Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory

Collective knowledge work, then, is not about those who work in the knowledge industry. But it is also not about employment. The mass layofs in the dotcom sector have not stopped Internet content from growing or its technologies from mutating. The acknowledgment of the collective aspect of labor implies a rejection of the equivalence between labor and employment, which was already stated by Marx and further emphasized by feminism and the post-Gramscian autonomy.⁴¹ Labor is not equivalent to waged labor. Such an understanding might help us to reject some of the hideous rhetoric of unemployment that turns the unemployed person into the object of much patronizing, pushing, and nudging from national governments in industrialized countries. (Accept any available work or else …) Often the unemployed are such only in name, in reality being the lifeblood of the dificult economy of under-the-table, badly paid work, some of which also goes into the new media industry.⁴² To emphasize how labor is not equivalent to employment also means to acknowledge how important free afective and cultural labor is to the media industry, old and new.

Ephemeral Commodities and Free Labor

There is a continuity, and a break, between older media and new media in terms of their relationship to cultural and afective labor. The continuity seems to lie in their common reliance on their public/users as productive subjects. The diference lies both in the mode of production and in the ways in which power/ knowledge works in the two types. Despite diferent national histories (some of which stress public service more than others), the television industry, for example, is relatively conservative: writers, producers, performers, managers, and technicians have definite roles within an industry still run by a few established players. The historical legacy of television as a technology for the construction of national identities also means that television is somehow always held more publicly accountable than the news media.

This does not mean that old media do not draw on free Labor. On the contrary, television and print media, for example, make abundant use of the free labor of their audiences/readers, but they also tend to structure the latter’s contribution much more strictly, both in terms of economic organization and moralistic judgment. The price to pay for all those real-life-TV experiences is usually a heavy dose of moralistic scaremongering: criminals are running amok on the freeways and must be stopped by tough police action; wild teenagers lack self-esteem and need tough love; and selfish and two-faced reality TV contestants will eventually get their comeuppance. If this does not happen on the Internet, why is it, then, that the Internet is not the happy island of decentered, dispersed, and pleasurable cultural production that its apologists claimed it to be?

The most obvious answer to such questions came spontaneously to the early Internet users, who blamed it on the commercialization of the Internet. E-commerce and progressive privatization were blamed for disrupting the free economy of the Internet, an economy of exchange that Richard Barbrook described as a gift economy.⁴³ Indeed, maybe the Internet could have been a diferent place than what it is now. However, it is almost unthinkable that capitalism could stay forever outside of the network, a mode of communication that is fundamental to its own organizational structure.

The outcome of the explicit interface between capital and the Internet is a digital economy that manifests all the signs of an acceleration of the capitalist logic of production. It might be that the Internet has not stabilized yet, but it seems undeniable that the digital economy is the fastest and most visible zone of production within late capitalist societies. New products and new trends succeed each other at an anxiety-inducing pace. After all, this is a business where you need to replace your equipment/ knowledges and possibly staf every year or so.

At some point, the speed of the digital economy, its accelerated rhythms of obsolescence, and its reliance on (mostly) immaterial products seemed to fit in with the postmodern intuition about the changed status of the commodities whose essence was said to be meaning (or lack of) rather than labor (as if the two could be separable).⁴⁴ The recurrent complaint that the Internet contributes to the disappearance of reality is then based both in humanistic concerns about real life and in the postmodern nihilism of the recombinant commodity.⁴⁵ Hyperreality confirms the humanist nightmare of a society without humanity, the culmination of a progressive taking over of the realm of representation. Commodities on the net are not material and are excessive (there is too much of it, too many websites, too much clutter and noise) with relation to the limits of real social needs.

It is possible, however, that the disappearance of the commodity is not a material disappearance but its visible subordination to the quality of labor behind it. In this sense, the commodity does not disappear as such; it rather becomes increasingly ephemeral, its duration becomes compressed, and it becomes more of a process than a finished product. The role of continuous, creative, innovative labor as the ground of market value is crucial to the digital economy. The process of valorization (the production of monetary value) happens by foregrounding the quality of the labor that literally animates the commodity.

The digital economy, then, challenged the postmodern assumption that labor disappears while the commodity takes on and dissolves all meaning. In particular, the Internet foregrounds the extraction of value out of continuous, updateable work, and it is extremely labor-intensive. It is not enough to produce a good website; you need to update it continuously to maintain interest in it and fight of obsolescence. Furthermore, you need updateable equipment (the general intellect is always an assemblage of humans and their machines), which is, in its turn, propelled by the intense collective labor of programmers, designers, and workers. It is as if the acceleration of production has pushed to the point where commodities, literally, turn into translucent objects. Commodities do not so much disappear as become more transparent, showing throughout their reliance on the labor that produces and sustains them. It is the labor of the designers and programmers that shows through a successful website, and it is the spectacle of that labor changing its product that keeps the users coming back. The commodity, then, is only as good as the labor that goes into it.

As a consequence, the sustainability of the Internet as a medium depends on massive amounts of labor (which is not equivalent to employment, as we said), only some of which is hypercompensated by the capricious logic of venture capitalism. Of the incredible amount of labor that sustains the Internet as a whole (from mailing list trafic to websites to infrastructural questions), we can guess that a substantial amount of it is still free labor.

Free labor, however, is not necessarily exploited labor. Within the early virtual communities, we are told, labor was really free: the labor of building a community was not compensated by great financial rewards (it was, therefore, free, unpaid), but it was also willingly conceded in exchange for the pleasures of communication and exchange (it was therefore free, pleasurable, not imposed). In answer to members’ requests, information was quickly posted and shared with a lack of mediation that the early netizens did not fail to appreciate. Howard Rheingold’s book, somehow unfairly accused of middle-class complacency, is the most well-known account of the good old times of the old Internet, before the net-tourist overcame the net-pioneer.⁴⁶

The free labor that sustains the Internet is acknowledged within many diferent sections of the digital literature. Despite the volatile nature of the Internet economy (which yesterday was about community, today is about portals, and tomorrow who knows …?), the notion of users’ labor maintains an ideological and material centrality that runs consistently throughout the turbulent succession of Internet fads. Commentators who would normally disagree, such as Howard Rheingold and Richard Hudson, concur on one thing: the best website, the best way to stay visible and thriving on the web, is to turn your site into a space that is not only accessed, but somehow built by its users.⁴⁷ Users keep a site alive through their labor, the cumulative hours of accessing the site (thus generating advertising), writing messages, participating in conversations, and sometimes making the jump to collaborators. Out of the 15,000 volunteers who kept AOL running, only a handful turned against it, while the others stayed on. Such a feature seems endemic to the Internet in ways that can be worked on by commercialization, but not substantially altered. The “open source” movement, which relies on the free labor of Internet tinkers, is further evidence of this structural trend within the digital economy.

It is an interesting feature of the Internet debate (and evidence, somehow, of its masculine bias) that users’ labor has attracted more attention in the case of the open source movement than in that of mailing lists and websites. This betrays the persistence of an attachment to masculine understandings of labor within the digital economy: writing an operating system is still more worthy of attention than just chatting for free for AOL. This despite the fact that in 1996, at the peak of the volunteer moment, over 30,000 “community leaders” were helping AOL to generate at least \$7 million per month.⁴⁸ Still, the open source movement has drawn much more positive attention than the more difuse user labor described above. It is worth exploring because of the debates that it has provoked and its relation to the digital economy at large.

The open source movement is a variation of the old tradition of shareware and freeware software, which substantially contributed to the technical development of the Internet. Freeware software is freely distributed and does not even request a payment from its users. Shareware software is distributed freely, but incurs a moral obligation for the user to forward a small sum to the producer to sustain the share-ware movement as an alternative economic model to the copyrighted software of giants such as Microsoft. Open source “refers to a model of software development in which the underlying code of a program—the source code, a.k.a. the crown jewels—is by definition made freely available to the general public for modification, alteration, and endless redistribution.”⁴⁹

Far from being an idealistic, minoritarian practice, the open source movement has attracted much media and financial attention. In 1999, Apache, an open source web server, became the “Web-server program of choice for more than half of all publicly accessible Web servers.”⁵⁰ It has since then expanded to the point where Bavaria in Germany and the whole of China have recently announced a switchover to Apache. Open-source conventions are anxiously attended by venture capitalists, who have been informed by the digerati that the open source is a necessity “because you must go open-source to get access to the benefits of the open-source development community—the nearinstantaneous bug fixes, the distributed intellectual resources of the Net, the increasingly large open-source code base.”⁵¹ Opensource companies such as Cygnus convinced the market that you do not need to be proprietary about source codes to make a profit: the code might be free, but tech support, packaging, installation software, regular upgrades, ofice applications, and hardware are not.

In 1998, when Netscape went open source and invited the computer tinkers and hobbyists to look at the code of its new browser, fix the bugs, improve the package, and redistribute it, specialized mailing lists exchanged opinions about its implications.⁵² Netscape’s move rekindled the debate about the peculiar nature of the digital economy. Was it to be read as being in the tradition of the Internet gift economy? Or was digital capital hijacking the open source movement exactly against that tradition? Richard Barbrook saluted Netscape’s move as a sign of the power intrinsic in the architecture of the medium.⁵³ Others, such as John Horvarth, however, did not share this optimism. The “free stuf” ofered around the Net, he argued,

is either a product that gets you hooked on to another one or makes you just consume more time on the net. After all, the goal of the access people and telecoms is to have users spend as much time on the net as possible, regardless of what they are doing. The objective is to have you consume bandwidth.⁵⁴

Far from proving the persistence of the Internet gift economy, Horvarth claimed that Netscape’s move was a direct threat to those independent producers for whom shareware and freeware have been a way of surviving exactly those “big boys” that Netscape represents:

Freeware and shareware are the means by which small producers, many of them individuals, were able to ofset somewhat the bulldozing efects of the big boys. And now the bulldozers are headed straight for this arena. As for Netscrape [sic], such a move makes good business sense and spells trouble for workers in the field of software development. The company had a poor last quarter in 1997 and was already hinting at job cuts. Well, what better way to shed staf by having your product taken further by the freeware people, having code-dabbling hobbyists fix and further develop your product? The question for Netscape now is how to tame the freeware beast so that profits are secured.⁵⁵

Although it is tempting to stake the evidence of Netscape’s layofs against the optimism of Barbrook’s gift economy, there might be more productive ways of looking at the increasingly tight relationship between an idealistic movement such as open source and the current venture mania for open source companies.⁵⁶ Rather than representing a moment of incorporation of a previously authentic moment, the open source question demonstrates the overreliance of the digital economy as such on free labor, both in the sense of not financially rewarded and willingly given. This includes AOL community leaders, the open source programmers, the amateur web designers, mailing list editors, and the netslaves willing to “work for cappuccinos” just for the excitement and the dubious promises of digital work.⁵⁷

Such reliance, almost a dependency, is part of larger mechanisms of capitalist extraction of value that are fundamental to late capitalism as a whole. That is, such processes are not created outside capital and then reappropriated by capital, but are the results of a complex history where the relation between labor and capital is mutually constitutive, entangled, and crucially forged during the crisis of Fordism. Free labor is a desire of labor immanent to late capitalism, and late capitalism is the field that both sustains free labor and exhausts it. It exhausts it by subtracting selectively but widely the means through which that labor can reproduce itself: from the burnout syndromes of Internet start-ups to underretribution and exploitation in the cultural economy at large. Late capitalism does not appropriate anything: it nurtures, exploits, and exhausts its labor force and its cultural and afective production. In this sense, it is technically impossible to separate neatly the digital economy of the net from the larger network economy of late capitalism. Especially since 1994, the Internet has been always and simultaneously a gift economy and an advanced capitalist economy. The mistake of the neoliberalists (as exemplified by the Wired group), is to mistake this coexistence for a benign, unproblematic equivalence.

As stated before, these processes are far from confined to the most self-conscious laborers of the digital economy. They are part of a difuse cultural economy that operates throughout the

Internet and beyond. The passage from the pioneeristic days of the Internet to its venture and recession days does not seem to have afected these mechanisms, only intensified them. Nowhere is this more evident than on World Wide Web.

In the winter of 1999, in what sounds like another of its resounding, short-lived claims, Wired magazine announced that just after five years, the old web was dead:

The Old Web was a place where the unemployed, the dreamy, and the iconoclastic went to reinvent themselves…. The New Web isn’t about dabbling in what you don’t know and failing—it’s about preparing seriously for the day when television and Web content are delivered over the same digital networks.⁵⁸

The new web was made of the big players, but also of new ways to make the audience work. In the new Web, after the pioneering days, television and the web converge in the one thing they have in common: their reliance on their audiences/users as providers of the cultural labor that goes under the label of “real-life stories.” Gerry Laybourne, executive of the web-based media company Oxygen, thinks of a hypothetical show called What Are They Thinking? a reality-based sketch comedy based on stories posted on the web, because “funny things happen in our lives everyday.”⁵⁹ As Bayers also adds, “until it’s produced, the line separating that concept from more puerile fare dismissed by Gerry, like America’s Funniest, is hard to see.”⁶⁰

The diference between the puerile fare of America’s Funniest and user-based content seems to lie not so much in the more serious nature of the new web as compared to the vilified output of television’s people shows and reality television. From an abstract point of view, there is no diference between the ways in which people shows rely on the inventiveness of their audiences and the ways in which websites rely on users’ input. People shows rely on the activity (even amid the most shocking sleaze) of their audience and willing participants to a much larger extent than any other television programs. In a sense, they manage the impossible; they create monetary value out of the most reluctant members of the postmodern cultural economy: those who do not produce marketable style, who are not qualified enough to enter the fast world of the knowledge economy, are converted into monetary value through their capacity to perform their misery.

When compared to the cultural and afective production on the Internet, people shows also seem to embody a diferent logic of relation between capitalism (the media conglomerates that produce and distribute such shows) and its labor force—the beguiled, dysfunctional citizens of the underdeveloped North. Within people shows and reality TV, the valorization of the audience as labor and spectacle always happens somehow within a power/knowledge nexus that does not allow the immediate valorization of the talk show participants: you cannot just put a Jerry Springer guest on TV on her own to tell her story with no mediation (indeed, that would look too much like the discredited access slots of public-service broadcasting). There is no real 24/ 7 access to reality TV, but increasing and decreasing levels of selective editing (according to the diferent modalities of a communication spectrum that goes from terrestrial to digital TV and the Internet). In the case of talk shows, various levels of knowledge intervene between the guest and the apparatus of valorization, which normalize the dysfunctional subjects through a moral or therapeutic discourse and a more traditional institutional organization of production. So after the performance, the guest must be advised, patronized, questioned, and often bullied by the audience and the host, all in the name of a perfunctory, normalizing morality. In reality television, psychologists and other experts are also brought in to provide an authoritative perspective through which what is often a sheer voyeuristic experience may be seen as a social experiment.

The Net and the Set

TV shows also belong to a diferent economy of scale: although there are more and more of them, they are still relatively few when compared to the millions of pages on the web. It is as if the centralized organization of the traditional media does not let them turn people’s productions into pure monetary value. TV shows must have morals, even as those morals are shattered by the overflowing performances of their subjects.

Within the Internet, however, this process of channeling and adjudicating (responsibilities, duties, and rights) is dispersed to the point where practically anything is tolerated (sadomasochism, bestiality, fetishism, and plain nerdism are not targeted, at least within the Internet, as sites that need to be disciplined or explained away). The qualitative diference between people shows and a successful website, then, does not lie in the latter’s democratic tendency as opposed to the former’s exploitative nature. It lies in the operation, within people shows, of majoritarian discursive mechanisms of territorialization, the application of a morality that the excessive abundance of material on the Internet renders redundant and, even more, irrelevant. The digital economy cares only tangentially about morality. What it really cares about is an abundance of production, an immediate interface with cultural and technical labor whose result is a difuse, nondialectical antagonism and a crisis in the capitalist modes of valorization as such.

A New Conclusion: The Liberation of Free Labor February 2012

“Free Labor” was written in the late 1990s as output of a funded research project about the future of the Internet and partially rewritten in the mid-2000s, after the crash of the dotcom bubble. It put forward two propositions. The first argued that the future of the Internet was going to be driven by the centrality of users’ active participation. The second proposition argued that such process could be productively explained by means of the autonomist Marxists’ thesis of the social factory and concurrent notions of immaterial labor and the social factory. Today, in the middle of chronic financial turbulence and a general slowing down or recession of the global economy, the digital economy of the social web seems to belong to a diferent universe, as numbers of users increase exponentially and the profits and market value of web 2.0 giants are exceptions to the general depressing economic climate. The idea that the value of such corporations is given by users’ participation has become common business sense. The composition of labor producing the value of such companies shows a massive surplus of free labor as compared to a tiny percentage of actual waged labor. Furthermore, voluntary work, unpaid work, underpaid work, and a growing gap between the wealthy and everybody else have become salient features of contemporary economies at large. But what to make of the other thesis, put forward in the original article, that such activity could be considered as a form of labor and that such labor was being exploited?

Calling users’ participation in the digital economy labor was not so much an empirical description of an undisputable social and economic reality, but a political choice. Subscribing to the autonomists’ thesis of the social factory meant rejecting the separation between consumption and production and hence arguing that the production of value could no longer be confined to the spaces and times of waged work. This implies arguing that wages paid for work performed as such could no longer be considered an adequate way of distributing wealth socially generated in contemporary societies.

Within the economic limits of capitalist economies, then, living labor is doubly exploited. To the increasing exploitation clearly visible in the domain of waged digital work (decreasing autonomy and falling wages for increasing productivity), we have to add, then, a new kind of exploitation—that which concerns the immaterial commons of cultural and technical production. Such exploitation must be conceptualized diferently than the one concerning waged work. It implies a privatization of the wealth produced by free labor that takes the shape of an impoverishment of potential users’ appropriation of the fruits of such labor. This impoverishment can be understood in terms of the unilateral