Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory

Computers Are Not to Blame

Participants in the free labor debate often come close to assuming that digital technology is its causal agent—responsible in and of itself for punching a colossal hole through the universe of employment norms. Yet blaming new media is a sorry instance of the fallacy of technological determinism at work. Among other things, it ignores the proliferation of unpaid labor in old media and other parts of the employment landscape over the last decade and a half.

There is no doubt that new media, which has the technical capacity to shrink the price of distribution to almost zero, is hosting the most fast-moving industrial eforts to harness the unpaid efort of participants. But old media has also seen heavy inroads from the volunteer or amateur economy. Nowhere is this more visible than in the rise of reality TV, which was recognized and nurtured as a degraded labor sector almost from the outset. Indeed, the first significant lurch in the direction of utilizing free content as a business model was in the TV industry of the late 1980s, when producers responded to the explosion of cable channels and the concomitant fragmentation of audiences by introducing genre formats that drove down production inputs and professional labor costs.¹³ The cumulative outcome was an assault on entertainment unions. The response was a strike wave on the part of several of these media unions and craft guilds. The twenty-two-week-long 1988 strike by the Writers Guild of America was especially significant in the annals of reality TV, because it opened the door to the sector’s longest-running show, COPS. Faced with an acute content shortage, and on the lookout for scab material, the Fox network green-lighted this unscripted show, which required no actors’ salaries and boasted extra-low production costs. Indeed, much of the cinema verité feel of reality programming was pioneered by the use, in COPS, of handheld cameras to capture real-life police oficers as they pursued their more action-oriented assignments.

Since 2001, with the jumbo success of Survivor and Big Brother, the programming share claimed by reality TV and amateur challenge game shows has ballooned. The production costs of these shows are a fraction of what producers pay for conventional, scripted drama, while the ratings and profits have been mercurial. Indeed, they are so cheap to make that virtually all the production costs are earned back from the first network showing; syndicated or overseas sales are pure profit. From the outset, owners have insisted that producers and editors are not so much writers, who pen scripts and dialogue, as editors, who patch together chunks of real life. Anyone who views raw footage of reality shows can see that the dialogue is carefully scripted and plotted and that the supposedly real-life scenes, usually shot in multiple takes, are highly constructed. Nonetheless, this fiction is used to keep the Writers Guild of America out of reality programming. So, too, networks have begun to categorize game shows as reality programming in order to produce them without contracts.

Not surprisingly, the nonunionized reality sector teems with substandard conditions. Below-the-line workers, such as production assistants, loggers, assistant editors, drivers, and other technical crew, are often asked to work eighteen-hour days, with no meal breaks and no health or other benefits, and they face employer coercion to turn in time cards early. Wage rates are generally half of what employees on scripted shows are paid, and most overtime goes unpaid.¹⁴ Writers, pressured to produce by just-in-time network schedules, are also faced with the same roster of wage and hours violations, and, since they are usually hired at-will, sufer chronic job instability.¹⁵

Nor are the amateur contestants much better of. They are not considered actors and so do not enjoy the rights and protections that an actors’ union would aford. Yet, as befits a jackpot economy, talent on the top shows can make a bundle. Indeed, some are paid handsome fees for each episode, though most of their remuneration comes from aftermarket revenue in the form of endorsements. However, the majority receive trifling stipends, if anything, and the price for their shot at exposure is to endure conditions—deprived of sleep and plied with hard alcohol—that are designed to spark tension, conflict, and confrontation on screen.

The labor infractions in these old media sectors are conspicuous because they take place against the still heavily unionized backdrop of the entertainment industries. In the world of new media, where unions have no foothold whatsoever, the blurring of the lines between work and leisure and the widespread exploitation of amateur or user input has been normative from the outset. It would be more accurate to conclude, then, that while digital technology did not give birth to the model of free labor, it has proven to be a highly eficient enabler of nonstandard work arrangements.

Another illustration of the explosion of free labor is the whitecollar or no-collar internship, arguably the fastest-growing job category of recent years for a large slice of educated youth trying to gain entry into workplaces that are leaner and meaner by the day. Entrants now go to extreme lengths (including paying outright for positions in the internship marketplace) to secure an unpaid internship (often the first of many) that might help them build a resumé and win a foot in the door, or a leg up in the skilled labor market. The biggest beneficiary of this galloping trade, of course, is the employer. In Ross Perlin’s book on the internship explosion, he estimates that corporate America enjoys a \$2 billion annual subsidy from internships alone, and this sum does not include the massive tax dodges that many firms execute though employer misclassification.¹⁶ Perlin confirms that the Great Recession has seen a generation of full-time jobs converted into internships, while formerly paid internships have rapidly morphed into unpaid ones. An estimated 50% of U.S. internships are now unpaid or below minimum wage, 51% in Germany, and 37% in the United Kingdom.

If interning really were a rational career investment with a guaranteed payof, then the ethics of this form of employment would be more transparent. But the conversion rates that Perlin cites—recording how many interns move into permanent positions—are not very impressive. In good times, and at some companies, the rate used to be as high as 50%, but in recent years, it has taken a nosedive, all across the board. Indeed, the figures are trending toward the sweepstakes pattern that has become so emblematic of late neoliberalism. Interning, in other words, will only win you the equivalent of a lottery ticket in the white-collar job economy if things continue along this path.

Given these stingy odds, why are more youth not turning toward the blue-collar forerunner of the internship, an apprenticeship in the skilled trades? Apprenticeships still ofer a solid pathway—albeit after a lengthy probationary term—to distinct livelihoods in as many as a thousand trades. Some of these occupations die of as technologies and markets mutate, but most of them are relatively safe from ofshoring—plumber and electrician jobs are not sent overseas. So, too, their association with manual craft evokes the kind of artisanal autonomy that excites the moralists among us—witness the overheated reception of Matthew Crawford’s book Shop Class as Soulcraft. No doubt, the stigma of manual work is still the biggest factor in steering educated youth away from considering trade apprenticeships. But most of the trades in question remain male strongholds, an inconvenient fact that stymied Crawford’s efort to exalt his own beloved art of motorcycle maintenance and its kindred occupational spirits. While less than 10% of registered apprentices are female, women tend to dominate the most precarious sectors of white-collar and no-collar employment, and it is no surprise that they are assigned the majority of unpaid internships—77% according to one survey.¹⁷

Can we conclude that the intern economy is yet another reflection of what sociologists call the feminization of work? If so, then it is not just because it involves women in the majority, doing a lot of unpaid work. Internship labor also blurs the line between task and contract, between duty and opportunity, and between afective and instrumental work. Women are disproportionately burdened when these kinds of boundaries are eliminated. The sacrifices, trade-ofs, and humiliations entailed in interning are more redolent of traditional kinds of women’s work, whether at home or in what used to be called the secondary labor market (to distinguish it from the family wage generated by the primary market).

The internship is particularly relevant to our overall discussion because most interns do not see themselves as hard done by. In this respect, it is one more example of the twisted mentality of self-exploitation that has marched on to the killing fields of employment. Today, there is fairly broad agreement on what constitutes fair labor in the waged workplace of industry, or, to be more accurate, there are limits to the range of disagreement on the topic. People understand, more or less, what a sweatshop is, and also recognize that its conditions are unfair. By contrast, we have very few yardsticks for judging fairness in the salaried or freelancing sectors of the new, deregulated jobs economy, where any efort to draw a crisp line around work and pay (not to mention work and play) seems to be increasingly inefectual.

Capital owners have long sought to transfer work from the producer to the consumer or user, or from the formal site of production to decentralized points of consumption. Michael Palm’s account of the rise of self-service (a major component of this history of work transfer) begins with Bell’s elimination of telephone operators in favor of customer dialing. Persuading phone customers to take on the additional work of dialing for themselves required a great deal of cajoling, not to mention practical education.¹⁸ In retrospect, of course, dialing for ourselves is very small beer compared to the much more challenging tasks we have taken over from producers in the intervening century. Think of the massive amount of buyer’s time and energy that goes into researching and assembling consumer products, or the growing volume of user input that is considered mandatory for customer services of all sorts. Because these time soaks are palpable, especially those involving customer service, they are the ones that irritate us most, and so we end up venting our anger on robo-voices or on hapless call center employees in Bangalore.

But these burdens are only the most tangible evidence of what Italian operaismo theorists such as Mario Tronti called the “social factory.” According to this thesis, the work discipline of the factory is exported far beyond its bounded walls, and a large share of the work of production is subsequently and increasingly performed, without remuneration, in our daily social doings. Consequently, the entire content of our everyday lives—our net subjectivity—and not just our workplace toil, becomes raw material for capital accumulation. In the mid-1970s when this thesis was put forth, it was an avant-garde analysis of the eforts of capital owners to liberate themselves from factory-bound conflicts with unionized and often militant workers organizations. The transfer of work outside of the traditional sites of production was only part of capital’s response. Another was to relocate to cheaper, union-free locations, and a third was to casualize workforces wherever possible. Today, ofshore outsourcing is a fait accompli, and the forced march of temping into most professions seems to be unstoppable. Nor is there anything avantgarde about the concept of social factory, at least not when business strategies to extract rents through social web platforms and crowdsourcing techniques are openly discussed and urged in the pages of Businessweek.¹⁹

One of the salient questions at The Internet as Playground and Factory conference was whether the Marxist labor theory of value is still applicable to the new modes of capital accumulation exemplified by Facebook. The new profile of glad-some work—sometimes referred to as play-labor or “playbor”²⁰—does not seem to fit neatly into Marx’s classic analysis of how surplus value is generated from socially necessary, waged labor. On the other hand, some commentators in the Italian school have suggested that Marx, in a few prescient passages in the Grundrisse, predicted the increasing dependence of capitalism on the “general intellect” or “social brain”—the vast network of cooperative knowledge that is the source and agent of the cognitive mode of production.²¹ On the face of it, this theory does seem capable of accommodating or explaining the exploitative use of donated or passionate efort that is part and parcel of immaterial labor.

Marx or Not?

In response to the first debate about the relevance of Marx, it is worth noting that waged labor is not the only, or the best, lens through which to view work under capitalist conditions. Michael Denning has argued that, for Marx, the accumulation of labor was just as significant a feature of capitalism as the accumulation of capital.²² In that regard, the proliferation of unwaged (and thus less measurable) work may be a better analytical standpoint for understanding global economic life. After all, the template of the bounded, waged workday (and five-day work-week), with its formal wraparound of mutually observed rules, obligations, and expectations, was a highly artificial product of bargaining in the advanced economies during the temporary postwar truce between capital and labor. Though it was adopted and referred to as standard employment in those decades, there was nothing natural about its norms, and it applied almost exclusively to the primary employment of unionized male industrial workers. Indeed, this closely contested arrangement floated upon an ocean of unpaid work in the home, and it coexisted with casualized work in the secondary employment sector and wageless work in the informal sector, both of which have swelled in the last quarter century.

In addition, and this hardly goes without saying, the vast majority of human labor, historically and to this day, is wageless—only 7% of India’s workforce, for example, enjoys regular wages and salaries, and that number is on the decrease. The chances are that waged labor in a legally limited workday may soon come to be seen as the short-lived norm for a small minority, and most of them employed in the world’s increasingly besieged public sectors.²³ The upsurge of precarious work in the private sector—whether in low-wage services or in the high-wage knowledge and creative industries, where a self-employed or gigbased profile is more and more normative—may be seen as the degradation of the formal model, but it is viewed quite diferently by those who were excluded from standard employment in the first place. The under-40 workforce, who have known nothing but precarious underemployment, have their own understanding of what counts as fair or unfair labor, and it is highly contextual and subject to continual readjustment. Are they not the arbiters of their own exploitation? To argue otherwise is to come close to charging them with “false consciousness.”

On the question of the general intellect, there is little dispute that some high-growth industrial sectors are increasingly dependent on ideas and creative talent, and that capital has had to grant some concessions in order to guarantee a supply of cognitive skills. As long as their control over intellectual property is assured, capital owners have been willing to cede some ground over labor discipline; the creative work landscape now hosts multiple forms of autonomy and self-organization, at a far remove from the Taylorist rules of standardization and deskilling. Yet the copy-fight over intellectual property is a fraught terrain, featuring running skirmishes with the commons-loving hacker fractions of the cognitive class over the policing of digital rights management. So, too, the exposure of capital to open knowledge networks for sources of profit carries its own risks; investments in technically specific business models can go south rapidly when access to the same knowledge is widely available at no cost. In the case of free inputs, the hand that gives is also the hand that takes.

The least we can say, then, about capital’s dependence on the general intellect is that the outcome is a field of engagement within which contests can crop up virtually anywhere. In this respect, we are far beyond the confrontation at the factory gates—the customary location of the wage earner’s eforts to negotiate the sale of labor power—or the bargaining of a wage contract—which is the legal or symbolic efort to limit this confrontation. Indeed, as Angela McRobbie has recently pointed out, the cognitives or creatives who quarry the general intellect are often less consumed by struggles over compensation than by other political causes. They often invest more of their time and energy in fights over schooling, community development, food sovereignty, racism, sexism, and homophobia on the information landscape or other issues afected by unfair distribution.²⁴

It would be naive, however, to conclude, as some advocates of immaterial labor do, that capital has been weakened or outsmarted by the need to forage far and wide, and on especially uncertain and hostile terrain, for cognitive inputs and surpluses. The evidence from the current rent-extraction boom is that profits from new markets are far from soft, whether for jumbo monopolists like Google and Facebook or rapidly expanding content farms like Demand Media and Associated Content or for the army of smaller content aggregators. Moreover, their business models are highly quantitative and are very precisely tied to the measurable value of inputs from users or contributors. In this regard, it is by no means clear that the increasingly sophisticated Internet metrics industry represents a significant departure from the gainful calculus of the labor theory of value. Far from transforming the conventions of worker productivity and rewards beyond recognition, the digital labor system, as Chris Lehman suggests, has “merely sent the rewards further down the fee stream to unscrupulous collectors.”²⁵

Nor should the dizzying pace of development in the information sector lead us to conclude that factory gates are no longer important flashpoints. Virtually all of the technological infrastructure for this sector is manufactured in the workshops of the world in East Asia, where harsh factory conditions give rise to high-intensity labor conflicts on a regular basis. Where the creative use, say, of a notebook computer involves a highly customized work experience, emblematic of the fluid, flexible, self-organized profile of post-Fordism, the conditions of its manufacture could not be more diferent. Factories employing hundreds of thousands of workers are more and more common in the electronics production chain, and the most recent tendency in the industry is to integrate all the component operations under one roof, as opposed to contracting out to suppliers in diferent parts of the world. The result looks something like Fordism on steroids.

The giant Taiwanese original design manufacturer notebook makers like Quanta, Compal, Wistron, and Inventec grew to monopolize global production by building a component supply chain that snaked all over East Asia and by utilizing cheap Chinese labor to integrate and assemble the finished products. Yet this contracting model is currently undergoing a sea change as a result of the 2009 entry into the notebook sector of another Taiwanese heavyweight called Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., better known to the world as Foxconn. Foxconn’s rise to industrial prominence threatens to revolutionize manufacture in the way that Walmart changed the retail industry. According to what passes for humor among its executives: “In 20 years, there will be only two companies; everything will be made by Foxconn and sold by Walmart.”²⁶ Until recently, the company was itself a supplier of the Taiwanese notebook kingpins. Because its profit margin from making components was much larger than the margins it enjoyed from computer assembly, Foxconn was able to take them on by integrating all the parts manufacture and lowering its own margin on the final assembly work. Now that it is the largest private employer in China, with more than one million workers, Foxconn has the market power to force these former customers to adopt its vertical production methods by merging with its other component suppliers. Moreover, as part of the megafirm’s bid to become an original design manufacturer, it is developing its own design capacity, aimed ultimately at taking on the top brands that it currently supplies: Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Acer, and Sony.

Foxconn is the same company that has earned a toxic reputation for the militaristic labor discipline in its gargantuan factories. In 2010, a string of worker suicides focused international scrutiny on its Longhua factory campus in Shenzhen, which houses and employs an army of 400,000, mostly migrant, youth from China’s hinterland. The deaths—eighteen in all, and dozens of others narrowly averted—were widely interpreted as an existential response to the brutality of factory labor conditions, heightened by an oppressive speed-up brought on by the sharp market demand for Apple’s iPad. After the twelfth jump from the dormitory windows, a worker blog carried this poignant post: “Perhaps for the Foxconn employees and employees like us … the use of death is simply to testify that we were ever alive at all, and that while we lived, we had only despair.”

Foxconn’s CEO, Terry Gou, launched an extensive public relations crusade in response to the outcry and promised to raise wages. The most telling response to the suicides, however, has been to move production inland to the western provinces; to Chongqing, 1,000 miles up the Yangtze River, to the Sichuanese capital of Chengdu, and to Zhengzhou, the capital of a province, Henan, that is home to one-fifth of Foxconn’s workforce. The firm has a lot of company. In the biggest restructuring since the migration across the Taiwan Straits a decade ago, the entire PC industry looks to be moving lock, stock, and barrel to Chongqing and Chengdu to take advantage of the much cheaper labor, generous government subsidies (the result of fierce bidding among inland provinces), and locations that are farther removed from the scrutiny of labor and human rights groups. But this time, Foxconn is at the head of the pack, and its methods of labor discipline and vertical production models are setting the pace.²⁷

Foxconn’s move to integrate production may seem like a throwback to the IBM model of the 1960s, when the original computer giant made everything in-house. So, too, Foxconn’s vast, ruthlessly marshaled workforces are redolent of the Taylorism of the early twentieth-century assembly lines. Both of these industrial models are supposed to be gathering dust, irredeemably associated with the bygone era of mass society. Yet here they are, thriving at the profitable heart of one of the world’s most advanced manufacturing sectors. For the best part of two decades, anti-sweatshop activists have tried to force consumers in the global North to confront the human costs that lie behind their clothing purchases. Whether the same moral crusade can be applied to information technology products remains to be seen. Apparel never had the air of magical production that sustains the aura of high-tech. For their part, Foxconn’s Longhua workers used the most extreme means at their disposal to generate public attention—“To die is the only way to testify that we ever lived.” Through their suicides, they spelled out the literal implications of the “dead labor” precept used by Marx to explain the process of capitalist production. Nor are they likely to be the last to publicize their alienation in this way.