Monthly Archives: April 2015

Digital Labor Compensation—A Catch-22 Situation!?!

Laurel Ptak makes an apt analogy of “unwaged condition of housework” and that of facebook.  Both the housewife and the Facebook user/“worker” undertake their “work”—mystified by Capitalism as non-work in order for capital to function more smoothly—out of love and enthusiasm rather than financial reward.  However, if housewives unite and demand payment, who should be the one responsible for their compensation?  The husbands (because they are the direct beneficiaries)? The established corporations (as a result of housewives’ indirect contribution to capitalism)?  The government and the tax payers (as a reward for housewives’ maintaining the domestic and societal wholesomeness)?  Ptak’s “Wages for Facebook” manifesto distantly resonates with the call to political action (“Workers of the world unite!” and to protect their economic interests against bourgeoisie through class struggles) in Communist Manifesto.  But then, who should be responsible for the digital “laborers?”  If the corporations were to pay for digital contributions indiscriminately, would that change the free accessibility of online resources into hierarchized knowledge only for the wealthy? Would that deepen the capitalist grip, as many scholars have indicated?  Furthermore, is monetary payment the only way of compensation?  What about the form of self-compensation that’s driven by self-interest, (for instance, twittering for one’s own world-wide recognition)?

Maurizio Lazzarato in his mid-1990s essay “Immaterial Labor” posits that as both a virtuality and an actuality, immaterial labor is seen in every productive subject in postindustrial societies.  Knowledge is intrinsically collective in the postmodern economy, and information are produced collectively but are selectively and disproportionately compensated.  On the one hand, knowledge economy thrives on the production and consumption of intellectual property—a form of immaterial labor, as capitalist panopticon spies on everyone and punishes anyone who threatens to change the rules of the game.  On the other hand, as Richard Barbrook argues, the internet could only be successfully developed by letting its users build the system for themselves.  Tim Berners Lee famously stated that since there is a need for the infrastructure to make copies for reasons of efficiency and reliability, the concept of “copyright” makes little sense. Linux, the non-proprietary operating system, comes out of the open process of communal sharing and collaboration. By contributing one’s own work to the collective knowledge already shared online, everyone gets access to a much larger pool of information in return.  This kind of gift economy constitutes what Barbrook calls “anarcho-communism,” which is “a marriage of altruism and self-interest,” and “the only alternative to the dominance of monopoly capitalism.”

Ptak’s Communist Manifesto-sounding “Wages for Facebook” and Barbrook’s “anarcho-communism,” though both instigating anti-capitalist sentiments, seems to be occupying the opposite ends of the spectrum.  However, it is important at this moment to be reminded by authors such as Bernard Stiegler, who, in his Technics and Time 2, astutely argues for a keen consciousness of time frame and temporality of technics, which to him is the clue to understanding the future over-connected world of a human and technics symbiosis.  The two seemingly opposing proposals both operate within the capitalist metabolism, and exhibit what Stiegler would call the capitalist “temporalization of consciousness.”  Another scholar we read for this week, Tiziana Terranova, observed the limits of Barbrook’s “anarcho-communism” in her “Free Labor” article: “The relative abundance of cultural/technical/affective production on the Net […] does not exist as a free-floating postindustrial utopia but in full, mutually constituting interaction with late capitalism, especially in its manifestation as global-venture capital.” (43)  The limit of digital labor compensation, then, lies in its Catch-22 dilemma: not asking for compensation implies capitalist exploitation (as opposed to “anarcho-communism” on the surface); asking for compensation further indicates—and even encourages—capitalist exploitation.  The way out probably lies in the future unpredictable “temporalization of consciousness,” in which human beings and technics co-reside in some progressive form indescribable.

Realism and Utopianism in Discussions of Digital Labor

All of the readings we did for this week touch on a tension that exists in many forms of Left politics. On the one hand, there is a desire to find sites of possible resistance and encourage the development of an affective basis for modes of activity that exist outside of Capitalism, which seems to be what Barbrook is attempting to do in his discussion of the early open source community. On the other hand, there is the desire to bring injustices into the light—hence, the “Wages for Facebook” manifesto’s attempt to enable a discussion of the exploitative nature of Facebook by referring to people’s use of the service as “work.” One thing I find particularly striking about this juxtaposition is the way in which naming an injustice produced by Capitalism seems to require that we take on the language of Capitalism, referring to an ostensibly personal form of activity as “work,” while Barbrook’s claim that the Internet is “anarcho-communist”—as radical as the terminology of this argument is—seems to imply a much less critical attitude towards the world as it is.

While I am generally more sympathetic to Ptak than Barbrook, I am concerned that interventions like “Wages for Facebook” will only get us so far. Referring to Facebook activity as “work” brings an issue that was hidden to the foreground, but it also seems to go right along with a broad trend in American discourse towards framing more and more activities within Capitalist and managerial categories. Referring to clicking like buttons as “work” and stating that ad-driven services treat users as “products” may serve the interest of social realism, but this rhetorical move could also backfire, feeding right into the madness that, for instance, leads people to obsess over their “personal brands” and use the word “metric” to refer to any sort of standard against something is to be judged, acting as if the entirety of the world worked like a marketing firm.

One writer who has noted this specific issue in oppositional discourse is Theodore Adorno. At the end of his book Minima Moralia, Adorno arrives at a critique of Hegelian dialectic from the perspective of the anti-fascist Left. One of the issues that he raises is the tendency of dialectical thought to inadvertently reinforce the system that it is meant to critique. To use Adorno’s example, the Left must acknowledge that the romantic view of marriage can cover up the exploitative economic relations that underlie the institution. But if we instead reframe marriage as a purely economic arrangement—realistic as this view may be—we can lose sight of the possibility that it could or should be something more. The structural analogy between the two sides of a dialectic, Adorno argues, makes the immediate division of Hegel’s followers into Left and Right factions inevitable—since the vocabulary of pro- and anti-Capitalist writing is necessarily similar, politics comes to be discernable less in the formal character of a work than in the social, institutional, and discursive formations in which it is enmeshed.

We might find an example of this structural analogy between Left and Right in Franco Moretti’s work on the literary marketplace, which we discussed last semester. In a cursory reading, Moretti’s Marxist account of the “slaughterhouse of literature” could easily be mistaken for a Capitalist analysis—the terms of discussion (market, product, consumer) are largely the same. Christopher Prendergast’s accusation that Moretti’s use of evolutionary ideas makes him a Social Darwinist is unfair, but I don’t think it’s too implausible that Moretti’s work could be mistaken for a Social Darwinist project on a cursory reading, given how much his terms of analysis borrow from this viewpoint. The difference is a hair’s breadth.

Adorno responds to this seeming bind with one of his most famous aphorisms: “The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption” (247). This formula suggests a different grounding for criticism that aims for transcendence rather than for “realism” of the sort that borrows its terms from the prevailing order. There are some ways in which this response is problematic, and it certainly dates itself as pre-1968. Adorno’s approach bears a suspicious resemblance to the positivist idea of a “view from nowhere;” and his big problem, of course, is his tendency to presume knowledge of what is best for other people. But I think this formula might still be useful in thinking about our own motivations in undertaking online labor. How would we articulate our reasons for blogging, for contributing to Wikipedia, or for clicking a like button if exploitation finally came to an end? How distorted would our activity appear from this standpoint? Framing the question in this way allows us to name the negative aspects of reality within terms that are not determined by the current order—but unlike the sort of techno-utopianism that peaked in the 1990s, it allows us to keep in mind that the alternative is, and perhaps will always remain, not wholly real.

Digital Labor: Odd Jobs for Fun or Money?

Thoughts on Wikipedia Editing and Digital Labor by Dorothy Howard raises some compelling points about the nature of working in the so-called digital economy. When is digital labor a voluntary, altruistic, creative way to spend free time and when is it an exploitative dead end for people with few other choices? It is inspiring to think about Wikipedia as a collaborative gift to human knowledge constructed by high-minded volunteers who have steady incomes and a bit of time to spare. It is depressing to think about Wikipedia as “hope labor” for people who otherwise earn a little cash delivering pizzas or as a “honey-trap for people on the autism spectrum.” Wikipedia encompasses both the inspiring and depressing aspects of digital labor, but it is free labor for a free resource.

What happens when digital labor is paid? A new market is emerging for “human intelligence tasks” in which humans are employed on a piecework basis to do small tasks which computers cannot do. For example, Amazon Mechanical Turk offers workers pennies per job to do “HITs”or human intelligence tasks such as tagging photos, selecting correct spelling for search terms or choosing the appropriate category for products. HITs might seem like a convenient way to use spare time on the computer to earn some extra money, but the average hourly rate falls well below minimum wage (see Tips for Making Money with Amazon Mechanical Turk). In addition, Amazon Mechanical Turk acts only as a liability-free payment processor (see their conditions of use) in a marketplace which offers workers about as much protection as a street corner meetup for day laborers  (see The Unregulated Work of Mechanical Turk by Nancy Folbre). In contrast, employers have access to a global, on-demand, 24 x 7 workforce and they “pay only when satisfied with the results.”

Another entry into the digital piecework business is a new app called Spare5. Spare5 has an upfront business plan: “We’re very much trying to harness the attention deficit generation” (see New York Times article). It distinguishes itself from Amazon Mechanical Turk by filtering workers for relevant skills (users of the app complete a questionnaire and provide links to their social media pages) and offering employers a more targeted labor pool. Spare5 not only appeals to workers’ desire to make money, but also makes a rather nervy pitch to their desire to join a community of like-minded experts: “Hello, Providers of Insights! We aspire to build a great community of people who enjoy exercising their hobbies, passions and interests in snippets of their free time. Since you are seeking to join this community, we thought we’d lay out the fine print that our lawyers assure us is vital…” (From Spare5 terms of service).

Non-profit organizations including universities, libraries and museums also need workers to perform HITs  to create metadata for digitized collections or to assist in filtering big data for research projects. While some have used paid workers through Amazon Mechanical Turk, others have focused on creating gaming platforms such as Metadata Games, an open source software project developed by Dartmouth College or Building Inspector, a game based on New York City historical maps developed by the New York Public Library. These projects don’t offer the digital workers any money, so instead they offer the fun of playing games plus a strangely nuanced appeal for volunteer help. NYPL encourages “citizen cartographers” to “kill time and make history” by identifying buildings and other details on historical maps of New York City. The slightly mixed message is that you are going to waste your time online in any event, so you should make the most of it and do some volunteer work. Metadata Games makes a more straightforward appeal to workers (“Museums and libraries have digital collections of images, audio, and video files, but there aren’t any descriptions! Through playing our games, players make it possible for these media artifacts to be found and used.”), but the appeal to employers is  nearly identical to the pitch from Spare5 (“Metadata Games allows you to harness the power of players to easily enhance information about your collections.”)

Both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations need to access extremely cheap digital labor. They both seek to  “harness” masses of workers to do human intelligence tasks by paying them pennies or by appealing to their desire to have fun and contribute to a community. What does it mean for an  individual  to decide to provide this cheap labor? The distinction between paid work on exploitative terms and volunteer work for personal enrichment or a social good should be an obvious one, but it seems increasingly hazy. To use Maurizio Lazzarato’s terms, when and how does an individual performing immaterial labor become an “intellectual proletarian”?