DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY

18th-century humanoid automata functions as a model, on the one hand, for submission and use and, on the other, for empirical analysis.

Foucault has often been criticized for ignoring the racial others in his historiography.6 Notably, his concept of docility displacesOrientalist traces by solely focusing on the European subject in a selective genealogy. This absence becomes more critical in the analysis of an automaton that carries significations of Oriental "other,"such as Kempelen's chess-playing automaton. However, I believe that the trick of the chess-playing automaton involves more than just exchanging the enacted body of the European chess player with the represented body of the Turk, animated through its mechanical artifice. It also includes initial assumptions that were set up in the audience by the automaton's chess performance that were crucial in influencing the public debates on the mechanized reason that provided the larger context for these performances. These initial assumptions are closely tied to Orientalist undercurrents that were exploited by Enlightenment discourse in order to configure the docile subject on the image of the Turk.7

The Orientalist assumptions that were active in Enlightenment automata were also effective in the cultural performance of Kempelen's automaton. I will focus on the two main aspects of the affordance of the image of the Turk as a significant part of themain interface of the chess-playing automaton.8The first critical aspect of the Turk's performance is its liminal quality. This liminality created a buffer zone against the risk associated with the idea of the man-machine that most Enlightenment humanoid automata performed. That potential risk was often associated withinstigations of libertinism, atheism, and insurrectionin public due to the heretical understanding of a body without a soul (Vartanian 1960). Relegating this precarious role to an Oriental figure had, in fact, a long tradition with origins in medieval romance literature (Truitt 2004). The Oriental automata, through its association with liminal spaces and experiencesin these literary accounts, conveyed surveillance, discipline, and enforcement of limits of morality.

The second aspect of the Turk's performance is a particular form of docility that conveys the idea of the disciplined productive body, which played a salient role in the formation of the enlightened culture (Schaffer 1999). The association of the Oriental with docility has its roots in medieval theology, where the Muslim subjects were considered as strict followersof religious code. Linking this association with the discourse of Oriental automata, Christian theology configured a particular discourse of Muslim as automaton (Biddick2011). Furthermore, docility prefigures the hidden chess player's performance of the intellectual labor on behalf of theOriental automaton. This dual performance of docility highlights the question of the intellectual laborin the context of the epistemic renovation in 18th-century Europe (Foucault 1977). These two aspects of the Turk's performance—docility and liminality—are crucial for graspingits function as a model of power for the idealization of a social order in the context of the large-scale processes of mechanization of labor in Europe in the 18th century.

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The chess-playing automaton performed its role as a model of power in multiple layers, the first of which was the demonstration of knowledge as a tool of power. The hidden chess player was the open secret of Kempelen's (and later Maelzel's) shows (Carroll 1975). Kempelen admitted that his automaton was just a “happy deception" (Cook 1995). As Schaffer notes, one of the roles of the Enlightenment automata was “to allow the selective entry by th[e] power to the inner workings of art and nature" (Schaffer 1999: 135). In other words, this open secret was also a conceited wink of the guardians of knowledge and power, reminding the general public about their privilege and status

The element of mystery in Kempelen's performance can be considered withinthesystem of representation of the natural philosophy, which perceived the whole of nature as a divine theater. The effects of this system of representation could be exploited to create a particularmoral impression on its audience (Schaffer 1983). Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid expounds this moral effect as follows: “Upon the theatre of nature we see innumerable effects, which requires an agent endowed with active power; but the agent is behind the scene." Kempelen's automaton benefitedfrom the assumptions within this theater as a significantrepresentation of the technomythical idea of the mechanized mind, and was not just a machine but also provided the language that made it possible to explicate that myth (Beaune1989). As in every technical medium, it carried the inscriptions of discursive traditions and formulations that defined its culturalsystem of significations. The Automaton Chess Player performed these inscribed notions that were formulated as technical puzzles, which have remained relevant throughout the history of the mechanization of the mind. The puzzle of the mechanical chess player, or the mechanized symbol processing, has been tackled by many notable scholars and practitioners, including Gottfried Leibniz, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Babbage, Norbert Wiener, and Alan Turing.

In Europe in the second half of the 18th century, automata performed as a secure experimental apparatus for exploring impenetrable ontological liminalities in a more systemic way and most of the time simulated life in order to redefine it (Riskin2003). Fueled by the mechanistic philosophy, humanoid automata transformed not only the cultural attitude toward living creatures but also machines, as they performed the idea that mechanisms were also living beings. The mutual relationship between the animation of machinery and the mechanization of life was explored through the experimental apparatus of humanoid and animal automata and was popularized through the debates instigated by their public exhibition in Europe.

Wolfgang von Kempelen's Chess Player Automaton formulated the question of the mechanized life with a unique emphasis: Can the mind exist without the body? To this question, it gave two answers simultaneously: yes and not yet. The actual answer was not yet, as the automaton was indeed controlled by a human operator. However, the deceptive yes response was still valuable as a philosophical game1º for grappling with the ideas that were later made technically possible and implemented systematically, such as self-regulating mechanisms.

In contrast to other automata of the 18th century, the Turk's apparatus did not act as mere clockwork; instead, it gave the impression of a self-regulating system that could counter external actions within the symbolic logic of chess."1 As historian of technology Otto Mayr (1970) suggests, in contrast to the idea of clockwork universe, which was the political universe of autocratic feudalism, the mechanical, political, and economic ideas of self-regulating systems influenced the Enlightenment ideas of liberal subjects and democracy. This association is partly constructed as a result of the rationalization of the socioeconomic life through industrialization, where subjects self-regulate according to their rational economic interests. Philosophical arguments for such conflict-free social systems had already been provided by various scholars, the most famous of whom was Gottfried Leibniz.

The preceding century had seen Leibniz's proposal of a universal symbolic language or algebra of thought. Since the expansion of the commerce in Leibniz's time, there had been a search for a universal language that would allow European traders to establish a sustainable communication with the people in the new colonies. Leibniz's universal language could be manipulated by a logical calculation framework, calculus ratiocinator (ca. 1680), which was a precursor model of modern computing (Wiener 1948). Leibniz suggested that the mind is a spiritual automaton that operates involuntarily based on a predetermined set of laws. “The operation of spiritual automata, that is of souls, is not mechanical, but it contains in the highest degree all that is beautiful in mechanism"(Leibniz 2005: 365). However, the automaton/self-moving soul does not eliminate agency for Leibniz, because symbols and the symbolic systems of language play a constitutive role for reasoning. Based on this principle, Leibniz proposed calculus ratiocinator as an ultimate solution for all conflicts between the people of the world. This perspective finds its expressionin Leibniz's Machiavellian motto calculemus (let us calculate!): “if controversies were to arise there would be no more need ofdisputation between two philosophers than between two accountants. For it would suffice to taketheir pencils in their hands, and say to each other: Calculemus."12

Chess is à perfect example for computable symbolic systems; consequently, when the Turk spoke the language of the symbolic via chess, it entered“the world of the machine" (Lacan 1991: 47). But that machine denoted a particular type of subjectivity because of the nature of the actors and their limited set of behaviors that are strictly defined within a set of rules in the game of chess. As Deleuze and Guattari state:

Chess is a game of State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop.

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Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with a relative power, anc these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the ches player or the game's form of interiority. ... Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary's pieces: their functioning is structural.... Chess is indeed war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war. (Deleuze and Guattar 2004:352)

Consequently, an automatized chessboard represents the ideal Enlightenmen universe, where the subjects and their possible actions are coded according to the regulations informed by the power structure of the society. Each subject is endowed with a relative power, and they cannot go beyond the roles for which they qualify.Particularly, when these intrinsic properties are abstracted into geometrio functions and when combined with the functions of other subjects, they have the potential to exhibit numerous but finite possibilities for a final outcome. This i another reason for mechanized chess being a model for imagining a society whose coded subjects articulate a plurality of results. Thus, the chess-playing Turk embodied an integration of the self-regulating liberal subject with the mechanica docility of the Oriental, performed within the coded socioeconomic universe o the game of chess.

In the mid-19th century, during the Turk's tour in the Americas, Edgar Alar Poe took this seemingly conflicting performance for his argument of why ar automaton chess player would be impossible. In an editorial published in the Richmond-based Southern Literary Messenger, he surmised that “[n]o one move in chess necessarily follows upon any one other. From no particular dispositior of the men at one period of a game can we predicate their disposition at a different period" (Poe 2009: 1). This perceived paradox was mainly due to the assumption Poe had for the possible operational principle of the automaton, which was mainly based on the linear mechanism paradigm,where the interaction between the mechanism and the environment is not a relevant factor during its operation. Poe explicitly based hisargument ona comparison of the performance of the chess-playing automaton with Charles Babbage's calculating machine anc concluded that:

There is then no analogy whatever between the operations of the Chess-Player, and those of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage, and if we choose to call the former a pure machine we must be prepared to admit that it is, beyond all comparison, the most wonderful of theinventions of mankind. (Poe, 1910: 84)

Poe's resistance to the idea of mechanized thinking may also be related to a particular kind of predicament that concerned his intellectual labor. The very possibility of chess automaton as a “pure machine” must have posed an uncanny prospect for Poe as an intellectual worker. The designer of the actual calculating machine, Babbage, had already implicated the particular kind of skill and labor that Poe uses for his intellectual work as part of the mechanization and division of the cognitive labor system. Charles Babbage specifically used newspapers as an example

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of a manufactory in which the division of labor, both mentally and bodily, is admirably illustrated, and in which also the effect of the domestic economy is well exemplified. It is scarcely imagined, by the thousands who read that paper in various quarters of the globe, what a scene of organized activity the factory presents during the whole night, or what a quantity of talent and mechanical skill put in action for their amusement and information (Babbage 1963: 216).

Following Adam Smith's analysis in The Wealth of Nations, Babbage thought that the process of division of mental labor would serve for the eventualgoal of transferring the functions of the human cognitive labor to the operations of a machine. Thus, for Poe, chess-playing automaton, with its allusions to such a "manufactory of information" processing, must have posed an uncanny puzzle also for its implications about the exchange value of his previously irreplaceable intellectual labor. In one of his later speculative narratives, Poe depicted von Kempelen as an alchemist who transforms lead into gold, which results in an enormous reduction of the value of gold and an inflation in the price of lead in international markets.13 This narrative could be read as an allusion to the expected decline in the exchange value of the intellectual labor as an unavoidable outcome of the mechanization of reason through a division of cognitive labor.

The imminent threat for the privileged labor position of the enlightened subject as a result of the division of cognitive labor was already under way in the 19th century. Industrial capitalism's premise was that any of the roles in the socioeconomic chessboard could be played by anyone when these functions are regulated into smaller units through industrial organization.

This social program as an instance of the expansion of the Cartesian mechanistic universe is mainly guided by the flow of human thinking into computational organizations and apparatuses, including the state. In this volume, Jonathan Beller's essay emphasizes this point through a close reading of Villem Flusser's works. Particularly, the scientific discourse of the Enlightenment led the trend toward the encoding of human thought into numerical representations. My historical analysis considers the Chess Playing Automaton as one of the behavioral prototypes of this trend inhabiting the associated tensions of the emergent apparatuses that later realize these initially imaginary encodings into commodified social and cultural programs such as cameras or computers. In fact, Flusser finds similarities between photographers’ attempts to find possibilities within the program of the camera and the chess players’ pursuit of finding new possibilities in the program of chess (Flusser 2000: 27–30). In both instances, humans and apparatuses merge into a unity, which explains how human functionaries of apparatuses both control them and are controlled by them. These apparatuses, as a codified set of social relations, are integrated into other socioeconomic apparatuses ranging from industrial production regimes to disciplinary apparatuses of the state. By emphasizing this particular definition of apparatus, Jonathan Beller guides us through a potential and common risk of ignoring the socioeconomic ground of their emergence,

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There is an immense similarity between Flusser's use of apparatus and that of Michel Foucault's, which denotes strategic constellations of tangible and intangible tools, institutions, and discourses that are inscribed into politics of knowledge and power.Apparatus/Dispositif, according to Foucault,is “a set of strategies of the relations of supporting, and supported by certain types of knowledge."14 Foucault uses the term apparatus in order to move beyond discourses to include material, behavioral, and institutional elements for describing formations of structures of knowledge. The term frequently appears in relation to his studies on governmentality from the mid-1970s.

Foucault uses the prison as an example of an apparatus by emphasizing its optic attributes that are configured based on Bentham's Panopticon architecture. The prison in this view is simultaneously a technical medium designed for seeing without being seen and consequently a tool for subjectification by internalization of surveillance. As Agamben succinctly describes, the apparatus “is first of all a machine that produces subjectifications, and only as such it is also a machine of governance" (Agamben 2009: 20). As a result, the term apparatus provides a very useful vantage point for studying mechanization of mind withanintegrated focus on its technical, industrial mediations such as the division of cognitive labor as a disciplinary formation and its constitutive socioeconomic conditions.

Consequently, the analysis of the evolution of the industrial cognitive labor apparatus from its imaginary Enlightenment conceptual prototype to large-scale computable social systems in postindustrial capitalism needs to take into account the neoliberal grounds of its emergence.

The transfer of the functionary role of the cognitive laborapparatus from the privileged labor of the Enlightened subject to unqualified crowds of the neoliberal cognitive capitalism is primarily enabled by the digital networks of the 21st century. This transfer further extends the effect of the foreclosure of the semiosis for the cognitive worker by microdivision of cognitive tasks and its distribution across cultural, temporal, and geographical zones.

Return of the Crowds

Crowdsourcing is a hybrid concept that merges the neoliberal outsourcing paradigm with the crowds on the digital networks. In the June 2006 issue of Wired magazine, Jeff Howe evangelized the concept to its technologically savvy neoliberal audience as follows:

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Technological advances in everything from product design software to digital video cameras are breaking down the cost barriers that once separated amateursfrom professionals. Hobbyists, part-timers, and dabblerssuddenly have a market for their efforts, as smart companies in industries as disparate as pharmaceuticals and television discover ways to tap the latent talent of the crowd. The labor isn't always free, but it costs a lot less than paying traditional employees. It's not outsourcing; it's crowdsourcing. (Howe 2006:1)

Crowdsourcing as an alternative to traditional employment methods also signifies an unexpected return of the concept of the crowds to the agenda of the global North. But atthis time, its discursive signification is limited within the communities of the global South. As William Mazzarella expounds:

Crowds, supposedly, belong to the past of the neoliberal democracies of the global North. By the same token, they also mark the present of non- or insufficiently liberal polities in the global South. .. crowds are the dark matter that pull the liberal subject from its past, whereas multitudes occupy the emergent horizon of a postliberal politics. (Mazzarella2010: 697)

Mazzarella finds the distinction between crowds and multitudes as parallel to the distinction between Foucault's “society of discipline"and Gilles Deleuze's postindustrial “control society." While crowds correspond to industrial discipline, multitudes can only be considered in the context of the postindustrial control society where command by control is “fractal and aims to integrate conflicts not by imposing a coherent social apparatus but by controlling differences" (Mazzarella 2010:700). Command by control also characterizes the mode of production in the postindustrial service economy with full integration of computers and digital networks.

At this point, it is useful to look at the concept of immaterial labor and some of the assumptions it conveys, because it is the most prominent activity that gives its characteristics to the multitude. Because of its reliance on the commodification of communication, which inherently forms social relationships, immaterial labor denotes the process through which “social" becomes “economic." According to Maurizio Lazzarato, as an extension of the commodification of social relationships, the subjectivity becomes the “raw material"of immaterial labor (Lazzarato 1996). This is partly because the “production today is directly the production of a social relation" (Mazzarella 2010: 700). Here, the key assumption that needs to be challenged is that the economic expression of the social relationships happens in the same sociocultural environment. However, crowdsourcing unsettles this relationship because of its effect of deterritorialization.

Consequently, we need to consider the production of subjectivity in the context of the global system of cognitive labor practices. Despite its similarity to the industrial commodity consumption/production cycles, the information production cycles are different in terms of their effects on subjectivity, since their immediate domain of effect is in the information and communication industry that forms the cultural fabric of the society by simultaneously constructing active consumer/communicator subjects. As a result, “[t]he productionofsubjectivity ceases to be only an instrument of social control (for the reproduction of mercantile relationships) and becomes directly productive" (Lazzarato 1996: 1).But how wouldthis process still be valid when the communicator is no longer a consumer as a result of both the fragmentation of intellectual work and the global income gaps between the producers and the consumers of information commodities, or between the multitude and the crowd?

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Asimilarsetofassumptions characterizes Hardtand Negri's conceptofmultitude. They expand the characteristics of postindustrial production onto the multitude and claim that “[w]hat the multitude produces is not just goods orservices; the multitude also and most importantly produces cooperation, communication, forms of life, and social relationships" (Hardt and Negri2005:339). Further, Hardt and Negri ascribe an autonomous character to the subjectivities that are produced through cognitive labor mainly due toits assumed collective nature. “Such new forms of labor.. . present new possibilities for economic self-management, since the mechanisms of cooperation necessary for production are contained in the labor itself"(Hardtand Negri 2004: 336). This characteristic of the immaterial labor is presented in distinct contrast to the industrial notion of the labor power, which is considered“variable capital" in Marxist terms of political economy, since it can be activated and formed as a productive force only by capital.

However, I believe the crowdsourcing apparatus, with its unique configuration, challenges all of these assumptions and essentially negates the essentialist distinction between the industrial and postindustrial configuration of labor. In digital labor markets maintained by crowdsourcing protocols, crowds are subjected to a form of division of labor that is reminiscent of industrial production. But this division of labor differsfrom the industrial division of labor in terms of its effects in its relation to the global neoliberal socioeconomic formations that constitute a distinct condition for the workers of the global South. These conditions could be described as the gray zones of international laws that are designed by neoliberal policies to take advantage of stark regional differences inlabor costs, which Aihwa Ong conceptualizes as “system of exception."

Crowdsourcing as a Neoliberal Exception Apparatus

Aihwa Ong describes neoliberalism as a global system of exception, borrowing a term from German political theorist Carl Schmitt. The state of exception, in the Schmittian sense, defines a political liminality that is established outside of the juridical order, created by the sovereign rule. Ong, similar to Schmitt's description, emphasizes inclusive as well as exclusive aspectsof neoliberal political formations, because these exceptions primarily work for making decisions outside of a consistent legislative framework. She formulates the neoliberal exception in relation to “the interplay among technologies of governing and of disciplining, of inclusion and exclusion, of giving value or denying value to human conduct"(Ong 2006: 5). A significant example of these technologies of exclusion is labor arbitrage.

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According to Ong, labor arbitrage is one of the strategies that informs the conditions of governing and disciplining by way of deterritorializing labor. Labor arbitrage breaks apart the traditional relationship between the national labor legislations and the worker as citizen. Ong describes labor arbitrage as “the latest technique to exploit time-spacecoordinates in order to accumulate profits, putting into play a new kind of flexibility" (Ong 2006: 174). Cognitive labor is particularly susceptible to labor arbitrage technologies because computerized division of labor enables the fragmentation oftasks into smaller and standardizable units, allowing their completion by an assembly of workers across the globe (Ong 2006: 161). I believe crowdsourcingis an apparatus of a neoliberal system of exception that signifies a novel instance of labor arbitrage, where online cognitive labor markets are established as aggregation platforms that simultaneously act as a techno-immigration system.

The exploitative aspects of cognitive labor arbitrage are clearly exemplified by Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing system. The Turker community seems to have varied responses to the claims of exploitation. Some U.S.-based Turkers oppose such claims and state that their interest in Mechanical Turk is solely motivated by the novelty of the experience. This fact could be explained by the seemingly negligible amount of income that canbe earned through AMT for à U.S.-based worker.15

On the other hand, workers from countries such as India or China appear to be mostly interested in Mechanical Turk as a primary income source, though some of them find that AMT undervalues their labor. For example, Rajesh Mago, a computer freelancer from New Delhi, criticizes Mechanical Turk in his blog as follows:

They call the assignments posted by their requester as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks). So, is the human intelligence worth cents only? LOL! I know no one is forcing anyone to do these assignments but yet it doesn't justify the usage word “intelligence"—a mockery of human brain.16

Mago states that he completed more than 10,000 HITs working for a few hours a day for Mechanical Turk through 2008. He earned \$572.62. His HIT approval rate was98.2%; in other words, the requesters he worked for rejected approximately 2% of his completed tasks, for which he was not compensated at all. According to Mago, requesters do not give any credible reason for their rejection. Moreover, even the payments for accepted works are most of the time delayed, a matter that appears to affect many other Indian Turkers. Rajesh Mago does not work for Mechanical Turk anymore, and, in retrospect, he concludes that:

Mechanical Turking was kind ofaddictive as I always challenged myself to test and experiment and work for low-paying HITs thinking that I will be able to make decent money. But, Mechanical Turk requesters are pretty smart; they had done more R&D than me andwere sure that they would get the work done at the lowest rates or for free!17

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Mago's case highlights the unregulated nature of the emerging global cognitive labor market and evokes the Gastarbeiter (guest worker) program of the economic wonder years of postwar Germany in terms ofthe long-term historical interest of Western industries in labor arbitrage. The German Gastarbeiter program has been a prominent model for establishingan immigration without rights legislative system and it has recently inspired U.S. lawmakers during the fiery political debate on the immigrant worker program (H-1B visa) for the U.S. information technology industry (Jacoby 2009). The German Gastarbeiter program initially allowed only male workers fromYugoslavia, Greece, Spain, and Turkey ona temporary immigration status. These men were required to work up to 80 hours a week, supplying the labor needs of the booming postwar German industry at a much lower minimum wage than domestic workers and were exploited in a state of exception outside of the normal legislations, rights, and union protections.

The current neoliberal system of exception advances this early form of labor arbitrage by the help of digitalnetworks. In addition, the peculiar temporality of the digital network with its “timeless time"creates another effect—the time arbitrage—which furtheraccentuates the consequences of labor arbitrage. According toShehzad Nadeem:

Time arbitrage can be defined as the exploitation oftimediscrepancies between geographical labor markets to make a profit. This operates on two scales. At the geographical scale, many companies exploit time zone differences to achieve a 24-hour business cycle. At the labor process scale, time arbitrage can mean the extension of work hours or the acceleration of the labor process. (Nadeem 2009: 21)

One may consider the acceleration of digital labor processes as an extension of the general acceleration of the pace of life on digital networks. According to Manuel Castells, digital networks replace the clock time of the industrial age with what he calls“timeless time," which is

defined by the use of newinformation/communication technologies in a relentless effort to annihilate time, to compress years in seconds, seconds in split seconds. Furthermore, the most fundamental aim is to eliminate sequencing of time, including past, present and future in the same hypertext. (Castells 2004: 12)

In addition, Castells characterizes network time as “the time of the dominant functions and powerful social actors in the network society" (Castells 2009: xli).

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