[iDC] Introduction: The Internet as Playground and Factory
Joe Edelman
joe.edelman at gmail.com
Sat Jun 6 21:29:42 UTC 2009
I thought I'd chime in a response to Frank, Trebor, and Howard about
this stuff.
For me, it's about power. Are these corporations giving private
individuals, especially the disempowered in society, more power to
change their communities and circumstances, or are they taking it
away. And how do these power dynamics compare to what governments,
nonprofits, art projects, universities, and other non-commerce
organizations are doing?
While this Web 2.0 stuff is certainly not a panacea, it's clear to me
that social websites are having a profound and positive effect on
personal empowerment. Universities, who have long claimed to elevate
and connect through scholarships and the like, are closed to most
participants, and can take six years and a great deal of expense to
effect the same power shift that can be accomplished by a disempowered
group on facebook or twitter in a few weeks. The U.S. government this
year is distributing more economic power via grants than usual, but it
is hard to see exactly how this is panning out and who is benefiting.
Art projects sometimes pretend to talk about power but very seldom do
anything to shift or expand it.
Cautiously, I have to admin these corporate endeavors are doing better
than most social justice related nonprofits, and better than the
public school system, at slowly leveling the playing field. We have
seen the ubiquitous availability of information, and the empowerment
that that brought, and we are now moving slowly toward the ubiquitous
availability of social connection. I won't rest until we get to the
ubiquitous availability of physical resources like cars and trucks,
the availability of labor and in-person expertise, and ultimately the
availability of cash... to those who do not presently have access to
these things.
In the end, such an empowered, connected citizenry may well be bad
news for the advertising sector and for large corporations: certainly
a lot of advertising and consumerism prays on isolation and
disempowerment. But that's not going to stop internet companies, many
of them funded by advertising, from bringing us that future.
Indeed, it seems well on it's way, and I'm doing my part to keep it
going in that direction.
--
J.E. // nxhx.org // (c) 413.250.8007
On Jun 5, 2009, at 6:48 PM, Frank Pasquale wrote:
> Hi List,
>
> I’m a law professor (presently visiting at Yale, with a home base at
> Seton Hall). I am looking forward to the conference. I want to
> respond to this question:
>
> "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?"
>
> We all “pay attention” (literally and figuratively) at monolithic
> sites like Google, Facebook, and eBay. Promoters of those companies
> say that our “return” for that activity is finding sites, staying in
> touch with friends, finding bargains, etc. They convert our attention
> into cash from advertisers and sellers. Some questions I like to ask
> are:
>
> 1) Is the amount of control and cash the operators of the sites get
> commensurate with their own contributions to the site’s order and
> maintenance?
>
> 2) How much of the site’s success is due to its owners’ innovative
> genius—and how much is owed to the activities of users? For example,
> when a user thinks of a really good Google search query, has the user
> “co-authored” the results that come up? Not under current copyright
> law, but there’s a moral case there.
>
> Similarly, Google’s supremacy in search may largely be due to its
> dataset of how people responded to past searches. If its secret
> methods of ranking webpages are largely built on analysis of users’
> actions, don’t users deserve some credit as co-creators? Or, more
> plausibly, isn’t the company acting less as a provider of services and
> more like a cultural voting machine—counting votes as to what’s the
> “winner” for billions of search queries? If so, should there be more
> accountability? The German constitutional court recently embraced the
> principle that vote-counting has to be understood by all.
>
> 3) Maybe it’s inevitable that there would be one dominant search
> engine, or social network. David Grewal’s fundamental insight (in the
> book Network Power) is that the “individual choice” celebrated in
> markets (and many other settings) is often simultaneously both “forced
> and free.” For example, “[T]he network power of English isn’t the
> result of any intrinsic features of English (for example, “it’s easy
> to learn”): it’s purely a result of the number of other people and
> other networks you can use it to reach.” Might the same be said of
> Facebook, eBay, or Google? If so, what are the implications for their
> governance or regulation?
>
> Some say that platforms like Google and Facebook were always
> inevitable, and those companies just happened to be in the right place
> at the right time. Alperovitz & Daly's new book makes this argument
> generally (at
> http://www.americabeyondcapitalism.com/UnjustDeserts.html)
>
> They ask: "Why should only a tiny fraction of our citizens keep most
> of the money made off [our technical and cultural] heritage if, in
> fact, it is [our] common background that gave them their success?" As
> one reviewer puts it, "Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly [propose] a new way
> of looking at great wealth. It is not the primary product of luck,
> they say, nor is it the child of skill. Rather, it is society that
> allows individuals to achieve great things and earn such magnificent
> rewards." They give several examples of laureled "innovators" who in
> fact barely advanced tech beyond other, less celebrated, figures.
>
> Both Microsoft Word and the ISO 9000 standards gained power in a
> self-reinforcing way; as more people adopted them, others anticipated
> their further adoption and “fell into line” in promoting the
> standards. Grewal worries that “privately owned technological
> standards not only [threaten] the freedom of users to choose the best
> standards for their needs . . . [but also result in] . . .a great deal
> of power [being] handed over to the private owner of that standard.”
> I have the same worries about the corporate platforms on which much
> Web 2.0 labor is being conducted.
>
> Anyway, I try to provide some commentary on these questions in some
> blog posts and articles. I’ll append them after my signature for
> anyone interested.
>
> All best,
>
> --Frank
>
> PS: For more of my thoughts on the topic, see:
>
> Is Web 2.0 an Engine of Inequality?, at
> http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2008/03/
> is_the_new_econ.html
>
> Federal Search Commission? (authored with Oren Bracha):
> http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1002453
>
> Network Power, Forced and Free:
> http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2008/05/network_power_f.html#more-11633
>
> Is MySpace Exploiting You?, at
> http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2007/04/
> is_myspace_expl.html
>
> Beyond Innovation and Competition: The Case for Transparency at
> Internet Intermediaries (available on request)
>
> On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 11:46 AM, Trebor Scholz <trebor at thing.net>
> 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 http://is.gd/OaFq
>> User labor http://is.gd/OaqD
>> "Creative labor" http://is.gd/Oaue
>> Labor and value http://is.gd/Oav5
>> Fan labor http://is.gd/Oaxg
>> Immaterial labor http://is.gd/OayA
>> Enculturation http://is.gd/OaA1
>> Virtual worlds, education, and labor http://is.gd/OaAI
>>
>> 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 Œlabor¹ 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 ³tradeoffs² and
>> ³social
>> costs²‹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 people¹s
>> 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 ³cyber sweatshops² 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 ³virtual
>> proletariat²?
>>
>> 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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