Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory

The obvious objection is that going online to converse, shop, explore, and network is clearly not a form of wage labor, even if people are in a sense compensated with free access to useful resources in exchange for submitting to detailed forms of valuegenerating monitoring. This activity is not a job (at least not for most of those who go online): they are not submitting their activity to the direct dictates of a supervisor, and they are not receiving wages. Exploitation can clearly take place in the absence of wages, but does it retain any meaning in a context in which users do not sacrifice control over their productive activity? The question is potentially misleading insofar as the digital environment facilitates what might be described as a redoubling of creative or productive activity. When we create a blog or post an item on Facebook or even purchase an item or view a web page, we do so in ways that are, in many cases, unsupervised and minimally controlled. At the same time, however, we generate information about our activities over which we sacrifice control in exchange for access to the infrastructure and the services it supports. In a sense, then, we lose control over some aspects of our online productivity even when this remains free from familiar forms of oversight and control.

Just as we sacrifice a degree of control over the use of our productive activity when we enter into a workspace, so too do we sacrifice a degree of control over how our activity is used when we agree to the terms of service for a particular website or online service (or even when we browse the Internet, which collects information about our activities without notifying us). Those who control the means of online sociability have the power to set the terms of access, and these terms include the establishment of certain rights over the information provided by users—rights that tend to be outlined in cursory, often incomprehensible and qualified fashion. Separation (the private control over online resources for sociability) begets separation (the establishment of rights of use over information generated by users). The various “terms of use” and end-user license agreements posted by social networking sites establish their rights over the use, sale, and transfer of information collected online.

That is to say, forms of socializing, interacting, and transacting that once relied upon other resources, as well as new forms of sociability, are increasingly dependent upon an infrastructure provided by a third party. This is not to say that the introduction of a third party is entirely novel. Certainly the phone company, for example, served as a for-profit intermediary (although not an advertising-supported one). In the current context, rather, we can identify an increasing tendency toward the use of a commercially supported mediated infrastructure for a growing range of activities: the replacement, for example, of a cash purchase in a store by an online purchase; the tendency to text a friend or a colleague in the next dorm room or ofice instead of knocking on his or her door; as well as the creation of new forms of sociality that are integrally tied to developing commercial infrastructures (such as “friending” someone on Facebook), and so on. When we are separated from the means of socialization, this does not mean we do not have access to them; rather, we come to rely upon the provision by their parties of technologies for socialization that separate us from the information upon which our social lives rely. Crucial resources for interaction are no longer in our own hands (at least to the extent that they once were), but are stored in servers owned and controlled by commercial entities.

We do not have to go far to figure out why people are so willing to use such sites: they provide a ready, convenient, and entertaining way of enriching, extending, and preserving our connections with others. What requires a bit more explanation is how we might discern, in a voluntary and rewarding activity, the traces of exploitation. The result of the form of separation facilitated by Facebook is not the dispossession of users, but rather the alienability of the product of their online social activity: the fact that the fruits of this activity can become a resource whose uses range far beyond their control. Or, given that the extraction of the value of information gathered about users relies on the same logic of resource enclosure and the consequent asymmetry of power relations that structure the “freely” agreedupon surrender of control over personal information, the more salient question is why should we care?

The notion of exploitation is meant to invoke questions of social justice. From a Marxian-inflected critical perspective, the charge of exploitation is both a term of critique and a call to action: exploitation is, as Holmstrom puts it, “evil” because it “involves force and domination in manifold ways and because it deprives workers of control that should be theirs.”¹⁹ The force is not often directly manifested in the compulsion to surrender control over one’s labor power, but is built into asymmetrical social relations and manifests itself overtly when these are challenged. Likewise, the privatization and commercialization of much of the digital media infrastructure does not take place by force, but merely reproduces existing property relations by extending them into the digital realm. The background of compulsion is built into the legal structure and regulatory regimes that enable the privatization process. We might note the indirect efects of compulsion by positing that, given the choice, users are more likely to prefer not having to submit to comprehensive forms of monitoring in order to access online and networked resources, as suggested by recent surveys that indicate opposition to monitoring-based profiling and high levels of concern about online information collection.²⁰ They do not freely choose to exchange their personal information for convenience but do so under conditions structured by the private ownership of network resources and the attendant low level of awareness about actual tracking practices. If what concerns us about workplace exploitation is both the forms of compulsion that underwrite it and the toll it takes on workers in terms of physical immiseration (exhaustion and worse) and loss of control over their creative activity (what Holmstrom calls alienation), do these concerns carry over into critiques of the exploitation of free labor? Here we might note a distinction— free labor does not carry with it the same physical toll as some forms of workplace exploitation, not least because users can stop when they wish without threat of losing their job (at least in some contexts). However, they do lose control of aspects of their productive activity in ways that are, in the terms suggested by the critique of alienation, turned back upon them. The goal of comprehensive surveillance is to discover those levers that allow marketers to channel consumer behavior according to commercial imperatives—to relegate the consumer to the role of feedback mechanism in an accelerating cycle of production and consumption. As the founder of cybernetics put it in an embittered paean to the power of feedback-based marketing:

A certain precise mixture of religion, pornography, and pseudo-science will sell an illustrated newspaper … To determine these, we have our machinery of fan-ratings, straw votes, opinion samplings and other psychological investigations with the common man as their object…. Luckily for us, these merchants of lies, these exploiters of gullibility have not yet arrived at such a pitch of perfection as to have things all their own way.²¹

The goal of marketers and other exploiters of gullibility is, of course, to realize the implicit threat in Wiener’s formulation: to overcome the “not yet.”

In more concrete terms, the goal of marketers is, as Ian Ayres puts it in his book on data mining, to “predict what you will want and what you will do”—even when you yourself do not know or are unsure.²² This does not mean predicting some kind of inevitable future; it means learning how to manipulate conditions, appeals, and contexts in order to yield a desired behavior or action. It means using the detailed information gathered about people to accelerate and channel the consumption process. It is only about serving consumers better if that means getting them to believe that they must consume more copiously and expeditiously. The goal is to determine what triggers are most efective in stimulating consumer behavior as well as how to get around the reservations and concerns that might forestall consumption. It is to discover what appeals—whether to one’s insecurities, one’s anxieties and health concerns—are most efective in driving behavior, and what subconscious factors might influence behavior without consumers realizing what is taking place.

To the extent that consumers participate in generating the information that feeds into the manipulation process, we might level the charge of exploitation to highlight the way in which the capture of personal information turns our own activity against ourselves. Marx describes this as estrangement or alienation:

The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.²³

Although Marx is here talking about the product of wage labor in the context of capitalist social relations, it is a formulation that illuminates the trajectory of information commodities generated by consumers and then turned back upon them for the purposes of manipulating their actions and desires.

The alienated world envisioned by interactive marketers is one in which all of our actions (and the ways in which they are aggregated and sorted) are systematically turned back upon us. It is, in the end, a disturbing vision: an informationalized world in which the very atmosphere through which we move has become privatized and commercialized. Every message we write, every video we post, every item we buy or view, our time-space paths and patterns of social interaction all become data points in algorithms for sorting, predicting, and managing our behavior. Some of these data points are spontaneous, the result of the intentional action of consumers; others are induced, the result of ongoing, randomized experiments. The complexity of the algorithm and the opacity of correlation render it all but impossible for those without access to the databases to determine why they may have been denied a loan, targeted for a particular political campaign message, or saturated with ads at a particular time and place when they have been revealed to be most vulnerable to marketing. Much will hinge on whether the power to predict can be translated into the ability to manage behavior, but this is the bet that marketers are making. Or, more accurately, this is the bet that a society makes when it turns to a monitoringbased system of data mining and predictive analytics as a means for supporting its information and communication infrastructure.

In part, the question of whether exploitation applies to forms of free labor hinges on an attempt to hold separate the realms of leisure, consumption, and domesticity from the workplace proper. Marx’s critique of capitalism emerged within the context of a distinctly modern realm of diferentiation. The development of wage labor relied on maintaining a clear distinction between the work-place and other realms of social life—not least for the purposes of surveillance and monitoring. Interactive digital technologies facilitate forms of de-diferentiation that challenge this clear-cut distinction: we can work from home and socialize in our workplaces, thanks to mobile phones, text messaging, portable computers, and so on. At the same time, the cultural and economic shifts associated with the development of so-called immaterial labor capitalize on the capture of activities that blur clear-cut distinctions between realms of leisure, labor, and domesticity. As Terranova puts it, quoting Toni Negri: “The ‘social factory’ describes a process whereby ‘work processes have shifted from the factory to society, thereby setting in motion a truly complex machine.’”²⁴ When we help build the value of Facebook with work we do at home, while on the train, or on the beach, we are participating in this social factory.

At the same time, the line between online creativity and the workplace proper is becoming much less clear in many professional contexts. Academics, politicians, and TV producers alike are encouraged to blog, send tweets, and network online to promote themselves and their work. A researcher who studies public broadcasting recently told me that whereas once upon a time television producers put their work in “the can” and could then be elsewhere when it aired, now they are expected to be online, following the online discussion and posting tweets in response to viewer comments when their programs air.

In some cases, the obligation to network online is becoming institutionalized and recognized as a potential source of value. Consider, for example, the development of applications that allow employers to capitalize on contacts harvested from their employees’ social networks. The press release for a company called Appirio, for example, outlines the triple value of employee social networking data as a resource for recruiting, sales, and marketing—all of this without having to pay employees extra for providing the data. Appirio’s marketing application piggybacks on Facebook to increase the size of a company’s “virtual account team” by leveraging relationships that employees might already have:

The employee can see if a friend has become a lead, bought a product, attended an event … etc. If the employee chooses they can contact their friend through Facebook to make a connection and ultimately help contribute to their company’s bottom line (and maybe even their own bonus!).²⁵

The same data that can provide leads for potential hires and clients serve treble duty by providing data for targeted marketing appeals: “Based on a search of keywords in friend profiles, the application makes recommendations of friends who might be interested in the ofer, which users can then choose to take action on.”²⁶ The application links data from the social networks of individual employees with a proprietary consumer relationship marketing database in order “to track leads, make follow-up ofers, and report on campaign success to see how their viral campaigns stack up to other marketing programs.”²⁷

The future envisioned by such applications is one in which online activities serve as multiple sources of value for employers who seek to capture and monetize the value created by the afterwork activities of their employees as well as by commercial entities that harvest detailed personal information online. There is double logic of appropriation at work in this scenario: private ownership of workplace resources and private ownership of communication resources are both used to extract value from activities that take place beyond the workplace. The type of concessions that employers can extract from employees is part of the ongoing struggle over wage labor contracts conditioned by asymmetric control of productive resources. Appirio envisions a future in which submission of one’s social network to workplace priorities becomes one of the conditions of earning one’s livelihood.

If, as Hesmondhalgh argues, the notion of exploitation is an explanatory concept as well as a historical and analytical one, it is tempting to note the way in which it helps account for the forms of anticipated productivity that characterize the digital economy. The value accruing to the privatization of network resources is, at least in part, dependent upon the ability to extract productive data from users—data that can serve as a resource for advertisers, employers, political campaigns, and policing. Unlike more material commodities, there is no clearly defined saturation point for the consumption of data—as long as automated systems can be developed for sorting and processing it. Individual humans may be limited in their ability to absorb data, but not databases. Nor is there a clear limit on the amount of information that can be extracted, which grows along with the opportunities for interaction, transaction, and communication—even as the cost of data collection continues to drop. It is the anticipated productivity of data collection and mining that serves as justification—at least in some quarters—for refusing to regulate it more aggressively. The threat from companies that prefer so-called self-regulation is that enhanced privacy legislation will put a check on the growing online economy. This threat was invoked by a privacy attorney who claimed that proposals to require websites to include a donot-track option “may lead to the Internet economy—one of the few economic bright spots—being shackled.”²⁸

Privacy-based critiques do not quite capture the element of productive power and control at work in the promise of monitoring-based marketing. If privacy violations constitute an invasion—a loss of control over the process of self-disclosure— market monitoring includes an additional element of control and management: the systematic use of personal information to predict and influence. The critique of exploitation addresses this element of power and control. Defenders of market monitoring will argue that individual consumer behavior remains uncoerced. Critical approaches, however, locate coercion not solely at the level of discrete individual decisions, but also in the social relations that structure them. In this regard, the invocation of the notion of exploitation parallels Jonathan Beller’s claim in his contribution to this volume that, “an interest in labor should force us to rethink the logistics of media platforms and see them as technologies formed in the struggle between labor and capital and thus by and for the expropriation of labor.”

Given the diference between post-Fordist forms of productive consumption and industrial modes of production, a critical approach to exploitation needs to be revisited. This chapter argues for the importance of considering how the components of exploitation (the capture of unpaid surplus labor, coercion, and alienation) operate within the context of technologically facilitated forms of commercial surveillance. While these components are interconnected—alienation, for example, implies the existence of background forms of coercion—they appear in diferent configurations in the realms of consumer productivity or immaterial forms of collective, social labor. Some critics focus on the element of unpaid labor, others on the element of alienation. The challenge is to think these together against the background of the coercion embedded in relations of control over communication resources and the forms of productive surveillance it facilitates.

Mobilizing the Critique of Exploitation

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. In abstract analytic terms, there are structural similarities between the extraction of value in the wage labor exchange and in the convenience-for-personal-information exchange. Both rely on the private enclosure of productive resources to structure the surrender of control over aspects of productive activity. In both cases, this surrender of control returns in the form of alienation—the misrecognition of $\mathrm { { o n e ^ { \prime } s } }$ own participation in the very forces that seem to come from elsewhere. Both contribute to the generation of wealth for those who own and control the productive resources. In more concrete terms, exploitation in the social factory looks very diferent from that in the actual one. It is 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. Both highlight diferent ways in which the potential of individual and social life is diminished—in which the productive capacities developed by society fall short of their promise of an unalienated existence. The point of running them alongside one another is not to diminish the brutality of the exploitation of industrial capitalism but to add depth and urgency to the critique of exploitation in the emerging information economy.

Notes