Digital Labor

The Internet as Playground and Factory

Trebor Scholz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136506697
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Digital Labor calls on the reader to examine the shifting sites of labor markets to the Internet through the lens of their political, technological, and historical making. Internet users currently create most of the content that makes up the web: they search, link, tweet, and post updates—leaving their "deep" data exposed. Meanwhile, governments listen in, and big corporations track, analyze, and predict users' interests and habits.

This unique collection of essays provides a wide-ranging account of the dark side of the Internet. It claims that the divide between leisure time and work has vanished so that every aspect of life drives the digital economy. The book reveals the anatomy of playbor (play/labor), the lure of exploitation and the potential for empowerment. Ultimately, the 14 thought-provoking chapters in this volume ask how users can politicize their troubled complicity, create public alternatives to the centralized social web, and thrive online.

Contributors: Mark Andrejevic, Ayhan Aytes, Michel Bauwens, Jonathan Beller, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Sean Cubitt, Jodi Dean, Abigail De Kosnik, Julian Dibbell, Christian Fuchs, Lisa Nakamura, Andrew Ross, Ned Rossiter, Trebor Scholz, Tizania Terranova, McKenzie Wark, and Soenke Zehle

PART I The Shifting Sites of Labor Markets

1 IN SEARCH OF THE LOST PAYCHECK

Andrew Ross

DOI: 10.4324/9780203145791-3

When the Huffington Post was sold to AOL in February 2011, fair labor advocates finally had a high-profile vehicle for their fight against exploiters of free online content provision. Legions of bloggers who had polished the site’s reputation over the years were passed over when owner Arianna Huffington collected a cool $315 million from the sale of the site. Regular HuffPo contributors from ArtScene and Visual Art Source announced a boycott that burgeoned into a full-blown e-strike after Huffington ridiculed the action of the unpaid writers. “Go ahead, go on strike,” she scoffed, opining that no one would notice, or care. In March, the 26,000-member Newspaper Guild threw its weight behind the strike, as did the National Writers Union (NWU)/UAW Local 1981), and an electronic picket line was thrown up.¹ Progressives who crossed the line to write for HuffPo drew heated protests, and some were labeled scabs for putting their bylines above the calls for professional solidarity. In April, a class action suit, claiming $105 million on behalf of the uncompensated bloggers, was filed by media labor activist Jonathan Tasini, who described the plaintiffs as “modern-day slaves on Arianna Huffington’s plantation.” Tasini had a good track record. Previously, in 2001, he won a milestone victory when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (in New York Times Co. Inc. et al. v. Tasini et al.) that publishing companies must obtain permission from freelance writers before reusing their works in electronic databases.

By any measures, the practical impact of the boycott was limited, and, from the outset, the prospects for the lawsuit were not bright. But Huffington’s let-them-eat-cake posture, amplified by her public renown as a left-leaning pundit, helped to push the affair into the limelight. Arguments about fair compensation for digital content got a good airing, along with some elements of the debate about free labor, which had been nurtured by the coterie of cybercritics for the last decade. The volume of the hubbub far exceeded the low-key grumbling that had accompanied previous sales of social web properties such as YouTube (to Google), Flickr (to Yahoo), and Bebo (to AOL itself).

Apologists for the “attention economy” played up all of the nonmonetary benefits that page-view exposure delivers to freelance strivers, piloting their do-it-yourself careers through the turbulence of the blogosphere. According to this view, the value of free promotion on a wide platform outweighs any benefits to be gotten from the surety of a professional pay scale. It was also argued that the publisher’s relationship with her bloggers simply reflected the already-established norms of the digital information landscape, which seem to demand an initial donation of services as a customary price of entry. In any event, it was concluded that the owner was under no contractual obligation to share the spoils with those who had volunteered their labor up front. On the other side of the debate, supporters of the boycott played up the continuity of the case with traditional forms of capitalist expropriation. The lucre extracted by Huffington was not different in kind from that enjoyed by brick-and-mortar owners who profit from shortchanging their workers. Talk about the benefits of self-promotion is the sort of deceptive practice touted by employers who are in a position to take advantage of an oversupply of market labor. As for the publisher’s debt to the bloggers, it was argued that she had a moral obligation, at the very least. But Tasini’s class action suit went further, alleging “unjust enrichment” on Huffington’s part—a legal claim that did not depend on whether writers had agreed up front to write for free.

Increasingly thrown on the defensive, Huffington insisted that, in her new position as AOL’s head of content, she was pushing for the hiring of hundreds of professional journalists to staff the bureaus the company had opened as part of its Patch.com local news operation. That was a valid argument. But closer examination suggested that these new recruits would be servicing operations that are difficult to distinguish from what is known as a content farm—a site with shallow, non-original stories written specifically to trigger popular search queries and to game Google algorithms into placing the site on the first page of search results. Leading content farms such as Demand Media and Associated Media churn out low-quality articles and video in the field of online advice, paying a measly piece rate to their free agent creatives. As Dan Roth reported in his original 2009 Wired article on the topic, “pieces are not dreamed up by trained editors nor commissioned based on submitted questions. Instead they are assigned by an algorithm, which mines nearly a terabyte of search data, Internet traffic patterns, and keyword rates to determine what users want to know and how much advertisers will pay to appear next to the answers.” As a gauge to the fast growth of this spam-like sector, Roth estimated that Demand Media alone would soon be publishing “the equivalent of four English-language Wikipedias a year.”²

Just as these sites are ushering in a fast food revolution in content, they are engaged in a race to the bottom when it comes to remunerating employees. The filmmaker featured in Roth’s 2009 article was paid $20 per clip for each how-to video he shot on location, edited at home on Final Cut Pro, and then uploaded to Demand Media. Given the growth rate of this sector, that $20 piece rate has undoubtedly come down in the intervening years. AOL’s own business model for its big push into online content proved to be one of the factors driving the wage depreciation. The AOL Way, the company’s expansion plan that was leaked in February 2011, revealed how it would pay a pittance to in-house writers who were expected to pen up to 10 blog articles per day, each prepped for search engine friendliness and for maximum ad exposure.³

Creatives who have been knocked to the ground by the recent Great Recession feel pressured to sign up with this kind of word factory when, increasingly, it is the only game in town that pays. After all, the alternative to churning out junk product for a content farm is to play the reputation game by posting for free, like the Huffington Post bloggers. The former option involves the kind of routine toil that is anathema to aspiring creative professionals. The latter option promises the kind of unalienated expression of thought that is closer to their ideal. Yet only one of these will guarantee food on the table.

On the face of it, this does not appear to be a new dilemma. Creatives have been facing this kind of choice since the eighteenth century, when the onset of commercial culture markets offered them the choice of eking out a living with the scribblers on Pope’s Grub Street or of building a name-recognition relationship with the fickle public. Literary agents, unions, and other professional organizations sprang up or evolved in order to protect their livelihoods from the rough justice of the marketplace, and while the explosive growth of new media has outpaced and outsmarted the traditional agents of bargaining and regulation (such as the press unions), ever-fresher versions are likely to emerge. The Freelancers Union, for example, was founded in 2001 specifically to respond to the needs of the self-employed, and it has been the fastest-growing union in the United States in recent years. Its members are learning how to acquire an ever-larger share of social insurance and political clout while surfing each new wave that washes over the ever-mutating creative/digital landscape. Beginning in the 1990s, WashTech pioneered the business of labor protection for permatemps in the tech industry, and other Communications Workers of America (CWA) locals are following suit in their efforts to recruit independent contractors.

But it would be wrong to conclude that in the realm of digital labor there is nothing new under the sun. On the contrary, each rollout of online tools has offered ever more ingenious ways of extracting cheaper, discount work from users and participants. The transition from web 1.0 to social web was a quantum leap in this regard. The youthful zeal that went into the first generation of web designs was bought with cappuccinos and beaming admiration from clueless elders. Building the pioneer environment of the web was like a massive barn raising, largely dependent on uncoordinated volunteer effort. Its successor also trades on the openness of youth, but the sophisticated operations of its hidden labor economy bear as much resemblance to the block-building of web 1.0 as the exotic derivatives of today’s Wall Street do to the origins of pork belly trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The social platforms, web crawlers, personalized algorithms, and other data mining techniques of recent years are engineered to suck valuable, or monetizable, information out of almost every one of our online activities. Whether all this activity can or should be classified as labor according to any traditional criteria of political economy is a case in point, and one of the themes of this book. To address the question more fully, as I will do in the pages that follow, involves delving far below the visible surface of the digital landscape on which the Huffington affair was exposed.

From the outset, however, let us bear in mind that new media are not determining agents. Like any other technology, they are facilitators, not causes, of changing social forces. So, too, as Marx and many others have noted, technologies are not simply weapons of class war, designed to control and deskill workers, they also harbor the potential to eliminate wage labor, socialize production, and free up our time. Whether they are deployed for the latter purpose depends not so much on their technical development as on what Marx called the “relations of production”—that is, the state of our socioeconomic relationship to capital, property, and governance. Reverse engineering begins with technology, but unless it is also taken up as a social challenge, the chances are that the outcome will only benefit tech-savvy elites.

Formerly Known as Employment

In the heyday of the labor movement, it was commonly observed that the bosses needed workers but that workers didn’t need bosses. Yet in the third and fourth quarters of 2010, corporate America posted record profits at a time when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the real unemployment rate at 17%. Does this yawning disjunct between profits and joblessness mean that the bosses have learned how to get by without workers? Not exactly, no, but the statistics, which can be dissected a hundred ways, might suggest that a sea change is occurring in the world of work.

Two of the reasons for the high earnings seem to be beyond dispute. Corporations are moving more and more of their operations offshore, especially jobs in high-skilled sectors, where the largest savings in labor costs can be gotten. So they still need workers, but not expensive ones in the North. A second explanation rests on what business economists call increased productivity. Roughly translated, this means that employees have been pressed, by the stiff threat of redundancies, either to work harder and longer for the same paycheck or to take a cut. In any downturn, employers will push their advantage in this way, but in a soul-sucking recession like this one, there is no quarter; the assault comes from all sides, whether in the form of pay freezes, concessions, furloughs, layoffs, or further casualization. A third reason—and this is the unfamiliar quantum—is the growing reliance on new kinds of free labor to boost the balance sheet of companies that are canny enough to harvest it. Hard evidence for this footprint is not so easy to muster, but the strong anecdotal record suggests it is large enough to be statistically significant.

Free, or token-wage, labor is increasingly available though a variety of channels: crowdsourcing; data mining or other sophisticated digital techniques for extracting rents from users/participants; expanded prison labor programs; the explosion of unpaid, near-obligatory internships in every white-collar sector; and the whole gamut of contestant volunteering that has transformed so much of our commerce in culture into an amateur talent show, with jackpot stakes for a few winners and hard-luck swag for everyone else. The web-enabled developments have attracted the most media attention, not least because the tidal surge of free online content directly threatens the livelihoods of professional writers and artists. After all, the widespread shuttering of newspapers, magazines, and overseas news bureaus has seen a generation of union jobs scattered to the winds. Professional pay scales are reduced to dust as the online content aggregators sweep all before them, and resistance was few and far between until the Huffington affair came along. In most corners of the information landscape, working for nothing has become normative, and largely because it is not experienced as exploitation.

From the early days of the Great Recession, business press pundits have wondered how far firms could go in taking advantage of new sources of free labor in order to stay afloat and improve their market positions. How can we take advantage of all the free time (or “cognitive surplus,” as net evangelist Clay Shirky puts it) that people have, especially the newly unemployed? Since many of the latter will be spending their newly free time online, how can we exploit their willingness to explore any avenue in search of the possibility of employment? Can we take advantage of their inclination to take on tasks that feel like fun? Or, more ominously, how can we harness their habitual need to participate in something that feels like work, in the absence of paid work and just to keep their hand in? Advocates for this line of thinking have seen it as a viable business strategy. They have also made overblown bonanza-scale claims for the potential windfall, inspired no doubt by the high valuations of social media firms. Inevitably, it has been suggested that social networking is the oil of the twenty-first century; yet, so far at least, it looks as if oil is still the oil of the twenty-first century.

Even so, the financial profile of these companies is remarkable. In 2011, Face-book took in an estimated $4.3 billion in revenue, and almost $1 billion of that was net profit. Leaving aside its pre-IPO valuation at more than $100 billion, these numbers are big enough, especially if you consider that the firm only had not many more than 2,000 employees on payroll. This ratio of employees to revenue is unusual by any historical standards, but it is typical of firms that dominate the upper stratosphere of information services. In 2011, Google, for example, had around 30,000 employees, but it pulled in an estimated $35 billion in revenue for a $13 billion profit. The other fast-growing social media companies—Twitter, Groupon, Zynga, LinkedIn, and Tumblr—are in the same boat.

For the rapidly shrinking population that are not Facebook users, Aaron Sorkin’s film The Social Network must have presented a conundrum. On the one hand, the story of creative conception that it presents is reasonably familiar. Take a hot-house Ivy League environment where collegiate values are easily trumped by the predatory marketplace ethos already incubating on the campus and add a cast of recognizable characters: a socially challenged white male engineer; a brainy white girlfriend who cha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Why Does Digital Labor Matter Now?
• PART I The Shifting Sites of Labor Markets
• PART II Interrogating Modes of Digital Labor
• PART III The Violence of Participation
• PART IV Organized Networks in an Age of Vulnerable Publics
• Further Reading
• Contributors
• Index