Christian Fuchs: Introduction to Digital Labour Studies

Introduction to
Digital Labour Studies

Christian Fuchs

c.fuchs@westminster.ac.uk

1. The Digital Labour Discourse

A


Trebor Scholz:
“The Internet has become a
simple-to-join, anyone-can-play
system where the sites and
practices of work and play
increasingly wield people as a
resource for economic
amelioration by a handful of
oligarchic owners. [...] Over the
past six years, web-based work
environments have emerged
that are devoid of the worker
protections of even the most
precarious working-class jobs. [...]
These are new forms of labor
but old forms of exploitation.
There are no minimum wages or
health insurance“ (p. 1)


Introduction (Burston, Dyer-Witheford and Hearn 2010, 215):

“People still labour in the traditional sense, to be sure – in
factories and on farms, in call centres, in the newsroom and
on the sound stage. But contemporary life likewise
compels us, for instance, as audiences for ever more
recombinant forms of entertainment and news programming,
to labour on ever-multiplying numbers of texts (as readers,
facebook fans, mashup artists). When such labour is
subsequently repurposed by traditional producers of
information and entertainment products, the producing/
consuming ‘prosumer’ (or ‘produser’) is born.


Additionally, as individuals are subject to precarious, unstable
forms of employment that demand they put their
personalities, communicative capacities and emotions into
their jobs, they are encouraged to see their intimate lives as
resources to be exploited for profit and, as a consequence,
new forms of labour on the self are brought into being“.


Book:
Fuchs, Christian and Marisol Sandoval, eds. Forthcoming.
Critique, Social Media and the Information Society. New
York: Routledge.

EU COST Action IS1202 “Dynamics of Virtual
Work“ (2012-2016)

Chair: Prof. Ursula Huws, University of Hertfordshire
Vice Chair: Christian Fuchs

virtual work: “labour, whether paid or unpaid, that is carried
out using a combination of digital and telecommunications
technologies and/or produces content for digital
media“ (MoU, 4)


4 working groups

Working group 1. New geographies and the new spatial
division of virtual labour

Working group 2. Creativity, skills, knowledge and new
occupational identities

Working group 3. Innovation and the emergence of new
forms of value creation and new economic activities

Working group 4. Policy implications, including economic
development, employment and innovation policy

2. Digital Labour – Examples

Amazon
Mechanical
Turk


1
hour
interview:
typical
transcription
time
6
hours

=>
Hourly
wage:
a)
US$
4,
b)
US$
4,
c)
US$
3


60
minutes:

60
GBP
=

95
US$

=
approx.
16

US$
/
hour


http://www.franklin-‐square.com/transcription_per_line.htm

US$
90-‐US$150:

US$15-‐25
/
hour

CROWDSOURCING
LABOUR
=>

More
precarious
labour?
More
unemployment?


Pepsi launched a marketing campaign in early 2007 which
allowed consumers to design the look of a Pepsi can. The
winners could win a $10,000 prize, and the promise was that
their artwork would be featured on 500 million Pepsi cans
around the United States.


A


ARD: Ausgeliefert! Leiharbeiter bei Amazon.
(At mercy! Contract workers at Amazon), February 2013


€8.52/hour instead of €9.68 as inititally promised = -12%


Amazon.de Facebook group: comments on February 16th/
17th, 2013


Ideabounty is a crowdsourcing platform that organizes
crowdsourcing projects for corporations as for example
RedBull, BMW, or Unilever.


Facebook has asked users to translate its site into other
languages without payment.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24205912

"We thought it'd be cool," said Javier Olivan,
international manager at Facebook, based in Palo Alto,
Calif. "Our goal would be to hopefully have one day
everybody on the planet on Facebook.”

Other critics say Facebook just wants free labor.


Valentin Macias, 29, a Californian who teaches English in
Seoul, South Korea, has volunteered in the past to translate
for the nonprofit Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia but said he
won't do it for Facebook.

"(Wikipedia is) an altruistic, charitable, information-
sharing, donation-supported cause," Macias told The
Associated Press in a Facebook message. "Facebook is
not. Therefore, people should not be tricked into
donating their time and energy to a multimillion-dollar
company so that the company can make millions more –
at least not without some type of compensation."


Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/

Started as political blog in 2005,
developed into the most
successful Internet newspaper/
news blog
#83: world‘s most accessed web
sites (Jan 1st, 2013, alexa.com)

2006: venture capital injection,
SoftBank capital US$ 5 million,
February 2011: AOL bought
the Huffington Post for US$
315 million => advertising-
financed


The writer Jonathan Tasini filed a
$105-million class action suit
against HP – “unjust
enrichement”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=qcisNB6vN1w

“In my view, the Huffington
Post’s bloggers have essentially
been turned into modern-day
slaves on Arianna Huffington‘s
plantation,”


“She wants to pocket the tens of millions of dollars she
reaped from the hard work of those bloggers….This all
could have been avoided had Arianna Huffington not acted
like the Wal-Marts, the Waltons, Lloyd Blankfein, which is
basically to say, ‘Go screw yourselves, this is my money.’”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/04/12/aol-
huffpo-suit-seeks-105m-this-is-about-justice/


Arianna Huffington:
"People blog on HuffPost for free for the same reason they
go on cable TV shows every night for free: either because
they are passionate about their ideas or because they
have something to promote and want exposure to large and
multiple audiences," Huffington said. "Our bloggers are
repeatedly invited on TV to discuss their posts and have
received everything from paid speech opportunities and
book deals to a TV show.“
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/04/arianna-
huffington-on-jonathan-tasini-writer-lawsuit-there-are-no-
mertis-to-the-case.html
Argumentation:
* bloggers do it for fun and creativity, not for the purpose
of money
* other indirect forms of payment


couchsurfing.org


Started as non-profit company,

Was incorporated in 2011

founder Casey Fenton: economic crisis => “This is a very
difficult time to become a 501c(3)“ company (=a charity)“.
“From the beginning, being a non-profit has been a major
part of Couchsurfing‘s identity. It‘s been something that I
have always taken pride in“. “The non-profit structure [...]
can really limit our ability to innovate“ Being a non-profit
“isn‘t Couchsurfing‘s core identity. Our identity is our vision
and mission: We get people together“. (
http://www.couchsurfing.org/bcorp)

$US7.6 million venture capital investment raised in 2011:
Omidyar Ventures, VC Benchmark Capital (
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/24/couchsurfing-raises-7-6-m-


=B Corporation: for-profit, certification of “social
responsibility“ (
http://www.bcorporation.net/community/directory/
couchsurfing): accountabiltiy, employees, consumers,
community, environment => overall B score

User protests:

Avazz petition
http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/
For_a_strong_Community_behind_CouchSurfing


User protests:
Petition
http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/
For_a_strong_Community_behind_CouchSurfing
“We, the community of CouchSurfing, are the ones who
built everything from scratch in voluntary work. [...] Many
of us already left as CouchSurfing turned into a B-
Corporation, because of the fear that the spirit about the
alternative way of CouchSurfing got lost completely and profit
and greed took it's place. [...] As this community was giving
such a high social reward to all it's users, and as we won't
just watch how this all is destroyed by the profit-seeking
share holders, we decided to fight for the future of our
community and will do our best to put it back to the track
of the user based community it has been for a long time!


The couchsurfing community is especially critical of changes
of the ToS like the following one

https://www.couchsurfing.org/terms.html, version from
October 12, 2012

“4.3 Member Content License. If you post Member Content
to our Services, you hereby grant us a perpetual, worldwide,
irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free and fully
sublicensable license to use, reproduce, display, perform,
adapt, modify, create derivative works from, distribute, have
distributed and promote such Member Content in any form,
in all media now known or hereinafter created and for
any purpose, including without limitation the right to use
your name, likeness, voice or identity“


Conflict minerals


Who is this?


Steve Jobs


Tian Yu


Foxconn

Play Labour
e.g. the Google workplace


eWaste
labour


Occupy – a new working class?
Occupy‘s digital media use – working class ICTs?


What theories and concepts do we need in order to
understand and critically analze paid work at Google,
Facebook, etc, phenomena such as slave labour in conflict
mines, labour in hardware assemblage, software
engineering, paid work at Google, Facebook, etc, unpaid
user labour on social media, the labour of bloggers and
online journalists, e-waste labour, the global division of
labour in the ICT industry, alternative online media work, the
digital media use in contemporary working class movements
etc?

3. Digital Labour – Contexts

Nicholas Garnham: “the bibliography on the producers of
culture is scandalously empty” (Garnham 1990, 12)

“The problem of media producers has been neglected in
recent media and cultural studies – indeed in social theory
generally – because of the general linguistic turn and the
supposed death of the author that has accompanied it. If the
author does not exist or has no intentional power, why study
her or him?” (Garnham 2000a, 84).

Vincent Mosco (2011, 230): “labour remains the blind spot of
communication and cultural studies”

Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller (2012, 16): “Most writings in
media studies constrict the ambit of media labor such that
the industry mavens” (Maxwell and Miller 2012, 16).

3. Digital Labour – Contexts

How has the role of labour in the study of media,
communications, the information society, digital media, the
Internet and social media developed historically?

What is the role of digital labour in the contemporary
academic landscape?

Why are labour and class blind spots of the study of digital
media?

What can be done in order to illuminate and overcome the
labour blind spot? What is needed for doing so?

4. Digital Labour – Debates

Smythe, Dallas W. 1977. Communications: Blindspot of Western
Marxism. Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 1 (3): 1-27.
Smythe, Dallas W. .2006. On the Audience Commodity and its Work. In
Media and Cultural Studies Key Works, 230-256. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
(Orig. pub. 1981.)
Fuchs, Christian. 2012. Dallas Smythe Today - The Audience Commodity,
the Digital Labour Debate, Marxist Political Economy and Critical Theory.
Prolegomena to a Digital Labour Theory of Value. tripleC 10 (2): 692-740.

What is the relevance of Dallas Smythe, the “Blindspot
Debate“, the notion of audience commodification and
audience labour for the digital labour debate?

Is (digital) labour a blind spot of media/cultural studies? Is
Marxism a blind spot of media/cultural studies? Are media/
culture still blind spots of Critical Theories? If so, why? If not,
what progress has been achieved?

Political Economy of Unpaid Labour

Rosa Luxemburg:
milieus of primitive accumulation

Feminist Political Economy

concepts of housework economy,
reproductive labour, gender division of
labour, etc.
Maria Mies, Claudia von Werlhof, Veronika
Bennholdt-Thomsen, Mariarosa Dalla Costa,
Leopoldina Fortunati, Zillah Eisenstein,
Martha Gimenez, Rosemary Hennessey,
etc.

Autonomous Marxism: social worker,
social factory, Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri,
etc.


Garnham, Nicholas. 1995a. Political Economy and Cultural Studies:
Reconciliation or divorce? Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 (1):
62-71.
Grossberg, Lawrence. 1995. Cultural Studies vs. Political Economy: Is
anybody else bored with this debate? Critical Studies in Mass
Communication 12 (1): 72-81.
Garnham, Nicholas. 1995b. Reply to Grossberg and Carey. Critical
Studies in Mass Communication 12 (1): 95-100.


Celebratory Cultural Studies vs. Critical Political Economy/
Cultural Studies

=> Celebratory Social Media Studies vs. Critical and Marxist
Social Media Studies


“Crowdsourcing is just one
manifestation of a larger
trend toward greater
democratization in
commerce“ (14).


Henry Jenkins

“the Web has become a site of
consumer
participation” (Jenkins 2008,
137).


Clay Shirky

cognitive surplus = “a novel
resource that has appeared as
the world‘s cumulative free time
is addressed in
aggregate“ (Shirky 2011, 27)

“the wiring of humanity lets us
treat free time as a shared
global resource, and lets us
design new kinds of
participation and sharing that
take advantage of that
resource“ (ibid.)


Mark Andrejevic:
Exploitation 2.0

Jodi Dean:
communicative capitalism,
online post-politics, communist horizon

Eran Fisher:
new spirit of networks

Christian Fuchs:
Internet prosumer labour/
commodification

Ursula Huws:
consumption labour, cybertariat


What are the basic positions and differences in the debate
between celebratory social/digital media studies and critical
social/digital media studies?

What should be the next step in the debate?

How do we engage with critics of digital labour and the points
they make?

What is the relationship between creativity and exploitation in
digital labour?


Fuchs, Christian. 2010. Labor in Informational Capitalism and on the
Internet. The Information Society 26 (3): 179-196.
Arvidsson, Adam and Eleanor Colleoni. 2012. Value in informational
capitalism and on the Internet. The Information Society 28 (3): 135-150.
Fuchs, Christian. 2012b. With or without Marx? With or without
Capitalism? A Rejoinder to Adam Arvidsson and Eleanor Colleoni. tripleC
– Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 10
(2): 633-645.


“But since ‘free labor’ is free, it has no price, and cannot,
consequently, be a source of value“ (Arvidsson 2011,
266f).
“labor theory of value in fact does not apply“ to social media
(Arvidsson and Colleoni 2012, 136)

Fuchs: digital labour theory of value

What is the role of time for understanding digital labour?

What is the role of affects, social relations, reputation,
attention, visibility and how does it relate to the law of value
on social/digital media?


What is/should be the role of Karl Marx and his theory in
the study of media, culture, digital labour and cultural
labour today?

BURYING MARX? RENEWING MARX?


A

5. Digital Labour – Theories, Concepts

Which theories and concepts do we need for understanding
digital labour critically?

What is digital labour/work?

What is the relationship of various forms of digital labour?

How is digital labour/capitalism connected to gender and
racism?

How does the international division of digital labour look like
and how can it be theorised?

What aspects of toil and fun, labour and play are at work in
different forms of digital labour?


Which ideologies influence debates about digital labour?

What is the relationship between alienation and exploitation
in digital labour?

What is the connection of digital labour to
various forms of unpaid work, gender division of labour,
housewifization, feminization of work?

We require an engagement with theoretical categories:
Which categories do we need for understanding the actors,
structures, dynamics and politics of digital labour?

Absolute/relative surplus value production
Advertising and consumer culture
Affective labour
Alternative journalism
Alternative media
Appearance of value
Audience commodification
Audience labour
Becoming-rent of profit
Capital
Citizen media
Class
Class struggle
Cognitariat
Cognitive capitalism
Commodification of everything
Commons
Commons-based Internet

Communicative capitalism
Communicative work
Communism, commonism
Communist Internet
Concrete/abstract labour
Constant/variable capital
Consumption work
Cooperation, collaborative work
Creativity
Cybertariat
Desire
Digital labour
Double-free labour
Eros, Thanatos
Fetishism
Form of value

Free labour
Gender division of labour
General intellect
Global division of labour
Hacker class
Housework
Ideology
Immaterial labour
Internet prosumer commodification
Internet prosumer labour
Knowledge work
Labour aristocracy
Labour power
Labour theory of value
Migrant work
Mode of production
Money
Multitude

Necessary/surplus repression of desire
New spirit of capitalism
Overtime
Patriarchy
Peer production
Play
Play labour (playbour)
Power
Precariat
Price
Price of labour power
Primitive accumulation
Productive forces and relations of production
Productive/unproductive labour
Profit rate
Prosumption
Public service

Racist mode of production
Rate of exploitation/surplus value
Rent
Reproductive work
Slave labour
Social factory
Social movement media
Social relations
Social struggles
Social worker
Species-being
Stress
Substance of value
Surplus enjoyment/desire
Surplus value
Taylorism
Use-value, exchange value, value

Value forms
Value of labour power
Vectoral class
Violence
Virtual work
Working class ICTs
Working class network society

5. Digital Labour – Political Praxis
How can a critical theory of digital labour best be connected
to political movements, protests, activists, campaigns, etc?

Christian Fuchs: Introduction to Digital Labour Studies

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