[iDC] Exploitation....
matthew stadler
businessofutopia at gmail.com
Fri Jun 12 16:17:47 UTC 2009
I'd like to introduce myself to the list. I am a writer involved with
publication. I coordinate print with social gathering and the kind of
user-driven digital commons that's being talked about here. My projects have
all been temporary or open-ended, built through strategic partnerships with
lots of people and some institutions, both where I live, in Portland, Ore.,
and internationally. suddenly.org is the most recent. Thanks to an unknown
volunteer, wikipedia's entry on
me<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Stadler>is actually fairly
good.
An older blog <http://www.urbanhonking.com/matthewstadler/>, "Matthew
Stadler's Personal Weblog," was entirely written by the MechTurk. More
interesting, I recently posted a HIT on the Turk asking for a PowerPoint
that "explains how to use the Amazon Mechanical Turk." I paid $10. Rather
than getting the "how to post HITs and find workers" presentation I
expected, a man called Rathika Lakshmi sent me a presentation about how to
make money by taking HITs, how to manage the Turk as a worker.
You can see Rathika's PPT on
YouTube<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SV1tuI-E7tY>(posted with
Rathika's permission). It's funny and smart. Meeting him in the
wake of my HIT is not common, but it is not that unusual for me either. I
generally pay $10/job, so Turk workers often seek me out after taking on one
of my jobs. (You'll see in Rathika's presentation that this is in fact one
of his recommended strategies.) I think the potentials and dyamics of the
Turk are enormously complex, largely because Amazon has not subjected it to
rigorous controls or investment.
Matthew Stadler
2009/6/12 Julian Kücklich <julian at kuecklich.de>
> Lilly, everybody,
>
> I like this post a lot. MechTurk either never entirely took off, or it
> continues to flourish behind the scenes, it's hard to tell. In any
> case, it's interesting as an early example of crowdsourcing, a
> practice which is now increasingly referred to as deploying
> "artificial artificial intelligence." So within the space of a few
> years, we have moved from the Turing paradigm to the Philip K. Dick
> paradigm. Instead of computers pretending to be human we are dealing
> with humans pretending to be computers pretending to be humans. Let's
> call it objectification-as-subjectification.
>
> So I would take it one step further and say exploitation is
> underwritten not only by processes of objectification but also of
> subjectification, and the devenir-machine is joined by a
> devenir-humain. Again, I would argue, as with exploitation and
> liberation, sub- and objectification are intertwined and embedded in a
> form of multitudinous intersubjectivity. I am taking my cues here from
> Gotthard Gunther's work on trans-Aristotelian logic (which,
> incidentally, can be read as an unfolding of ideas Gunther derived
> from reading Asimov), in which he emphatically and methodically
> refutes the "tertium non datur" axiom.
>
> This opens up a space for thinking about phenomena that escape the
> dualism of being and nothing, and this is precisely the space we need
> to think about exploitation. A conjecture: Marx, being a Hegelian, was
> deeply invested in the idea that the negation of being (ie
> entfremdung, "alienation") could only result in nothing, the reduction
> of the human being to a commodity. And this sad state of affairs could
> only be reversed by a negation of the negation, ie a revolution. But
> what if NOT NOT a != a? This opens up a whole range of new avenues,
> one of which is Tronti's strategy of refusal, but there are many
> other, less codified forms of refusing alienation, which I am too lazy
> to enumerate. To speak with Bartleby: "I'd prefer not to."
>
> But this does not mean that alienated labour and exploitation do not
> exist, or that it is easy to avoid them. What I find interesting about
> Lilly's example of fertility therapy is that it shows that
> objectification (and by extension, exploitation) can be distributed
> unevenly within a body's organs (this is more Fantastic Voyage than
> Body-without-Organs, or rather it's Body-with-or-without-Organs). You
> just have to look at office workers in a park, trying to run away from
> their brains, to see this in action. Another way of conceptualizing
> the uneven distribution of alienation within the body is to look at
> the various biopolitical campaigns (anti-smoking, anti-drinking,
> anti-teenage-pregnancy, anti STD, anti-skin-cancer, 5-a-day) that
> target different parts of the human body, and the various strategies
> of refusal deployed against them.
>
> The Mechanical Turk (a machine within which a human pretends to be a
> machine) is a BwowO that is reduced to a brain and hands, the body
> itself compressed and hidden from sight. It's a perfect metaphor of
> the plight of immaterial labourers on the internet, who are hidden,
> yet have to perform with virtuosity. Exploitation bisects them, or
> multi-sects them, they are exposed yet anonymous, subject to
> surveillance and escaping it through sousveillance. The choreography
> of exploitation, to take up Lilly's term, thus emerges as a phenomenon
> that challenges us to think beyond the oppositions of labourer and
> machine, subject and object, alienation and liberation. We are all
> Mechanical Turks now, to a lesser or greater degree and we dance to
> the inane refrain of The Machine is Us(ing Us).
>
> Julian.
>
> 2009/6/11 Lilly Irani <lirani at cs.stanford.edu>:
> > Hi all -
> >
> > I've been thinking a lot about Amazon Mechanical Turk this year (the side
> > project that haunts me). I've found Charis Thompson's work (which I've
> > encountered through Lucy Suchman) and Donna Haraway's work most though
> > provoking in considering a post-Marxist, post-relativist exploitation.
> >
> > One take on exploitation might be to see not who gets objectified, but
> how
> > those objectifications and exploitations are choreographed, controlled,
> and
> > assembled, and how they are or are not open to reconfiguration. In
> studies
> > of how particular women voluntarily place themselves under the
> objectifying
> > gaze of a doctor for fertility therapy, Charis Cussins (Thompson)
> "locates
> > alienation not in objectification per se, but in the breakdown of
> > synechdochal relations between parts and whole that make objectification
> of
> > various forms into associated forms of agency." Suchman explains that "It
> is
> > this process 'of forging a functional zone of compatibility that
> maintains
> > referential power between things of different kinds' that she names
> > ontological choreography." Ontological choreography touches on issues of
> > control and feelings of control brought up in this thread, it relates to
> > class (im)mobility, and also debates about agency in sex work /
> > exploitation. (My reading is from Suchman's "Agencies in Technology
> Design:
> > Feminist Reconfigurations":
> > www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/papers/suchman-agenciestechnodesign.pdf )
> >
> > Donna Haraway takes on exploitation and labor more directly in her book
> Ch 3
> > ("Sharing Suffering: Instrumental Relations Between Animals and People")
> of
> > the book "When Species Meet." In thinking through animals as *laborers*
> > instead of as food or lab animals, she draws links to the ways production
> is
> > often gendered and raced (asian women in semi-conductor factories or
> > africans dying in the wars over the coltan destined for our cellphones).
> > Critiquing vegans and PETA who base their actions on the logic of
> > privileging animals as sacrosanct while saying nothing of the
> exploitation
> > of others (people) who labor and die, she says "try as we might to
> distance
> > ourselves, there is no way of living that is not also a way of someone,
> not
> > just something, else dying differentially." (80) Haraway suggests
> > responsibility and responsiveness as an alternate framework for thinking
> > about exploitation -- in other words, seeing exploitation as a failed
> sort
> > of relation that has to be judged by time and situation, rather than by
> who
> > has the capital or the breasts.
> >
> > Both Cussins and Haraway, then, suggest that exploitation has to do with
> a
> > lack of responsibility, a lack of responsiveness, a breakdown in which
> fluid
> > relations are continually forced into reified ones.
> >
> > This helps me think about mechanical turk as not necessarily, essentially
> > exploitative, despite the exploitative rhetoric Amazon deploys about what
> > the platform is (Turk and the Human API of deraced, degendered human
> > cognitive labor accessible 24-7). It suggests that claiming the
> exploitation
> > of low-paid turk workers demands attention to the particular reasons why
> > those people are doing turk and how they are (or are not) able to
> > reconfigure those relations.
> >
> > ~lilly
> >
> > 2009/6/11 Julian Kücklich <deludologist at googlemail.com>
> >>
> >> Hi all,
> >>
> >> I recently had a long and embittered debate about exploitation at a
> >> panel on co-creative labour that Larissa Hjorth and I co-chaired at the
> >> COST298 conference. I think I was arguing that what Tiziana calls "free
> >> labour" (and which I call "playbour" when I write about things like
> >> computer game modification (modding), the policing of virtual space in
> >> massively multiplayer games, and the free marketing players provide by
> >> digging, blogging, tweeting about games, etc.) is never entirely
> >> exploited, nor is it ever entirely free (in the sense of libre). The
> >> one-size-fits-all concept of exploitation we have inherited from the
> >> Marxist tradition was probably never particularly useful to begin with,
> >> but when we talk about forms of living where labour and leisure are so
> >> deeply intertwined it is in danger of losing its meaning altogether.
> >>
> >> One of the counter-arguments from an audience member at the COST298
> >> panel was that women's movements didn't view work so much as
> >> exploitation than as a liberation from the subservience dictated by
> >> chauvinist societies, so this is not necessarily something that only
> >> becomes an issue with digital technologies, but rather something that
> >> comes into play once we start asking questions about what constitutes
> >> productive labour and what makes labourers eligible for renumeration.
> >> Traditionally, "women's work" was obviously often unpaid, unrecognized,
> >> and pretty much unregulated. The same is true of many of the forms of
> >> labour we see arising within digital forms of life today.
> >>
> >> I could insert the standard blurb about autonomism, refusal, and the
> >> multitude here, but you've obviously all read your Negri, your Tronti,
> >> and your Lazzarato, so let's skip that for the time being. What I find
> >> interesting about Mark's thoughts about exploitation is that he connects
> >> the concept to intellectual property and to the question of control. I
> >> am interested in both these things as a researcher and a gamer, and I
> >> find ludic models of control very useful to describe some of the
> >> processes that we are trying to get to the bottom of here. Play is
> >> necessarily a process in which the level of control the players
> >> experience oscillates during the game (I've written about this in terms
> >> of "ruled" and "unruled" space, yadayadayada, but that's neither here
> >> nor there), and their perception of their amount of control is not
> >> always accurate. Let's call it gote no sente
> >> (http://senseis.xmp.net/?GoteNoSente).
> >>
> >> Two or three things follow from that: 1) It's not so much about the
> >> level of control people actually have but about the level of control
> >> they perceive as having. 2) Being in control is not always a good thing
> >> (e.g. using restrictive licensing for the fruits of your labour limits
> >> what Henry Jenkins, for better or for worse, calls "spreadability". 3)
> >> Being out of control can be a good thing (for example, Minh Le's name
> >> only got firmly attached to Counterstrike when the mod was snapped up by
> >> Valve, and redistributed in a commercial version). So IPR, control, and
> >> exploitation are enmeshed in a tight mesh of causation, and both
> >> exploitation and liberation can be experienced negatively and positively
> >> (just as an example, let's remember that many academics like myself
> >> still subject themselves to the gangrape of publishing in peer-reviewed
> >> academic journals, and wear their bruises with pride).
> >>
> >> Let's also remember that exploitation feels normal to many people. One
> >> of my friends recently lost her job, and has tried to find a new one for
> >> the past three months. She is resigned to the fact that when she
> >> eventually finds a job, it will be just as mind-numbing, meaningless,
> >> and degrading as the last one, but despite my attempts to get her out of
> >> this mindset, she desperately scours jobsites, newsletters, even (gulp)
> >> newspaper job ads. London being a city that provides for people with
> >> much less in terms of financial resources, I find it hard to accept that
> >> someone would cling to this kind of negative normativity so strongly,
> >> but my friend is not the only one. I see the same kind of desperation in
> >> many social networks where you "pay with your life" (and all its mundane
> >> lacunae) for the privilege of not being a freak. It's this kind of
> >> motivation, however bourgeois we may find it, that we might have to
> >> consider when we talk about exploitation in the digital age.
> >>
> >> Julian.
> >>
> >> Mark Andrejevic wrote:
> >> > Howard's post got me thinking about the need to tighten up
> >> > an understanding of what we might mean by the term "exploitation." The
> >> > very broad sense in which it is often used -- to indicate that someone
> >> > else benefits from our labor -- isn't a particularly useful one.
> >> > Theoretically it remains amorphous (how might it distinguish between
> >> > collaborative labor and working in a sweat shop?) and practically it
> >> > isn't much of a rallying cry ("Help, I'm being exploited because the
> >> > value of my neighbor's house went up when I painted mine!").
> >> >
> >> > I'd suggest (as a preliminary foray) that a meaningful political sense
> >> > of the term (one that allows us to critique exploitation) would have
> >> > to include at least two aspects:
> >> > 1) a sense of loss of control over the results of our own productive
> >> > activity (especially when these are turned back against us) and
> >> > 2) structured relations of power that compel this loss of control,
> >> > even when it looks like the result of "free" exchange.
> >> > I don't feel a loss of control over my own productive activity when
> >> > I contribute to a Wikipedia entry that may benefit others. On the
> >> > other hand, I might be more likely to feel this loss of control when I
> >> > discover, say, that details of my online activity have been collected,
> >> > sorted, and packaged as a commodity for sale to people who may use it
> >> > to deny me access to a job or to manipulate me based on perceived
> >> > vulnerabilities, fears, and other personal details about my mental or
> >> > physical well being. If I find myself in a position wherein I have to
> >> > submit to this kind of monitoring as a condition of access to
> >> > resources that I need to earn my livelihood or maintain my social
> >> > relations in a networked era, I might be more likely to think of this
> >> > situation as a truly exploitative one.
> >> >
> >> > When it starts to become tricky -- at least conceptually -- is when my
> >> > work on Wikipedia (or tagging, or participating in other forms of UGC
> >> > production) gets folded into the
> >> > demographic/psychographic/geographic/(eventually biometric) forms of
> >> > profiling that form the basis for the emerging online commercial
> >> > economy. Still a meaningful conception of exploitation might help
> >> > distinguish between the different productive roles of our online
> >> > activity -- and between infrastructures that are more or less
> >> > exploitative.
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >> > On Sat, Jun 6, 2009 at 7:11 AM, Howard Rheingold <
> howard at rheingold.com
> >> > <mailto:howard at rheingold.com>> wrote:
> >> >
> >> > Trebor asked me to introduce myself in regard to his post and the
> >> > conference on "The Internet as Playground and Factory"
> >> >
> >> > I've written "Tools for Thought," "The Virtual Community," and
> >> > "Smart
> >> > Mobs." Two of those books are online at http://www.rheingold.com
> >> > <http://www.rheingold.com/> . I
> >> > teach "Social Media" and Berkeley and Stanford and "Digital
> >> > Journalism" at Stanford.
> >> >
> >> > I agree with much of what you say, Trebor, but I would only add
> that
> >> > I'm entirely delighted to let Yahoo stockholders benefit from
> >> > flickr.
> >> > It's not only a great service for sharing my own images, but a
> place
> >> > where I can find Creative-Commons licensed images to use in
> >> > presentations and videos. Maybe that at the same time we look
> >> > closely
> >> > at the way commercial interests have colonized public behavior, we
> >> > ought to look at the way profit motives have made available useful
> >> > public goods. May Yahoo and Google live long and prosper as long
> as
> >> > I
> >> > can view and publish via Flickr and YouTube. And if this means
> that
> >> > I've blurred the line between my recreation and my labor, I have
> to
> >> > testify that even after reflection I don't mind it at all. It's
> >> > pleasurable, in fact. And I'm equally delighted that Google gives
> >> > away
> >> > search to attract attention, some of which Google sells to
> >> > advertisers. I remember that when I first got online with a modem,
> >> > the
> >> > cost of accessing skimpy information online via Lexis/Nexis and
> >> > other
> >> > paid data services was way beyond my means. Now I get answers for
> >> > any
> >> > question in seconds. How many times a day were YOU exploited by
> >> > searching for something without paying a charge for the service?
> >> > Informed consent seems to me to be crucial -- I choose to be
> >> > exploited, if exploitation is how you want to see my uploading and
> >> > tagging my photographs and videos. More people ought to reflect on
> >> > who
> >> > is profiting from their online activity, and it seems entirely
> >> > reasonable to me that many would decide not to be exploited. I
> would
> >> > never argue that people should refrain from witholding their
> labor,
> >> > if
> >> > that's what they want to do. Otherwise, I'm all for asking all the
> >> > questions Trebor proposes, which is why I assign students to read
> >> > "What the MySpace generation needs to know about working for
> free."
> >> >
> >> > Howard Rheingold howard at rheingold.com
> >> > <mailto:howard at rheingold.com> http://twitter.com/hrheingold
> >> > http://www.rheingold.com <http://www.rheingold.com/>
> >> > http://www.smartmobs.com <http://www.smartmobs.com/>
> >> > http://vlog.rheingold.com <http://vlog.rheingold.com/>
> >> > what it is ---> is --->up to us
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >> > _______________________________________________
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> >> --
> >>
> >> dr julian raul kuecklich
> >>
> >> http://playability.de
> >>
> >> M: +447833193467
> >>
> >> L: +442032395578
> >>
> >> http://flickr.com/cucchiaio
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
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> >
> >
> > --
> > Lilly Irani
> > University of California, Irvine
> > http://www.ics.uci.edu/~lirani/ <http://www.ics.uci.edu/%7Elirani/>
> >
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