The internet runs on unpaid digital labor

Hyperemployment doesn’t come with better benefits

Keynes thought we’d replace work with recreation; tech critic Ian Bogost says we’ve replaced recreation with work. He calls digital labor “hyperemployment,” and says even if it’s not strictly unpaid, we agree to it only because our contributions are recast as compulsions or necessities.

↩︎ posted Nov. 2, 2016

To make machines look intelligent it was necessary that the sources of their power, the labor force which surrounded and ran them, be rendered invisible.

Instead of Oz behind the curtain, a million users lend the web its mystique. Computation under capitalism doesn’t subsume social relations, it amplifies them.

↩︎ e-flux, posted Nov. 1, 2016

The Immaterial Labour Union zine riffs on everything from the social graph to how to leave Facebook on your own terms. “The Immaterial Labour Union is a decentralized labour union which occupies the space of the ‘social factory’—Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, etc.—where we’re being stripped off of our data for the profit of a privileged few. With this zine we hope to deconstruct what it means to equate social media with labor. Each issue will hopefully tackle a piece of the digital economy puzzle and bring a better understanding of our condition as workers.”

↩︎ posted Nov. 1, 2016

I broke the internet and all I got were these fleeting endorphins

The exploitation of digital labor goes further than allowing platforms to custom-tailor ads. It also greases the wheels of cultural appropriation, as shown in this illustrative profile of Vine stars who created dances and coined slogans but never owned their own work.

↩︎ posted Nov. 1, 2016

In the Facebook Algorithmic Factory, researchers catalogue the many data inputs that users provide the tech giant, to categorize novel forms of exploitation native to the algorithmic economy, where people’s data is treated as a natural resource. Check out all three parts: ”Immaterial Labor and Data Harvesting,” ”Human Data Banks and Algorithmic Labor,” and ”Quantified Lives on Discount."

↩︎ posted Nov. 1, 2016

Facebook could sell you for a Big Mac

A user is worth about $3.82 to Zuckerberg’s company. Its trove of data powers the company’s advertising, which has provided about 90% of revenue.

↩︎ posted Nov. 1, 2016

Capital used force to enclose common land, put starving peasants to work for a wage, and colonize the South. Today it also uses ‘lolcat’ videos. Economic historians may credit the casually dressed bosses of Silicon Valley with the creation of a world-group of cheerfully dispossessed laborers, willing co-producers of the services they consume.

Data is Latin for “given,” but it is in fact stolen. There are only two ways forward: Users can broker their own data, or the state can engage to redirect value back to its owners.

↩︎ Le Monde Diplomatique, posted Nov. 1, 2016