Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory

About the Organization of This Book

Following the structure of the Internet as Playground and Factory conference, this book is arranged in four parts. The first part, “The Shifting Sites of Labor Markets,” introduces the broadest issues in the debate. The second part, “Interrogating Modes of Digital Labor,” provides examples and case studies of emerging digital work environments. The third part, “The Violence of Participation,” focuses on questions of exploitation. The fourth part, “Organized Networks in an Age of Vulnerable Publics,” reflects on near-future scenarios, including peer-to-peer alternatives.

In the first part, Andrew Ross provides a wide-ranging and sobering overview of the implications of digital technologies and monetizable labor. He states that the profits of the owners of Google or Facebook are evidence of the current rent extraction boom. Ross also thinks through the class action suit against Hufington Post. The question is whether HufPo had a contractual obligation to share the spoils of the sale to AOL with the bloggers who created the content for the site.

The entire fabric of our everyday lives, rather than merely our workplace toil, becomes the raw material for capital accumulation. Ross points to the fact that corporate America enjoys a \$2 billion annual subsidy from largely unpaid or underpaid internships alone. Ross also asks us to consider that the vast majority of human labor, historically and to this day, is performed without remuneration— only 7% of India’s workforce, for example, enjoys regular wages and salaries. Digital technology, to be sure, didn’t give birth to free labor, but it has proven highly eficient as an enabler of dicey work arrangements.

In her chapter “Free Labor,” Tiziana Terranova discusses what she calls free labor as work that is not based on employment, work that is unpaid and freely given. For companies it is very clear that the new source of added value in the digital economy is user participation. Terranova states that, “in 1996, at the peak of the volunteer moment [in AOL chat room moderation], over 30,000 ‘community leaders’ were helping AOL to generate at least \$7 million a month.”

Sean Cubitt continues this line of thought by describing how social networking commercializes the gift of labor, not as individual activity but as aberrations from the average, which can be read as tendencies and exploited as such. He writes that the battle for the Internet is not yet over, but in critical strategic and tactical fields such as codecs and HTML5, capital is winning. Technological rule-making directly determines civil liberties online. Technical standards such as MP3, mpg, and Bluetooth are increasingly determined by private or hybrid private/public institutions, which become points of control over global information architectures.² While design decisions can have

serious consequences for our freedom, it is only a small group of people that has control over the entire Internet. There are significant battles on this level. Victims of Hurricane Katrina, for example, couldn’t register for federal emergency help unless they used the Internet Explorer browser. Technical standards are politics by other means. McKenzie Wark states that the vectoral class, a term that he developed in Hacker Manifesto, has less and less interest in the viability of national spaces of production and consumption; it can do without factories. Wark also cautions against the rhetoric of “gamification,” because it could be conceived of as getting people to do things without paying in exchange for symbolic rewards. In the second part, “Interrogating Modes of Digital Labor,” Patricia Ticineto Clough addresses labor metrics and afect. She wonders if it is possible that labor is not measurable on the parasitic platforms of the social web. Clough suggests that in financial capitalism, wealth is produced external to capital’s organization of labor or external to the accumulation of capital through production. She writes that philosophy is registering the ongoing reconfiguring of labor, measure, and afect accompanying the efort to make productive the micro afects of matter itself. Ayhan Aytes, in his chapter, poses that if the digital network is the assembly line of cognitive labor, then the Mechanical Turk is its model apparatus. Crowdsourcing, for Aytes, is a hybrid concept that merges the neoliberal outsourcing paradigm with the crowds on the digital networks. He continues that the unregulated nature of the emerging global cognitive labor market evokes the Gastarbeiter (guest worker) program of the economic wonder years of postwar Germany. This German Gastarbeiter program has been a prominent model for establishing a legislative immigration system without rights. Abigail De Kosnik investigates the work of fan moderators, writers, and artists who post and comment on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. Their number is in the millions, and their free labor activities contribute to far more massive corporate revenues than the \$7 million monthly garnered by AOL, mentioned also in Tiziana Terranova’s chapter. The abundant contributions of fans to the Internet can be regarded as labor, she writes. Fan labor can ramp up the buzz and reputation of a product, and fans are booted into this emerging labor market. De Kosnik concludes that corporations should value fan labor as a new form of publicity and advertising. They should compensate fans who could understand their work as the first rung on the reputation ladder for aspiring creative professionals. Jodi Dean contemplates blogging. As bloggers, she writes, we expose ourselves, our feelings and experiences, loves and hates, desires and aversions, but we need to be reminded of our exposure, our visibility, vulnerability, and ultimate lack of control. Access to my friend is a way of getting access to me, Jodi Dean notes. For Dean, publicity is the ideology of communicative capitalism, which suggests work without work (work without pay or work that is fun) and play without play (play for which one is

paid and play for which one pays with enjoyment). Convenience trumps commitment. Dean concludes that in this economy, a lucky few will get nearly everything, but most will get very little, almost nothing.

In the third part, “The Violence of Participation,” Mark Andrejevic reports from the new frontiers of data mining. He makes the case that the commercial appropriation of information meets an abstract definition of exploitation. Andrejevic argues that it is indeed 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. Google tracks its 1 billion unremunerated users and sells their data to advertising clients, who consequently target users with ads. The intertwining of labor, leisure, consumption, production, and play complicates the understanding of exploitation, but Andrejevic remarked that 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.

Andrejevic also discusses peer pressure and the obligation to network online, which is becoming institutionalized, and the fruits of this labor are recognized as a source of value. Commercial surveillance has become a crucial component of our communicative infrastructure, he observes. Exploitation, however, does not mean that workers don’t take pleasure in the success of a collaborative efort. There are moments of pleasure despite the fact that we are losing control of our productive and creative activities. While his critique of exploitation does not disparage the pleasures of workers, it also does not nullify exploitative social relations.

Jonathan Beller argues that there is no easy distinction between financialization and digitization. For him, the Arab Spring, Los Indignados in Spain, and the worldwide protests of 2011 all transmit a radical disafection with the capitalist organization of representation and assert the living history and potential of insurrection.

Lisa Nakamura’s chapter examines the racialization of digital labor by Chinese gold farmers in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft. These “farmers” produce and sell virtual goods such as weapons, garments, animals, and even their own avatars to other players for actual dollars. Asian gold farmers are constructed as unwanted guest workers within the culture of World of Warcraft. While on guard when it comes to explicit references to racial conflict in the real world, the game is premised upon a racial battle in a virtual environment.

The fourth and concluding part of this book, “Organized Networks in an Age of Vulnerable Publics,” discusses alternatives to the logic of the network. Which tangible and imaginative suggestions can we ofer that some of us could implement, today, after putting down this book?

For users, the web signals a double bind between the benefits of weak ties, the real possibilities of getting a job, and an awareness that their participation greases the wheels of the corporate Internet. How much power should society allocate to the major sites on the Internet? Shouldn’t critically important digital platforms be regulated or even nationalized? What are the temptations of dominance? Should Google be able to dictate who has access to Google Books and perhaps only give full access to the highest bidder?

According to Mark Zuckerberg, “sharing and connecting are core human needs.”³ For him, consumer-communication is at the heart of the service that he ofers. But self-disclosure is misunderstood if we talk about it in terms of basic needs. We don’t always get what we want. Is it really self-disclosure when we vote thumbs-up or thumbs-down? Seeking praise and peer acknowledgment, hundreds of millions of post-job workers are flocking to the social web like moths to the light, trying to get noticed by transforming themselves into something quite generic. Instead of projecting identities that conform with what employers might expect, is there not an opportunity for collective selfbecoming?

If class consciousness across social networks is an unrealistic proposal, maybe a call for political consciousness could lead to a fight against mindless individualism or the power imbalance between intermediaries and users.

Michel Bauwens argues that in conditions of social strife, capitalist corporations can be transformed into worker-owned, self-managed entities that create their own commons of shared knowledge, code, and design. The task of movements of cognitive forms of labor, he writes, is to try to create a new hegemony and a new commons-based alliance for social change, which challenges the domination of capital.

Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle explain the current transformation of networks into autonomous political and cultural “networks of networks.” Zehle and Rossiter emphasize that in order to afect politics of the universal on its computational terrain, we have to take the condition of variational territories and topologies of code seriously. Such an action intervenes on the algorithmic level, they write.

How do we carve out autonomous spaces for creative resistance when frictionless sharing of network interaction undermines our privacy and when digital infrastructures of control invisibly capture value from all areas of our lives? Which practices and instruments provide us with true social power—the power to act collectively and form publics of common concern?

Are we willing to sit at the table and negotiate future scenarios with intermediaries, or is the end of capitalism a precondition to kick-start our actions? Christian Fuchs calls for a diferent world today. He demands that the communicative commons of society should not be privately owned or controlled. The commons should be available to all, without payment or other access requirements. A more pragmatic, near-future approach would be the establishment of legal jurisdiction that imposes restrictions on outsourcing services online, providing workers with some basic rights.

Digg.com’s Digital Boston Tea Party or the so-called Facebook riots about the newsfeed, Beacon and the various other privacy hiccups are referenced frequently. The social web does empower consumers in their negotiation of the rules of their own consumptive activities by these “spectacles of democracy,” as I call them, but do not give license to citizens in their struggle for meaningful social change. Instead of riots, what we witness are just-in-time user feedback loops.

Apart from such rebellions, further considerations include the building of actual alternatives—technical and social infrastructures—and the possibility of refusal of or withdrawal from the Internet.

There are a few nonproprietary social networking services, but at this point, they do not reach considerable membership. I hope that one day a mass exodus from Facebook will happen. The social networking service Diaspora is designed for that purpose.⁴ Other initiatives include the independent citizen media project Crabgrass, which is especially designed to meet the needs of bottom-up grassroots organizing.⁵ We can think of sites like Craigslist, which, despite recent controversies, is a good example of an online business that is not focused on profit maximization but rather on user satisfaction.

But the Internet is so intensely subjugated to corporate interests that even if you jump ship, if you abandon the Facebook Titanic today, chances are that you are jumping on to the next life raft that is likely just as profit oriented. Wikipedia, Crabgrass, Diaspora, and Craigslist are exceptions; they are not practical models for the entire Internet. On the Internet, even peer-to-peer sharing practices, the exchange of the “gift” that almost always takes place on corporate turf, creates capital for those from whom we rent those platforms. In the age of friendship marketing, we rent the product of our own labor, as McKenzie Wark puts it.

Those who called for an all-out refusal of the sunless digital cycles of capitalist production and reproduction need to acknowledge the rare privilege of such position and need to understand that the engagement of users is not entirely voluntary. The violence of participation is about data mining on the one hand and the personal and professional price they would pay for their refusal of mainstream social media services on the other. Refusal would be tantamount to social isolation. Furthermore, in Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins accurately points out that the debate keeps getting framed as if the only true alternative is to opt out of media altogether and live in the woods, eating acorns and lizards (Jenkins, 248–9). Instead, we can produce real counterpublics, support civil disobedience actions, and create networks of solidarity by diversifying/hybridizing our social media practices.

On the social web, we are getting used, we are using each other, and we can act together. Which social practices make it easier for us to be powerful together? Which political stance do we take by aligning ourselves with a particular network or service? Surely, we will want to question all those dear friends who only care about the bottom line instead of really doing something magnificent with these emerging online platforms. And if you think about it, well, wouldn’t you like to stir up some serious havoc in the playground that is the factory?

Notes

References

PART I

The Shifting Sites of Labor Markets

In Search of the Lost Paycheck

Andrew Ross

When the Hufington Post was sold to AOL in February 2011, fair labor advocates finally had a high-profile vehicle for their fight against exploiters of free online content provision. Legions of bloggers who had polished the site’s reputation over the years were passed over when owner Arianna Hufington collected a cool \$315 million from the sale of the site. Regular HufPo contributors from ArtScene and Visual Art Source announced a boycott that burgeoned into a full-blown e-strike after Hufington ridiculed the action of the unpaid writers. “Go ahead, go on strike,” she scofed, opining that no one would notice, or care. In March, the 26,000-member Newspaper Guild threw its weight behind the strike, as did the National Writers Union (NWU)/UAW Local 1981), and an electronic picket line was thrown up.¹ Progressives who crossed the line to write for HufPo drew heated protests, and some were labeled scabs for putting their bylines above the calls for professional solidarity. In April, a class action suit, claiming \$105 million on behalf of the uncompensated bloggers, was filed by media labor activist Jonathan Tasini, who described the plaintifs as “modern-day slaves on Arianna Hufington’s plantation.” Tasini had a good track record. Previously, in 2001, he won a milestone victory when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (in New York Times Co. Inc. et al. v. Tasini et al.) that publishing companies must obtain permission from freelance writers before reusing their works in electronic databases.

By any measures, the practical impact of the boycott was limited, and, from the outset, the prospects for the lawsuit were not bright. But Hufington’s let-them-eat-cake posture, amplified by her public renown as a left-leaning pundit, helped to push the afair into the limelight. Arguments about fair compensation for digital content got a good airing, along with some elements of the debate about free labor, which had been nurtured by the coterie of cybercritics for the last decade. The volume of the hubbub far exceeded the low-key grumbling that had accompanied previous sales of social web properties such as YouTube (to Google), Flickr (to Yahoo), and Bebo (to AOL itself).

Apologists for the “attention economy” played up all of the nonmonetary benefits that page-view exposure delivers to freelance strivers, piloting their do-it-yourself careers through the turbulence of the blogosphere. According to this view, the value of free promotion on a wide platform outweighs any benefits to be gotten from the surety of a professional pay scale. It was also argued that the publisher’s relationship with her bloggers simply reflected the already-established norms of the digital information landscape, which seem to demand an initial donation of services as a customary price of entry. In any event, it was concluded that the owner was under no contractual obligation to share the spoils with those who had volunteered their labor up front. On the other side of the debate, supporters of the boycott played up the continuity of the case with traditional forms of capitalist expropriation. The lucre extracted by Hufington was not diferent in kind from that enjoyed by brick-and-mortar owners who profit from shortchanging their workers. Talk about the benefits of selfpromotion is the sort of deceptive practice touted by employers who are in a position to take advantage of an oversupply of market labor. As for the publisher’s debt to the bloggers, it was argued that she had a moral obligation, at the very least. But Tasini’s class action suit went further, alleging “unjust enrichment” on Hufington’s part—a legal claim that did not depend on whether writers had agreed up front to write for free.