Trebor Scholz wrote:
Dear all,

What follows is my introduction to the conference The Internet as Playground and Factory, which will take place November 12-14 at the New School University in NYC.

Over the next few months this list will serve as one of the places for discussion in preparation for the event and some of the exchanges that we had on the iDC over the past few years are highly relevant to this debate.

These include: Social information overload/time :: User labor :: “Creative labor” :: Labor and value :: Fan labor :: Immaterial labor :: Enculturation :: Virtual worlds, education, and labor

I hope that you’ll join this discussion.

The Internet as Playground and Factory

Introduction

Today we are arguably in the midst of massive transformations in economy, labor, and life related to digital media. The purpose of this conference is to interrogate these dramatic shifts restructuring leisure, consumption, and production since the mid-century. In the 1950s television began to establish commonalities between suburbanites across the United States. Currently, communities that were previously sustained through national newspapers now started to bond over sitcoms. Increasingly people are leaving behind televisions sets in favor of communing with — and through– their computers. They blog, comment, procrastinate, refer, network, tease, tag, detag, remix, and upload and from all of this attention and all of their labor, corporations expropriate value. Guests in the virtual world Second Life even co-create the products and experiences, which they then consume. What is the nature of this interactive ‘labor’ and the new forms of digital sociality that it brings into being? What are we doing to ourselves?

Only a small fraction of the more than one billion Internet users create and add videos, photos, and mini-blog posts. The rest pay attention. They leave behind innumerable traces that speak to their interests, affiliations, likes and dislikes, and desires. Large corporations then profit from this interaction by collecting and selling this data. Social participation is the oil of the digital economy. Today, communication is a mode of social production facilitated by new capitalist imperatives and it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between play, consumption and production, life and work, labor and non-labor.

The revenues of today’s social aggregators are promising but their speculative value exceeds billions of dollars. Capital manages to expropriate value from the commons; labor goes beyond the factory, all of society is put to work. Every aspect of life drives the digital economy: sexual desire, boredom, friendship ‹ and all becomes fodder for speculative profit. We are living in a total labor society and the way in which we are commoditized, racialized, and engendered is profoundly and disturbingly normalized. The complex and troubling set of circumstances we now confront includes the collapse of the conventional opposition between waged and unwaged labor, and is characterized by multiple “tradeoffs” and “social costs, such as government and corporate surveillance. While individual instances are certainly exploitative in the most overt sense, the shift in the overall paradigm moves us beyond the explanatory power of the Marxian interpretation of exploitation (which is of limited use here).

Free Software and similar practices have provided important alternatives to and critiques of traditional modes of intellectual property to date but user agency is not just a question of content ownership. Users should demand data portability, the right to pack up and leave the walled gardens of institutionalized labor à la Facebook or StudiVZ. We should ask which rights users have beyond their roles as consumers and citizens. Activists in Egypt have poached Facebook’s platform to get their political message out and to organize protests. Google’s Image Labeler transforms people’s endless desire for entertainment into work for the company. How much should Google pay them to tag an image? Such payment could easily become more of an insult than a remuneration. Currently, there are few adequate definitions of labor that fit the complex, hybrid realities of the digital economy.

This conference confronts the urgent need to interrogate what constitutes labor and value in the digital economy and it seeks to inspire proposals for action. Currently, there are few adequate definitions of labor that fit the complex, hybrid realities of the digital economy. The Internet as Playground and Factory poses a series of questions about the conundrums surrounding labor (and often the labor of love) in relation to our digital present:

Is it possible to acknowledge the moments of ruthless exploitation while not eradicating optimism, inspiration, and the many instances of individual financial and political empowerment?

What is labor and where is value produced?

Are strategies of refusal an effective response to the expropriation of value from interacting users?

How is the global crisis of capitalism linked to the speculative performances of the digital economy?

What can we learn from the “cyber sweatshops” class-action lawsuit against AOL under the Fair Labor Standards Act in the early 1990s?

How does this invisible interaction labor affect our bodies? What were key steps in the history of interaction design that managed to mobilize and structure the social participation of bodies and psyches in order to capture value?

Most interaction labor, regardless whether it is driven by monetary motivations or not, is taking place on corporate platforms. Where does that leave hopeful projections of a future of non-market peer production?

Are transnational unionization or other forms of self-organization workable acts of resistance for what several authors have called the “virtual proletariat”?

Are we witnessing a new friction-free imperialism that allows capital to profit from the unpaid interaction labor of millions of happy volunteers who also help each other? How can we turn these debates into politics?

How does the ideology of Web 2.0 work to deflate some of the more radical possibilities of new social media?

How can we maintain and enforce the rights to our own gestures, our attention, our content, and our emotional labor? In the near future, where can we, personally, enter political processes that have an impact on these issues?

-Trebor Scholz
http://digtallabor.org

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