Today, the means of communication are in the hands of Internet users but the environments in which those tools reside are privately owned. Is this really exploitation or does it stop at expropriation? And if there are examples of exploitation: Are they endemic or are they merely the exception?

Exploitation in new social media contexts is not fertilized by sweat and watered by the tears of the seven year-old child that works sixteen-hour days in the factory. The kind of exploitation that Marx described in Kapital still exists today but, in the face of globalization, it is far less visible. Just think about the one hundred thousand “gold farmers” who worked in China’s gaming factories, some four years ago -- far outside urban areas, earning virtual currency by shooting virtual enemies in online games (Dibbell 2007). They slept in rural dorms far from home. However, dazzling stories like this are not representative for what happens online.

• Social participation is -- for the very most part -- mutually beneficial for Internet users and the operators of social media services.
  

What may look like exploitation at first, is -- on reflection-- a situation in which users benefit from each other while corporate hosts capture value from them, the end-users of their product.

There are some moments of exploitation where netizens are utilized in an unjust, cruel, or selfish manner or where they are unfairly used as a resource against their will or without their consent and knowledge (i.e., by way of hidden, deceptive, or contracts written in legalese). Exploitation also entails not offering workers adequate remuneration for their labor.

Generalizations about exploitation in the context of social media services sometimes fall short because they don't take the specifics of a given tool or platform into account. Amazon.com is a good example of the complexities of simultaneous pleasure, usefulness, and exploitation at work in one company. (I'd not say that the cadre of people who write book reviews on Amazon.com are exploited.) To determine if Amazon.com is exploitative we need to discuss it through the lens of specific case studies.

I'm thinking about labor and the Internet for a few years now but I can only point to a few instances where exploitation in the most technical sense of the word is apparent. Mechanical Turk is one of these examples.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk; Instances of Day Labor in the Virtual World
Mechanical Turk, also referred to as MTurk, was launched in 2005. As one of Amazon.com's services, it enables computer programs to coordinate the use of online volunteer workers to perform tasks, which computers are unable to do.

In their terms of service, Amazon refers to the workers as “providers” and the employers as “requesters.” “Providers” can work from home and remain fairly anonymous. Common tasks that are executed through MTurk include translations, the categorization of information, the editing of marketing content, the writing of reviews for websites or books and the transcription of audio or video files. One MTurk a "provider," interviewed for a Salon.com article, describes his work

"My job is to categorize the shoe based on a list of basic colors: Is it red, blue, pink, purple, white, green, yellow, multicolored? A description next to it reads 'Pink Lemonade Leather.' This is not exactly a brain-busting task; I'm doing it while talking to a friend on the phone. With the mouse, I check a box marked 'pink.' In the next split second, a picture of a navy blue shirt appears. I check 'blue.' Assuming my answers jibe with those of at least two other people being paid to scrutinize the same pictures, I've just earned 4 cents."

MTurk was named after the 18th century chess playing automaton "the Turk," a wooden figure with a turban that seemed to have the ability to think. With a human chess expert hidden inside it, “the Turk” turned out to be a hoax. Conversely, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos is proud of the fact that MTurk is a platform that coordinates the human work force of thousands of people.

All you need to participate is a computer, a net connection, and an Amazon account. The “providers” perform activities that computers are not capable of (e.g., image recognition). Workers answer questions like “Do the images on this website match with the content?” Some employers on MTurk are using people as computers; which fulfills Henry Ford’s vision of turning workers into intensely exploitable second grade machines. It's not the machine that is using us; it's the firms that use MTurk that put us in the working position.

"Turkers" enter into a situation of control: Sitting in their homes, their every mouse click is monitored. While the pay rates for "providers" are lousy, far below minimum wage, “requesters” get menial tasks done on the cheap. Employers also have the option of rejecting the work, which is one way of not paying the workers at all after the task is completed. The word exploitation really does fit here because the workers are often dramatically underpaid. One worker, for example, was paid $8 for a transcript of 45 minutes of video.

The language of “requesters” and “providers” obfuscates the real labor relationships at play. The original language on the MTurk website was changed from “providers” to “workers” but is still maintained in the terms of service (accessed April 17, 2009). Employers are still called "requesters" on the website.

CEOs felt emboldened by the “cost-saving” MTurk venture, which has cut their expenses by thousands of dollars. Companies who pay contracted workers through Amazon.com do not have to file taxes and they skirt minimum-wage legislation and health insurance. The mentioned article contends that there is something a little disturbing about a billionaire like Jeff Bezos dreaming up new ways of getting ordinary folks to do work for him for pennies. However, Bezos retorts that MTurk is a marketplace where folks who have work meet up with folks who want to do work.

To some degree this sentiment is echoed in Lawrence Lessig’s Remix where he suggests that “If those within the sharing economy begin to think of themselves as tools of a commercial economy, they will be less willing to play (177). In addition, he says that “no one builds hybrids on community sacrifice.” (244)

Bezos objects to Salon.com’s insistence on calling MTurk a “virtual sweatshop.” Both Lessig and Bezos propose that people would not knowingly enter situations of economic exploitation or sacrifice. Historically, however, that has not been the case; the exploited may well be aware of their exploitation but they may simply have to enter those relationships out of economic desperation.

One “Provider” (worker) describes a task he performed.

"I first accepted a job from ContentSpooling.net that asked me to write three titles for an article about annuities and their use in retirement planning. Then I viewed a series of images apparently captured from a vehicle moving through the gray suburbs of North London, and, at the request of Geospatial Vision, a division of the British technology company Oxford Metrics Group, identified objects like road signs and markings. For all this, my Amazon account was credited the lordly sum of 12 cents."

Concomitantly, the “Amazon Remembers” iPhone application invites users to take a photo of a product (e.g., a chair) and send it to Amazon. Within roughly a day the application provides a link to the user who can now buy this product (or a similar one) on Amazon. The application is not based on image recognition software, as it may seem at first, but on the labor of a workforce that is globally distributed. Once a photo has been submitted, it is made available on MTurk where workers try to match the photo with existing products in Amazon.com’s database. If they succeed, Amazon pays them 10 cents.

It’s hard to believe that anybody would actually perform such “human initiated task” (HIT) for 10 cents but some workers say that they are simply multitasking.

For the most part, Amazon.com is enabling theses labor practices; it is not actually functioning as “requester” (employer) itself; "Amazon Remembers" iPhone application is an exception. They provide the MTurk platform and employers use it. Beyond that, Amazon does not want to get involved. Through this hands-off approach, Amazon technically facilitates and condones the exploitative practices on MTurk, its code choreographs the interaction.

More than half of the people who are using this web service live in the United States but close to 32% of MTurk workers reside in India where a few dollars may make a bigger dent. Many more people would work for Mechanical Turk if banking access would not be a conditon for participation.

"Turkers" in the US use this "crowdsourcing marketplace" sometimes as a form of entertainment. They appreciate the repetitiveness of the tasks, the meditative absorption. The biggest trick that Mechanical Turk ever pulled off was to make workers believe that what they do is not really work. That, at least, is somewhat suggested by the slogan on MTurk's coffee mugs: "Why work if you can turk?"

Not everybody who uses this "marketplace for work" participates in order to make money. In fact, some middle class users in the United States are reported to have used the platform merely as entertainment --an eccentric hobby-- which they enjoy with full awareness of the pitiful compensation. The repetitiveness of tasks and the duration reminds some of them of a video game. "It doesn't add up to a lot of money per hour but if I'm sitting there watching TV anyway, it's more than I'd make just sitting there," one worker wrote.

MTurk, for these workers, is not primarily about the money, it’s a pastime just like doing crossword puzzles. Indeed, many of the traditional pastimes have, at least partially, migrated online. From playing Chess or Scrabble, to quilting bees, and book clubs, people spend their free time together to enjoy each other’s company and be creative. In the case of Mturk, however, creativity and togetherness does not come into it.

MTurk is a fairly new environment, a novel and quirky activity in the eyes of many. (Remember the hype around Second Lifea few years ago?) It is not deceptive; there are no hidden agendas but it is exploitative simply because there are many instances in which workers are not paid anywhere near to what they deserve. The fact that “requesters” can find “turkers” (as workers call themselves) to work for them does not mean that it pays them fairly. Many workers may simply be forced to take whichever job (i.e., or HIT as it is called) that they can get. Consider that most users have no college education and fall into two age groups: 18-24 or above 65. Working for MTurk may simply be one of a set of desperate and equally bad options.

Reports also showed that “requesters” (employers) found ways of simply not paying their workers by rejecting the work after it was already executed. "The creativity of business in avoiding its responsibility to workers never ceases to astound. It's day labor in the virtual world," a lawyer for the National Employment Law Project points out. No minimum wage, no overtime, no unemployment insurance, no health insurance, and no taxes.

In the netherworld of networked labor today's coal miners of sorts may well sit, type, and stare at screens; all day, every day and it ends up hurting them. It hurts them in ways that are slow enough and subtle enough to steal up on them (Sterling, 134). Nigel Thrift summarizes it succinctly:

"When a commodity produces a sufficiently compelling experience environment, consumer communities will evolve beyond a company’s control, thus directly co-creating value and providing the firm with a new terrain of profit/ generalized outsourcing/ if it is nimble enough to adapt to the new conditions." (Thrift 290)

MTurk offers an odd and engaging experience, which attracts users into a web of exploitation. Who are we becoming by offering ourselves up like that? What does it say about our sense of self-worth when we have to resort to click work to relax?
Do we really feel so powerless that it becomes our life project to “kill time.” Surely, for some people, alos in the US, it's a supplement to their income but I can't help but think what all of this cognitive surplus could do if put to collective use (i.e., just think of the The Extraordinaries).

Work that is executed through Mturk does not feed back into the commons but it mostly benefits the enterprise. Today the technological tentacles of the enterprise reach deep into our homes where they facilitate the extraction of even the smallest willingness and ability to work.



A former graduate student a UCLA’s Design/Media Arts program created a project that playfully engaged with the exploitative nature of MTurk. He invited “turkers” to draw a sheep facing to the left" at a rate of 2 cents per sheep. After 40 days 7,599 workers had contributed 12,000 sheep. The artist Aaron Koblin, then sold sets of 20 sheep for $20 at Sheep Market (http://thesheepmarket.com), which upset some of the workers: "Does anyone remember signing over the rights to the drawings?" In fact they did. In the terms of service, Koblin had indeed specified that workers lose all ownership rights.

Other art projects, using MTurk include the Mechanical Olympics's Channel and Bicycle Built for Two Thousand.

Not all work that is offered through MTurk is exploitative and most workers may not feel used at all. Remuneration for many "HITs" is, in fact, appropriate. However, some of the cases of waged labor on MTurk are clearly exploitative but within a larger context of the Web they remain fairly isolated examples.

Amazon.com set up a scenario that allows for exploitative relationships to take shape, it sees those unfold, and it does not intervene (as if it were a neutral bystander). Some employers who use MTurk abuse their workers who put themselves into this weak position.  This does not excuse the exploitation that Amazon.com facilitates (and simultaneously ignores) and that  some "requesters" execute. At the same time, MTurk also signifies how desparate many workers must be who indeed use the platform to make ends meet.

Global Internet Activism (Technology-enabled activism outside the United States and Europe). View more presentations from Trebor Scholz.

Participation Literacy

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After the presentation I had an email exchange with Dr. Beth Coleman who is professor in Writing and Humanistic Studies and Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Her research interests include virtual world design and use, networked subjectivity, global media emergence and practice in China, India and Africa, contemporary art and technology, and critical history of race and technology. She blogs at Project Goodluck.

There Beth Coleman followed up on my talk:

Media professor Trebor Scholz gave a talk at MIT last week on Free Cooperation, discussing the ways in which we participate freely in data mining platforms (such as Google and Face Book) and what if means to give free labor to giant commercial enterprises.

He showed us network effect graphs that described the ways in which casual use of a site can turn into a de facto commitment to a platform. He also talked about how online labor exploitation is not visible in the manner that historical industrial labor has been. The centralizing effect of the giant media platforms is a phenomenon that causes him real alarm.

I had a few more questions for him and he nicely agreed to continue the conversation here.

1. Is this inevitable? Going from a mass-media distribution model to a distributed media of the Web, what has happened to the ability to choose? There are alternatives to Youtube?? Why does this site dominate? Is it design or social (the aggregating of people).

2. There is no precedent for participatory networks at this scale. So the rules of ownership in regard to what one makes or even of one's personal information are not clear. The eula [end users agreement] for most sites say that the user give up all rights to content. If we are seeing a centralizing movement that reflects in effect our own use habits, how do we reverse this momentum?

3. This free work is the opposite of what was meant by free software and open source initiatives a decade ago. Do user’s rights need to be mandated at the level of law to prevent our herding instincts from helping to create de facto media monopoly? Does this destroy the progressive and innovative aspects of Web agency that someone like Y. Benkler has applauded in Wealth of Networks?

Trebor Scholz:

Why do people congregate in very large numbers in very few places? People want to be where other people are. I learn from my friends on Facebook (FB) through the newsfeed and from my network on Del.icio.us. Knowledge is created among us, laterally. D. Weinberger calls it the Daily We. I can see what my FB friends (people whom I met at conferences or with whom I am otherwise acquainted) bookmark, read, which events they put on, and which groups they associate themselves with. I'm certainly not alone-- these reasons motivate many of the 70 million people who are on Facebook.

Business plans for startups are based on a very low threshold for participation, uploading is made very easy. People contribute videos, blog entries, wall posts, bookmarks, status updates, and photos but none of this material can be exported. An active user becomes more valuable over time, not unlike a bottle of wine in the wine cellar. All those “friends” with whom we reconnect, sometimes after quite some time, and all those media and texts are literally locked up. Try to delete Flickr photos (you’ll have to go one by one; try that with the 2 GB that you just uploaded). Or, try deleting your Facebook (FB) account. You can't. Attempt to export blog entries on MySpace or photos on Facebook. Not accidentally, the export option does not exist. Groups are locked up in these social milieus. Weak-tie-communities are entrapped; it's a corporate confiscation of attention, creativity, and time. Steve Chen, co-founder of Youtube understands how much he owes the "community" when he thanks Youtube users shortly after being acquired by Google for $1.6 billion. Chen: “Thanks to everyone of you guys that have been contributing to YouTube, to the community. We would not be anywhere close to where we are without the help of this community.” Within three years the site had achieved popularity and that user community directly translated into Google stocks.

Users who "flirt" with a given site are attracted by the wealth of user-submitted content. Bigger is better. It's the network effect: the more people use a technology, the more valuable it becomes. Fax machines don’t get you very far if only 5 people use them. Equally, you'll not reconnect with your high school sweetheart on an obscure startup social networking site. You will also not find many photos with an uncommon tag on a photo site other than Flickr. User-submitted content makes these sites so attractive. The top ten site of the Web share 40% of all web traffic (sina.com, baidu.com, yahoo.com, msn.com, google.com, youtube.com, myspace.com, live.com, orkut.com, qq.com). These sites disproportionally control the networked public sphere because of the user-submitted content, which makes their social milieus so intensely engaging. Yochai Benkler refers to this mass-media-like constellation of media monopoly as the "Berlusconi Effect." The democratizing effects that Benkler described in Wealth of Networks in 1995 have little to do with user-generated content. He focuses on the remaining 60% web traffic made up in part of blogs that spread reports showing the shortcoming of Diebold's voting machines.

I think that Benkler's sometimes criticized utopian enthusiasm for peer production is justified when it comes to initiatives like Wikipedia or even Google Adsense that allows individuals to supplement their income.   

 Sure, there are endless alternatives to the MyTubes and YouSpaces of the World Wide Computer. But good luck trying to migrate your data and friend lists with you. YouTube is attractive because of those 70,000 uploads a day (and counting). It's very difficult to migrate data to another site. Interoperability is largely an illusion. Users can reconnect with high school friends and those dozens of people would not all move with the potential migrating users. The loss would be significant. My hope is that exportability will become a competitive advantage for Social Web companies.

The American site Orkut dominates Brazil and India completely. Canada hearts Facebook. MySpace and FB reign supreme in the United States. How do these sites become the default? Some researchers suggest that it has to do with the colors of the interface or with a celebrity joining the site. (This is not so different to a real estate agency that spreads the news that the R&B singer and songwriter Beyoncé will buy a duplex in a newly erected building.) But then, soon, once a solid number of users is established, the wealth of social life will be the attraction. Good design cannot have much to with it: just look at MySpace and its disastrous interface.

Yochai Benkler correctly suggests that "peer production is as efficient and significant for the 21 century as the assembly line was for the 20th century." I also agree with Benkler when he suggests that through peer production "people can do more by and for themselves" but I add that the pleasures of online sociality are exploited. Communities are often deceived and commodified. They are unfairly used as a resource, often without their consent and knowledge. It's a bit like Mark Twain's "Whitewashing the Fence" in Tom Sawyer.

Tom tries to motivate the neighborhood boys to paint the fence for him. His friend Ben rejects the offer to paint the fence without pay. Tom responds “What do you call work?” and resumes his whitewashing:

“Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain’t. All I know, is, it suits Tom Sawyer.”
“Oh come, now, you don’t mean to let on that you like it?”

The brush continued to move.

“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”

That put the thing in a new light. Ben stopped nibbling his apple:

“Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.”

Online the promise of the free service is subtler than Tom Sawyer's boyish box of manipulating tricks.
The surplus attention of people, diverted from television to the Internet, translates into many hours every day spent on social networking sites. (For Myspace that meant an increase in value from $ 583 million in 2005 to $15 billion in 2008.)

I disagree with Benkler when he proposes social peace: "The key is managing the marriage of money and nonmoney without making nonmoney feel like a sucker." How can big businesses like NewsCorp can get away with exploiting communities. From a business perspective, the question is how you a company can find people to make a living with. How can they harvest the labor and presence of those millions on Myspace, for example, without making them feel bad? This is also an underlying question for Don Tapscott in Wikinomics when he celebrates that "In Second Life, the consumer actually co–innovates and coproduces the products they consume." (Tapscott and Williams, 2007. Wikinomics, p. 126).

Companies like LindenLab, while granting users IP-rights to their creations in the virtual world SecondLife, make profits without providing anything but the technical backbone, the real estate for all this creativity and flying around. The ownership issues of submitted content are handled in favor of the user here. But perhaps that simply shows that the content does not matter so much. Since Howard Rheingold's Electric Minds, companies have learned have learned that user-submitted content is very rarely what makes money. Today, the platform zars realize that it's about attention; it's about time spent in an environment and about the data that can be sucked out of the user clicks.  

Benkler, Lessig, Sunstein and others are looking at these issues as lawyers. Their contributions are important but they respond to questions that are relevant to the legal community. I approach the issues from the cultural activist perspective.  

Is centralization avoidable? Is it a new phenomenon? User-submitted or generated content such as book reviews are not new (very much in opposition to what Web 2.0 ideologues wants you to believe). Benkler argues for the Web as a place where ordinary people can find a voice but it is not a novel trend. Personal email was a sneaky and by all means unplanned use of ARPANET. Amazon.com's review submission feature started in 1995 as an early form of self-publishing. The Indian social networking site Sulekha kicked off in 1999.  The participatory turn, the shock of the social, and groundswell of sociality online-- whatever you want to call this quantitative leap of participation in web-based social milieus-- it is new.  

Is the "Berlusconi Effect" avoidable on the Social Web? The history of radio would be a discouraging precedent. From a plethora of individual radio operators, airwave politics made sure that only the highest-paying stations would survive. Debates about net neutrality immediately enter my mind. A two-tiered Internet would be the kiss goodnight for decentralization. But recent news made me hopeful.   As it stands now, bloggers like Dailykoz or curated sites like Boingboing still exist and they are A-list sites in terms of traffic. They get a good share of the remaining 60% of traffic and that is worth defending.

    "If history is any guide, the democratization promised by Web 2.0 will eventually be succeeded by new monopolies, just as the democratization promised by the personal computer led to an industry dominated by only a few companies. Those companies will have enormous power over our lives -- and may use it for good or ill."

    "At a more foundational level of collective understanding, the shift from an industrial to a networked information economy increases the extent to which individuals can become active participants in producing their own cultural environment. It opens the possibility of a more critical and reflective culture (130)."

    "The networked information economy makes individuals better able to do things for and by themselves, and makes them less susceptible to manipulation by others than they were in the mass-media culture. In this sense, the emergence of this new set of technical, economic, social, and institutional relations can increase the relative role that each individual is able to play in authoring his or her own life (130)."

 
Talk of novelty is equally misplaced when it come to wikis. Ward Cunningham installed WikiWikiWeb on the Internet in 1995. And the first version of RSS, a format for syndicating content, was created by Netscape in 1999.

Application Programming Interface (API) is an additional technology at the core of Web 2.0. APIs  interconnect websites just like a door way through which people with the right “key” can pass; they facilitate the link between one computer program and another. Open APIs allow programmers to write applications that access the rich databases at Google, Facebook or Yahoo.  In the past, companies protected their APIs like treasures. But more recently, they decided to share their APIs, allowing developers to build their own hybrid mash-up software. Frappr, for example, uses GoogleMaps and adds layers of conversations on top of them.

Hardly the latest marker of the evolution of the Web, Extensible Markup Language (XML) facilitates the sharing of data across different systems on the Internet. XML 1.0 became a “W3C Recommendation” already in 1998.

Folksonomy, however, was popularized in 2004. It stands for collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, social tagging. It is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. While the Web has always been social, the scale of participation is new. It did not, however, explode over night but was the result of the steady growth of the Web. Today, online participation is made easier because of increased familiarity, easier-to-use tools and broader access to bandwidth and technologies.

Also new is the term AJAX, first coined by Jesse J. Garrett in 2005. It means that Javascript is now working in a way that allows web-based applications to function much like traditional desktop software. AJAX makes web pages feel more responsive by exchanging only small amounts of data with the server so that one does not have to reload the entire web page, each time when requesting a change. While the term AJAX is new, it uses a set of decade-old, existing technologies.

While neither user-generated content, XML, RSS, wikis, blogs, CSS, the network effect, or social networking sites were new in 2004, it is correct that folksonomies as well as the current scale of participation are indeed new.

The Web 2.0 Ideology
Web 2.0 ideologues say that control is bad but in fact control is only increasing as Lawrence Lessig warns us in his book Code 2.0. Other abreviations of this rethoric include: openness--good, authority--bad, hierarchy--bad, and amateur creativity--good.

With Web 2.0, services, rather than products are offered and users are encouraged to participate. Architectures of participation allow networked publics to achieve what Pierre Levy called Collective Intelligence. Networked individuals refer each other to useful content. They page rank, tag, follow and "unfollow." The line between amateur and professional gets blurred when users collaborate to write blogs and wiki entries. Users tag content online and therefore in many cases editorial classification is made unnecessary.

The claim of the relinquishing of control, an essential part of the Web 2.0 ideology, is a myth as William Blaze argues:

    "What separates the Web 2.0 from that plain old "web" is the establishment and entrenchment of a hierarchy of power and control. This is not the same control that Microsoft, AOL and other closed system/walled garden companies tried unsuccessfully to push upon internet users. Power in the Web 2.0 age comes not from controlling the whole system, but in controlling the connections in a larger network of systems. It is the power of those who create not open systems, but semi-open systems, the power of API writers, network builders and standard definers."