Trebor Scholz (Ed.) - Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory

The Internet as Playground and Factory

Edited by Trebor Scholz

Trebor Scholz

Andrew Ross

Tiziana Terranova

Sean Cubitt

McKenzie Wark

Ayhan Aytes

Free Labor

Abigail De Kosnik

Patricia Ticineto Clough

Jodi Dean

Mark Andrejevic

Jonathan Beller

Lisa Nakamura

Michel Bauwens

Christian Fuchs

Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle

Many thanks go to a great many people. I am indebted to my colleagues at The New School, a university in New York City, who have generously and enthusiastically supported my work, specifically The Politics of Digital Culture conference series that I started there in 2009.

Nearly three years have passed since I convened The Internet as Playground and Factory conference that led to the publication of this book. I wish to recognize and thank the participants of this conference who have contributed chapters to this book.

I would like to particularly thank my colleague McKenzie Wark for his intellectual fire and many helpful critical comments. Also working with Erica Wetter at Routledge has been a pleasure.

I would like to thank the following friends and colleagues, for thought-provoking debates, challenging and constructive comments, practical help with the conference, and putting this book together: Frank Pasquale, Neil Gordon, Gabriella Coleman, Shannon Mattern, Laura De Nardis, Mark Greif, Sven Travis, Joel Towers, Jenny Perlin and the students in my spring 2012 seminar Play and Toil in the Digital Sweatshop.

In addition, I would also like to thank the members of the mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity for the six-month-long pre-conference discussion on the commercial geographies of unsung digital labor, value, and the fight for fairness and economic democracy.

I dedicate this book to the memory of my grandmother Herta Fritzsche, who was born in 1917 and labored as a home worker most of her life.

R. Trebor Scholz

Why Does Digital Labor Matter Now?

Trebor Scholz

In 2009, the Internet as Playground and Factory conference at The New School, a university in New York City with a rich history of critical theory and student activism, asked whether Marxist labor theory, with its concept of exploitation of labor, is still applicable to emerging modes of value capture on the Internet. This book is a result of this international conference that I convened.

What does it mean to be a digital worker today? The Internet has become a simple-to-join, anyone-can-play system where the sites and practices of work and play increasingly wield people as a resource for economic amelioration by a handful of oligarchic owners. Social life on the Internet has become the standing reserve, the site for the creation of value through ever more inscrutable channels of commercial surveillance. This inquiry has important ramifications for struggles around privacy, intellectual property rights, youth culture, and media literacy.

To this collection of essays the authors bring a common commitment to understanding the complex implications of new forms of waged and unwaged digital labor. Throughout this publication, you will find the consistent analysis of digital labor as a continuation of the social relations surrounding the traditional work-place. While also exploring discontinuities, shifts of labor markets to the Internet are described as an intensification of traditional economies of unpaid work.

Over the past six years, web-based work environments have emerged that are devoid of the worker protections of even the most precarious working-class jobs. Amazon.coms Mechanical Turk is only one example. These are new forms of labor but old forms of exploitation. There are no minimum wages or health insurance, and so far federal and state regulators have not intervened. Digital labor matters; such underpaid, waged occupations must not be ignored when thinking about cognitive capitalism.

But several authors in this book are also thinking about unwaged labor, the activation of our behavior on the social web as monetizable labor. This argument is frequently challenged because in opposition to traditional labor, casual digital labor looks merely like the expenditure of cognitive surplus, the act of being a speaker within communication systems. It doesnt feel, look, or smell like labor at all. This digital labor is much akin to those less visible, unsung forms of traditional womens labor such as child care, housework, and surrogacy.

In 2011, the value of Facebook was pegged at $100 billion, which can be linked to vast financial speculation but also the companys collection of user data over a seven-year time span. Intimate forms of human sociability are being rendered profitable for Facebook, which makes it such a big-ticket company. Facebook sells its user data to its customers, which are mostly third-party advertisers. The social web appears to be free for us to use, but there are hefty social costs; oligarchs capture and financialize our productive expression and take flight with our data. We, the users, are sold as the product. The loss of our privacy, with all its psychological and political consequences, buys us the convenience of free, innovative services. All of life is put to work, unfairly harnessing implicit participation for wild profits.