Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory

In considering mediation of the terrain of our struggle, we have seen that it involves the refusal of the commandeering of all mediations for the purposes of capitalist production and reproduction; however, we have also seen that everywhere and in all cases just such a commandeering of the means of production is at hand, and indeed in mind. For the logical conclusion of our discussion of sign function implies that our very thought is the thought of capital. How, then, to reconcile such a totalizing view of expropriation and its necropolitics (one that is largely in accord with the current claims surrounding cognitive capitalism and virtuosity) with what would appear to be the bourgeoning of life all around? Perhaps, given Turing’s brilliant dismissal of the idea that there simply could not be a program for human behavior, we cannot dismiss an account that strives to be adequate to the history and as it were aspiration of capital’s enclosure on the mere grounds that sheer planetary diference “could never be” subsumed by a universal Turing machine of financialization? Nonetheless, we might will a diferent fate.

Here, in the face of informatic subsumption, we could say with Flusser that the hierarchy of programs is open at the top and satisfy ourselves with the cosmic indiference of digitality, or we could wager that this indiference or indeterminacy itself appears through a sociohistorical lens that is not indiferent—that our cognition, in its very formation, is being bent to conform to capitalist process. Such an assertion (for that’s what it is) would be political (before it was ethical) and aware that it was bound to a conceit that could well be rendered moot (for example, if thought became utterly impossible, or if the environment collapsed and consciousness as we know it ceased). A political and thus politicizing approach to media studies would insist upon the materiality of mediation as well as a reckoning of the material consequences of even the most ostensibly immaterial and abstract mediations. In other words, the indeterminacy regarding the nature of our program is our best hope and hence a call to arms.

A mediatic approach to the sphere of operations would restore the technical and economic components—the realia—of afective dispensations. Media platforms are not merely technologies in the sense of being objects or machines or practices that have an objective character; rather, they are social formations and, more particularly, gender and racial formations. For example, the geopolitical emergence and role of photography during the violent racialization processes of slavery and colonialism tells us not simply about the visual sculpting of racial formations but about the coevolution of two ostensibly separate technologies for graphing people(s) by their external appearances. Which is to say that, as surely as the camera and the photograph have had a role in the transmission and productive (for capital) development of the various racisms, intrinsic to the camera and the photograph is the history of racial exploitation. This is part of the Program that Flusser does not see.

Just as 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, we must understand that the flesh, in Hortense Spillers’s sense of the word, is now the surface of inscription, the medium in the last instance, for all transmissions. Which is to say that for the 2 billion people who live on two dollars or less per day, it is their labor of survival that bears the burden of the messages considered to be worthy of transmission.³⁰ The medium is the flesh of the world. Dialectically, the flesh is the other side of the vanishing mediator called money and, hence, necessarily, the other side of the digital.

A rigorous mediological approach would also attend closely to the politics of the utterance. Is it really possible to talk anymore as if race, class, nation, and gender were issues that were marginal or have been surpassed? Even though it is fair to say that the meaning of these terms has shifted—moreover that the very forms of racial and class oppression are being reimagined and repurposed to fit the emergent exigencies of domination—these terms remain at the very least the names for technologies of violence and expropriation that are brought to bear in full force upon, to use an old-fashioned term, the masses. The fragmentary character of the multitudes, such that each of us has the multitude within, and the monadic character of geopolitics, such that each of us bears the signature of the globopolitical jetzeit, cannot license the emergence of a purportedly value-neutral, degreezero, commonsensical, highly civilized speaking subject that a/ efects a deafness to the call of the enslaved, the savaged, the raped, and the expropriated even as it claims to listen. If the enormity of the crimes that make us what we are, if the unspeakable violence and unendurable pain of history does not haunt our words, then we have said too much and not enough. This invocation of the myriad agonies (past and present) against the pat presentation of the iterations of capital logic (cynically or ironically self-conscious or not) is not a mere poetic gesture; it is the informing call to which liberatory work must be ofered in response. Answering this spectral calling would endeavor to reanimate all the sedimented dead labor that is the condition of possibility for the living labor of this day’s utterances; these calls as the eternal return of the oppressed are the very principle of organization (a subterranean genealogy) that might inform our cognitive-linguistic labor such that it is not merely the productive reproduction of yesterday’s unheralded violence.

Notes

1 For example, “In his acceptance speech of the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the advancement of human rights on March 9, 2006 Habermas said that the ‘use of the Internet has both broadened and fragmented the contexts of communication. This is why the Internet can have a subversive efect on intellectual life in authoritarian regimes. But at the same time, the less formal, horizontal cross-linking of communication channels weakens the achievements of traditional media. This focuses the attention of an anonymous and dispersed public on select topics and information, allowing citizens to concentrate on the same critically filtered issues and journalistic pieces at any given time. The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism ofered by the Internet is the decentralized access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus.’” (http://ejournalist.com.au/v6n2/ubayasiri622.pdf, editor’s note)

2 Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (n.p.: Semiotext(e), 2004).

3 Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 31–2.

4 Vilém Flusser, “The Codified World,” in Writings, ed. Andreas Strohl, trans. Erik Eisel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 37–8.

5 It is worth interjecting that the rise of photography coincides with the early writings of Marx—not just the invocation of the camera obscura (which dates from much earlier) that Marx uses to figure the ideological inversion of the world image that makes it appear that ideas ground material relations, but more emphatically, the triple abstraction that Flusser claims for photography might also be claimed for use value/exchange value and money/capital. But that would be another essay.

6 Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (Macmillan, 1983).

7 Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Anthony Matthews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 27.

8 Ibid.

9 Flusser, Towards a Philosophy, 29.

10 Ibid.

11 A clue to Flusser’s cosmologistics can be gleaned from his remarks on the criticism of the photographic program, which he laments “serves the suspension of the critical faculties [and] the process of functionality.” Flusser writes:

Of course, critical awareness can still be awakened so as to make the photograph transparent. Then the photograph of Lebanon becomes transparent as regards its newspaper program and the program behind it belonging to the political party programming the newspaper. Then the photograph of the toothbrush becomes transparent as regards the program of the advertising agency and the program behind it belonging to the toothbrush industry. And the powers of “imperialism,” “Zionism,” “terrorism” and “tooth-decay” are revealed as concepts contained within these programs. But this critical exercise does not necessarily lead to a dis-enchantment of the images. That is, it can itself have been put under a magic spell, thereby becoming “functional.” The cultural criticism of the Frankfurt School is an example of such a second-order paganism: Behind the images it uncovers secret, superhuman powers at work (e.g. capitalism) that have maliciously created all these programs instead of taking for granted that the programming proceeds in a mindless automatic fashion (italics mine). A thoroughly disconcerting process in which, behind the ghosts that have been exorcized, more and more new ones are summoned up. (63–4).

Aren’t we to conclude from this that capitalism is not to be considered among the programs and much less the operating system of the current juncture of computations that currently constitute the clutch of the species?

12 Flusser, Towards a Philosophy, 20.

13 Ibid.

14 Flusser, Towards a Philosophy, 64.

15 Marshall McLuhan, “The Galaxy Reconfigured” in The New Media Reader, pp. 195-209. This, it should be noted, is diametrically opposed to the methodology of Foucault, for whom not just God, but power is in the details. McLuhan was not averse to a consideration of the details, but for him it was the standpoint of the platform that allowed for the clearest understanding of the reorganization of the sensorium. When all inputs were afected by emergent media, the very disposition of the species was transformed.

16 Originally published as Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory of Media,” New Left Review 64 (November/December 1970): 13–36; republished in The New Media Reader, 267.

17 Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory of Media,” in The New Media Reader, 271.

18 Ibid.

19 Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,” in The New Media Reader, 280.

20 Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,” 281.

21 Regis Debray, Media Manifestos (London: Verso, 1996), 46.

22 Debray, Media Manifestos, 13.

23 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster, Monthly Review Press, 1971.

24 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 1996), 298.

25 Foucault, The Order of Things, 299.

26 Foucault, The Order of Things, 300.

27 Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino, “Towards a Third Cinema,” http://documentaryisneverneutral.com/words/ camasgun.html.

28 Foucault, The Order of Things, 322.

29 Brian Holmes, Escape the Overcode, http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/07/20/escape-theovercode/. Additionally, Wlad Godzich, in an important essay called “Language, Images, and the Postmodern Predicament,” charts the increasing alienation of the subject of language over the long durée of European modernism, linking its existential crisis to the decreasing purchase of language on reality orchestrated by the rise of mechanically reproducible images. And Nicholas Mirzoef finds that the term visuality is first employed by Thomas Carlyle in “On Heroes and Hero Worship” to describe the perspective of the conservative hero who will save the republic from the rising power of the hordes. The suggestion is that the technomediated perceptions that are in the contemporary at once unavoidable and constitutive—perceptions that we now identify under the rubric of visuality—continue to be tinged with this reactionary perceptual modality, in short, a suppression of the masses. Put another way, we could say that the contemporary formation of visuality continues to conspire against the progressive forces of history. Here I would also include my own work on the cinematic mode of production as the emergence of a technology for the industrialization of visual perception and the transformation of the form of both work and the wage.

30 For more on this issue of inscription on the flesh of the global-social body, see my essay, “Paying Attention,” in Cabinet 24 (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2007). The essay was republished for Documenta XII. (Documenta is the largest contemporary art exhibition in Europe—similar to the Venice Biennial but curated by a single curator. http://d13.documenta.de/)

Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game

The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft

Lisa Nakamura

Cartman: “I am the mightiest dwarf in all of Azeroth!”

Kyle: “Wow, look at all these people playing right now.”

“Yeah, it’s bullcrap. I bet half of these people are Cartman: Koreans.”

South Park, Season 10, Episode 8, “Make Love Not Warcraft” ¹

Where did all the doggies and kitty cats go Since the gold farmers started to show
Don’t want to know what’s in the egg roll And they keep comin’ back
Cuz you’re giving them dough
Take one down and I felt inspired
Corpse camp until
This China-man gets fired
That’s one farmer they’ll have to replace
Not supposed to be here in the first place. I don’t know any other way to convey
How much we wish you’d all just go away Server economy in disarray
Guess I’ll just fear your mobs around all day.

Ni Hao (A Gold Farmer’s Story), warcraftmovies.com

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMOs) such as World of Warcraft (WoW), Lineage II, and Everquest are immensely profitable, skillfully designed, immersive, and beautifully detailed virtual worlds that enable both exciting game play and the creation of real-time, digitally embodied communities. In 2011, World of Warcraft surpassed 10 million users, confirming games economist Edward Castronova’s (2005) predictions for exponential growth, and these players are intensely interested in and protective of their investments in the virtual world of Azeroth. This stands to reason: as Alexander Galloway (2006) writes, “virtual worlds are always in some basic way the expression of utopian desire.” One of players’ primary rallying points as a group has been to advocate strongly that American video game developer and publisher Blizzard Entertainment regulate cheating within the game more stringently. However, the definition of cheating is unclear, despite the game’s end-user license agreement, since many players break these rules with impunity, a state of afairs that is actually the norm in MMOs.² As Mia Consalvo (2007) argues, it makes much less sense to see cheating within games as a weakness of game design or a problem with player behavior than to see it as an integral part of game culture, a feature that keeps players from getting stuck and quitting. Cheating thus benefits players and the game industry alike. However, cheating is as varied in its forms as is game play itself, and some varieties are viewed by players as socially undesirable, while others are not.

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Though Consalvo (2007) stresses the extremely subjective ways that MMO players define cheating, asserting that “a debate exists around the definition of cheating and whether it actually hurts other players [and] players themselves see little common ground in what constitutes cheating” (Consalvo 2007: 150), real-money trading—or buying and selling in-game property for real money—is widely considered the worst, more morally reprehensible form of cheating. The practice of gold farming, or selling in-game currency to players for real money, usually through resellers such as the International Gaming Exchange (IGE) or eBay, is especially disliked. Leisure players have been joined by player-workers from poorer nations such as China and Korea, who are often subject to oppression as both a raciolinguistic minority and as undesirable underclassed social bodies in the context of game play and game culture.³ These “farmers,” as other players dismissively dub them, produce and sell virtual goods such as weapons, garments, animals, and even their own leveled-up avatars or virtual bodies to other players for real-world money. As Consalvo (2007: 164) writes, the “gill-buying practice is viscerally despised by some players.”

Constance Steinkuehler’s (2006) analysis of Lineage II, a Korean MMO, discovered this to be true as well and, more importantly, uncovered some of the ways in which the condemnation of virtual currency buying is far exceeded by a visceral hatred of gold sellers or farmers. This hatred is strongly articulated to race and ethnicity: many (though by no means all) gold farmers are Chinese, and there is a decidedly anti-Asian flavor to many player protests against Chinese gold farmers. As Steinkuehler notes, hatred of gold farmers has given rise to polls querying players on North American servers: “Is it OK to Hate Chinese Players?” (32% of players responded yes; the majority, 39%, replied, “I don’t hate China, just what they stand for in L2”; and 10% checked “I am CN and you should mind yourself, you racist pig”). Though she notes “calling someone ‘Chinese’ is a general insult that seems aimed more at one’s style of play than one’s real-world ethnicity” (Steinkuehler 2006: 200), the construction of Chinese identity in MMOs as abject, undesirable, and socially contaminated racializes the culture of online games, a culture that scholars such as Castronova (2005) have claimed are unique (and valuable) because they are exempt from realworld problems such as racism, classism, “looksism,” and other types of social inequality.⁴ Though, as T. L. Taylor (2006) notes, MMOs are distinguished by their “enormous potential in a fairly divisive world,” the “fact that people play with each other across regions and often countries” as often as not results in ethnic and racial chauvinism: “as a tag the conflation of Chinese with gold farmer has seemed to come all too easy and now transcends any particular game” (Taylor 2006: 321). Robert Brookey (2007) expands upon this claim; in his analysis of gaming blogs, he discovered “overt racist attitudes” toward Chinese farmers; most importantly, that “some players, who harbor negative feelings toward Chinese farmers, do not believe that these feelings denote racial discrimination.” Thus, although it is the case that players cannot see each others’ bodies while playing, specific forms of gamic labor, such as gold farming and selling, as well as specific styles of play, have become racialized as Chinese, producing new forms of networked racism that are particularly easy for players to disavow.

Unlike the Internet itself, MMOs have always been a global medium, with many games originating in Asia.⁵ Korea has been a major player in the industry from its beginning, but Asian players are numerous even in U.S.-run MMOs such as Blizzard’s WoW; in 2008, the number of simultaneous players on Chinese WoW servers exceeded 1 million, the most that have ever been recorded in Europe or the United States (“Blizzard” 2008). Thus, although gold farmers are typecast as Chinese, most Asian players are leisure players, not player-workers. WoW sells Chinese, European, Japanese, and U.S. versions of its game software and also organizes its players into groups once they are signed on. MMOs support thousands, sometimes millions, of players from all over the world simultaneously in a live environment; therefore, to make the game playable and pleasurable and take pressure of of resources and space, players sign up to play on a specific “shard” or “server” when they create their user accounts. These servers are divided by region and language to facilitate eficient connections and handshaking as well as to promote social discourse between players who speak diferent languages, but users can choose to play on any server they wish. Blizzard disables virtual currency transfers between servers, which means that each server contains its own economy. Thus, players who engage in real-money trading can be found on every server—MMO virtual property resellers such as IGE ofer level-ups, gold, and other property on every server in WoW.

Like the biblical poor, in the world of MMOs, gold farmers are and will probably always be with us. Perhaps because most digital game scholars are players themselves, the economics of gold farming are usually discussed in the scholarly literature in terms of their negative impact upon the world of leisure players, who buy gold because they lack the time to earn virtual capital through “grinding” or performing the repetitive and tedious tasks that are the basis of most MMOs. However, as Toby Miller (2006) has advocated, digital games scholars need to attend to its medium’s political economy, and to “follow the money” to its less glamorous, less virtual places, such as games console and PC manufacturing plants, gold farmer sweatshops, and precious metals reclamation sites—in short, to China. Yet while many players are fairly un aware that their computer hardware is born and dies, or is recycled, in China, they are exceptionally aware of the national, racial, and linguistic identity of gold farmers. Gold farmers are reviled player-workers whose position in the gamic economy resembles that of other immigrant groups who cross national borders to work, but, unlike other types of “migrant” workers, their labors are ofshore, and thus invisible—they are “virtual migrants” (see Aneesh 2006). However, user-generated content in and around MMOs actively visualizes this process. Machinima fan-produced video production racializes this reviled form of gameplay as “Oriental” in ways that hail earlier visual media such as music videos and minstrel shows. Gold farming, a burgeoning gray-market labor practice in a disliked and semi-illegal industry that, as Consalvo (2007) notes, may soon outstrip the primary games market as a source of revenue, has become racialized as Asian—specifically as Chinese. The impact this racialization has had upon the medium and culture of gaming is tremendous and echoes earlier examples of online community such as MUDs (multiplayer real-time virtual world) and MOOs (text-based online virtual reality system), which also encouraged the development of racialized personae in a supposedly race-free medium. 6