by Trebor Scholz                                                    (download as .doc)

In mid-November 2009, one hundred media scholars, lawyers, historians, artists, social media experts, students, programmers, and activists came together for three days at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts to discuss digital labor. Seven hundred messages on the conference mailing list, 400 new subscribers to this forum (the iDC), hundreds of tweets,  52 video interviews, 1200 conference registrations, and 1000 views of the live stream show that participants engaged with The Internet as Playground and Factory conference intensely and on various levels.

Frequent reference points in the animated conversations included practices like gold farming, game modding, blogging, “turking” on Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk, gaming in World of Warcraft, outsourcing through LiveOps.com, collaborating on Wikipedia articles, reputation scamming through SubvertandProfit.com and sweating in "captcha sweatshops." Theoretical cues were repeatedly given to Paolo Virno, Harry Braverman, Hannah Arendt, Dallas Smythe, Jean Baudrillard, Bernhard Stiegler, Maurizio Lazzarato, Johan Huizinga, and Tiziana Terranova.


Tiziana Terranova (prelude to The Internet as Playground and Factory)

A few conference participants turned very many pages on the iDC mailing list (and on Facebook and on Twitter and on Seesmic) while others silently participated and then spoke up at the conference. I am planning to go back and re-read all the list messages that did not get a response.

Still in the middle of post-production, it is not a simple task to reflect on this relatively large conference. There is always the inevitability of omissions, and the risk of oversimplifications, or misunderstandings but I am writing this because I was probably the only person who attended nearly all sessions at least in part, which was my mission because I convened the conference.

Shifts in labor markets have drawn attention to places where labor does not look like labor at all. The Internet has created new markets that can be accessed from anywhere with a net connection. While managerial royalty like Don Tapscott celebrated the business potential of “crowdsourcing” in books like “Wikinomics,” scholars such as Andrew Ross see digital labor as a non-surprising continuation of exploitative capitalist modes of operation. At the prelude to the conference Ross stated that "those who see the digital realm as a technology of de-skilling, outsourcing and work degradation are far outnumbered by those who see it as a medium of reskilling, innovation, and common value creation." Interactive input is just another transfer of work from more regulated kinds of labor markets, Ross stated. There is a great deal of overlap between intensified forms of expropriation of digital labor and traditional economies of unpaid work, especially in the home.      

Several speakers claimed that we are all falling victim to a technocratic fetishization of the Internet that takes away from a full acknowledgment of the "real" places of exploitation: the heavily populated slums in what some participants called the “global south.” Are the discussed processes of monetization and coercion of "free" relations of exchange on the Social Web, as discussed at the conference, in fact a luxury problem in the overdeveloped world alone? The fact that cell phones are now widely used all throughout economical developing countries like Brazil, Russia, India, and China should lead to a re-evaluation of the worldwide participation gap.

At this conference the term exploitation did not find many friends as a suitable descriptor for what is happening online. This language is not helpful in opening up, especially young people to considerations about the ways in which they are being had. Right now,  net users are taking advantage of large commercial platforms to market themselves and they feel little or no sense of victimhood or lack of payment.

In the session “Ideology and the Erotics of Playbor,” Jonathan Beller correctly stated that the word "digital" does not sum up our entire condition. At the same time, however, the questions created by new expressions of labor markets in the financial-crisis world are increasingly urgent. There is a participatory turn in online sociality; the scale of participation is unprecedented. It is true that it is only a small segment of people with Internet access contributes material to the Web but this “small segment” of you-sers posted more than 150,000 videos a day to YouTube in 2008. Questions of expropriation of net users have a great deal of urgency given that the data of 350 million people are locked up under the rule of a single private entity like Facebook. 

“Sisyphus might have ultimately been convinced to pay a monthly fee for the pleasure of pushing that rock up the hill.”

- Scott Rettberg on iDC, http://is.gd/39X7S

We decide with one click what’s “hot” and what is not, we “follow,” or like, we save, refer, and bookmark. Why do we upload our boredom or perform our addictions online?  I quoted Tim O'Reilly who stated that “...they are participating without thinking that they participate. That’s where the power comes.” (Scholz, http://is.gd/5jQm2) There are manifold reasons for social participation online but fun is one of them.

May the fun be with you

Fun was indeed a recurring -and even recursive- topic at IPF: Martin Roberts and Chris Kelty explored Fun in their presentations. Taking as a starting-point the ubiquity of the term Fun in contemporary discourses on productivity, Martin Roberts related this to the eroding distinction between work and play. Considering it as a dominant value of postmodern society (comparable to terms such as "cool" or "organic"), he remained suspicious of it as an ideology, asking whose interests our Fun ultimately serves. Tracing the history of Fun to Coney Island, he suggested that critiques of labor by Adorno and others remain pertinent in a digital workplace organized around designing or even playing video games. Invoking the Sex Pistols' ritual destruction of Fun in their notorious final performance, Roberts considered whether escape from the postmodern fun house is even possible when anti-Fun has become just another kind of Fun. (Roberts, http://is.gd/5kg4f) How can we unlearn the short-lived pleasures of social media convenience?

It’s fun, right?

Chris Kelty continued Martin Robert’s line of inquiry. Kelty started by outlining how crucial fun is to get people involved in working with computers and software. There is an endless stream of books with fun in the title. “Programming is fun.” “Computer literacy is fun.” The argument of many of these books is that your new paid job with computers is more fun than your old job delivering pizza, for example. Few books would be called “The serious labor of software programming.” Fun has often dominated the discussion about how to activate people and much research funding has been funneled into social psychology research for that reason. Some of this mentality is a hold-over from William Whyte’s “Organization Man” (1956) and Ted Nelson’s “Computer Lib” (1974). Fun is also used as category to explain why people contribute to free software. Linus Torvald’s autobiography is titled “Just for Fun.” It’s fun to stay up all night and see if you can get Linux to run on your machine. People seem to like fun better than not-fun. Even if they have to work to have fun, they’ll do it to avoid not-fun work or no work at all,” Kelty said. With regard to free software, it is especially important to understand why people are working without having been paid to do so. Why do hacker-types produce high quality software and then give it away for free? That still surprises some skeptics. Why do people work? Individuals do Free Software work for a plurality of reasons. Kelty emphasized that some of them do it for “Free Software reasons”: creating something for the public, making something freely available. Others want to “stick it to the man,” so to speak. Yet others do it for the fun, the joy, the pleasure, the fame, or the Boy Scout badge, or they are learning new skills and meet new people. With Free Software, people do not just argue about the way the world should be, they provide a proof of concept. Kelty introduced Hannah Arendt to think about the various ways in which we are dividing up the problem of labor, and that at least some at the conference seemed to think that Marx might be getting in the way of conceptual progress with this topic. 

Kelty ends his IPF video interview with the plaintive request: "I may be the first against the wall when the revolution comes because I don't have any Marx in my presentation. So, please, don't kill me."  

In my own presentation I discussed the ESP Game by Luis Ahn, which was later bought by Google and branded as Google Image Labeler. Ahn does not hold back: "We encourage people to do the work by taking advantage of their desire to be entertained." 

Calling all mompreneurs

Jonathan Zittrain, in what may have been the most entertaining, broadly accessible, and example-rich presentation at IPF, mostly probed cases of paid distributed labor. The often little known instances of distributed labor that he introduced included LiveOps, an outsourcing agency that enabled the Red Cross to recruit in-home freelance agents who processed 17,000 phone calls in the days after Hurricane Katrina had struck the Gulf Coast. 

Other illustrations of “out crowding,” mostly in the area of innovation, included Crowdflower, Solvate, Innocentive, and the work of the Prize Foundation. At Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk even “the dimmest bulb” can make a few dollars, as he put it. Our individual web searches powered Google’s Flu Trend map. “Crowdsourced” stock market predictions are at the core of Piqqem.com. 

But Zittrain also made some skeptical notes about specific services such as the well-known service Subvertandprofit.com, which allows its customers to secretly buy grassroots support. A reputable member of the Digg.com referral service, for example, may receive undercover-payments to “dig” (recommend) a site or product that he would otherwise not get excited about. In other words, given enough capital, your business can shine on the Social Web, even if it is mediocre. I’d compare this to China's “50 Cent Army,” which consists of bloggers who get paid for pro-government comments or to Iran’s 10,000 Basji paramilitary forces, which were ordered to start blogging. With Subvertandprofit.com, dollars can buy your business a good reputation on the Web.

BBC News reports that ”captcha sweatshops” are used in the developing world “where spammers employ humans to decode 12 'captchas' a minute, all day long." A “captcha” is a test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer.

In a Newsweek article entitled "Work the New Digital Sweatshops" he suggests to adopt labor standards to the Internet.

"For one thing, online contracting circumvents a range of labor laws and practices, found in most developed countries, that govern worker protections, minimum wage, health and retirement benefits, child labor, and so forth. Any jurisdiction that imposes restrictions on how crowdsourcing services operate might find itself bypassed..." 

          -Jonathan Zittrain, http://is.gd/5jRC2

One of the most egregious businesses of this sort, not mentioned in this talk, however, is Txteagle (http://txteagle.com/). The mobile outsourcing business Txteagle is built on the fact that cell phones are increasingly pervasive in the economically developing world. The idea is to find simple tasks that people in those desperately poor geographic regions can execute on their phones in return for micro-payments.

Mark Andrejevic discussed surveillance on the Social Web and in particular the world of sentiment analysis, with businesses aiming to predict the behavior of users. Companies like Appirio are trying to piggyback on the social networks of their employees. “Connect today’s leading social network with your core business applications to engage a community and encourage word of mouth referrals.” 

"Social participation is the oil of the digital economy." (Scholz at IPF) The economy becomes dependent on the free life fuel of billions of Internet users.  Our online interactions grease the wheels of Wall Street, Dominic Pettman argued, pointing to McLuhan that "our whole life is now becoming a service environment." And Pettman continues: “We are not so much the workers but the oil in this metaphoric rendering of the social factory." Perhaps businesses should rethink their unhealthy reliance on this oil of the digital economy. Fans are giving their work away for free in exchange for being ignored by corporations who own the original content. Fully tracked Facebook status updates take the place of leisurely conversations in the coffee house. All the data collected get entered into larger databases of imperious, powerful intermediaries for the purpose of data tattooing, … corporate or government surveillance.

The Shifting Sites of Value

 “It is an ad-supported service. It is a free service.”

      – Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, 2007
         (reference Arikan, http://is.gd/5jXSK)

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."  

        - Eric Schmidt, CEO Google

Today we are witnessing the mysterious accumulation of value by Internet companies. This economic value is, in part, thoroughly speculative (think Tulip Mania of 1637, dot com crash, Lehmann Brothers) and partially it indicates actual dollars in the bank. Play, for Brian Holmes, becomes the lubricant to ”a perfected system of second-order cybernetic control over the consciousness of the [developed world's] middle-classes… a kind of world-creating and attention-channeling system [based on] contemporary social media, in its dominant corporate 2.0 forms"? (Holmes quoted by Kane, http://is.gd/5kkJn) Sean Cubitt asked in his insightful and charismatic talk "When does the conflation of play and work begin to be intolerable…?" Pat Kane, on the other hand, defended the creative potential of play with colorful Scottish accent, culminating in him singing a song about the “labors of love.” Dominic Pettman is opting for a "a type of work which in fact sounds a lot like mindful, enigmatic, erotic play." (Pettman, http://is.gd/5oDvH) Historically, Alexander Galloway says, play was the childlike, innocent opposite to monetization; that ineffable thing that is unsullied by the exigencies of modern industrial life.  But with the turn of the 21st century that is starting to go away. According to Galloway, Adorno was the first one to say that the playground is the factory.

Not all Internet companies, however, actually make the millions of dollars that are reputed to turn over. Google bought YouTube for $1.6 billion but what it gets back is cultural power instead of money. At the same time it is a question of perspective when some consultants claim that net companies are not making money in general. The $150 million that Facebook made last year solely from advertising is not negligible.

Every click, second of attention and piece of data input is slated to be sold; life itself is put to work. The Social Web is free for us to use but the middleman is paid with our data. We are willing give up our privacy or at least our anonymity for convenience and “free services.” Which price do we put on the psychological and political implications of this loss of privacy?
 
Slide from McKenzie Wark's talk "Ideologies of Praxis"

In his talk "Ideologies of Praxis" McKenzie Wark brilliantly condensed the digital economy into a semiotic square. He related the gamer and the hacker to the worker and the hustler. He then associated online services to these digital figures. The "worker" appeared in proximity to LinkedIn and Facebook, the "gamer" near World of Warcraft. 

Rob Mitchell claimed that “active patient participation in health projects [is] not unlike active participation in sites like Facebook. Yet emphasis on ‘health’ focuses our attention on different aspects of these information dynamics."

Alex Rivera's sci-fi thriller Sleep Dealer, which kicked off the conference, described a near-future scenario where (American) corporations can extract all the work from the (Mexican) worker without actually having to deal with bothersome issues that come with physical presence. They get all the work without the worker. Lisa Nakamura cited the film in her talk. 

Refusal/Withdrawal

"Obviously I’m not convinced by the emancipatory possibilities of really-existing corporate social media."

       -Brian Holmes http://is.gd/12Plv

Holmes also asserted that ICT and education in the third world are “a factory for producing the subjects of communicative capitalism.” (Holmes, http://is.gd/1vKmr) Jonathan Beller supported this line of argumentation by drawing on classic media critiques, from Enzensberger’s “Anyone who expects to be emancipated by technological hardware or by a system of hardware however structured, is the victim of an obscure belief in progress" (1970) to Baudrillard’s "terrorism of the code" (1972). (Beller, http://is.gd/5iUSy) Holmes also suggested that focusing on the Internet may altogether distract us from the most important issues of our time.  

In my presentation I suggested that there are no longer any unsullied outside spaces that escape the imperial Ferris Wheel of the corporate capture of value. Digital economies are always already hybrid. I suggested that feasible strategies of resistance have to arise within the belly of the beast. With help of the rhetoric of “free speech” commercial interests have colonized even the last corners of the Web and consequential political activism and commons-oriented practices now find ways to thrive on corporate, virtual “real estate.” 

Many conference speakers embraced critical perspectives about time spent on the Web. In my presentation I referred to Yochai Benkler who calculated that “A billion people in advanced economies may have between two billion and six billion spare hours among them, every day.” (Scholz, http://is.gd/5sK8d) Dominic Pettman suggested that we must learn to focus, and not be “distracted by shrill solicitations from all 360 degrees (of which Twitter is only the most recent exacerbating example).” (Pettman, http://is.gd/5nzeZ) Eugene Lang undergraduate student Luis Nunez said that "being tied to your Blackberry isn’t as cruel as, say, being chained to the floor of a manufacturing plant; nevertheless the condition of bondage is almost as absolute." (Nunez, http://is.gd/5kl7i)

The theme of time theft and addiction repeatedly emerged in conference discussions. Jonathan Beller quoted Dallas Smythe:  "As the Chinese emphasized during the Cultural Revolution, if people are spending their time catering to their individual interests and sensitivities, they cannot be using the same time to overthrow capitalist interest and to build socialism.”

Time spent on Facebook, in other words, stops us from pursuing the expropriation of the expropriators.  We cannot further the cause of the revolution because we are too busy checking news feeds. Would there really be an insurrection if millions of citizens had more time?

Ulises Mejias evoked the sirens of monopsony, which is a concept from economics that refers to a market in which several sellers offer goods or services but there is only one buyer. If you want your video to be seen by many people, YouTube is your only chance.If you want your micro-blog message to be read widely, Twitter is your must-go destination. If you post your grandma’s favorite recipe on one of these platforms, ads will appear. They abuse your gift to the commons by turning a profit from it. Mejias pushes us to un-think the logic of the network. Deviation from social norms, he suggest, is only possible in private, surveillance-free spacees, away from the network. In search for the outside of networks, Mejias proposed a turn to the paranodal, the spaces between the network nodes.

In front of our very eyes, Hector Postigo permanently deleted his Facebook account. He showed the messages that the site spits back to deter users from the act. Lovable profile photos of Hector's friends with captions like "Jonah will you" appeared. "Casey will miss you." "Sebastiano will miss you." Numerous conference speakers signed on to this gesture of refusal and withdrawal.

I am increasingly convinced that such gestures of refusal are based on significant degrees of privilege. It is a classic double bind. Many students depend on their web-presence and the wealth of their networked weak ties when they enter the job market. On the other hand, such buy-in merely greases the wheels of the corporate Social Web. Is it responsible to suggest refusal of or withdrawal from the Social Web to students (especially those without a trust fund) unless you are sure that the revolution is knocking on the door tomorrow?

Alternatives

While various speakers focused on theoretical analysis, others proposed hands-on alternatives, tangible suggestions that many of us could actually start to pursue today. Many speakers offered sharp analysis but were unspecific about proposals that could be implemented. The end of capitalism was a precondition for some scenarios. Notably, Christian Fuchs demanded a Communist Internet for a Communist society.

The question of new opportunities for solidarities came up several times. How can we rethink unionization and class, and how can net-workers demand a stake in the wealth that they are creating? With hundreds of millions of people flocking to the Social Web like moths to the light, is not there an opportunity for a collective self-becoming? It is time for Internet users to self-organize. If class consciousness is a thorny and perhaps unrealistic proposal for the realities of the Internet, maybe demands for a political consciousness are not quite as far fetched. Jonathan Zittrain concluded his talk with the call "Click workers of the world, unite!" but he did not detail his proposal.

Expropriation Literacy: Unlearning to Labor

Suggesting new literacies for the future, Howard Rheingold contributed the most participatory presentation at IPF. Digital natives are familiar with digital systems but they often lack essential competencies, he argued. Pointing to self-organized educational projects like The School of Everything and The Supercool School, Rheingold questioned the future of brick and mortar institutions for higher learning. Alexander Halavais reported that his former employer, a research university, had posed a challenge to the faculty: think of your students as hamburgers and tell us how you can turn out more hamburgers with fewer resources. How would you like your student today?

But while Rheingold and Halavais did not idealize the mentioned educational alternatives; they did allude to problems, namely branding and accreditation. More specifically, Rheingold suggested “crap detection” as one of the most vitally important literacies for today’s students.  How do you –as a student or teacher-- detect when you are being manipulated?   What are the ethics of encountering others in mediated social milieus? In my own presentation I specifically argued for the term expropriation literacy.

Disrupt, Fake, Jailbreak

IPF also asked to consider ways in which art and activism can reroute the locked-down technologies of transnational corporations and distribute digital labor according to more ethical terms. Christiane Paul was one of the most perceptive voices at the conference when it came to media art. Burak Arikan’s online project “Meta-markets,” for example, draws attention to “user labor” by offering a stock market for online assets. Your contributions to Flickr, Delicious, and Facebook are translated into stocks, which you can then trade with each other. At The Internet as Playground and Factory, Ursula Endlicher, in collaboration with Arikan set up a performance, which took the code that drives Facebook as starting point for the choreography of their performance. Several performers reenacted user labor on this social networking service.   

One lawyer got really confused by artist projects like Chris Barr’s Bureau of Workplace Interruptions (http://www.interruptions.org). Barr offered workers a way out of their daily trot. Where else can you schedule a phone call by a fake corporate agent who reads you a poem while you are at work?

Screen Capture from "No Matter" Project 

With their project "No Matter," Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott examined how the "freelance labor market" operates in Second Life (SL). They asked residents in the virtual world to build 40 "imaginary objects." In SL, fashion items and pre-fabricated structures like buildings cost between $0.56 and $37.42. For a model of Icarus's Wings, for example, Kildall and Scott paid $5.59 for 45 hours of work to a SL resident who was based in Slovenia. That translates into an hourly age of $0.12. Why would residents possibly perform such underpaid labor? Kildall and Scott argued that this work allowed residents to reinvent themselves. They could establish a new reputation online that was not impacted by their age, class or nationality (http://ww.nomatter.org).

Through the lens of his “Implementation,” a novel published on stickers, Nick Montfort proposed the refusal of utility as a subversive strategy. In his video interview he stated that “Linux is great but it is extremely useful. My own work is of very little if any utility.” (http://nickm.com/implementation/)

“We might be able to use today’s networks as an axe for the frozen sea within us, a way of radicalizing ourselves along literary as well as political dimensions,” Montfort said.

In his presentation, Darren Wershler reflected on the political economy of creativity, the way in which business gets interested in creativity while poetry moves toward uncreativity. Wershler took cues from the American poet Kenneth Goldsmith and his questioning of Richard Florida’s discourse about creativity and business. What gets left out from mainstream narratives of creativity and what does a poetics of uncreativity have to say in order to form a critique of that?

Where Wershler and Montfort brushed against common notions of creativity and utility, Geoff Cox tackled the glorification of the social by presenting a collection of “anti-social projects” that he co-curated for Arnolfini, a contemporary arts organization in Bristol (http://project.arnolfini.org.uk/antisocial).

In line with such interventions that “jail break” social blockbuster services, I would also like to mention Jack Toolin’s “My Space for Your Life.” Toolin states: “The project consists of Facebook pages made for Iraqis killed during the Iraq invasion. These pages feature volunteers who have agreed to become the 'face' of these lost individuals, and they are circulated in Facebook through the act of 'friending.'”

In my own talk "The Expropriation of Digital Labor and What to Do About It,” I introduced Kevin Killian who writes autobiographical fiction in Amazon.com’s book review section. In addition, I presented project NOSO. “The NOSO experience offers a unique opportunity to create NO Connections by scheduling 
NO Events with other NO Friends.” (http://nosoproject.com/)

Frank Pasquale

Legal Interventions

In an inspiring and clear presentation Frank Pasquale questioned the justice of wealth distribution. Pasquale challenged us to think if it is just that companies like Facebook or Google reap the benefits from our online activities in such a centralized and non-transparent way. How much power do we as a society give to major sites on the Internet? Should not critically important digital public spheres be regulated in some way? Giving the example of Google’s protected algorithms, Pasquale reminded us of the sharply defined asymmetries between users and intermediaries. What are the temptations of dominance, he asked. Should Google be able to tier access to Google Books? Imagine Harvard University, for example, which could get unlimited access to the full text of all scanned books for $10 million a year while other universities would only obtain a “disabled version.” Should Google be able to manually change rankings: uprank sites by business partners, down rank or eliminate sites that sue the company (or those that criticize Google executives)? Should Facebook be able to kick off its members without due process or prevent them from accessing their data? Pasquale quoted one blogger who wrote: “Facebook is shutting down accounts of users who are exhibiting any behavior it finds remotely suspicious.”

Control is not merely taking place on the content level but also on the level of infrastructures, Laura DeNardis argued in her talk. Technological rule making directly determines civil liberties online. She argued that technical standards like mp3, mpg, bluetooth, IP, and HTTP are politics by other means and that these standards are increasingly determined by private or hybrid (private/public) institutions, which become points of control over global information architectures. DeNardis provided the example of protests against the ISO Office Open XML standard in India and Norway. A small group of people has control over the entire Internet. Design decisions can have serious consequences for our freedom (think privacy/encryption). Power comes with authority over interoperability. Victims of hurricane Katrina could not register for FEMA help unless they used the Internet Explorer browser. There are significant battles on this level. Technical standards are politics b other means.

Following the trajectory of legal proposals, James Grimmelman suggested four ethical scripts for copyright law: 1) Respect copyrights. (Fandom encouraged and channeled.) 2) Don't sue your customers ("Tired of being treated like a criminal for sharing music online?" EFF) 3) Software should be free. 4) I like to share. ("Sharing" valorized as showing respect for the audience.) (http://www.scribd.com/doc/22393902/Ethical-Visions)  While Free and Open Software is most famous for inspiring others to rethink, often drastically, the direction, purpose, and use of intellectual property law, Biella Coleman instead focused on the  dual existence of individuality and collectivism among Free Software developers to assess the strength of this domain in political terms.

Grimmelman’s four ethical scripts for copyright law related to Abigail De Kosnik’s presentation about free fan labor. Fans write fiction. They build objects. Fans produce videos, fan mashups, and curatorial music mixes. Hollywood simply cannot keep up with really popular properties. The copyright holders of the source material indirectly profit from fan labor, De Kosnik argued. Fans service marketing campaigns. Fans popularize movies and books, or rock bands. Fans promote and market products. Their work engages people; it influences them. De Kosnik suggests that changes to copyright law should “force copyright holders to accept fans’ right to profit from transformative works.” (De Kosnik http://is.gd/5k37o) Today, production and fan creations exist side by side and for viewers, the differences between these two kinds of material are fairly small, De Kosnik argued.

A Note on Conferencing

Women are often underrepresented at technology-related conferences. Gender equality is a central concern of my event-based practice. With roughly a third of the participants being women, The Internet as Playground and Factory conference included more women than most such events. While I am not especially proud of this ratio, it is the result of intensive focus on women in the field. And while gender equality was constantly on my mind when convening this event, the main goal of the conference was to bring together people who work (more or less directly) on issues specifically related to digital labor.

The topic of digital labor offered an invitation to dust off discourses about expropriation of invisible and "unfree" labor (from commercial surrogacy and traditional women's labor to Facebook and sites like 23andme.com), control, audience manufacture, internet governance, the wrongness of wealth distribution, data portability, the instrumentalization of fun, the temptations of dominant expropriators, and media literacies for the future.

Conferences matter. If done right, they can turn the focus of a few thousand people to a set of fundamental questions of our time. Conferences have the potential to make professional friendships more durable and to build community.

The home base of this conference was the iDC mailing list. We used Seesmic, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Vimeo, and Flickr to expand the conversation and open up windows into the rich online discussion. 

A developer at an Internet search company politely declined my conference invitation stating that he sensed a slightly anti-capitalist attitude in my introductory text. I was not sure what bugged me more: the "slightly" or the "anti-capitalist." But he was right: this conference proposed a critical approach to Internet Studies. I aimed to frame a broadly comprehensible analysis and critique of the complex nexus of labor and networked sociality and I very much hoped that speakers would offer responses to what we can do in response to the awareness of patterns of expropriation.

I expected that critical perspectives would be stated in a way that is accessible to more than a small, select group of learned media scholars and I think that we reached a good mix. Speakers who came for dense theory found likeminded others while those who searched for example-rich and exoteric talks also got their fix.

Eugene Lang students Idil Abshir and Andre Singleton at IPF

On his blog “A thaumaturgical compendium” Alexander Halavais voiced his concern that "in the discussion that preceded the conference there was ... particular focus on fairly abstract critical theory. "Over the years," Halavais writes, "my enjoyment of super-abstract cultural theory has given way to tolerance. Too often, I worry that the language has obscured the precision of the ideas. Luckily, the pendulum has swung back from the extreme end of this, where verbal gymnastics was valued more than real ideas, and theorist rock stars attracted audiences not because of what they had to say but how they had to say it." Some first year students for whom IPF was also the first conference they had attended, would have been on board with Halavais’ statement. One or two presentations were not even accessible for the most conference-traveled of cultural theorists. I worry about that. While I understand that it can be pedagogically wise to show students that there is lots to learn and while I also acknowledge that there is value in speaking high theory to a handful of insiders, it does not help if young people get disheartened by our professional allures (e.g., extended deliberations about academic standing, text-heavy slides, incomprehensible lingo). In my opinion, comprehensibility is key especially if we aspire to inspire behavioral change.

In her presentation, Ellen Goodman’s thought through the future of public media. She  quoted from the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967:  “foster delivery of public telecommunications services; that constitute a source of alternative services for all, and that serve as valuable local community resources through outreach; that are responsive to local and general interests, expressing diversity and excellence, involving creative risks, and addressing the needs of unserved and underserved audiences, particularly children and minorities. ” Where are the not-for-profit social networking services that reached any kind of significant membership? The independent citizen media project Crabgrass is one contender in this field but where are the others? Surely, Wikipedia is often quickly cited but this encyclopedia is not a practical model for the entire Internet. Rather, Wikipedia is the exception. Craigslist, however, could be serviceable as a model for online businesses that do not solely aim for profit maximization.

Mind map by Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation in Bangkok (Thailand), presented a birds-eye vision of peer production that connected with social movements worldwide (e.g. Argentinean workers cooperatives). Bauwens referred to a map that charts the territory of practices that are committed to open access to knowledge, open infrastructures, open formats, and commons-oriented practices. (Bauwens, http://is.gd/5jPvc) My question for Michel Bauwens (and Yochai Benkler) relates to their visionary but also utopian characterization of the blossoming landscapes of peer producers whose contributions to the commons are not driven by monetary incentives. People contribute to Seti@Home, they gradually refine articles in Lostpedia (the encyclopedia for the TV show Lost), they upload how-tos to howcast.com or wikihow.com. They may help to tag photos from the Library of Congress on the Flickr Commons. The social web facilitates a growing number of sharing but it facilitates this sociality on the proprietary “real estate” of commercial platforms. The future may be user-led but each click for the benefit of the commons is also potential, profit in the pockets of the intermediaries. 

"We talk about things as if we know what they are," Orit Halpern contended in her memorable presentation. Halpern wants us to envision new types of economies and she uses history to denaturalize our assumptions about the present. She wants to make things more curious, interesting and playful. What kind of questions would create new ideas about how to act? One cannot act without a dream of what one wants to put in the world. History forces us to ask: "What world would we like to live in? What forms of economy, technology, and subjectivity do we desire? Can we rethink technology and ourselves in new metaphors, and under different terms? How can we create a future that does not replicate the past?"

The Internet as Playground and Factory Conference was the first conference in a series of biennial conferences about the politics of digital media at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts.

http://digitallabor.org/
Documents: http://is.gd/5slWs