Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory

Two Ends of the Chain Gang

In Marx’s well-known analysis, “living labor” is needed to reanimate the “dead labor” embodied in factory machinery. As a result of the surplus generated (Marx described this as a vampiric act), capital is able to roam, zombie-like, wherever it pleases, until its profiteers are forced, under communism, to dig their own graves in an act of self-administered exorcism.

In the case of the new generation of work technologies, especially the mobile ones, the living labor is also allowed to range freely, choosing when and where to clock in, and whether to play along the way. In return for this rare permission, though not exactly out of gratitude, we seem to be ofering up more and more of our work for free, or at a tidy discount. Mobile workers—whether they are banging away in a cofee shop, a teleworker “hotel,” or on a beach—appear to be at a far remove from the sweaty precincts of the industrial age. But their parcours digital feats depend on the uniform regimentation of mass workforces at the other end of the production chain, some of them larger in scale and more strictly controlled than anything dreamed of by Henry Ford. As fast as we can dream of ever more personal tools and applications, those individual desires get mined and harvested into industrial demands that are serviced by the most impersonal forms of manpower that modernity has seen.

In these low-wage manufacturing locations, work is feminized not because it involved a blurring between the factory and the traditionally feminine household sphere, but because the workforce is disproportionately composed of the most vulnerable segment of the population: rural teenage girls. It’s worth noting the female dominance of this factory labor pool has come into being at the same time as young women have disproportionately entered the precarious world of self-employment and creative labor at the other end of the production chain, moving, as McRobbie has put it, “from the reserve army of labor” to the very “heartland of new forms of work.”²⁸ The women in the first kind of workforce are firmly disciplined according to traditional gender roles at the same time as they have access, for the first time, to some disposable income and to the feel of urban freedoms. The women in the second—the so-called creative industries—enjoy full equality of access and unprecedented control over the scheduling of their lives at the same time as their gendered skills and aptitudes around networking, multitasking, and social finessing of a whole range of work-leisure overlaps have made them ideal workers for the most neoliberal forms of flexible accumulation.

These creative workers operate in the do-it-yourself economy, where skilled entrants fashion their own livelihoods by piecing together disparate lumps of work and income. Yet this defiantly postindustrial world of custom-built workers does not subsist on its own ethereal, cyberspace foundation. It is tied, as I have shown, to conditions of production that have much in common with the early stages of industrialization. The workers that service either end of the chain are drawn from quite diferent strata—one is educated and urban, the other underresourced and migrant—but they share the existential condition of radical uncertainty that intermittent work begets. Whether they labor in the increasingly thin regulation state of reform China or in the hothouse creative capitals of the world, they find themselves isolated from any protective framework of social insurance, marooned in the crowded ether of selfhood.

Notes

1 This debate was initiated by Tiziana Terranova in “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 63, Vol. 18, No. 2 (summer 2000): 33–58, and it entered mainstream public discussion with the publications of Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the Rest of Today’s User-Generated Media are Destroying Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values (New York: Crown, 2007) and Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (New York: Hyperion, 2009). The contributors to a special issue of ephemera touch on various elements of the debate. See Jonathan Burston, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Alison Hearn, eds., “Digital Labour: Workers, Authors, Citizens,” ephemera: theory & politics in organization 10, no. 3/4 (August 2010): 214–21, http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/10-3/10-3index.htm.

2 Daniel Roth, “The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model,” Wired, October 19, 2009.

3 See “The AOL Way: Content, Product, Media Engineering, and Revenue Management,” http://www.businessinsider.com/theaol-way#-1.

4 Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (New York: Penguin Press, 2001), 7, 43.

5 Quoted in Parisier, p. 21.

6 See Alison Hearn, “Structuring Feeling: Web 2.0, Online Ranking and Rating, and the Digital ‘Reputation’ Economy,” ephemera: theory & politics in organization 10, no. 3/4 (August 2010): 421–38.

7 See Jef Howe, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business (New York: Crown, 2008).

8 Katharine Mieszkowski, “I Make \$1.45 a Week and I Love It,” Salon, July 24, 2006, http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/ 2006/07/24/turks, and Jonathan Zittrain, “Work the New Digital Sweatshops,” Newsweek, December 8, 2009.

9 Andrew Ross, No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

10 Melissa Gregg, Work’s Intimacy (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2010); Rosalind Gill, Technobohemians or the New Cybertariat: New Media Work in Amsterdam a Decade After the Web (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2007); David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker, Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries (New York: Rout-ledge, 2010); Sybille Reidl, Helene Schifbanker, and Hubert Eichmann, “Creating a Sustainable Future: The Working Life of Creative Workers in

Vienna,” Work, Organization, Labour & Globalization 1, no. 1 (2006): 48–58; D. Perrons, “The New Economy and the Work Life Balance. A Case Study of the New Media Sector in Brighton and Hove,” Gender, Work and Organisation 10, no. 1 (2003): 65–93; Ursula Huws, Jorg Flecker, Monique Ramioul, Karen Guerts, et al., WORKS Project, Work Organisation and Restructuring in the Knowledge Society (Leuven: Institute for Labor Studies, 2009), http://www.worksproject.be/.

14 Robert Elisberg, “The Amazing Reality of ‘Reality’ TV.” Hufington Post (2008), http://www.hufingtonpost.com/robert-jelisberg/the-amazing-reality-of-re\_b\_118433.html.

17 Ibid., 27.

18 Michael Palm, “Phoning It In: Self-Service Technology and the History of Consumer Labor” (PhD dissertation, New York University, 2010).

20 Julian Kücklich, “FCJ-025 Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry,” Fibreculture 5 (2005).

21 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (1861), chap. 13, http://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch13.htm#p694; Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy, eds. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133–46; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

22 Michael Denning, “Wageless Life,” New Left Review 66 (November– December 2010).

23 Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, “Precarity as a Political Concept, or Fordism as an Exception,” Theory Culture Society 25, no. 7–8 (2008): 51–72.

24 Angela McRobbie, “Reflections on Feminism, Immaterial Labour and the Post-Fordist Regime,” New Formations 70 (Winter 2011): 60–76.

25 Chris Lehmann, “An Accelerated Grimace,” The Nation, March 21, 2011, 32.

26 Frederik Balfour and Tim Culpan, “The Man Who Makes Your iPhone,” Bloomberg Businessweek, September 9, 2010.

27 The one labor rights group with access to the new factories, Hong Kong–based Students and Scholars against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM), reported that a year after Foxconn’s initial response to the suicides, most of the company’s promises regarding increased wages, reduced overtime, improved workermanagement communication, and internship regulation remained unfulfilled. SACOM, “Foxconn and Apple Fail to Fulfill Promises: Predicaments of Workers after the Suicides,” May 6, 2011, http://sacom.hk/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ 2011-05-06\_foxconn-and-apple-fail-tofulfill-promises1.pdf.

28 Angela McRobbie, “Reflections on Feminism, Immaterial Labour and the Post-Fordist Regime,” New Formations 70, no. 1 (2011).

Tiziana Terranova

The real not-capital is labor.

—Karl Marx, Grundrisse

Working in the digital media industry was never as much fun as it is made out to be. Certainly, for the workers of the bestknown and most highly valued companies, work might have been a brief experience of something that did not feel like work at all.¹ On the other hand, even during the dot-com boom, the “netslaves” of the homonymous webzine had always been vociferous about the shamelessly exploitative nature of the job, its punishing work rhythms, and its ruthless casualization.² They talked about “24-7 electronic sweatshops” and complained about the 90-hour week and the “moronic management of new media companies.”³ Antagonism in the new media industry also afected the legions of volunteers running well-known sites for the Internet giants. In early 1999, 7 of the 15,000 “volunteers” of America Online rocked the info–love boat by asking the Department of Labor to investigate whether AOL owed them back wages for their years of playing chat hosts for free. They used to work long hours and love it; but they also felt the pain of being burned by digital media.

These events point to an inevitable backlash against the glamorization of digital labor, which highlighted its continuities with the modern sweatshop and the increasing degradation of knowledge work. Yet the question of labor in a digital economy as an innovative development of the familiar logic of capitalist exploitation is not so easily dismissed. The netslaves are not simply a typical form of labor on the Internet; they also embody a complex relation to labor that is widespread in late capitalist societies.

In this chapter, I call this excessive activity that makes the Internet a thriving and hyperactive medium “free labor”—a feature of the cultural economy at large and an important, yet unacknowledged, source of value in advanced capitalist societies. By looking at the Internet as a specific instance of the fundamental role played by free labor, this chapter also highlights the connections between the digital economy and what the Italian autonomists have called the “social factory” (or “societyfactory”).⁴ The society-factory describes a process whereby “work processes have shifted from the factory to society, thereby setting in motion a truly complex machine.”⁵ Simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited, free labor on the net includes the activity of building websites, modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing lists, and building virtual spaces. Far from being an unreal, empty space, the Internet is animated by cultural and technical labor through and through, a continuous production of value that is completely immanent to the flows of the network society at large.

Support for this argument, however, is immediately complicated by the recent history of Anglo-American cultural theory. How should we speak of labor, especially cultural and technical labor, after the demolition job carried out by 30 years of postmodernism? The postmodern socialist feminism of Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” spelled out some of the reasons behind the antipathy of 1980s critical theory for Marxist analyses of labor. Haraway explicitly rejected the humanistic tendencies of theorists who see the latter as the “pre-eminently privileged category enabling the Marxist to overcome illusion and find that point of view which is necessary for changing the world.”⁶ Paul Gilroy similarly expressed his discontent at the inadequacy of Marxist analysis of labor to the descendants of slaves, who value artistic expression as “the means towards both individual selffashioning and communal liberation.”⁷ If labor is “the humanizing activity that makes [white] man,” then, surely, this humanizing labor does not really belong in the age of networked, posthuman intelligence.

However, the “informatics of domination” that Haraway describes in the manifesto is certainly preoccupied with the relation between cybernetics, labor, and capital. In the 20 years since its publication, this triangulation has become even more evident. The expansion of the Internet has given ideological and material support to contemporary trends toward increased flexibility of the workforce, continuous reskilling, freelance work, and the difusion of practices such as “supplementing” (bringing supplementary work home from the conventional ofice).⁸ Advertising campaigns and business manuals suggest that the Internet is not only a site of disintermediation (embodying the famous death of the middle man, from bookshops to travel agencies to computer stores), but also the means through which a flexible, collective intelligence has come into being.

This chapter does not seek to ofer a judgment on the efects of the Internet on society. What I will rather do is map the way in which the Internet connects to the autonomist social factory. I will look at how the “outernet”—the network of social, cultural, and economic relationships that crisscrosses and exceeds the Internet—surrounds and connects the latter to larger flows of labor, culture, and power. It is fundamental to move beyond the notion that cyberspace is about escaping reality in order to understand how the reality of the Internet is deeply connected to the development of late postindustrial societies as a whole. It is related to phenomena that have been defined as “external economies” within theoretical perspectives (such as the theory of transaction costs), suggesting that “the production of value is increasingly involving the capture of productive elements and social wealth that are outside the direct productive process.”⁹ Cultural and technical work is central to the Internet but is also a widespread activity throughout advanced capitalist societies. Such labor is not exclusive to so-called knowledge workers but is a pervasive feature of the postindustrial economy. The pervasiveness of such production questions the legitimacy of a fixed distinction between production and consumption, labor and culture. It also undermines Gilroy’s distinction between work as “servitude, misery and subordination” and artistic expression as the means to self-fashioning and communal liberation. The increasingly blurred territory between production and consumption, work and cultural expression, however, does not signal the recomposition of the alienated Marxist worker. The Internet does not automatically turn every user into an active producer and every worker into a creative subject. The process whereby production and consumption are reconfigured within the category of free labor signals the unfolding of another logic of value whose operations need careful analysis. 10

The Digital Economy

The term digital economy emerged in the late 1990s as a way to summarize some of the processes described above. As a term, it seems to describe a formation that intersects on the one hand with the postmodern cultural economy (the media, the university, and the arts) and on the other hand with the information industry (the information and communication complex). Such an intersection of two diferent fields of production constitutes a challenge to a theoretical and practical engagement with the question of labor—a question that has become marginal for media studies as compared with questions of ownership (within political economy) and consumption (within cultural studies).

We will distinguish here between the New Economy—“a historical period marker [that] acknowledges its conventional association with Internet companies”¹¹—and the digital economy—a less transient phenomenon based on key features of digitized information (its ease of copying and low or zero cost of sharing). In Richard Barbrook’s definition, the digital economy is characterized by the emergence of new technologies (computer networks) and new types of workers (the digital artisans).¹² According to Barbrook, the digital economy is a mixed economy: it includes a public element (the state’s funding of the original research that produced ARPANET, the financial support to academic activities that had a substantial role in shaping the culture of the Internet); a market-driven element (a latecomer that tries to appropriate the digital economy by reintroducing commodification); and a gift economy element (the true expression of the cutting edge of capitalist production that prepares its eventual overcoming into a future “anarchocommunism”).

What Barbrook proposed was that the vision of politicians and corporate leaders who linked the future of capitalism to the informational commodity involved a basic misunderstanding. Pointing to the world of discussion groups, mailing lists, and the distributed learning of programmers, he suggested that the Internet was far from simply being a new way to sell commodities. The predominance of relationships of collaboration across distance and exchange without money suggested that this was a practiced relationship with a viable and alternative political and economic model.

Unrestricted by physical distance, they collaborate with each other without the direct mediation of money and politics. Unconcerned about copyright, they give and receive information without thought of payment. In the absence of states or markets to mediate social bonds, network communities are instead formed through the mutual obligations created by gifts of time and ideas.¹³

Barbrook’s vision of the informational commons was only reinforced by the subsequent explosion of peer-to-peer, filesharing networks—a huge network phenomenon that had the music and film industries up in arms.

From a Marxist-Hegelian angle, Barbrook saw the high-tech gift economy as a process of overcoming capitalism from the inside. The high-tech gift economy is a pioneering moment that transcends both the purism of the New Left do-it-yourself culture and the neoliberalism of the free market ideologues: “moneycommodity and gift relations are not just in conflict with each other, but also co-exist in symbiosis.”¹⁴ Participants in the gift economy are not reluctant to use market resources and government funding to pursue a potlatch economy of free exchange. However, the potlatch and the economy ultimately remain irreconcilable, and the market economy is always threatening to reprivatize the common enclaves of the gift economy. Commodification, the reimposition of a regime of property, is, in Barbrook’s opinion, the main strategy through which capitalism tries to reabsorb the anarcho-communism of the net into its folds.

This early attempt to ofer a polemical platform from which to think about the digital economy overemphasizes the autonomy of the high-tech gift economy from capitalism. The processes of exchange that characterize the Internet are not simply the reemergence of communism within the cutting edge of the economy, a repressed other that resurfaces just at the moment when communism seems defeated. It is important to remember that the gift economy, as part of a larger digital economy, is itself an important force within the reproduction of the labor force in late capitalism as a whole. The provision of free labor, as we shall see later, is a fundamental moment in the creation of value in the economy at large—beyond the digital economy of the Internet. As will be made clear, the conditions that make free labor an important element of the digital economy are based in a dificult, experimental compromise between the historically rooted cultural and afective desire for creative production (of the kind more commonly associated with Gilroy’s emphasis on “individual selffashioning and communal liberation”) and the current capitalist emphasis on knowledge as the main source of added value.

The volunteers for America Online, the netslaves and the amateur web designers, did not work only because capital wanted them to, but they were acting out a desire for afective and cultural production, which was nonetheless real just because it was socially shaped. The cultural, technical, and creative work that supported the digital economy had been made possible by the development of capital beyond the early industrial and Fordist modes of production and therefore is particularly abundant in those areas where post-Fordism has been at work for a few decades. In the overdeveloped countries, the end of the factory has spelled out the obsolescence of the old working class, but it has also produced generations of workers who have been repeatedly addressed as active consumers of meaningful commodities. Free labor is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into excess productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited.