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<div style="direction: ltr;font-family: Tahoma;color: #000000;font-size: 10pt;">Hello #DL14:
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<div>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.</div>
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<div>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 education 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. </div>
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<div>This year, as part of a project we are doing with the Connected Learning Research Network, we began conducting mini-ethnographies that examine <span style="font-size: 10pt;">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.</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Hope to see you in NYC.</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Best,</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Craig </span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"> </span></div>
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<div class="PlainText">S. Craig Watkins<br>
The University of Texas at Austin<br>
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<div class="PlainText"><a href="http://theyoungandthedigital.com/">http://theyoungandthedigital.com/</a><br>
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<div id="divRpF799795" style="direction: ltr;"><font face="Tahoma" size="2" color="#000000"><b>From:</b> idc-bounces@mailman.thing.net [idc-bounces@mailman.thing.net] on behalf of Trebor Scholz [scholzt@newschool.edu]<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Friday, September 19, 2014 3:31 PM<br>
<b>To:</b> idc@mailman.thing.net<br>
<b>Subject:</b> [iDC] #DL14<br>
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<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>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica">With that out of the way, let's start.</span></p>
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<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>
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<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.
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<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>).
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<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.
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<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>
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<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>
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<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.
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<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.
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<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>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica">Forward!</span></p>
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<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>
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