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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This book is about the rise of digital labor. Companies like Uber and Amazon Mechanical Turk promise autonomy, choice, and flexibility. One of network culture's toughest critics, Trebor Scholz chronicles the work of workers in the "sharing economy," and the free labor on sites like Facebook, to take these myths apart.
In this rich, accessible, and provocative book, Scholz exposes the uncaring reality of contingent digital work, which is thriving at the expense of employment and worker rights.
The book is meant to inspire readers to join the growing number of worker-owned "platform cooperatives," rethink unions, and build a better future of work. A call to action, loud and clear, Uberworked and Underpaid shows that it is time to stop wage theft and "crowd fleecing," rethink wealth distribution, and address the urgent question of how digital labor should be regulated and how workers from Berlin, Barcelona, Seattle, and São Paulo can act in solidarity to defend their rights.
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Seitenzahl: 458
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
Epigraph
Dedication
Title page
Copyright page
Acknowledgments
Author's Note
Introduction: Why Digital Labor Now?
About This Book
The Digital Labor Conferences
Notes
Part I
1: Waged Labor and the End of Employment
1) Toward a Typology of Digital Labor
Overview
2) Crowdsourcing: All Together Now!
3) Digital Labor in the Shadows: Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT)
4) The Ecosystem of Compensated Digital Labor
5) Ethical Crowdwork? MobileWorks and Samasource
6) Content Farming
7) Competitive Crowdsourcing
8) User-led Innovation
9) In-game Labor
10) Online Labor Brokerages
11) On-demand Labor
12) Online Assistance
13)
Conclusion
Notes
2: Playbor and Other Unpaid Pursuits
Overview
1) Data Labor
2) The Development of an Ecosystem of Digital Work
3) The Performance of Self
4) Free Labor is not the Problem
5) Hybrid Public/Private Business Models
6) Hope Labor
7) Gamification
8) Fan Labor
9) Universal Basic Income
Notes
3: Vocabulary
Overview
1) The Myth of Immateriality
2) Work vs. Labor
3) The Fence Around the Produser Factory
4) Against a Surrender of the Language of Labor
Notes
4: Crowd Fleecing
Chapter Overview and Omissions
1) Is This Still Exploitation?
2) The Living Museum of Human Exploitation
3) Crowd Fleecing
4) Historical Context
5) Sleep as a Site of Crisis
Notes
Part II
5: Legal Gray Zones
Overview
1) What is the Holdback for Regulators?
2) Independent Contractors, Employees, or What?
3) Widening the Definition of Employment
4) Lawsuits by Workers
5) Toward a Living Wage
6) Toward a Bill of Rights for All Platform Workers
7) The French Internet Tax Proposal
Notes
6: On Selective Engagement
When the Factory Turns Cold: A Manifesto
Overview
1) Targeting the Centers of Power
2) Break Off, Switch Off, Disengage, Unthink
3) A Reprieve from Monetized Data Labor
4) “There is No CLOUD, Just Other People's Computers”
5) On Withdrawal, Defection, and Refusal
6) Toward Tactical Refusal and Selective Engagement
Notes
7: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism
Overview
1) Consequences of the Sharing Economy
2) Possible Futures
3) Solidarity
4) The Rise of Platform Cooperativism
5) Toward a Typology of Platform Co-Ops
6) Ten Principles for Platform Cooperativism
7) The Cooperative Ecosystem
8) For All People
Notes
Epilogue
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
CHAPTER 1
Index
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“Bringing together the rich and long tradition of cooperativism and worker self-management with the digital economy of the twenty-first century, Scholz's timely and groundbreaking new book provides both in-depth analysis and practical steps to make the Internet economy truly work for all who most rely on it.”
Zeynep Tufekci, writer at The New York Times, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, professor at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“Trebor Scholz has written a unsparing and bracing critique of platform capitalism. Moreover, he's developed a blueprint for transcending it: a tough-minded platform cooperativism that eschews the utopianism of ‘sharing economy’ bromides. Anyone concerned about the future of work should read this book.”
Frank Pasquale, author of The Black Box Society
“Based on years of research and cooperation, Uberworked and Underpaid passionately and sharply tracks down the dark side of the ‘sharing economy,’ that is the reduction of labor to a cheap and disposable commodity, without protections or benefits. Against such hyper-precarization, Scholz believes in the possibility of autonomous self-organization of digital work. Posing platform cooperativism against crowd fleecing and the on-demand service economy, Scholz's book is an invaluable contribution to a much needed reinvention of a socialism for the twenty-first century.”
Tiziana Terranova, author of Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age
For Suvarnaprabha
Copyright page
Copyright © Trebor Scholz 2017
The right of Trebor Scholz to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2017 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
350 Main Street
Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5356-3
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5357-0(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Scholz, Trebor, author.
Title: Uberworked and underpaid : how workers are disrupting the digital economy / Trebor Scholz.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015037155| ISBN 9780745653563 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745653570 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Information technology–Economic aspects. | Information technology–Social aspects. | Social media–Economic aspects. | Labor. | Electronic commerce–Social aspects. | Internet industry.
Classification: LCC HC79.I55 S3565 2016 | DDC 331.7/6138433–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037155
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Acknowledgments
This book is based on years of research, taking into consideration work from the arts, law, technology studies, and the social sciences. It is informed by many exchanges with participants at the Digital Labor Conferences that I have convened at The New School in New York City since 2009.
I enjoy critical thought wherever I can find it, which meant that while writing this book I focused not only on printed matter but also on mailing lists, e-books, jounalistic accounts, and blog essays. I couldn't have written Uberworked and Underpaid without the conversations on the Institute for Distributed Creativity mailing list, which I founded in 2004. Many of its members offered commentary and prodded me into starting this project. This book, then, reflects what I learned about digital labor.
Some readers may search the pdf of this book and will be most interested in a particular chapter. Therefore, in the process of writing, I aimed for each chapter to hold up on its own, also outside of the context of the entire book.
This book greatly benefited from many discussions. I would like to thank those who invited me to present and test the ideas and arguments for this book through lectures at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, Harvard University, Warsaw's Center for Contemporary Art, Yale University, Transmediale, Re:publica, Schloss Solitude, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Cologne, Georgetown University, McGill, and universities in Berlin, Chiang Mai, Athens, Uppsala, Mexico City, and Hong Kong. I am especially grateful to the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy at the University of Toronto for inviting me to deliver the Grafstein Lecture in March of 2014 and to Hampshire College for asking me to present the 8th Erick Schocket Memorial Lecture a year later.
Many people helped to shape the ideas by offering helpful comments on the manuscript. First of all, my New School colleague McKenzie Wark, along with various undisclosed academic reviewers, deserves special thanks for persuading Polity Press to give this book a chance. Thank you also to my editor at Polity, Elen Griffiths, for helping me to make this a better book.
I owe gratitude to The New School, and Eugene Lang College in particular, for sustaining my cross-disciplinary practice as a scholar-activist, cultural catalyst, and educator. My faculty colleagues across the university, at Lang, Media Studies, and Parsons, have been extraordinarily congenial and supportive of my work, for which I would like to thank them as well.
At the University of Maryland School of Law, I would like to thank Frank Pasquale for his unceasing invaluable input and enduring friendship. He kept me going; I owe him much. At Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, I would like to thank Jefferson Cowie for his enthusiastic comments. Fred Turner read and commented on earlier versions of this book. (I hope that it reads more like a waterfall now.) At Leuphana Universität, many thanks to Mercedes Bunz, for her graceful comments and encouragement. At Ryerson University, I would also like to thank Henry Warwick for his support of the project. My gratitude goes out also to Rochelle LaPlante, Winifred Poster, David Carroll, Antonio A. Casilli, Orit Halpern, Karen Gregory, Samuel Tannert, Nathan Schneider, Natalie Bookchin, and Roger Brishen.
During my sabbatical in 2012–13, the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI) in Berlin hosted me in its magnificent quarters through a guest fellowship. Thank you, Christopher Holtzey, director of the ICI, and Corinna Haas, ICI's librarian.
I would like to extend a special thanks to my smart and wonderfully quirky New School students for their curious questions and useful input, in particular those who participated in my seminars on digital labor in 2011 and 2014. I hope that this book will help them to navigate their own work lives with greater critical awareness.
Life during the time of writing this was filled with speaking engagements at conferences and the work of chairing The Politics of Digital Culture series at The New School. There have been many convivial meetings, much time preparing for class and teaching, and advising.
On a personal note, these past years were also about raising my two daughters Rosa and Emma with my partner in life, the artist Jenny Perlin. They make me proud in more ways than I can name. I was only able to take on the bleak realities of digital labor because of their giggles and loving embrace.
Author's Note
Please note that some citations do not have page numbers. The reason for this omission is that they are based on ebooks, not print books. Text passages can, however, be easily found through simple searches.
Introduction: Why Digital Labor Now?
No one would have believed, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, that the ideological bubble of the “sharing economy” would deflate so quickly, or that workers, labor advocates, programmers, and activists would soon start to build structures for democratic ownership and governance on the Internet. It is likely that we will look back to this era and understand it as a turning point for both the nature of work and our lifestyles.
The title of this book purports to be about the “sharing economy” but it goes beyond that. In fact, it starts off with an atlas of sites of digital work – from on-demand work to in-game labor, and finishes with proposals for ways in which workers and their allies can start to take back the digital economy.
Fairly compensated digital work with reliable hours holds considerable potential for low-income immigrants and those living in geographically remote or economically precarious regions. Such digital work could also provide a decent income for the more than 650,000 people1 who are released from prison each year, struggling to find a well-paying job. People who care for a child or a sick relative or those who have phobias or other restrictions that do not allow them to leave their homes could also benefit. Half of all Americans earn less than $30,000 a year; they cannot afford to pay for basic needs like housing, food, healthcare, childcare, or utilities.2 Unemployment among black Americans is twice as high as that among white Americans. And for Latinos, the situation is only slightly better. Women are often hit the hardest by unemployment. Digital labor could play a positive role for these groups, offering them more flexibility and sparing them some of the hardships associated with traditional workplaces.
The overall burden of the debt crisis and changing work regimes means that for millions of Americans, a paycheck is increasingly unlikely to include legal protections or benefits. If we acknowledge that this trend is unlikely to be reversed in favor of a 40-hour workweek with a regular paycheck, the question becomes: what are good alternatives for the one third of the workforce that is not traditionally employed?
One proposal on the table is for portable benefits for workers who have several employers. Another suggestion is to build democratically governed service platforms and online marketplaces owned and operated by those who most rely on them. A network organized around what I have called “platform cooperativism” could rival firms like Amazon or Uber. Cities could build and operate their own platforms for short-term rentals, and inventive unions could protect workers in the platform economy.
These “platform co-ops” already exist today; they demonstrate that society can positively develop a moral vision of digital work that does not tolerate surveillance, surreptitious extraction, and exploitation.
Loconomics,3 for instance, is a freelancer-owned cooperative where members-freelancers own shares, receive dividends, and have a voice in running the company. Loconomics offers massages and other services that are locally in demand. Membership in Loconomics costs $29.95 per month and there is neither a bidding process nor a markup. The founders started testing the Loconomics app in the San Francisco/Bay Area in the spring of 2016 and will now expand it to other cities.
Stocksy4 is an artist-owned cooperative for stock-photography. The co-op is based on the idea of profit sharing and co-ownership with the artists who are contributing photos to its platform. Artists can apply to become members and, when accepted, license images, receiving 50 percent commission on sales and profit sharing at the end of the year. The objective of the cooperative is to create sustainable careers for its members.5
These are just two examples – and many more are to follow – but their very existence shows that platform cooperatives can offer a clear alternative to the individualist ethos of the “sharing economy.” But platform co-ops are only still emerging and so far, despite their potential, it appears that the magic of digital work and growth of the sharing economy could be more harmful for low-income workers than any other technological development of the past four decades. Currently, digital labor appears to be the shiny, sharp tip of a gargantuan spear of neoliberalism made up of deregulation, economic inequality, union busting, and a shift from employment to low-wage temporary contracts.
In his book Average is Over, the conservative economist Tyler Cowen introduces us to one possible endgame for this trend. Soon, he predicts, there will be a superclass, a “hyper-meritocracy” of 10 to 15 percent of the population that will make over $1 million per year.6 For the bottom 85 percent, he envisions an annual income along the lines of $5,000–10,000. Cowen takes Mexico as an example where “lodging [for the poor] is satisfactory, if not spectacular, and of course the warmer weather helps.”7 In Cowen's vision, there's nothing that we can do to avert a future in which a tiny hyper-meritocracy of Americans enjoy fantastically interesting lives while the rest slog along, tranquilized by free Internet and low-paying gigs. On Cowen's planet, Leftoverswap.com would rule and Uber would be celebrated for honoring schoolteachers who drive for UberX after hours to put food on the table.
The following scenarios of digital work highlight its darker side. Take Boston native Jennifer Guidry, for instance. Guidry strings together several gigs, trying to make a full-time living.8 Guidry, a woman in her mid-thirties, is driving for upstarts like Lyft, Uber, and Sidecar. Sometimes her day starts with drop-offs at the airport in the early morning while her family is still asleep. When her children are at school, she assembles furniture and tends gardens. However, all of these gigs still don't add up to a living wage, the work is unpredictable, and she does not have employer-paid health insurance or a pension plan.
Low-wage and part-time jobs have dominated the global financial recovery; Guidry is only one of 53 million Americans who scrape by despite earning several incomes from multiple jobs. It takes skill and time to constantly track down new gigs; the on-demand economy requires perma-youth, flexibility, and perpetual health.
A 2015 study by Jonathan Hall (Uber) and Alan Krueger (Princeton University) showed that Uber drivers in 20 cities are netting about $17.50 an hour, which, following accounts from drivers, comes out to anywhere between $10 and $13 an hour after subtracting the cost of insurance, gasoline, auto payments, and maintenance.9 While some drivers appreciate the flexible hours, they realize that with increasing competition, their wages are likely to sink. In the absence of binding standards (e.g., price per mile), the working conditions for these drivers, classified as “independent contractors” instead of “employees,” can (and do) change arbitrarily.
In this book, rather than analyzing the “sharing economy” in isolation, I am considering it alongside practices like crowd work. Kristy Milland, for example, turned to Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) in 2005. Like many others, she started working with AMT to supplement her income, but five years later, after her husband lost his job, she started to work up to 17 hours a day to take care of bills and pay off the debt that they had accrued.
For novice workers on the Mechanical Turk platform, the pay can range between $2 and $3 an hour, which is also the average hourly rate on CrowdFlower and other companies in the sector. In 2010, speaking to young tech entrepreneurs, CEO of CrowdFlower Lukas Biewald, shared that “[b]efore the Internet, it would be really difficult to find someone, sit them down for 10 minutes and get them to work for you, and then fire them after those 10 minutes. But with technology, you can actually find them, pay them the tiny amount of money, and then get rid of them after you don't need them anymore.”10
While in Brazil and France regulators have punished “sharing economy” businesses that violate labor laws, such behavior is largely tolerated in the United States; “disruptive” business practices are understood as an integral part of the economic playbook.11
Milland writes that the people who commission work on Mechanical Turk often “don't realize that there is a living, breathing human on the other end of the connection who needs to feed their children, pay medical bills, or ensure their home doesn't go into foreclosure.”12
In addition to Milland and Guidry, there are the Yelp and Amazon reviewers who fuel for-profit sites with their free labor. Until recently, Harriet Klausner was Amazon's top book reviewer. A retired librarian, Klausner reads two books a day. Her profile shows the grand sum of 31,014 reviews (and counting); book reviewing is her career, she states. While Klausner is not paid, she is respected among her fellow reviewers, major newspapers have written features about her, and, not unlike professional literary critics, she has a degree of power. Klausner's opinion can help or hinder the careers of young novelists. She is not the only one who spends her space time in this way. Every day, one billion people in advanced economies have between two billion and six billion spare hours among them.13 Capturing and monetizing those hours is the goal of platform capitalism. A manager of volunteers for the telecommunications company Verizon explains how he recruits the enthusiasm of the “voluntariat”: “If handled adeptly, [volunteers] hold considerable promise. …You have to make an environment that attracts [them], because that's where the magic happens.”14
About This Book
This book was written for the people who feel stuck in this economy, who don't have the time to write about it, and who are looking for a future of work that they can wholeheartedly embrace. Part I comprises four chapters; it introduces and discusses sites of paid and uncompensated digital work; it aims to draw a dotted line around the term “digital labor,” and it spells out the concept of crowd fleecing, which distinguishes what is happening on labor platforms like Uber from traditional exploitation.
In the first chapter, I examine the sites and size of the rapidly growing digital labor segment of the workforce. This is the beginning of a much-needed typology of digital labor, starting here with paid digital work, that identifies central discussions relevant to these emerging forms, namely that of worker rights under platform capitalism, the myth of choice and flexibility, the illegality of many sites and practices under Federal labor law, the short-termism of Silicon Valley, the materiality of this work, historical precursors for an ecosystem of digital work, and the question of decent digital labor.
Drawing on the work of Andre Gorz, Mike Davis, Erin Hatton, Frank Pasquale, and Susan Buck-Morss, I reveal, in great detail and with a rich set of examples ranging from crowd work to on-demand service labor; what is lost in the transition from employment to contingent contract work. How are workers supposed to plan their lives and think ahead when the ground is constantly shifting? I pay particular attention to Amazon Mechanical Turk and Uber because these companies have become emblematic of platform capitalism; they provide templates for the society-wide reorganization of work.
Beyond technology, other factors that impact the role of the labor platforms discussed in this chapter include: a lack of regulation, the decline of labor unions, the society-wide reorganization of work, and publicly traded stockholder companies driven by growth imperatives and the fiduciary duty to maximize profits. This chapter sets the stage for the discussions in Part II of the book.
Chapter 2 is a continuation of the typology begun in the first chapter. It is an introduction to sites of unpaid digital work, such as data labor – the surreptitious capture of value from quotidian online activities – hope labor, gamification, and geospatial labor. In this chapter I refer to work by Julian Kücklich, Ross Perlin, Gary Shteyngart, Golan Levin, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Jonathan Crary, Tiziana Terranova, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi. I explain that free labor per se is not the main culprit; it is what I call “crowd fleecing,” the growth imperative, and the fiduciary duty of the stockholder corporation to maximize profits that should be questioned and restricted.
Chapter 2 concludes with a discussion of Universal Basic Income. The practices described here cannot thrive when half of the population of the United States can barely sustain itself. Specifically, I argue for a version of Universal Basic Income that is globally implemented and paid at sustenance level. Anything below that would still put workers in the position of having to scramble for additional income; it would merely become a subsidy for large corporations.
In chapter 3, building on the work of Karl Marx, Raymond Williams, Dallas Smythe, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Maurizio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno, Christian Fuchs, and Lewis Hyde, I pinpoint omissions in the current discussion about digital labor.
The fluidity of the use of the term “digital labor” makes a rigorous definition less interesting than a reflection about this constantly changing conversation. In order to productively talk about digital work, all involved have to overcome disciplinary narcissism and political differences and start looking for a common language and understanding. Coming out of the previous two chapters, chapter 3 is seeking a useful vocabulary to address digital labor. After all, how can we reshape what we are unable to articulate?
Digital labor is everything but “immaterial;” it is a sector of the economy, a set of human activities that is predicated on global supply chains of material labor; it is about human activities that have economic value and are performed through a range of devices on highly monopolized platforms in real time on a truly novel and unprecedented scale.
Despite the recognition that too much play seeps into what we consider as work, I argue against the surrender of the language of labor.
By letting go of the language of labor we would lose associations with the history of organized labor and related struggles and movements. Not talking of labor depoliticizes the discussion by disconnecting it from traditional labor practices as well as the accomplishments, sacrifices, and lessons learned from this history.
Chapter 3 also emphasizes the materiality of digital labor and clarifies my use of terms like “work” and “labor.” I am also throwing into question concepts like immaterial labor and Virno's claim of total financialization of the everyday.
Finally, this chapter introduces the concept of the “produser factory,” where social participation goes hand-in-hand with value extraction. Considering the four billion people who are not connected to the Internet, there are still large zones of non-work and time not captured by Mark Zuckerberg's dreams of Facebook access for all. So far, there is still a fence around the “produser factory.”
In chapter 4, I propose that the term exploitation is in fact inadequate to describe the sites of value extraction that I introduced in the first two chapters. This debate is not a contribution to the more technical exchange about exploitation among Marxist economists, but rather, at the onset, a collection of perspectives on exploitation from scholars such as Byung-Chul Han, Adam Arvidsson, Geert Lovink, Mark Andrejevic, Brian Holmes, Nicholas Carr, and Alan Wertheimer,
I introduce the concept of “crowd fleecing” to describe a discontinuity between traditional and contemporary forms of exploitation such as crowd work. Where to draw the line between what is fair and legal and what is cruel and what should not be tolerated? The concept of crowd fleecing can help provide a framework for the economic exploitation and mistreatment of unprecedented numbers of globally distributed, mostly anonymous, invisible solo workers, each synced and available in real time to a small number of platform owners. Crowd fleecing is a result of the reorganization of work marked by temporal uncertainty that supplants the model of employment. Here, I ask how can it be that a rich country like the United States tolerates unfair labor practices like the ones on Mechanical Turk, CrowdFlower, and 99Designs.
At the end of chapter 4, I identify practices that should be prioritized in terms of media attention, labor advocacy, and regulatory intervention.
Many people understand the complex problems with the current shift of labor markets to the Internet but few think there is anything that they can do about it. This book is for them. It is also written in honor of Stéphane Hessel who reminded us that “the worst possible outlook is indifference that says ‘I can't do anything about it; I will just get by.’ Behaving like that deprives you of one of the essentials of being human: the capacity and freedom to feel outraged.”15
The book is also for my students who are often told that their careers will look like self-driving cars heading toward Armageddon. It is for all who are looking for an introduction to the broader discussion of digital labor and platform cooperativism.
The second part of this book, comprising three chapters, provides a contrast to Tyler Cowen's vision for the future of work based on democratic values, mutualism, and cooperativism. It is about a future of digital work in which we would want our children to participate. What would have to change for that to happen? This book encourages readers to think about how to protect themselves against exploitation on power hubs like Uber and Facebook, how to form and run platform cooperatives like Loconomics or Fairmondo, and how to inspire others with their work.
The last three chapters propose a range of pathways for action, solidarity, and ways in which the digital economy can be made more just, especially for its most vulnerable contributors.
In chapter 5, I show that technological development outpaces regulatory efforts by the government and that current labor law inadequately reflects the development of distributed digital work on the ground, thereby leaving an ever-growing segment of the working population unprotected. The chapter confronts the legal gray zones of digital labor by discussing whether workers are statutory employees or independent contractors. Here, I introduce the idea of portable benefits for contingent workers, a modification to Tim Berners-Lee's “Magna Carta of the Web,” and French proposals to tax Internet companies like Amazon and Facebook based on the value that French citizens generate on those sites.
Chapter 6 is about escape, tactical refusal, and withdrawal. How we can break off and switch off? How can we “bomb the cloud” and disengage, or “unthink” data labor? How can we own the cloud? This chapter proposes selective engagement and the possibility of cutting loose from data labor. Who needs to see one billion faces anyway? Can we leave Facebook or Google and promote thorny conversations and slowly growing friendships? What does disengagement from the Internet or even an unthinking of its logic really mean? It's about a society where, as Geert Lovink put it, a tweetless life is constructed as not living. These are a false dichotomy. Life is not about either being connected or being unplugged. It is not about signing my life away to platform capitalism or simply giving it a pass.
As an additional strategy when thinking about resistance to platform capitalism, I suggest to not forget about the electoral process and also to remember the physical infrastructures of platform owners. Where are the protests, for instance, at Amazon's headquarters in Seattle?
Chapter 7 serves as a preemptive strike against an Uber-ized future that might be; it provides readers with actionable advice. I reflect on the importance of electoral politics, inventive unions, new forms of guilds; social media and design interventions. At the center of this chapter, however, is the proposal for what I call “platform cooperativism.” This term can be briefly described as follows:
First, it is about cloning the technological heart of Uber, Task Rabbit, Airbnb, or UpWork. Platform cooperativism creatively embraces, adapts, or reshapes technologies of the sharing economy, putting them to work with different ownership models. It is in this sense that platform cooperativism is about structural change, a transformation of ownership models.
Second, platform cooperativism is about solidarity, sorely missing in an economy driven by a distributed and mostly anonymous workforce: the interns, freelancers, temps, project-based workers, and independent contractors. Platforms can be owned and operated by inventive unions, cities, and various other forms of cooperatives such as worker-owned, produser-owned (producer-user – produser), multi-stakeholder, co-ops.
Third, platform cooperativism is built on reframing concepts like innovation and efficiency with an eye toward benefiting all, not just sucking up profits for the few. I propose ten principles of platform cooperativism that are sensitive to the critical problems facing the digital economy right now. Platform capitalism is amazingly ineffective in watching out for people.
The Digital Labor Conferences
The Digital Labor Conferences at The New School in New York City have been central to this book. In research areas like Internet & Society, such gatherings play a crucial role as publications take a long time to surface while technology changes rapidly. Importantly, all the digital labor conferences highlighted both practitioners and scholars.
The urgency to discuss the climate change of digital labor and pathways to a sustainable future for workers is no longer in question. But that was not always so.
When I started these conferences I was intrigued by people cheerfully contributing to social networking services. They performed their new identities seemingly without hesitation, offered up their personal data, and put in hour after hour of their time. As a writer, activist, professor at a progressive university, I have a commitment to academic research, and practices like organizing, protests, and interventions. This combination of scholarship and practice led me to inaugurate this series of digital labor conferences.
The Internet as Playground and Factory16 in 2009 felt like the Woodstock of digital labor at the time; it was a historical gathering of researchers, artists, and legal scholars; the focus was mainly on digital labor/“playbor.” Over 2,000 researchers, through a mailing list called the Institute for Distributed Creativity, discussed digital labor over a period of nine months leading up to the event. While the event was extremely well received, some scholars were openly skeptical of the term “digital labor,” the research area as a whole, and also the unashamed disciplinary agnosticism of the event. Despite the widely-read and cited volume based on the conference,17 it took six years, countless conferences, publications, festivals, seminars, articles, exhibitions, and of course, the proliferation of Uber, Amazon, and Google as templates of work, until “digital labor” was accepted as a serious area of inquiry.18
Events after that, especially in 2014, focused far less on data labor; what some have called “Facebook” labor – and increasingly on crowd fleecing, exploitation of paid digital work, the possibilities for worker solidarity and inventive unions given the rapid shift of labor markets to the Internet.
In 2015, the Platform Cooperativism: The Internet, Ownership, Democracy event19 came out of my proposal for a change of ownership of labor platforms like Uber. In “Platform Cooperativism vs. The Sharing Economy,” written in 2014, I argued that service platforms like Uber could be owned and operated by worker cooperatives or unions.20 2015 was also a seminal year for policy workshops, research papers, working groups, and op-eds about the future of work, mainstreaming the discourse about worker rights in the digital economy.
I wrote the book you are reading now alongside these conferences, critically chronicling the discourse and sites of work and interviewing countless speakers while also contributing my own analysis and proposals.
In The Flight From Reality in the Human Sciences, Ian Shapiro argues for a problem-driven approach to framing of the research methodology. “Normative theorists,” he writes, “spend too much time commenting on one another, as if they were themselves the appropriate objects of study.”21 Shapiro makes the case for starting with a problem in the world, next coming to grips with previous attempts that have been made to study it, and then defining the research task by reference to the value added. This theoretical enterprise does not only identify what is wrong with what is currently being done across the various sites of digital labor, it engages with activists, workers, designers, developers, and policy makers to discuss how it might be improved and to then move in that direction.
Notes
1
United States Department of Justice, “FBCI: Prisoners and Prisoner Re-Entry.” Available at:
http://www.justice.gov/archive/fbci/progmenu_reentry.html
.
2
Alan Pyke, “Almost Half The Country Can't Afford The Basics,” ThinkProgress, September 18, 2013. Available at:
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/09/18/2641301/half-country-afford-basics/
.
3
https://loconomics.com
.
4
https://www.stocksy.com
.
5
By 2014, their revenues had reached $3.7 million dollars, and since their founding they've paid out several million dollars in surplus to their artists.
6
Tyler Cowen,
Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation
(E P Dutton & Co, 2013).
7
“In Mexico for instance, I have met large numbers of people who live on less than $10,000 a year, or maybe even on less than $5,000 a year. They hardly qualify as well-off but they do have access to cheap food and very cheap housing. They cannot buy too many other things. They don't always have money to bring the kid to the doctor or to buy new clothes. Their lodging is satisfactory, if not spectacular, and of course the warmer weather helps” (Cowen,
Average Is Over
, 240).
8
Natasha Singer, “In the Sharing Economy, Workers Find Both Freedom and Uncertainty,”
The New York Times
, August 16, 2014. Available at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/17/technology/in-the-sharing-economy-workers-find-both-freedom-and-uncertainty.html?_r=0
.
9
Seth D. Harris and Alan B. Krueger, “A Proposal for Modernizing Labor Laws for Twenty-First-Century Work: The ‘Independent Worker,’ ” The Hamilton Project, December 7, 2015. Available at:
http://www.hamiltonproject.org/papers/modernizing_labor_laws_for_twenty_first_century_work_independent_worker
.
10
Moshe Z. Marvit, “How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine,”
The Nation
, February 5, 2014. Available at:
http://www.thenation.com/article/how-crowdworkers-became-ghosts-digital-machine/
.
11
It is not at all surprising that the US was included in a global index of worker rights violations, which included the US on a list of 30 countries including Kenya that showed
systematic
violations of worker rights.
12
Vanessa Barth and Florian Schmidt, “Interview with Spam Girl,” in
Crowd Work: Zurück in die Zukunft
, ed. by Christiane Benner (Bund Verlag, 2014).
13
Lawrence Lessig,
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
(Penguin, 2008), 178.
14
Steve Lohr, “Customer Service? Ask a Volunteer,”
The New York Times
, April 26, 2009. Available at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/business/26unbox.html
.
15
Stéphane Hessel,
Time for Outrage
(Quartet Books, 2011).
16
http://digitallabor.org/2009
. You can access over 170 interviews with participants in these conferences at
https://vimeo.com/mobilityshifts/videos/
.
17
Trebor Scholz,
Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory
(Routledge, 2012).
18
Conferences that have helped shape this discourse include
Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory
(New School, New York City, United States, 2009),
Digital Labour: Workers, Authors, Citizens
(Western University, London, Ontario, Canada, 2009),
Invisible Labor Colloquium
(Washington University Law School, 2013),
Towards Critical Theories of Social Media
(Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden, 2012),
Re:Publica
conference (Berlin, Germany, 2013), and the
Chronicles of Work
lecture Series at Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, Germany, 2012/2013). Exhibitions like
Arbeidstid
in Oslo (2013), MASSMOCA's exhibition
The Workers
(2012) and artworks and films by Alex Rivera, Stephanie Rothenburg & Jeff Crouse, Xtine, and Aaron Coblin were also crucial.
19
“Platform Cooperativism: The Internet, Ownership, Democracy” was convened by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider (
platformcoop.net
).
20
Trebor Scholz, “Platform Cooperativism vs. the Sharing Economy.” Available at:
https://medium.com/@trebors/platform-cooperativism-vs-the-sharing-economy-2ea737f1b5ad#.e886o8hmj
.
21
Ian Shapiro,
The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences
(Princeton University Press, 2007), 179.
Part I
1Waged Labor and the End of Employment
It seems inevitable, doesn't it? The traditional relationship of employer and employee stands like a lone tree, a relic of the past. In the twenty-first century, “flexible workers” – the Uber drivers, baristas, crowd workers, fast-food cooks, models, and adjunct professors – all supposedly carry the torch of choice and autonomy high above their heads, bringing light to the monotonous world of formal jobs. “Think Outside the Boss,” the slogan goes. Continued employment with social security and legally regulated norms is no longer the rule. Digitization is making work increasingly dense. Casual work, part-time or freelance, is the new normal. Full-time jobs are fragmented into freelance positions, turning workers into “micro-entrepreneurs” who are competing under conditions of infinite labor supply. Increasingly, companies retain a small number of core employees, making up the rest with temporary contract laborers. It echoes from all corners: don't romanticize employment. And it's true: employment is a relatively young and by all means flawed relationship but it would be a mistake to give up on the protections and benefits that come with employment. Digital labor is instrumental in the process of dissolving direct employment, thereby creating low-wage futures for millions of people. Just like the railroad industries of the past, “sharing economy” platforms are changing the world of work. As the horse is already out of the barn, proponents argue, we might as well embrace this new working world.
Ryan Bingham, the antihero and central character of the 2009 film Up in the Air makes this argument almost irresistibly. Ryan (played by George Clooney) is a hired gun, a corporate consultant whose sole job it is to tell people that they are being fired. In fact, this is his company's business: stepping in when corporations want to lay off their workers, telling them that they are being “let go.” Firing people for a living allows Ryan to enjoy a lifestyle of executive business class travel and luxurious hotels. Bingham's standard line when facing the soon-to-be-unemployed is “anybody who ever built an empire, or changed the world, sat where you are now. And it is because they sat there that they were able to do it.” Bingham's spiel about opportunity and innovation echoes the rhetoric of Silicon Valley; you might even say that it prepares the newly unemployed for the digital economy.
The rhetoric of the enterprising individual is meant to make people feel optimistic about a “liberation” from career and employment and a forced entry into the world of entrepreneurship. Just check in with your “inner entrepreneur” and “do what you love!” Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn, begins his book The Start-Up of You by channeling Ryan Bingham: “All humans are entrepreneurs.” All jobs that are solid melt into freelance labor while Silicon Valley exports its playbook to the rest of the world. Hoffman points to “our ancestors in the caves” who invented their own rules for living:
They were founders of their own lives. In the centuries since then we forgot that we are entrepreneurs. We've been acting like labor.
On the other hand, the author Bob Black, the scholar Kathi Weeks, or the anarchist CrimethInc Ex-Workers' Collective, distance themselves from the obsession with work altogether. “The carrot is just a stick by other means,” as Black put it.1 Their stance does not stop at a rejection of employment; it is a rejection of the demeaning system of domination at work altogether; it's a call to slow down the engines of productivity.
The platform economy helps to facilitate an overall shift away from salaried employment. “Did anyone ever like having a boss, irritating colleagues, or long hours, anyway?,” supporters of the extractive economy ask. The spokespeople for the extractive “sharing economy,” on the other hand, glorify independent work, choice, opportunity, and autonomy. Burn the heavy briefcase, the two-bedroom house, the car payments; humans are meant to be lions. Bingham puts it so convincingly:
I see people who work at the same company for their entire lives. They clock in, they clock out, and they never have a moment of happiness. You have an opportunity here.
This dream of flexible work, of an opportunity for a better life, spurs many of the contemporary labor practices that I introduce in this chapter.
1) Toward a Typology of Digital Labor
As part of this typology of paid digital labor, I closely examine practices like crowdsourcing, paid in-game labor, and content farming. I ask which forms of paid digital labor shaped the terrain of unregulated digital work. I caution that the templates of work introduced by companies like Uber and Amazon Mechanical Turk can lead to a regime of work that is even worse than previous systems of labor.
Ultimately, this typology can lead to a broader understanding of the landscape of digital labor practices necessary for careful and network-savvy regulation. Such typology, read alongside chapter 7, can clarify which tendencies are worth advancing while at the same time calling out practices and companies that need regulatory attention and punishment for violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act. In the absence of worker protections for the most vulnerable workers, we face the threat of a crushing regime of digital work.
My perspective on digital work is informed by four conferences that I convened between 2009 and 2016. This research is grounded in the review of studies coming out of fields like sociology, political science, labor law, and media theory. The writing is informed by news accounts and interviews with workers, labor advocates, cooperativists, historians, venture capitalists, activists, artists, civic technologists, designers, and union representatives. While this chapter emphasizes the perils of digital labor, I conclude with a vision of decent digital work. In chapter 7, you'll find a proposal for what I call platform cooperativism.
Throughout this chapter, I show how digital labor platforms and “new vectors of the production of wealth,” as the French economist Yann Moulier Boutang put it,2 have made contemporary work more intensive (dense), while restructuring labor markets on a global scale. Time becomes even more central as an instrument of oppression.
One new quality of contemporary labor online is the vast scale of a global, on-demand labor force available in real time. The virtual hiring hall UpWork,3 for example, claims to have 10 million workers; the grand sum of real-time work hours ingested by this globally operating company is unprecedented. Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen claimed that his software is eating the world and indeed, today, there is a pronounced power asymmetry between the class of platform owners, that holds all four aces and the workers who hold none, as David Graeber puts it.
What can this chapter accomplish and what are its limitutions? The examples offer a freeze-frame perspective haunted by technological obsolescence; think about the quick succession with which Google discontinued Google Wave, Google Knol, Google Reader, Google Glasses, and Google+. Amazon introduced HomeServices, Amazon Flex, and Handmade at Amazon, while oDesk acquired Elance and rebranded it as Upwork. TaskRabbit changed its modus operandi, its “pivot” in industry parlance, from one day to the next. Uber can alter its agreements with drivers with the click of a button. The constant reshuffling of labor markets makes it hard to offer a stable inventory of these practices.
What follows in the next two chapters, broken down into paid (chapter 1) and unpaid (chapter 2) digital work, is a proposal for a typology of digital work that is crucial for the discussion about the future of work. While such typology, grounded in historical and political observations, is necessary, it has also clear limitations. What I place in one category, for instance, isn't always comfortably contained in that grouping. There are fluid boundaries between these categories; even the distinction between paid and unpaid labor is not always so clear. In Labor in the Global Digital Economy, the British labor scholar Ursula Huws establishes categories of digital work. Huws argues that it is impossible to assign a type of worker to each category to extrapolate their class belonging, for instance. Some workers engage in several different kinds of labor, both simultaneously and over the course of their lives, she writes. They are crossing these simple categories. Even in one household, one finds relatives who carry out quite different kinds of labor. Further complicating the picture, there are workers like Jennifer Guidry, mentioned in the introduction to this book. Workers like Guidry are “multi-homing,” which means that they are, for instance, toiling for Uber in the morning and assembling furniture for TaskRabbit in the afternoon.
The typology that I am presenting here, clearly, cannot be comprehensive. The area of content moderation, workers filtering out inappropriate content submissions on social media, for instance, is not addressed extensively here. It deserves more attention. As the cooperative models that I am introducing in chapter 7 are just emerging, I did not include them here.
To understand that such typology cannot be comprehensive, you only have to follow the litany of the news cycle; in any given month, new platforms enter this landscape. I pay a good amount of attention to Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) while focusing less on other upstarts because AMT has became an influential template for the future of work.
Contained within the presented categories is also a geography of digital work; I am really discussing different social groups: specific labor platforms and ways of working that are experienced differently by individuals in different cultures. But despite these cautionary notes, lumping all of these labor practices together as “digital labor” may lead to misunderstandings as I have witnessed in many debates.
Overview
1) Toward a typology of digital labor
2) Crowdsourcing: all together now!
3) Digital labor in the shadows: Amazon Mechanical Turk
4) The ecosystem of paid digital labor
5) Ethical crowdwork? Platform cooperatives
6) Content farming
7) Competitive crowdsourcing
8) User-led innovation
9) In-game labor
10) Online labor brokerages
11) On-demand labor
12) Online personal assistance
2) Crowdsourcing: All Together Now!
Examples: Amazon Mechanical Turk, Universal Human Relevance System (UHRS), crowdSPRING, Crowdguru, CrowdFlower, CrowdSource, ManPower, Microworkers, Samasource, Microtask, Clickworker, Shorttask, ZeroFlaws, Livework, Cloudfactory, Crowdturfing
Today, crowdsourcing is a flourishing sector of the platform economy; it has taken off especially in industries that are built around data. The crowdsourcing sector had revenues of some $375 million in 2011 alone, a 75 percent increase on the year before. There is a clear overall upward arc in revenues ever since.
The term crowdsourcing was first used in a 2006 article by Wired Magazine editor Jeff Howe.4 Since then, the crowdsource-or-perish mantra was repeated in defense of greater “democratization” of work. Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams write that
A new economic democracy is emerging in which we all have a lead role, [because] the economics of production have changed significantly.5
Some, clearly, are leading more than others when it comes to financial rewards. According to NYU Business School professor Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis, crowdwork can cost companies less than half as much as typical outsourcing.6
Crowdsourcing has the goal of distributing the workload from one, sometimes paid, individual to many, frequently unpaid or underpaid volunteers. Companies like Google or Amazon no longer conceive of their workforce solely in terms of full-time employees; they can count on cadres of subcontracted workers worldwide who are on standby, just one click away. Animation and software testing are both sectors that are at the forefront of crowdsourcing, drawing in workers through platforms that are often still in “public beta” stage.
Canadian business executive Don Tapscott and consultant Anthony D. Williams claim in their book Wikinomics that the “old, ironclad vessels of the industrial era sink under the crushing waves where smart firms connect to external ideas and energies to regain the buoyancy they require to survive.”7 Firms that make their boundaries porous to external ideas and human capital, their narrative suggests, outperform companies that rely solely on internal resources and capabilities. That, at least, is the employer-centric motto of Wikinomics, emphasizing the ability of crowdsourcing to lower labor costs while leaving the quality of the work itself unexamined.
Crowdsourcing indicates that companies are subcontracting tasks to large numbers of people online, to then capture the value of these “outside producers” who might perform the job more swiftly and cheaply. The productive power of the network becomes a dynamo for profits. But crowdsourcing is also employed in support of public and non-market projects. What interests me most about the thorny practice of crowdsourcing is that it simultaneously inspires unambiguous excitement about the productive potentials of the Open Web, while at the same time leading to moral indignation about the alienation and ultimate exploitation of labor. The realities of crowdsourcing exist in the gaps between the film Sleep Dealer and the book Wikinomics.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is among the outspoken critics of the term. He wrote:
I dislike the word “crowdsourcing” because I think it turns the whole problem of how to foster openness upside down in a bad way.8
The Austrian media artist and journalist Armin Medosch observes that crowdsourcing, now arrived in the twenty-first century, is seen as hip, trendy, and popular. It is not associated with mass consumption and mass production but with participation of emancipated super-consumers.9
On the other hand, proponents appreciate the advantages of scale – the “big” in big data – and the efficiency of access to a global knowledge base that can be rapidly mobilized. Universities, upstarts, and new media giants like Microsoft, eBay, Google, and Amazon employ crowdsourcing to test drive their algorithms through “public betas,” categorizing inventory, filling in surveys, or filtering their websites for inappropriate content. Even the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the US Army Research Lab, the CIA, and various governments make use of crowdsourcing, embracing the fact that they can set up large collaborative groups at a distance, cutting travel and office costs when performing translations and transcriptions, for instance.
“Users happily do for free what companies would otherwise have to pay employees to do,” says former Wired editor turned drone manufacturer, Chris Anderson. It's a capitalist's dream come true. “It's not outsourcing, it's crowdsourcing. Collectively, customers have virtually unlimited time and energy; only peer production has the capacity to extend as far as the Long Tail can go.”10
