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title: "Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory"
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# Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory
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Fan Compensation
However, as much as the digital economy relies on unpaid, user-generated labor, the Internet has also been the site of some innovations in compensation that might serve fans well in the future. Garnering revenue from advertising has proved feasible for bloggers and video makers who attract significant audiences; fan producers could similarly benefit from Google AdSense or the YouTube Partner Program if companies would allow them to use copyrighted images, text, video, and sound, as most fan productions make use of proprietary media (companies could give permission tacitly, by not suing fans or serving them with ceaseand-desist letters for copyright infringement).
Another form of compensation that has benefited a few fans, and could benefit many more, is the elevation of fan laborers from amateurs to paid professionals. Some companies have included fan works with their oficial products or have used them as advertisements for the products, which have boosted those fans’ careers in the creative industries; other companies have hired talented artists, writers, and moderators whose works they first encountered on fan sites. Fan labor could eventually be regarded as the first rung on the reputation ladder for aspiring creative professionals, with the highest rung on the ladder being full-time employment.
The realization of any possibility for fans to earn payment for their labor would depend on both fans and corporations acknowledging that fandom is a form of labor that adds value to mass-produced commodities and is worthy of compensation. The history of discourse about fandom, especially within fan communities, makes such an acknowledgement unlikely. But if companies could begin to regard fan groups as the potential developers of their greatest promotional campaigns, and if fans could start to see that their productions have, not just personal use value, but market exchange-value, then fans could conceivably be one of the first social groups to formulate workable solutions to the important questions of Internet labor and pay. In this scenario, fans would help to shape how creative labor is fairly compensated in the digital economy rather than being the economy’s marginalized victims.
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Notes
1 Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 12.
2 Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture (New York: Doubleday/ Currency, 2007), 2–3.
3 Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (New York: Pluto Press, 2004), 73–4.
4 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979; reprint, London: Routledge, 2006), 3.
5 Hebdige, Subculture, 2–3.
6 I do not mean to privilege the subculture of youth gangs over the subculture of housewives, or any other group, in this discussion. Although Hebdige is concerned with subcultures that identify themselves as rebellious against mainstream society, one can regard safety pins as endowed with special meaning by homemakers just as much as by punks, although the meaning of the safety pin may be very diferent in each afinity group. The French saying, “tiré à quatre épingles,” or “pulled by four pins” (immaculately dressed), demonstrates how the ordinary pin (though not necessarily the safety pin, in this case) has been given special meaning in fashion culture.
7 Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 3–4.
10 Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2002), 28.
12 Hills, Fan Cultures, 35.
13 Ibid.
14 Hills, Fan Cultures, 28.
15 Lisa Taylor and Andrew Willis, Media Studies: Texts, Institutions and Audiences (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).
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17 See my article “Should Fan Fiction Be Free?” Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (Summer 2009).
18 Terranova, Network Culture, 90.
19 Ibid.
20 Terranova, Network Culture, 90–1.
21 Terranova, Network Culture, 93.
22 Terranova, Network Culture, 92.
23 Andrew Ross, “On the Digital Labor Question,” paper presented at the Internet as Playground and Factory preconference at The New School, September 29, 2009. Available at https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2009-November/004039.html.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
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References
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The Digital, Labor, and Measure Beyond Biopolitics
Patricia Ticineto Clough
This chapter turns to recent technoscientific developments in order to rethink the value of afective labor in relationship to mathematical (digital) forms of measure. I focus especially on the work of Luciana Parisi because my aims here, like hers, are both to draw out the political, cultural, economic, and social implications of these developments and at least to sketch what transformation in thought, or in the thinking about thought (as well as the unthought) they may incite. As Parisi takes philosophical discourse both as a guide to critical analysis of technoscientific development and as the discourse to which she finally hopes to contribute, I hope to do so as well. While philosophies focused on process—those of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead especially—are those to which Parisi is drawn, I contrast those philosophies with speculative realist philosophies and object-oriented ontologies. I propose that this contrast shows that philosophy, even if unconsciously, is being drawn to the implications of the technoscientific development of nano-technology and the issue of measure it raises in its efort to make productive the micro afects of matter. Or, to put it otherwise, philosophy presently is registering the reconfiguration of economy, afective labor, and biopolitical governance.
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Nanotechnology and Measuring Matter’s Afects
In her recent analysis of nanotechnology, Luciana Parisi has reported that the specific novelty of nanotechnologies is that nanomachines can “rearrange the very position of every atom” (2012: 48, n. 2). This means that “each atom can be placed in a selected position to become an active or structural component of a living system that is being redesigned.” In particular, this new capacity of controlling the position of atoms suggests that “the high speed oscillation and fuzziness of molecules, which was central to the discoveries of quantum physics, is no longer an absolute indeterminacy defined by atomic superposition between particles and waves.” Rather, the fuzziness provides a chaotic instability that could be turned into a “weird dynamic productivity” (Parisi 2012: 49, n. 2). At the nanoscale, Parisi continues, “particles can become probability waves which leap across impenetrable barriers, occupy two places at the same time and anticipate future states” (Parisi 2012: 33).
From the science of nanotechnology to the nanodesign of artificial atoms for what has been trademarked “programmable matter,” the aim, as Parisi sees it, is “to neutralize the distinction between the physical composition of materials—atoms, photons, protons, electrons—and their properties, such as color, shape, smoothness, brightness, and so on,” such that “material can change their substance instantaneously like the design and debugging of software” (Parisi 2012: 38). Parisi sums up by proposing that,
by entering the realm of pure potentials—of color, shape, roughness, electricity, vectoriality, etc., programmable matter promises an architecture of instantaneous realization of potentialities…. At work here no longer is control intended as the calculation of the future by means of prediction, or the calculation of the unknown through pre-set probabilities. The disappearance of bio-physical contingencies instead is directly proportional to the nano-programming of uncertainties as the inclusion of fuzzy states in the design of thought and extension. (Parisi 2012: 39)1
I have quoted at length from one of Parisi’s essays to situate my discussion of measure, as she situates her discussions of calculation and computation, in relationship to technoscientific development (Parisi 2009a, 2009b, 2009c). Nanotechnological development also is meant to frame my return to an earlier moment of engagement with labor, afect, and measure in a 2007 publication that I coauthored with Greg Goldberg, Rachel Schif, Aaron Weeks, and Craig Willse titled “Notes Toward a Theory of Afect-Itself.” We drew on George Cafentzis’s disagreement with Hardt and Negri’s claim that the value of immaterial or afective labor is immeasurable. Arguing instead that capitalism “imposes an extremely quantified form of life on its constituents,” Cafentzis warned against claims of immeasurability, proposing that capitalists have sought and still do seek a way to measure what at first seems immeasurable. Cafentzis not only argued that exploitation still was measureable in terms of laborers’ production of surplus value, but he also proposed that those who would resist capitalism must have quantitative capacity to match the quantitative capacity at the service of capitalism .2
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While taken with Cafentzis’s interest in measure and capitalism’s quantitative capacity, we felt that the question of the measurability or immeasurability of afective labor had to be posed diferently than in terms of laborers’ productive time, since afective labor as Paolo Virno (2004), among others, would have it, goes even beyond the labor of communicative and cognitive capacities in a knowledge society or information society, beyond what Marx called the labor of a general intelligence to the laboring of afect in a biopolitical society where afect refers to a preindividual, nonconscious, noncognitive, asubjective bodily capacity to afect or be afected. Here, afect is a vector of unqualified intensity opening to future actualization, a pure potential. Defined in this way, afective labor raised questions for my coauthors and me about the embodiment of pure potential or vectors of intensity in contrast to the organic body of the laborer. We asked what kind of body is the afective body or what is an embodiment of vectors of intensity. We doubted that it could be the body modeled on the human organism or the human laborer. If measure is central to afective labor as much as any other labor, we asked how should the measuring of afect be thought.3
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Bodies, Afect, and Media Technology
The preceding definition of afect is drawn from the philosophical tradition employed by Brian Massumi, the philosophies of Deleuze and Whitehead, and before them Spinoza and Bergson. Although Massumi (2002) develops his conceptualization of afect for the most part in relationship to the human subject—or, more specifically, the autonomic nervous system of the human organism—his very conceptualization of afect as preindividual potential, resonant with Deleuzean virtuality, would seem to let afect slip from the human organism. Indeed, Massumi at times does point to the various scales of matter at which afect is potential or indeterminism. It would seem, then, that afect points to the reconfiguration of bodies and matter/energy; afect may be experienced by and be the experience of bodies other than human bodies or bodies conceived as organisms.
In “Notes Toward a Theory of Afect-Itself,” my coauthors and I focused on the technical frame of afect, starting with the technologies with which Massumi measured afect as a fraction of time before conscious experience, a technological enhancement or measuring device theoretically overlooked by Massumi but seemingly necessary to his examples of preconscious afect as a measurable fraction of time before consciousness, a measurement that necessarily moves afect toward consciousness, virtuality toward actualization, although without depleting virtuality or afective potential. That is to say, ontologically, afect is potential and, as such, cannot be realized, only actualized; actualization can only be a matter of invention out of virtuality, which itself ontologically remains virtual. It seemed to my coauthors and me that it might be possible to imagine the body of afect as a technological assemblage or a technology of measurement, where measure measures without depleting or fully capturing, a computationally open technology of measure.
In “Heat-Death: Emergence and Control in Genetic Engineering and Artificial Life,” Parisi and Tiziana Terranova (2000) provided a way to begin to address our queries. Ofering a genealogy of the (re)configurations of bodies, technologies, and labor, “Heat-Death” makes it possible to think of the body-as-organism as only one figure, a historically specific one, of what the body is or what it can do. Focusing on autopoiesis, characteristic of the bodyas-organism, Parisi and Terranova argue that it was in the 19th century that the body-as-autopoietic-organism becomes the figure of what the body is and what it can do. They go on to propose that this figure of the body is befitting the disciplinary society of late-19th-century industrial capitalism, “where the fluids which were circulating outside and between bodies, are folded onto themselves in order to be channeled within the solid walls of the organism/self/subject” (Parisi and Terranova 2000: 4). The body-as-organism is organized for “reproduction within a thermodynamic cycle of accumulation and expenditure; and trained to work” (Parisi and Terranova 2000: 5). Here, Parisi and Terranova are suggesting that a body is a historically specific mode of organization of material forces, invested by capital into being as well as elaborated through various discourses of biology, physics, neuroscience, medicine, and so on that reconfigure work, bodies, production, and reproduction.
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If the turn to afect is registering a reconfiguration of the body, labor, and technology, as my coauthors and I went on to argue, then we also wanted to propose that it is due, in no small part, to digital technologies and to the technosciences of information that now propose that information is the general theory of matter/ energy and that thermodynamics is only a special case.4 Here, afect at every scale of matter points to the self-organization inherent to matter or matter’s capacity to be informational or informing. It points as well to the digital technology that supports a mathematics that is able to attach to and modulate the informational substrate of bodily matter and matter generally, such that technosciences—for example, biomedia and new media—introduce what Keith Ansell-Pearson (1999) has called the “post-biological threshold” into “life-itself.” That is to say, these technologies are changing what the body can do or its afective capacity, with the postbiological as a threshold or a limit. However, in what follows I suggest that in her treatment of nanotechnology, Parisi raises a question as to the status of this limit in thinking of bodies, afect, technology, and labor—a question that also points to recent philosophical debate over ontology.
In the years since the 2007 publication of “Notes Towards a Theory of Afect-Itself,” the thought of afect as a technological assemblage has been refined through interdisciplinary discussions about afect, media, technology, governance, and economy. This has occurred as media studies discourse has been shifting its focus from technologies and uses of mass communications to afect or capabilities of perception and sensation, and not only human perception and sensation. In fact, media are being defined in terms of a subtraction of human perception as the presumed center of being and feeling. Steve Goodman, writing on sound technologies and leaning toward the process philosophies of Deleuze and Whitehead, argues: “If we subtract human perception, everything moves…. At the molecular or quantum level, everything is in motion, is vibrating” (Goodman 2009: 83). For subjectivity and objectivity, all that is required is that an entity be felt by another entity. “All entities,” Goodman continues, “are potential media that can feel or whose vibrations can be felt by other entities” (Goodman 2009: 83). Here media are understood in terms of nonanthropocentric afect, where “afects are transitions, gateways, and passages between dimensions,” as Jussi Parikka has put it (Parikka 2010: xxvi).
In these terms, media is more broadly described as “contractions of forces of the world into specific resonating milieus” (Parikka 2010: xiv), such that mediation is contingent and immanent. Mediation (if it even should be called that) is less about connecting two or more entities, although by the above definition of entities, they are media and they do connect other entities. Still, for theorists such as Goodman and Parikka, it might be better to describe mediation as modulation, intensifying or deintensifying rhythmicities and forces that are of but also below, above, and other than human perception. Here media are extended to various platforms organic, nonorganic, chemical, and neurochemical. As Parikka concludes: “we do not so much have media as we are media and of media; media … cast a plane over the chaos” (Parikka 2010: xxvii).
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This definition of media borrows from contemporary thinking about assemblage as a mode of afective (de)intensification—that is, an afordance to sensations, percepts, and concepts and the modulation of their intensities at every scale of matter. As such, an analysis of efects engages them not as the end result of a predefined condition, but immediately as a cause or a condition of possibility of afect and further efects. This is the working of what Massumi has called a “quasi-causality”—that is, the (eternal) return of indeterminacy in every actualization or individualization.5 These actualizations and individualizations might well be thought of as bodies of afect, the bodies that this discussion of media provokes. If all entities are afective media, then they may share the definition of bodies that Elizabeth Grosz ofers: “discontinuous, nontotalizable series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and incorporeal events, speeds and durations” (Grosz 1994: 164), and, as such, they are open to the afordance of a media assemblage and its modulation of intensities. Given this take on media as afective embodiments and bodies as afective media, questions arise as to how an entity or object should be thought, or how relation might be thought when the body-as-organism is no longer the figure of life, and organic matter is no longer privileged over nonorganic matter. And, finally, what does addressing these questions have to do with measure and afective labor?
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