Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory

26 Michel Foucault, “On Popular Justice: A Discussion with Maoists,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 1–36.

28 See Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). See also Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Matthew Fuller, Software Studies: A Lexicon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); and Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder, Deep Search: The Politics of Search Beyond Google (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2009).

29 The sociotechnological process of free and open-source software development has long been considered a paradigmatic net-cultural dynamic—to understand the web is to understand free software. See Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter, Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software (New York: Routledge, 2007); Joseph Feller, Brian Fitzgerald, Scott A. Hissam, and Karim R. Lakhani (eds.), Perspectives on Free and Open Software (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Chris Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). Free software continues to serve as a foil for critiques of alternative licensing schemes such as creative commons; see Berry, The Philosophy of Software.

35 See Paul Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Ofshore Banking and Tax Havens (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), as well as reports by organizations such as Publish What You Pay (http://www.publishwhatyoupay.org), Tax Justice Network (http://www.taxjustice.net), and Global Witness (http://www.globalwitness.org).

38 See Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Changes: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” New Yorker, October 24, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/

101004fa\_fact\_gladwell. While we do not necessarily second Gladwell’s call for a return of (and to) hierarchical forms of organization, we share the concern that “[t]he instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more eficient” (ibid.).

Further Reading

Mark Andrejevic is a QE II Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. His work focuses on the productive aspect of surveillance and monitoring in the digital era. In particular, he explores the ways in which the capture of detailed information about citizens becomes a source of value creation and generation within the context of the emerging interactive commercial model. He is the author of Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched and iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on surveillance, popular culture, and digital media.

Ayhan Aytes received his PhD degree in Communication and Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego, in 2012. His research interests are related to the cultural history of artificial intelligence in relation to subjectivity, body, autonomy, temporality, religion, and race. His dissertation, The ‘Other’ in the Machine: Oriental Automata and the Mechanization of the Mind, is an inquiry into a long-term cultural relationship between intelligent automata and the Western discourse of Orientalism. His digital media works have been exhibited in various venues, including the Istanbul Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam and Aksanat Culture and Arts Center. www.ayhanaytes.net.

Michel Bauwens is a writer, researcher, and speaker on the subjects of technology, culture, and business innovation. He is the founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives (www.p2pfoundation.net) and collaborates with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. He has been an analyst for the United States Information Agency, knowledge manager for British Petroleum, e-business strategy manager for Belgacom, and an Internet entrepreneur in his native Belgium. He coproduced the TV documentary Technocalyps with Frank Theys and coedited a twovolume book about the anthropology of digital society with Salvino Salvaggio. Bauwens is Primavera Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam and an external expert for the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. He currently lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He is a partner with the Commons Strategies Group and serves on the advisory boards of the Union of International Associations (Brussels), Shareable magazine (San Francisco), and the Zumbara Timebank (Istanbul).

Contributors

Jonathan Beller is Professor of Humanities and Media Studies and Critical and Visual Studies at The Pratt Institute. He also directs Pratt’s graduate program in media Studies. He is the author of The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (2006) and Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle and the World-Media System (2006). Current book projects include Present Senses: Aesthetics/Afect/Asia (with Neferti Tadiar) and Wagers within the Image. He is editing a special issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online titled Feminist Media Theory: Iterations of Social Diference. www.jonathanbeller.wordpress.com.

Patricia Ticineto Clough is Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the City University of New York–Queens College and the Graduate Center. She is the author of Autoafection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (2000), Feminist Thought: Desire, Power and Academic Discourse (1994), and The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (1998). She is editor of The Afective Turn: Theorizing the Social (2007) and, with Craig Willse, editor of Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death (forthcoming).

Sean Cubitt is Professor of Film and Television at Goldsmiths, University of London; Professorial Fellow of the University of Melbourne; and Honorary Professor of the University of Dundee. His publications include Timeshift: On Video Culture, Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture, Digital Aesthetics, Simulation and Social Theory, The Cinema Efect, and EcoMedia. He is the series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press. His current research is on the history and philosophy of visual technologies, on media art history, and on ecocriticism and mediation.

Jodi Dean is Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Her books include Aliens in America (1998), Publicity’s Secret (2002), Zizek’s Politics (2006), Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (2009), Blog Theory (2010), and The Communist Horizon (2012). She is coeditor of the international electronic journal of critical political and cultural theory, Theory & Event.

Abigail De Kosnik is Assistant Professor at the University of California–Berkeley, at the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. www.twitter.com/De\_Kosnik.

Christian Fuchs is Chair Professor in Media and Communication Studies at Uppsala University. His main research interests are critical social theory; media and society; critical political economy of media; and communication, digital media, and society. He is chair of the European Sociological Association’s Research Network 18—Sociology of Communications and Media Research, cofounder of the ICTs and Society Network (www.ictsand-society.net) and editor of tripleC—Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society (www.triple-c.at). He is author of the books Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age (2008), Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies (2011), and Social Media: A Critical Introduction (forthcoming). And he is coeditor of Internet and Surveillance. The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media (2012). His website is www.fuchs.uti.at.