<div dir="ltr"><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Thanks, Trebor. This is a great introduction, and raises a few questions for me about the nature and scope of the digital labor community.<br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">A lot of big tech companies are seeing increasing tensions *within* their ranks. <span style="line-height:115%">Google bus protesters have highlighted
<a href="http://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/belabored-podcast-43-google-and-gentrification-with-julia-carrie-wong">one class divide</a> in Silicon Valley: between long-time residents and new tech
workers. But there are even <a href="http://www.fissuredworkplace.net/">fissures</a> in the workplace at megafirms. Consider: </span></font></div><div><span style="line-height:115%"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></span></div><div><span style="line-height:115%"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">a) 9 out of 10 Googlers who make political contributions donate to Democrats, but the company funds <a href="http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/11/12319/google-funding-grover-norquist-heritage-action-alec-and-more">many rightwing groups</a>. I have heard its lobbying team is dominated by Republicans.</font></span></div><div><span style="line-height:115%"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></span></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="line-height:115%">b) O</span><span style="line-height:150%;text-indent:0.5in">ne developer wrote a heartfelt “<a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/3/3216313/dalton-caldwell-facebook-developer-letter-mark-zuckerberg-app-net">Letter to Mark Zuckerberg</a>,” complaining that he felt trapped by a meeting with Facebook’s
acquisition team: he could either sell his app to the company, or risk being
cut off from customers after Facebook developed its own version.</span><span style="line-height:150%;text-indent:0.5in"> How many startups have the big firms swallowed up? Do workers stay at the tech goliaths because they know they'd never have a chance if they struck out on their own?</span></font></div>
<p class="" style="line-height:150%"><span style="line-height:150%"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">c) Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, is accused of <a href="http://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valleys-most-celebrated-ceos-conspired-to-drive-down-100000-tech-engineers-wages/">suppressing workers’ wages</a> by forming
a cartel with Apple, Adobe, and other firms. The firms tried to settle the case
months ago, but <span style="background-image:initial;background-repeat:initial">US District Judge Lucy Koh
rejected their terms, citing “<a href="http://pando.com/2014/08/08/breaking-judge-strikes-down-techtopus-wage-theft-settlement/">evidence of an overarching conspiracy</a>.” Who’s to say the next “joint venture” of tech
firms won’t include secret algorithms that highlight their own properties for
users, while hiding new entrepreneurs? Who’s to say such a venture doesn’t
exist already? </span></font></span></p>
<div>
</div><span style="line-height:115%;background-image:initial;background-repeat:initial"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">d) <span style="line-height:115%;background-image:initial;background-repeat:initial">Celebrity CEOs want immigration reform that
could massively reduce labor costs. Approve a million H1B
visas, and wages may slide for Bay Area programmers as fast as they have for
makers of tradeable goods. Or maybe they'll just take the <a href="http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/36/">seasteading</a> route with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueseed">Blueseed</a>.</span></font></span><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">I look forward to conversations at the conference about the "most exploited" workers, ranging from sharing economy "taskrabbits" to MTurkers working at a <a href="http://cyber.jotwell.com/banana-republic-com/">penny per "human intelligence task"</a>. But I also hope it raises consciousness among those who now have six-figure incomes at big tech firms: their CEOs would love nothing more than to see them replaced by robots, or, failing that, by people they could pay <a href="http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2011/01/ten-times-more-productive.html">ten times less</a>.</font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">--Frank</font></div><div><br></div><div>(@FrankPasquale)</div><div><br></div><div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 4:31 PM, Trebor Scholz <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:scholzt@newschool.edu" target="_blank">scholzt@newschool.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica">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. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica">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
(<a href="http://digitallabor.org/2009" target="_blank">http://digitallabor.org/2009</a>, <a href="http://goo.gl/E4hg5I" target="_blank">http://goo.gl/E4hg5I</a>). 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).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica">With that out of the way, let's start.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica">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. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica">#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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica">#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? </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica">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. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica">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 (<a href="http://www.sleepdealer.com" target="_blank">http://www.sleepdealer.com</a>), Harun Farocki's Workers Leaving the
Factory (<a href="http://vimeo.com/59338090" target="_blank">http://vimeo.com/59338090</a>), or Aaron Koblin's 10,000 Sheep
(<a href="http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/thesheepmarket/" target="_blank">http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/thesheepmarket/</a>). </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica">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. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica">#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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica">#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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica">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 is a provocation 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 (<a href="http://goo.gl/BjaAF6" target="_blank">http://goo.gl/BjaAF6</a>).
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 (<a href="http://goo.gl/4Kfx5H" target="_blank">http://goo.gl/4Kfx5H</a>), published in The
Atlantic, is part of this larger, very necessary debate about the staggering
social costs of allegedly free social networking services. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica">The debate around playbor and value capture
took center stage for much of the past five years and it will also continue at
#DL14. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica">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. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica">Forward!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal">Trebor Scholz</p><p class="MsoNormal">Associate Professor</p><p class="MsoNormal">Culture & Media </p><p class="MsoNormal">THE NEW SCHOOL</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
</div>
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