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# Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory
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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, Jef Howe evangelized the concept to its technologically savvy neoliberal audience as follows:
Technological advances in everything from product design software to digital video cameras are breaking down the cost barriers that once separated amateurs from professionals. Hobbyists, part-timers, and dabblers suddenly have a market for their eforts, 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 at this 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 insuficiently 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. (Mazzarella 2010: 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 diferences” (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 efect of deterritorialization.
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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 diferent in terms of their efects on subjectivity, since their immediate domain of efect 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 production of subjectivity ceases to be only an instrument of social control (for the reproduction of mercantile relationships) and becomes directly productive” (Lazzarato 1996: 1). But how would this 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?
A similar set of assumptions characterizes Hardt and Negri’s concept of multitude. They expand the characteristics of postindustrial production onto the multitude and claim that “[w]hat the multitude produces is not just goods or services; the multitude also and most importantly produces cooperation, communication, forms of life, and social relationships” (Hardt and Negri 2005: 339). Further, Hardt and Negri ascribe an autonomous character to the subjectivities that are produced through cognitive labor mainly due to its 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” (Hardt and 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 difers from the industrial division of labor in terms of its efects 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 diferences in labor costs, which Aihwa Ong conceptualizes as “system of exception.”
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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 aspects of 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.
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-space coordinates 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 of tasks into smaller and standardizable units, allowing their completion by an assembly of workers across the globe (Ong 2006: 161). I believe crowdsourcing is 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 can be earned through AMT for a 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
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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 was 98.2%; 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 afect many other Indian Turkers. Rajesh Mago does not work for Mechanical Turk anymore, and, in retrospect, he concludes that:
Mechanical Turking was kind of addictive as I always challenged myself to test and experiment and work for lowpaying 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 and were sure that they would get the work done at the lowest rates or for free!17
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 of the long-term historical interest of Western industries in labor arbitrage. The German Gastarbeiter program has been a prominent model for establishing an 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 from Yugoslavia, Greece, Spain, and Turkey on a 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 digital networks. In addition, the peculiar temporality of the digital network with its “timeless time” creates another efect—the time arbitrage—which further accentuates the consequences of labor arbitrage. According to Shehzad Nadeem:
Time arbitrage can be defined as the exploitation of time discrepancies between geographical labor markets to make a profit. This operates on two scales. At the geographical scale, many companies exploit time zone diferences 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)
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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 new information/communication technologies in a relentless efort 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: xlii).
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 in Western 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 commodity 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 analog information (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 more like 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.
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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 from outside by information and communication technologies industries. By the elimination of the cooperation aspect of the cognitive work, the labor power becomes a variable capital as it creates value only after the activation and organization of the capital.
As a result of the fragmentation of cognitive tasks, crowdsourced workers not only produce the desired information for the task algorithm, but they are, in turn, produced by the algorithm, disciplined by its process flows into a particular cognitive mode and problem solving that eventually determines the eficiency of their labor and thus their livelihood. This efect becomes more significant when we consider the fact that the processes that require the fulfilling of tasks by means of the Mechanical Turk system are mostly the culture-producing algorithms that constantly feed the production/consumption cycle of the network economy. This is the source of the innermost paradox of the system: a gradual reduction of the diferences that define the economic value of its information as a product by approximating the unpredictable global variety of tastes, expressions, metaphors, and conceptual afinities into a singular ontology of the multitude.
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Notes
1 In order to describe the particular type of immaterial labor that characterizes the industrial production of symbolicanalytical services, I prefer to use the term cognitive labor. This distinction is helpful to avoid the perceived emphasis on the immateriality of the immaterial labor under consideration, although various authors have carefully pointed out that the term does not denote solely immaterial processes in terms of production or consumption. However, I believe that immaterial labor still has the traces of some of the conventional assumptions about the processes of mind as separate from the body. Cognitive labor marks an epistemological and discursive culmination point in postindustrialism that is apparent in the academic, military, and socioeconomic prominence of the parallel systematization of the concept. As Mateo Pasquinelli describes, “Cognitive labour produces machines of all kinds, not only software: electronic machines, narrative machines, advertising machines, mediatic machines, acting machines, psychic machines, social machines, libidinous machines. In the XIXth century the definition of machine referred to a device transforming energy. In the XXth century Turing’s machine—the foundation of all computing—starts interpreting information in the form of sequences of 0 and 1” (Pasquinelli 2004). Another critical advantage of using the concept of cognitive 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 particular 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 a 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.
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6 Ann Stoler, in her work Race and the Education of Desire, has highlighted the oversight of racial Others in Foucault’s historiography, 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 afordance 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 Schafer (1983).
10 Windisch emphasizes the boldness of the idea that the automaton conveys as one of its intended efects. “He represented it for merely what it is; a machine, which is not without merit as to its mechanism, but the efects 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 archetype 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
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