part, the question of whether exploitation applies to forms of free labor hinges on an attempt to hold separate the realms of leisure, consumption, and domesticity from the workplace proper. Marx's critique of capitalism emerged within the context of a distinctly modern realm of differentiation. The development of wage labor relied on maintaining a clear distinction between the workplace and other realms of social life—not least for the purposes of surveillance and monitoring. Interactive digital technologies facilitate forms of de-differentiation that challenge this clear-cut distinction: we can work from home and socialize in our workplaces, thanks to mobile phones, text messaging, portable computers, and so on. At the same time, the cultural and economic shifts associated with the development of so-called immaterial labor capitalize on the capture of activities that blur clear-cut distinctions between realms of leisure, labor, and domesticity. As Terranova puts it, quoting Toni Negri: “The social factory’ describes a process whereby ‘work processes have shifted from the factory to society, thereby setting in motion a truly complex machine."24 When we help build the value of Facebook with work we do at home, while on the train, or on the beach, we are participating in this social factory.

At the same time, the line between online creativity and the workplace proper is becoming much less clear in many professional contexts. Academics, politicians, and TV producers alike are encouraged to blog, send tweets, and network online to promote themselves and their work. A researcher who studies public broadcasting recently told me that whereas once upon a time television producers put their work in “the can" and could then be elsewhere when it aired, now they are expected to be online, following the online discussion and posting tweets in response to viewer comments when their programs air.

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In some cases, the obligation to network online is becoming institutionalized and recognized as a potential source of value. Consider, for example, the development of applications that allow employers to capitalize on contacts harvested from their employees' social networks. The press release for a company called Appirio, for example, outlines the triple value of employee social networking data as a resource for recruiting, sales, and marketing—all of this without having to pay employees extra for providing the data. Appirio's marketing application piggybacks on Facebook to increase the size of a company's “virtual account team” by leveraging relationships that employees might already have:

The employee can see if a friend has become a lead, bought a product, attended an event...etc. If the employee chooses they can contact their friend through Facebook to make a connection and ultimately help contribute to their company’s bottom line (and maybe even their own bonus!).25

The same data that can provide leads for potential hires and clients serve treble duty by providing data for targeted marketing appeals: “Based on a search of keywords in friend profiles, the application makes recommendations of friends who might be interested in the offer, which users can then choose to take action on."26 The application links data from the social networks of individual employees with a proprietary consumer relationship marketing database in order “to track leads, make follow-up offers, and report on campaign success to see how their viral campaigns stack up to other marketing programs."27

The future envisioned by such applications is one in which online activities serve as multiple sources of value for employers who seek to capture and monetize the value created by the after-work activities of their employees as well as by commercial entities that harvest detailed personal information online. There is double logic of appropriation at work in this scenario: private ownership of workplace resources and private ownership of communication resources are both used to extract value from activities that take place beyond the workplace. The type of concessions that employers can extract from employees is part of the ongoing struggle over wage labor contracts conditioned by asómmetric control of productive resources. Appirio envisions a future in which submission of one's social network to workplace priorities becomes one of the conditions of earning one's livelihood.

If, as Hesmondhalgh argues, the notion of exploitation is an explanatory concept as well as a historical and analótical one, it is tempting to note the way in which it helps account for the forms of anticipated productivity that characterize the digital economy. The value accruing to the privatization of network resources is, at least in part, dependent upon the ability to extract productive data from users—data that can serve as a resource for advertisers, employers, political campaigns, and policing. Unlike more material commodities, there is no clearly defined saturation point for the consumption of data—as long as automated systems can be developed for sorting and processing it. Individual humans may be limited in their ability to absorb data, but not databases. Nor is there a clear limit on the amount of information that can be extracted, which grows along with the opportunities for interaction, transaction, and communication—even as the cost of data collection continues to drop. It is the anticipated productivity of data collection and mining that serves as justification—at least in some quarters—for refusing to regulate it more aggressively. The threat from companies that prefer so-called self-regulation is that enhanced privacy legislation will put a check on the growing online economy. This threat was invoked by a privacy attorney who claimed that proposals to require websites to include a do-not-track option “may lead to the Internet economy—one of the few economic bright spots—being shackled."28

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Privacy-based critiques do not quite capture the element of productive power and control at work in the promise of monitoring-based marketing. If privacy violations constitute an invasion—a loss of control over the process of self-disclosure market monitoring includes an additional element of control and management: the systematic use of personal information to predict and influence. The critique of exploitation addresses this element of power and control. Defenders of market monitoring will argue that individual consumer behavior remains uncoerced. Critical approaches, however, locate coercion not solely at the level of discrete individual decisions, but also in the social relations that structure them. In this regard, the invocation of the notion of exploitation parallels Jonathan Beller’s claim in his contribution to this volume that, “an interest in labor should force us to rethink the logistics of media platforms and see them as technologies formed in the struggle between labor and capital and thus by and for the expropriation of labor."

Given the difference between post-Fordist forms of productive consumption and industrial modes of production, a critical approach to exploitation needs to be revisited. This chapter argues for the importance of considering how the components of exploitation (the capture of unpaid surplus labor, coercion, and alienation) operate within the context of technologically facilitated forms of commercial surveillance. While these components are interconnected—alienation, for example, implies the existence of background forms of coercion—they appear in different configurations in the realms of consumer productivity or immaterial forms of collective, social labor. Some critics focus on the element ofunpaid labor, others on the element of alienation. The challenge is to think these together against the background of the coercion embedded in relations of control over communication resources and the forms of productive surveillance it facilitates.

Mobilizing the Critique of Exploitation

The potential usefulness of an exploitation-based critique of online monitoring is that it invites us to reframe questions of individual choice and personal pleasure in terms of social relations. In abstract analytic terms, there are structural similarities between the extraction of value in the wage labor exchange and in the

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convenience-for-personal-information exchange. Both rely on the private enclosure of productive resources to structure the surrender of controlover aspects of productive activity. In both cases, this surrender of control returns in the form of alienation—the misrecognition of one's own participation in thevery forces that seem to come from elsewhere. Both contribute to the generation of wealth for those who own and control the productive resources. In more concrete terms, exploitation in the social factory looks very different from that in the actual one. It is the sign of a certain kind of material luxury to be able to be exploited online—to have the leisure time and resources to engage in the activities that are monitored and tracked. Both highlight different ways in which the potential of individual and social life is diminished—in which the productive capacities developed by society fall short of their promise of an unalienated existence. The point of running them alongside one another is not to diminish the brutality of the exploitation of industrial capitalism but to add depth and urgency to the critique of exploitation in the emerging information economy.

Notes