[iDC] Ello--Alternative to Facebook

Thu Sep 25 22:54:42 UTC 2014

That is a troubling line, but it's surrounded by text that -- assuming it
applies to those future affiliations -- rather severely hems in their use
of our data.

BTW, I joined today. It is aesthetically pleasing, but so far I only have
one friend -- the person who sent me the invitation -- and neither of us
have posted anything, so it's feeling a tad tranquil.

David W.

On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 12:16 PM, Ian Bogost <ian.bogost at lmc.gatech.edu>
wrote:

> You might also want to read their privacy policy:
> https://ello.co/wtf/post/privacy
>
> "Ello does not have any affiliated companies right now. But if we do in
> the future, we may share information with them, too."
>
> Plus ça change…
>
> Ian
>
> Ian Bogost, Ph.D.
>
> Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies
> Professor of Interactive Computing
> Professor, Scheller School of Business
> Georgia Institute of Technology
>
> Contributing Editor, The Atlantic
>
>
> On Sep 25, 2014, at 10:43 AM, Karyn Hollis <karyn.hollis at villanova.edu>
> wrote:
>
> > Hi All--
> > Does anyone know anything about Ello.co  , the free, non-ad driven
> social media website? I've read that membership is exploding, especially
> among the arts and LGBTQ community.  But all are invited to escape
> Facebook!  I sure hope it works out.
> >
> > Here's an article about it
> >
> http://betabeat.com/2014/09/mysterious-social-network-ello-explodes-in-popularity-for-people-fleeing-facebook/
> >
> > And here's the address to Ello.co    (not .com) itself:
> > https://ello.co/beta-public-profiles
> >
> > Best,
> > Karyn
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: idc-bounces at mailman.thing.net [mailto:
> idc-bounces at mailman.thing.net] On Behalf Of idc-request at mailman.thing.net
> > Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2014 12:42 PM
> > To: idc at mailman.thing.net
> > Subject: iDC Digest, Vol 93, Issue 16
> >
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> >
> > Today's Topics:
> >
> >   1. Re: #DL14 (Watkins, Craig)
> >   2. Re: Introduction (astrid mager)
> >
> >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 1
> > Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 03:00:47 +0000
> > From: "Watkins, Craig" <craig.watkins at austin.utexas.edu>
> > To: Trebor Scholz <scholzt at newschool.edu>, "idc at mailman.thing.net"
> >       <idc at mailman.thing.net>
> > Subject: Re: [iDC] #DL14
> > Message-ID:
> >       <
> 4F144126C7FD814992C7560BF1AC909451E070DF at EXMBX05.austin.utexas.edu>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
> >
> > Hello #DL14:
> >
> > The intros look great and the conversation that is emerging is equally
> fascinating and urgent.  Thanks Trebor for the invite to share a bit about
> my work.
> >
> > Currently I'm working with a team of graduate students (i.e., media
> studies scholars, sociologists, designers) to explore the rapidly evolving
> conditions of social, educational, and economic inequality. As the contours
> of digital and contingent labor continue to evolve the uneven spread of
> opportunity and mobility grows ever more challenging.  We live in a city
> (Austin, TX) that has effectively fashioned a reputation as a bustling
> creative economy and hub of innovation.  But with that kind of social,
> spatial, and economic development comes a host of challenges that are often
> overlooked. Many young people who come here with the credentials that are
> often held up as essential for mobility in a knowledge-driven economy
> (i.e., college degrees, professional work experience, motivation) struggle
> with the often hidden realities of knowledge-sector local economies: boom
> and bust cycles of economic activity, itinerant work, unfulfilling work, or
> work that may not be commensurate with
> >  their e
> > d  ucation or expectations.  What do young people do in an economy like
> this?  Lots of things including endeavoring to create paths to work that
> are more meaningful, open, and creative.
> >
> > This year, as part of a project we are doing with the Connected Learning
> Research Network, we began conducting mini-ethnographies that examine how
> young people (20-somethings, for example) are navigating contingent work,
> digital labor, and massive shifts in the economy to create new kinds of
> work spaces and new kinds of paths to opportunity. While not completely
> unproblematic, the practices that we are studying in Austin's rapidly
> evolving yet wildly unequal creative economy raise questions about
> alternative future economies and who is best positioned to build them.
> >
> > Hope to see you in NYC.
> >
> > Best,
> > Craig
> >
> > S. Craig Watkins
> > The University of Texas at Austin
> >
> > http://theyoungandthedigital.com/
> > ________________________________
> > From: idc-bounces at mailman.thing.net [idc-bounces at mailman.thing.net] on
> behalf of Trebor Scholz [scholzt at newschool.edu]
> > Sent: Friday, September 19, 2014 3:31 PM
> > To: idc at mailman.thing.net
> > Subject: [iDC] #DL14
> >
> > Despite the steady influx of introductions, let me make a short
> insertion here. We really appreciate your contributions and look forward to
> more. Keep it coming and also start to respond to other people's
> introductions, don't just post your own.
> >
> > For newcomers, this is the eighth in a stream of large conferences that
> have been discussed on this mailing list. #DL14 will be the third event
> that I convened at The New School as part of the series The Politics of
> Digital Culture. The upcoming conference stands on the shoulders of The
> Internet as Playground and Factory conference that took place in 2009 (
> http://digitallabor.org/2009, http://goo.gl/E4hg5I). By now, you all know
> that the event will take place November 14 - 16 at The New School in NYC,
> and you follow our Twitter accounts for updates (@trebors, @idctweets).
> >
> > With that out of the way, let's start.
> >
> > My vision for #DL14 can be located somewhere between the first sequence
> of Chris Marker's "A Grin Without A Cat" and Jason Reitman's "Up in the
> Air." Or, perhaps the other way around. It's about 21st-century labor: the
> shift away from employment toward contingent work through Uber, TaskRabbit,
> 99Designs, and Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk. How large is this workforce
> and which emerging forms of solidarity can we envision? #DL14 questions the
> ability of traditional unions to protect the ever-larger contingent
> workforce. And it is about our imagination of novel associations and forms
> of mutual aid.
> >
> > #DL14 is also about the crooked language that is used to describe
> emerging forms of work through the lens of flexibility, sharing,
> self-reliance, and autonomy. And it centers on workers who get together in
> any way possible, who form their own cooperatives, and who learn from the
> encouraging developments in the fast food industry, at Walmart, Occupy, and
> the domestic labor, and taxi associations. The ultimate goal of #DL14 is to
> shape new concepts and theories as they relate to, for example, guaranteed
> basic income, wage theft, and shorter work hours. We also hope to look
> through the vast landscape of digital labor and identify work practices
> that are worth supporting.
> >
> > #DL14 is not solely about radical critique; it is also, simultaneously,
> about alternatives. In that vein, we hope to establish an advocacy group
> for the poorest and most exploited workers in the digital economy. Why did
> Tim Berners-Lee Magna Carta for the web ignore the fact that millions of
> people wake up every day to "go to work" online? Why has the Electronic
> Frontier Foundation still not taken up digital work?
> >
> > This isn't merely an academic event because this discourse has not only
> been shaped in universities. Philosophers, artists, sociologists,
> designers, toolmakers, activists, MTurk workers, journalists, legal
> scholars, and labor historians ? all co-shaped the ongoing debate about
> digital work.
> >
> > If you are not sure what the hell artists have to do with all this, go
> back to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer (
> http://www.sleepdealer.com), Harun Farocki's Workers Leaving the Factory (
> http://vimeo.com/59338090), or Aaron Koblin's 10,000 Sheep (
> http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/thesheepmarket/).
> >
> > This is a conversation that also calls for legal scholars to reconsider
> the definition of employment and the much-debated difference between an
> employee and an independent contractor. A difference, I might add, that is
> deeply consequential as independent contractors are stripped of their
> rights as workers.
> >
> > #DL14 will give a voice to startups that decided to put in place fair
> labor conditions. We will, for example, hear from one crowdsourcing upstart
> that decided to implement a minimum wage floor for their contractors.  At
> #DL14, you will not only hear from workers at UPS and fast food
> restaurants, you will not only meet farmworkers, taxi drivers, and
> Mechanical Turk workers; #DL14 will also bring these workers together with
> computer engineers and other technologists to think through possibilities
> for worker organization.
> >
> > #DL14 is set against the background of a blistering social vision of
> economic inequality. 4 in 10 working Americans earned less than $20,000 in
> 2012. Almost half of all Americans are economically insecure today; they
> cannot afford basic needs like housing, childcare, food, healthcare,
> utilities, and other essentials. The restructuring of the economy away from
> employment to contingent work, insidiously circumvents worker rights, in a
> way that is arguably more damaging than what Reagan and Thatcher did it to
> miners and flight traffic controllers in the 1980s. This restructuring
> creates facts on the ground that are an affront to over one hundred years
> of labor struggles for the 8 hour workday, employer-covered health
> insurance, minimum wage, the abolition of child labor, workplace
> harassment, and other protections that had been established through the New
> Deal to foster social harmony and keep class warfare at bay.
> >
> > What you can see here is a slight shift from the focus of the exchange
> that we had five years ago. Since then, there has been a proliferation of
> publications, artworks, conferences, tools, and workgroups, syllabi, and
> exhibitions that have taken on the issue of digital labor explicitly. There
> was concern for the question if digital labor is in fact distinct from
> traditional forms of labor. For Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, Tiziana
> Terranova, and Antonio Negri (and well, Marx) "to live is to labor." Life
> itself is put to work; we are all becoming the standing leave of his or her
> for capital. The publication of the IPF book came out of that
> understanding, informed by Italian Operaismo, leading up to an intense
> fascination with the Facebook exploitation thesis. In retrospect, the idea
> that we are exploited on Facebook ? that what we are doing there is labor
> in the sense of value creation ? is not as urgent in terms of its content
> but it is still essential as provocation. It i
> >   s a pr
> > ov  ocation that leads to an investigation of the digital labor
> surveillance complex and the instruments of value capture on the
> Post-Snowden web. The prolific Christian Fuchs has edited a collection of
> essays focusing in the definition of digital labor (http://goo.gl/BjaAF6).
> Mark Andrejevic and Fuchs, in particular, have taken up the question of
> exploitation in the context of predictive analytics and data labor. Adam
> Arvidsson, also in his latest book The Ethical Economy: Rebuilding Value
> After the Crisis, offers counterpoints, claiming that value generation on
> social networking services is more truthiness than fact. Ethan Zuckerman's
> recent rejection of online advertisement (http://goo.gl/4Kfx5H),
> published in The Atlantic, is part of this larger, very necessary debate
> about the staggering social costs of allegedly free social networking
> services.
> >
> > The debate around playbor and value capture took center stage for much
> of the past five years and it will also continue at #DL14.
> >
> > In the end surely, #DL14 will be out about many things, and you decide
> what you take away from it. So, if you haven't done so already, take out
> your pencil or boot up your calendar: join us at The New School in a few
> weeks, also to experiment with event formats a little bit.
> >
> > Forward!
> >
> >
> > Trebor Scholz
> > Associate Professor
> > Culture & Media
> > THE NEW SCHOOL
> >
> >
> >
> >
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> > ------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 2
> > Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 09:54:01 +0200
> > From: astrid mager <astrid.mager at oeaw.ac.at>
> > To: idc at mailman.thing.net, Brishen Rogers <brishen.rogers at gmail.com>
> > Subject: Re: [iDC] Introduction
> > Message-ID: <54227899.2050105 at oeaw.ac.at>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; Format="flowed"
> >
> > Dear Brishen,
> >
> > I'm looking forward to your presentation on the sharing economy and
> possible legal responses! I'm currently doing a research project on the
> governing of search engines in European contexts.. there's a new European
> data protection law negotiated right now, which is supposed to be binding
> for all European countries.. you can imagine that this is a rather tough
> negotiation process given the fact that countries like Ireland (where
> Facebook, Google and others have found their European homes due to tax
> reasons and liberal data protection laws) and Germany or Austria (with a
> long tradition in strict data protection legislation) have very different
> interests, economic cultures & concepts of privacy etc. Besides, US tech
> companies are heavily lobbying since their business models are at risk and
> the European market is a huge one..
> > against the background of the NSA affair and the fact that more and more
> Europeans are concerned about their personal data the case of the European
> data protection reform serves as an interesting case to study how search
> engines (Google) and others (FB etc) are/ may be governed in European
> contexts.. but also how some sort of European vision is forming in the
> context of data protection primarily understood as a counter-voice to the
> US IT industry etc. - drawing on Jasanoff & Kim
> > (2009) I call it a "sociotechnical imaginary" seen as co-produced by
> technological developments and the forming (falling apart) of European data
> protection visions.. I'm in the middle of fieldwork right now (doing a
> media & policy analysis on search engines in the context of the reform and
> qualitative interviews with various stakeholders involved in the process),
> but it might be interesing to compare the European case with the American
> case at a later stage.. especially since "Europe"
> > (whatever that is) increasingly aims to challenge US-American practices,
> ideologies, and legislations in this context, on the one hand, and remains
> highly dependent on the US IT industry, on the other, since hardly any
> European internet services exist (not least because all successful
> technologies, which are just a few anyway, have been sold to US companies;
> e.g. Skype having been bought by Microsoft) - which is yet another aspect
> to investigate further..
> >
> > I'll be presenting something else at the digital labor conference, but
> it might be fun to catch up on these issues nevertheless.. if you think our
> work is related at all.. ;)
> >
> > In any case, I'm looking forward to meeting you in NYC! Best, Astrid
> >
> >
> > Am 15.09.14 21:18, schrieb Brishen Rogers:
> >> Hi everyone,
> >>
> >> I'm really excited for the Digital Labor conference this year, and
> >> apologize for my belated introduction. I'm currently an Associate
> >> Professor of Law at Temple University, where I teach torts, employment
> >> discrimination, and various labor law courses. Before law school I was
> >> a community and union organizer for a number of years. My scholarship
> >> focuses on the particular challenges facing low-wage and informal
> >> workers in the current era of neoliberal globalization. So, right now
> >> I have a project on the role of law in constituting and governing
> >> global value chains, and several projects on the relationship between
> >> basic labor protections and egalitarian distributive justice.
> >>
> >> In the past, my work has addressed questions of the relationship
> >> between work, worker power, and technology, and I plan to expand that
> >> focus in the future. My first article, "Toward Third-Party Liability
> >> for Wage Theft" argued in part that Walmart and other mega-retailers
> >> use of sophisticated monitoring technologies to drive down prices and
> >> otherwise to discipline their suppliers should expose them to
> >> liability for those suppliers' subsequent violations of wage & hour
> >> laws. A subsequent article published last year ("Justice at Work:
> >> Minimum Wage Laws and Social Equality") considered the relationship
> >> between wage levels, productivity, employers' decisions to invest in
> >> labor versus technological goods, and basic social equality between
> >> employers and workers. I am also working on a short piece now (which I
> >> plan to present at the conference) on how the so-called "sharing
> >> economy" is undermining important public goods, and how regulatory
> >> theory may respond.
> >>
> >> FWIW, my published articles are available here:
> >> http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1714048
> >>
> >> Again, I'm really looking forward to meeting everyone in November.
> >>
> >> Brishen
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
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> >
> > --
> > Dr. Astrid Mager
> >
> > Institute of Technology Assessment (ITA) Austrian Academy of Sciences
> > A-1030 Vienna, Strohgasse 45/5
> > astrid.mager at oeaw.ac.at
> >
> > http://www.oeaw.ac.at/ita/mager
> > http://www.astridmager.net
> >
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