archive/dissertation
Nick Srnicek,
Douglas Rushkoff,
Robert W. McChesney,
Christian Fuchs,
Tim O'Reilly,
Franklin Foer,
McKenzie Wark,
Mark Andrejevic,
Evgeny Morozov,
Wolfgang Streeck
possibly relevant for my dissertation
According to Ong, labor arbitrage is one of the strategies that informs the conditions of governing and disciplining by way of deterritorializing labor. Labor arbitrage breaks apart the traditional relationship between the national labor legislations and the worker as citizen. Ong describes labor arbitrage as “the latest technique to exploit time-space coordinates in order to accumulate profits, putting into play a new kind of flexibility” (Ong 2006: 174). Cognitive labor is particularly susceptible to labor arbitrage technologies because computerized division of labor enables the fragmentation of tasks into smaller and standardizable units, allowing their completion by an assembly of workers across the globe (Ong 2006: 161). I believe crowdsourcing is an apparatus of a neoliberal system of exception that signifies a novel instance of labor arbitrage, where online cognitive labor markets are established as aggregation platforms that simultaneously act as a techno-immigration system.
AMT divides cognitive tasks into discrete pieces so that the completion of tasks is not dependent on the cooperation of the workers themselves but is organized from outside by information and communication technologies industries. By the elimination of the cooperation aspect of the cognitive work, the labor power becomes a variable capital as it creates value only after the activation and organization of the capital.
As a result of the fragmentation of cognitive tasks, crowdsourced workers not only produce the desired information for the task algorithm, but they are, in turn, produced by the algorithm, disciplined by its process flows into a particular cognitive mode and problem solving that eventually determines the efficiency of their labor and thus their livelihood. [...]
[...] Much of the discussion of online tracking has focused on the fate of privacy and the rights that pertain to it. This is an important set of issues, but it is complicated by the way in which it frames privacy in terms of personal choice (thereby dismissing challenges to the choices made by consumers as patronizing at best and at worst an affront to their personal freedom) and overlooks the way in which their information has become the private property of the commercial entities that do the work of harvesting it. It also tends to invoke the counterargument that there is little need for concern since many forms of monitoring that take place in interactive contexts are anonymous in the sense that the aggregators and their clients are not particularly interested in the personal identity of those monitored and do not personally inspect the details of their profiles (as if somehow the fact that no one is reading our personal e-mails means that there should be no cause for concern that they are being electronically scanned to determined how best to manipulate us). Privacy, in short, has a tendency to frame the discussion in personal, individual terms.
diss: the problems with thinking in terms of privacy (avoids the political economy implications)
For Ritzer and Jurgensen (2010), the capture of value online represents the extension of the logic of capital into new spaces and temporalities: “it appears that capitalists have found another group of people—beyond workers (producers)—to exploit and a new source of surplus value. In this case, capitalism has merely done what it has always done—found yet another way to expand.” [...]
[...] The privatization and commercialization of the Internet is a form of material deprivation and enclosure insofar as it separates users from the infrastructure that supports their communicative activities. It reinforces and reproduces the structure of social relations wherein a small group controls the productive resources used by the many and allows economic advantages to accrue from this control. The ownership class that includes the founders of Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and so on could not exist without capturing and controlling components of the productive infrastructure. The value that they appropriate stems in large part from their ability to capture aspects of the activity of those who access their resources, and their ability to do so is directly related to their ownership and control of these resources. Bluntly put, the ability to exploit this activity for commercial purposes for the economic benefit of the few would disappear if these resources were commonly owned and controlled.
[...] the privatization and commercialization of much of the digital media infrastructure does not take place by force, but merely reproduces existing property relations by extending them into the digital realm. The background of compulsion is built into the legal structure and regulatory regimes that enable the privatization process. [...]
this is good and important
Privacy-based critiques do not quite capture the element of productive power and control at work in the promise of monitoring-based marketing. If privacy violations constitute an invasion—a loss of control over the process of self-disclosure— market monitoring includes an additional element of control and management: the systematic use of personal information to predict and influence. The critique of exploitation addresses this element of power and control. Defenders of market monitoring will argue that individual consumer behavior remains uncoerced. Critical approaches, however, locate coercion not solely at the level of discrete individual decisions, but also in the social relations that structure them. In this regard, the invocation of the notion of exploitation parallels Jonathan Beller’s claim in his contribution to this volume that, “an interest in labor should force us to rethink the logistics of media platforms and see them as technologies formed in the struggle between labor and capital and thus by and for the expropriation of labor.”
[...] Internet platforms like Facebook and Twitter provide access to means of communication without selling access or content as commodity, yet they do not stand outside the commodity form, but rather commodify users' data. In return for the commodification of data, Facebook and Twitter provide a means of communication to their users. These means could be considered as being in-kind goods provided as return for the users granting the companies the possibility to access and commodify personal data. [...] users on Facebook and Twitter do not receive a universal medium of exchange, but rather one specific means of communication. By giving users access to their platforms, Facebook and Twitter do not provide general means of survival, but instead access to a particular means of communication whose use serves their own profit interests. This is not to say that I argue for payments to users of corporate Internet platforms that are advertising-financed. I rather argue for the creation of non-commercial non-profit alternatives that altogether escape, sublate and struggle against the commodity form.
glad to see he sidesteps the Jaron Lanier trap, but what does he propose should happen to FB/Twitter as they are now?
[...] Whereas wage labour is coerced by the threat of physical violence (the threat is death because of the lack of being able to purchase and consume goods), audience labour is coerced by ideological violence (the threat is to have fewer social contacts because of missing information from the media and missing communication capacities that are needed for sustaining social relations). Audiences are under the ideological control of capitalists who possess control over the means of communication. If for example people stop using Facebook and social networking sites, they may miss certain social contact opportunities. They can refuse to become a Facebook worker, just like an employee can refuse to work for a wage, but they may as a consequence suffer social disadvantages in society. Commercial media coerce individuals to use them. The more monopoly power they possess, the easier it gets to exert this coercion over media consumers and users.
in response to Brett Caraway's claim that audiences are not commodities (2011)
for diss: cite this to say people CAN't boycott
Social media users are double objects of commodification: they are commodities themselves and through this commodification their consciousness becomes, while online, permanently exposed to commodity logic in the form of advertisements. Most online time is advertising time. [...] advertisements do not necessarily represent consumers' real needs and desires because the ads are based on calculated assumptions, whereas needs are much more complex and spontaneous. The ads mainly reflect marketing decisions and economic power relations. They do not simply provide information about products as offers to buy, but present information about products of powerful companies.
cite this: information tech enables creation of a new frontier/digital domain where commodity logic is amplified, accelerated, spread everywhere more deeply