Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory

PART III

The Violence of Participation

Estranged Free Labor

Mark Andrejevic

It is hardly controversial these days to observe that one of the dominant business models for the online economy relies upon consumers’ willing submission to increasingly detailed and comprehensive forms of monitoring. As the mainstream rightward-leaning USA Today put it, “The coolest stuf on the Internet actually comes at a notable price: your privacy.”¹ And this price continues to grow thanks to the development of new frontiers for data mining ranging from start-ups mining the social web in real time to a host of mobile applications that collect data from users’ smartphones and laptops.

If the ability to track online behavior started out as somewhat serendipitous— the by-product of the convenience aforded by a strand of code that allowed web-sites to remember previous visitors, now monitoring is being designed into the system. The entire app layer of interactive services, for example, provides as many new dimensions of computer monitoring as it does innovative conveniences. If you download an application for surfing or knitting, you have simultaneously joined a new demographic group for the purposes of target marketing. The more targeted or unique the service, the more detailed and unique the information about the user it provides. Even upgrades to the computer language (hypertext markup language, or HTML) that supports the web incorporate new capacities for online monitoring and tracking. As one press account noted,

The new Web language and its additional features present more tracking opportunities because the technology uses a process in which large amounts of data can be collected and stored on the user’s hard drive while online. Because of that process, advertisers and others could, experts say, see weeks or even months of personal data.²

These technological developments are complemented by the growth of online and mediated culture: the fact that large swaths of the population are conducting an increasing share of their social, professional, and personal lives on interactive platforms. It would be futile to attempt to catalogue the myriad forms of information that are collected about users; sufice it to say that pretty much anything one does using a smartphone or an Internet connection can and will be tracked, sorted, stored, and aggregated. Those dimensions of one’s activity that are not yet captured by interactive devices soon will be, as interfaces become more sophisticated and multidimensional—eventually capable of recognizing (and thus recording) expressions, evaluating mood, monitoring vital signs, and tracking eye movements.

The ease with which this type of monitoring has insinuated itself into the digital media landscape is breathtaking, perhaps in part because of the novelty of the technology and its applications. The seductions of the convenience and gadgetry of the smartphone far outstrip concerns about its use as a sophisticated and multidimensional monitoring and tracking device. Transposed into a somewhat less novel landscape, the shift might appear more objectionable. The fact is, however, that the current embrace of commercial digital culture amounts to an unprecedented leap in the ability of institutions both public and private to collect, sort, and store information about members of the public. The flashy wizardry of new commercial technologies serves as a form of distraction or misdirection, averting or postponing direct engagement with the fact that we are constructing a culture in which commercial surveillance has become a crucial component of our communicative infrastructure. While the actual efects of this surveillance remain to be seen, it is worth pointing out that in developing a surveillance-based commercial infrastructure, we have efectively wagered on the prospect that it will prove efective in manipulating and channeling consumer behavior.

Privacy Issues

While it is true that popular culture portrayals of an emerging surveillance economy are starting to emerge—the USA Today article, for example, is headlined, “Online Tracking Takes a Scary Turn”—but they tend to frame the issue in terms of personal privacy. “As digital shadowing escalates,” the article observes, “so too have concerns about the erosion of traditional notions of privacy.”³ Much of the discussion of online tracking has focused on the fate of privacy and the rights that pertain to it. This is an important set of issues, but it is complicated by the way in which it frames privacy in terms of personal choice (thereby dismissing challenges to the choices made by consumers as patronizing at best and at worst an afront to their personal freedom) and overlooks the way in which their information has become the private property of the commercial entities that do the work of harvesting it. It also tends to invoke the counterargument that there is little need for concern since many forms of monitoring that take place in interactive contexts are anonymous in the sense that the aggregators and their clients are not particularly interested in the personal identity of those monitored and do not personally inspect the details of their profiles (as if somehow the fact that no one is reading our personal e-mails means that there should be no cause for concern that they are being electronically scanned to determined how best to manipulate us). Privacy, in short, has a tendency to frame the discussion in personal, individual terms.

Because of the potential shortcomings of privacy as a means of addressing monitoring concerns, this chapter proposes an approach to the commercial use of personal information that draws on a notion more conducive to collective action and the recognition of the role played by social relations: that of exploitation. The notion of exploitation has long been used in Marxist-inflected critiques of capitalism to destabilize the very notion of free choice that underwrites the type of exchange described by USA Today: the process whereby, as individual consumers, we freely give up something of our own (our privacy—in the form of personal information) in exchange for something we desire or need. The “or” in this formulation is admittedly a vexed one—it might be argued that it makes all the diference in the world whether we are talking about need or desire, about livelihood or convenience. Perhaps—although the notion of what constitutes an acceptable standard of living (beyond some baseline notion of physical survival) is, as Marx, among others, has noted, a historically and culturally conditioned one.⁴ While it is possible to mark the diference that separates sustenance from starvation, it is less easy to mark that which clearly delineates the boundary between need and desire.

This is not to dismiss the distinction outright, but rather to assert its socially conditioned character as a way of considering a similar issue that arises with the notion of exploitation. It is possible, as I will argue in the following pages, to make the case that the commercial appropriation of commercial information meets an abstract definition of exploitation, but to do so risks lumping together under the same name forms of brutal workplace exploitation with something that looks a lot more benign: people shopping or networking online. It is crucial to recognize the diference between types and levels of exploitation and to prioritize critical response accordingly—just as one might distinguish between diferent types of material deprivation. However, mobilizing the notion of exploitation raises questions about the social relations that characterize the online economy and their role in reproducing the privatization of productive resources, social and economic inequality, and resulting forms of alienation.

Exploitation and Free Labor

Although forms of online activity that take place beyond the workplace proper do not fall within the realm of wage labor, they can nevertheless generate value. Because the capture of personal information is used to create targeted marketing campaigns, the online marketing model has created a market in feedback commodities. In some cases, this information is used directly by interactive companies to customize advertising; in others, it is bought and sold to marketers. As the Wall Street Journal’s investigative report on data mining put it in a description of a company that profiles Internet users, “tastes can be sold wholesale (a batch of movie lovers is \$1 per thousand) or customized (26-year-old Southern fans of 50 First Dates).”⁵ Even when information is not directly bought or sold, the interactive economy relies on the capture of the value generated by users whose contributions help build the economic value of social media services such as Facebook or, earlier on, Internet portals such as America Online.

The value of activity captured by interactive platforms has generated a growing literature on the exploitation of so-called free labor. In what has become a canonical discussion of the labor provided by chat room moderators in exchange for access to online services, Tiziana Terranova notes that such productive activities can, in some contexts, be described as both voluntary and subject to exploitation: “Free labor is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited.”⁶ Similarly, Michael Hardt’s discussion of the network economy notes that, “in those networks of culture and communication, collective subjectivities are produced and sociality is produced—even if those subjectivities and that sociality are directly exploitable by capital.”⁷ Petersen’s (2008) account of the exploitation of usergenerated content argues that the commercial “architecture of participation turns into an architecture of exploitation and enclosure, transforming users into commodities that can be sold on the market.”⁸

For Ritzer and Jurgensen (2010), the capture of value online represents the extension of the logic of capital into new spaces and temporalities: “it appears that capitalists have found another group of people—beyond workers (producers)—to exploit and a new source of surplus value. In this case, capitalism has merely done what it has always done—found yet another way to expand.”⁹ For Comor, forms of interactive participation reinforce rather than revolutionize the social relations upon which exploitation relies: “as long as private property, contracts and exchange values are dominant mediators of our political economy, disparities and exploitative relationships will remain largely unchallenged—unchallenged, at least, through the auspices of presumption.”¹⁰

The notion of exploitation, in short, has become a recurring theme in recent accounts of the productivity of networks. Most of these critiques refer to the conscious productive activity of users beyond the confines of the workplace proper—activity such as fan labor, chat room moderation, and the creation of usergenerated content—that users engage in voluntarily but that also generates value for commercial entities that are able to piggyback on user activity (for more on fan labor, see Abigail De Kosnik’s chapter in this volume). The tendency has been to locate this kind of creative activity in the category of immaterial labor described by Lazzarato as the “activity that produces the ‘cultural content’ of the commodity,” noting that it “involves a series of activities that are not normally recognized as ‘work’—in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion.”¹¹

However, it might be useful to distinguish between some of these diferent forms of value generation—including users’ active participation in marketing to themselves, the appropriation of user-generated content, and the capture of information that can be turned back upon users. This is not to say that any of these categories are exempt from exploitation, but rather to argue that we might need to think a bit diferently about how exploitation functions in these varying instances.

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

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

It is not clear, however, that the Marxist-inflected critiques of exploitation invoked by such accounts are incompatible with a sense of enjoyment or pleasure. The fact of exploitation need not prevent workers from taking pleasure in their craft or in the success of a collaborative efort well done. Nor is it the case that accounts of exploitation necessarily denigrate the activities or the meanings they may have for those who participate in them rather than the social relations that underwrite expropriation and alienation. The point of a critique of exploitation is neither to disparage the pleasures of workers nor the value of the tasks being undertaken. To argue otherwise is to stumble into a kind of category confusion: an attempt to reframe structural conditions as questions of individual pleasure and desire. The critique of exploitation does not devalue individual pleasure any more than such pleasures nullify exploitative social relations. More work needs to be done to define what might be meant by exploitation in nonwage labor contexts to bolster the critique of exploitation in the digital economy and to address the way in which it is so often dismissed (for failing to acknowledge the benefits and pleasures received by those engaged in various forms of free labor).

Digital Alienation

To what extent can analytic definitions of exploitation be applied to unwaged forms of participation that generate value appropriated by those who control the platforms upon which this participation relies? Holmstrom ofers a clear summary of a Marxist conception of exploitation: “The profits of capitalists, then, according to Marx’s theory, are generated by surplus, unpaid and forced labor, the product of which the producers do not control.”¹⁵ Central to such an account is the notion that coercion is embedded in the relations that structure so-called free choices. That is to say, coercion does not require someone standing over the worker with a gun or some other threat of force. The further point to be made is that exploitation is not simply about profit, but also alienation. As Holmstrom puts it, “what workers really sell to the capitalists, according to Marx, is not labor, but the capacity to labor or labor power, which capitalists then use as they wish for the day.”¹⁶ Alienation subsists not just in the surrender of conscious control over productive activity, but also, consequently, in its product. Exploitation, then, is not simply about a loss of monetary value, but also a loss of control over one’s productive and creative activity. To push a bit further, it is the latter sense of exploitation that drives the critique, insofar as the deprivation of economic resources, in the end, is about reproducing the forms of scarcity that compel freely given submission.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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