Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2000 18:50:23 +0100 Subject: <nettime> Free labor 1/2 From: "tt" <T.Terranova@btinternet.com> To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Sender: owner-nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Precedence: bulk X-UIDL: 317a17a14470d192b707de56bd10f002 This is a paper very directly inspired by nettime debates (and other stuff), so it won't be that unfamiliar to the list's old hands. A much longer version will be published in the Summer issue of the journal Social Text (Duke University Press). The basic argument, if you don't want to read the whole thing, is that users' labor (free labor, un-waged, sometimes exploited, voluntary labor) is the most consistent trait of the Internet economy and also a phenomenon which goes beyond the Internet in a narrow sense. Have a good read Tiziana Terranova Department of Cultural Studies University of East London East Building, 4 University Way E16 8RD T.Terranova@uel.ac.uk http://www.btinternet.com/~t.terranova/ course tutor of the MA in Multimedia: Production, Theories, Cultures http://www.uel.ac.uk/multimedia/masters Free labor: producing culture for the digital economy Tiziana Terranova The real not-capital is labor. (Karl Marx Grundrisse ) Working in the digital media industry is not as much fun as it is made out to be. The NetSlaves of the homonymous Webzine are becoming increasingly vociferous about the shamelessly exploitative nature of the job, its punishing work rhythms and its ruthless casualisation (http://www.disobey.com/netslaves/). They talk about "24-7 electronic sweatshops", complain about the 90-hours week and the "moronic management of new media companies". In early 1999, seven of the fifteen thousands 'volunteers' of America On Line rocked the info-loveboat by asking the Department of Labor to investigate whether AOL owes them back wages for the years of playing chathosts for free . They used to work long-hours and love it; now they are starting to feel the pain of being burned by digital media. These events point to a necessary backlash against the glamorization of digital labor, which highlights its continuities with the modern sweatshop and point to the increasing degradation of knowledge work. Yet the question of labor in a 'digital economy' is not so easily dismissed as an innovative development of the familiar logic of capitalist exploitation. The NetSlaves are not simply a typical form of labor on the Internet, they also embody a complex relation to labor which is widespread in late capitalist societies. In this paper I understand this relationship as a provision of 'free labor', a trait of the cultural economy at large, and an important, and yet undervalued force in advanced capitalist societies. By looking at the Internet as a specific instance of the fundamental role played by free labor, this paper also tries to highlight the connections between the 'digital economy' and what the Italian autonomists have called the 'social factory' . The 'social factory' describes a process whereby "work processes have shifted from the factory to society, thereby setting in motion a truly complex machine" (Negri 1989). Simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited, free labor on the Net includes the activity of building websites, modify software packages, reading and participating to mailing lists and building virtual spaces on MUDs and MOOs. Far from being an 'unreal', empty space, the Internet is animated by cultural and technical labor through and through, a continuous production of value which is completely immanent to the flows of the network society at large. Collective minds The collective nature of networked, immaterial labor has been simplified by the utopian statements of the cyberlibertarians. Kevin Kelly's popular thesis in Out of Control, for example, is that the Internet is a collective 'hive mind'. According to Kelly, the Internet is another manifestation of a principle of self organization which is widespread throughout technical, natural and social systems. The Internet is the material evidence of the existence of the self-organizing, infinitely productive activities of connected human minds . From a different perspective Pierre Levy draws on cognitive anthropology and poststructuralist philosophy, to argue that computers and computer networks are sites which enable the emergence of a 'collective intelligence'. Levy, who is inspired by early computer pioneers such as Douglas Engelbart, argues for a new humanism, "that incorporates and enlarges the scope of self-knowledge and collective thought" . According to Levy, we are passing from a Cartesian model of thought based upon the singular idea of cogito (I think) to a collective or plural cogitamus (we think)_.. In Levy's view, the digital economy highlights the impossibility of absorbing intelligence within the process of automation: unlike the first wave of cybernetics which displaced workers from the factory, computer networks highlight the unique value of human intelligence as the true creator of value in a knowledge economy. In his opinion, since the economy is increasingly reliant on the production of creative subjectivities, this production is highly likely to engender a new humanism, a new centrality of man's [sic] creative potentials. Especially in Kelly's case, it has been easy to dismiss the notion of a 'hive mind' and the self-organizing Internet-as-free market as euphoric capitalist mumbo jumbo. One cannot help being deeply irritated by the blindness of the digital capitalist to the realities of working in the hi-tech industries, from the poisoning world of the silicon chips factories to the electronic sweatshops of America OnLine, where technical work is downgraded and workers' obsolescence is high . How can we hold on to the notion that cultural production and immaterial labor are collective on the Net (both inner and outer) without subscribing to the idealistic cyberdrool of the digerati? We could start with a simple observation: the self-organizing, collective intelligence of cybercultural thought captures the existence of networked immaterial labor, but also neutralizes the operations of capital. Capital, after all, is the unnatural environment within which the collective intelligence materializes. The collective dimension of networked intelligence needs to be understood historically, as part of a specific momentum of capitalist development. The Italian Autonomists have consistently engaged with this relationship by focusing on the mutation undergone by labor in the aftermath of the factory. The notion of a self-organizing "collective intelligence" looks uncannily like one of their central concepts, the "general intellect", a notion that the autonomists "extracted" out of the spirit, if not the actually wording, of Marx's Grundrisse. The "collective intelligence" or "hive mind" captures some of the spirit of the "general intellect", but removes the autonomists' critical theorization of its relation to capital. In the autonomists' favorite text, the Grundrisse, and especially in the "Fragment on Machines", Marx argues that "knowledge - scientific knowledge in the first place, but not exclusively - tends to become precisely by virtue of its autonomy from production, nothing less than the principal productive force, thus relegating repetitive and compartmentalized labor to a residual position. Here one is dealing with knowledge_ which has become incarnate_ in the automatic system of machines" . In the vivid pages of the "Fragment', the "other" Marx of the Grundrisse (adopted by the social movements of the sixties and seventies against the more orthodox endorsement of Capital ), describes the system of industrial machines as a horrific monster of metal and flesh: The production process has ceased to be a labor process in the sense of a process dominated by labor as its governing unity. Labor appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous point of the mechanical system. Subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living, (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism . The Italian autonomists extracted from these pages the notion of the "general intellect" as "the ensemble of knowledge_ which constitute the epicenter of social production" . Unlike Marx's original formulation, however, the autonomists eschewed the modernist imagery of the general intellect as a hellish machine. They claimed that Marx completely identified the general intellect (or knowledge as the principal productive force) with fixed capital (the machine) and thus neglected to account for the fact that the general intellect cannot exist independently of the concrete subjects who mediate the articulation of the machines with each other. The general intellect is an articulation of fixed capital (machines) and living labor (the workers). If we see the Internet, and computer networks in general, as the latest machines-the latest manifestation of fixed capital-then it won't be difficult to imagine the general intellect as being well and alive today. However the autonomists did not stop at describing the general intellect as an assemblage of humans and machines at the heart of postindustrial production. If this were the case, the Marxian monster of metal and flesh would just be updated to that of a world-spanning network where computers use human beings as a way to allow the system of machinery (and therefore capitalist production) to function. The visual power of the Marxian description is updated by the cyberpunk snapshots of the immobile bodies of the hackers, electrodes like umbilical cords connecting them to the matrix, appendixes to a living, all-powerful cyberspace. Beyond the special effects bonanza, the box-office success of The Matrix validates the popularity of the paranoid interpretation of this mutation. To the humanism implicit in this description, the autonomists have opposed the notion of a "mass intellectuality", living labor in its function as the determining articulation of the general intellect. Mass intellectuality - as an ensemble, as a social body - "is the repository of the indivisible knowledges of living subjects and of their linguistic cooperation_ an important part of knowledge cannot be deposited in machines, but_ it must come into being as the direct interaction of the labor force" . As Virno emphasizes, mass intellectuality is not about the various roles of the knowledge workers, but is a "quality and a distinctive sign of the whole social labor force in the post-Fordist era" . The pervasiveness of the collective intelligence both within the managerial literature and Marxist theory could be seen as the result of a common intuition about the quality of labor in informated societies. Knowledge labor is inherently collective, it is always the result of a collective and social production of knowledge . Capital's problem is how to extract as much value as possible (in the autonomists' jargon, to 'valorize') out of this abundant, and yet slightly untractable terrain. Collective knowledge work, then, is not about those who work in the knowledge industry. But it is also not about employment. The acknowledgement of the collective aspect of labor implies a rejection of the equivalence between labor and employment, which was already stated by Marx and further emphasized by feminism and the post-Gramscian autonomy . Labor is not equivalent to waged labor. Such an understanding might help us to reject some of the hideous rhetoric of unemployment which turns the unemployed person in the object of much patronizing, pushing and nudging from national governments in industrialized countries (accept any available work or else_.) Often the unemployed are such only in name, in reality being the life-blood of the difficult economy of 'under the table', badly paid work, some of which also goes into the new media industry . To emphasize how labor is not equivalent to employment also means to acknowledge how important free affective and cultural labor is to the media industry, old and new. Ephemeral commodities and free labor There is a continuity, and a break, between older media and new media in terms of their relationship to cultural and affective labor. The continuity seems to lie in their common reliance on their public/users as productive subjects. The difference lies both in the mode of production and in the way= s in which power/knowledge works in the two types. In spite of different national histories (some of which stress public service more than others), the television industry, for example, is relatively conservative: writers, producers, performers, managers, and technicians have definite roles within an industry still run by a few established players. The historical legacy o= f television as a technology for the construction of national identities also means that the latter is somehow always held more publicly accountable. This does not mean that old media do not draw on free labor, on the contrary. Television and print media, for example, make abundant use of the free labor of their audiences/readers, but they also tend to structure the latter's contribution much more strictly, both in terms of economic organization and moralistic judgement. The price to pay for all those real-life TV experiences is usually a heavy dose of moralistic scaremongering: criminals are running amok on the freeways and must be stopped by tough police action; wild teenagers lack self-esteem and need tough love. If this does not happen on the Internet, why is it then that the latter is not the happy island of decentered, dispersed and pleasurable cultural production that its apologists claimed? The most obvious answer to such questions came spontaneously to the early Internet users who blamed it on the commercialization of the Internet. E-commerce and the progressive privatization were blamed for disrupting the free economy of the Internet, an economy of exchange which Richard Barbrook described as "gift economy" . Indeed maybe the Internet could have been a different place than what it is now. However it is almost unthinkable that capitalism could stay forever outside of the network, a mode of communication which is fundamental to its own organizational structure. The outcome of the explicit interface between capital and the Internet is a digital economy which manifests all the signs of an acceleration of the capitalist logic of production. It might be that the Internet has not stabilized yet, but it seems undeniable that the digital economy is the fastest and most visible zone of production within late capitalist societies. New products and new trends succeed each other at anxiety-inducing pace. After all this is a business where you need to replace your equipment/knowledges and possibly staff every year or so. .Commodities on the Net are not material and are excessive (there is too much of it, too many websites, too much clutter and noise)with relation to the limits of 'real' social needs. It is possible, however, that the disappearance of the commodity is not a material disappearance, but its visible subordination to the quality of labor behind it. In this sense the commodity does not disappear as such; it rather becomes increasing ephemeral, its duration becomes compressed, it becomes more of a process than a finished product. The role of continuous, creative, innovative labor as the ground of market value is crucial to the digital economy. The process of valorisation (the production of monetary value) happens by foregrounding the quality of the labor which literally animates the commodity. In my opinion, the digital economy challenges the postmodern assumption that labor disappears while the commodity takes on and dissolves all meaning. In particular, the Internet is about the extraction of value out of continuous updateable work and is extremely labor intensive. It is not enough to produce a good web site, you need to update it continuously to maintain interest in it and fight off obsolescence. Furthermore you need updateable equipment (the general intellect is always an assemblage of humans and their machines), in its turn propelled by the intense collective labor of programmers, designers and workers. It is as if the acceleration of production has pushed to the point where commodities, literally, turn into translucent objects. Commodity do not so much disappear as they become more transparent, showing throughout their reliance on the labor which produces and sustains them. It is the labor of the designers and programmers that shows through a successful website and it is the spectacle of that labor changing its product that keeps the users coming back. The commodity, then= is only as good as the labor that goes into it. As a consequence, the sustainability of the Internet as a medium depends on massive amounts of labor (which is not equivalent to employment, as we said), only some of which is hyper-compensated by the capricious logic of venture capitalism. Of the incredible amount of labor which sustains the Internet as a whole (from mailing list traffic to web sites to infrastructural questions), we can guess that a substantial amount of it is still 'free labor'. Free labor, however, is not necessarily exploited labor. Within the early virtual communities, we are told, labor was really free: the labor of building a community was not compensated by great financial rewards (it was therefore 'free', unpaid), but it was also willingly conceded in exchange for the pleasures of communication and exchange (it was therefore 'free', pleasurable, not-imposed). In answer to members' requests, information was quickly posted and shared with a lack of mediation which the early netizens did not fail to appreciate. Howard Rheingold's book, somehow unfairly accused of middle class complacency, is the most well known account of the good old times of the old Internet, before the net-tourist overcame the net-pioneer . The free labor which sustains the Internet is acknowledged within many different sections of the digital literature. In spite of the volatile nature of the Internet economy (which yesterday was about community, today is about portals, and tomorrow who knows), the notion of users' labor maintains an ideological and material centrality which runs consistently throughout the turbulent succession of Internet fads. Commentators who woul= d normally disagree, such as Howard Rheingold and Richard Hudson, concur on one thing; the best web site, the best way to stay visible and thriving on the Web is to turn your site into a space which is not only accessed, but somehow built by its users. . Users keep a site alive through their labor, the cumulative hours of accessing the site (thus generating advertising), writing messages, participating in conversations and sometimes making the jump to collaborators. Out of the fifteen thousand volunteers which keep AO= L running, only a handful turned against it, the others stayed on. Such a feature seems endemic to the Internet in ways which can be worked on by commercialization, but not substantially altered. The 'open source' movement, which relies on the free labor of Internet tinkers, is further evidence of this structural trend within the digital economy. It is an interesting feature of the Internet debate (and evidence, somehow of its masculine bias) that users' labor has attracted more attention in the case of the open source movement than in that of mailing lists and websites= This betrays the persistence of an attachment to masculine understandings of labor within the digital economy: writing an operating system is still more worthy of attention than just chatting for free for AOL. This in spite of the fact that in 1996 at the peak of the volunteer moment, over thirty thousand 'community leaders' were helping AOL to generate at least $7 million a month . Still the 'open source' movement has drawn much more positive attention than the more diffuse user-labor described above. It is worth exploring not because I believe that it will outlast 'portals' or 'virtual communities' as the latest buzzword, but because of the debates which it has provoked and its relation to the digital economy at large. The 'open source' movement is a variation of the old tradition of shareware and freeware software which substantially contributed to the technical development of the Internet. Freeware software is freely distributed and does not even request a reward from its users. Shareware software is distributed freely, but implies a 'moral' obligation for the user to forwar= d a small sum to the producer in order to sustain the shareware movement as a= n alternative economic model to the copyrighted software of giants such as Microsoft. 'Open source' 'refers to a model of software development in whic= h the underlying code of a program -the source code a.k.a. the 'crown jewels'-is by definition made freely available to the general public for modification, alteration, and endless redistribution' . Far from being an idealistic, minoritarian practice, the open source movement has attracted much media and financial attention. Apache, an open source web server, is the 'Web-server program of choice for more than half of all publicly accessible Web servers" . In 1999, open source conventions are anxiously attended by venture capitalists, who have been informed by the digerati that the former is a necessity 'because you must go open-source to get access to the benefits of the open-source development community-the near-instantaneous bug-fixes, the distributed intellectual resources of the Net, the increasingly large open-source code base" . Open source companies such as Cygnus have convinced the market that you do not need to be proprietary about source code to make a profit: the code might be free, but tech support, packaging, installation software, regular upgrades, office applications and hardware are not. In 1998, when Netscape went 'open source' and invited the computer tinkers and hobbyists to look at the code of its new browser, fix the bugs, improve the package and redistribute it, specialized mailing lists exchanged opinions about its implications . Netscape=B9s move rekindled the debate abou= t the peculiar nature of the digital economy. Was it to be read as being in the tradition of the Internet =8Cgift economy=B9? Or was digital capital hijacking the open-source movement exactly against that tradition? =8A.Rather than representing a moment of incorporation of a previously authentic moment, the open source question demonstrates the overreliance of the digital economy as such on free labor, both in the sense of not financially rewarded and willingly given. This includes AOL community leaders, the open source programmers, the amateur webdesigners, mailing list editors and the netslaves willing to 'work for cappucinos' just for the excitement and the dubious promises of digital work . Such a reliance, almost a dependency, is part of larger mechanisms of capitalist extraction of value which are fundamental to late capitalism as = a whole. That is such processes are not created outside capital and then reappropriated by capital, but are the results of a complex history where the relation between labor and capital is mutually constitutive, entangled and crucially forged during the crisis of Fordism. Free labor is a desire of labor immanent to late capitalism, and late capitalism is the field which both sustains free labor and exhausts it. It exhausts it by subtracting selectively but widely the means through which that labor can reproduce itself: from the burn-out syndromes of Internet start-ups to under-retribution and exploitation in the cultural economy at large. Late capitalism does not appropriate anything: it nurtures, exploits and exhausts its labor force and its cultural and affective production. In this sense, it is technically impossible to separate neatly the digital economy of the Net from the larger network economy of late capitalism. Especially since 1994, the Internet is always and simultaneously a gift economy and an advanced capitalist economy. The mistake of the neo-liberalists (as exemplified by the Wired group), is to mistake this coexistence for a benign, unproblematic equivalence. As I stated before, these processes are far from being confined to the most self-conscious laborers of the digital economy. They are part of a diffuse cultural economy which operates throughout the Internet and beyond. The passage from the pioneeristic days of the Internet to its 'venture' days does not seem to have affected these mechanisms, only intensified them and connected them to financial capital. Nowhere is this more evident that in the recent development of the World Wide Web. Enter the New Web In the winter of 1999, in what sounds like another of its resounding, short-lived claims, Wired magazine announces that the old Web is dead: "Th= e Old Web was a place where the unemployed, the dreamy, and the iconoclastic went to reinvent themselves=8A The New Web isn't about dabbling in what you don't know and failing - it's about preparing seriously for the day when television and Web content are delivered over the same digital networks." . The new Web is made of the big players, but also of new ways to make the audience work. In the "new web", after the pioneering days, television and the web converge in the one thing they have in common: their reliance on their audiences/users as providers of the cultural labor which goes under the label of 'real life stories". Gerry Laybourne, executive of the web-based media company Oxygen, thinks of an hypothetical show called What Are They Thinking? " a reality-based sketch comedy show based on stories posted on the Web, because "funny things happen in our lives everyday." As Bayers also adds, "[u]ntil it's produced, the line separating that concept from more puerile fare dismissed by Gerry, like America's Funniest, is hard to see" . The difference between the puerile fare of America's Funniest and user-based content seems to lie not so much in the more serious nature of the 'new web' as compared to the vilified output of television 'people's shows'. From an abstract point of view there is no difference between the ways in which people shows rely on the inventiveness of their audiences and the website reliance on users' input. People shows rely on the activity (even amidst th= e most shocking sleaze) of their audience and willing participants to a much larger extent than any other television program. In a sense, they manage the impossible, they create monetary value out of the most reluctant members of the postmodern cultural economy: those who do not produce marketable style, who are not qualified enough to enter the fast world of the knowledge economy are converted into monetary value through their capacity to perform their misery. When compared to the cultural and affective production on the Internet, people shows also seem to embody a different logic of relation between capitalism (the media conglomerates which produce and distribute such shows) and its labor force the beguiled, dysfunctional citizens of the underdeveloped North. Within people's shows, the valorisation of the audience as labor and spectacle always happens somehow within a power/knowledge nexus which does not allow the immediate valorisation of th= e talk show participants: you cannot just put a Jeffrey Springer guest on TV on her own to tell her story with no mediation (indeed that would look too much like the discredited access slots of public service broadcasting). Between the talk show guest and the apparatus of valorisation intervenes a series of knowledges which normalize the dysfunctional subjects through a moral or therapeutic discourse and a more traditional institutional organization of production. So after the performance, the guest must be advised, patronized, questioned and often bullied by the audience and the host, all in the name of a perfunctory, normalizing morality. People shows also belong to a different economy of scale: although there ar= e more and more of them, they are still relatively few when compared to the millions of pages on the web. It is as if the centralized organization of the traditional media does not let them turn people's productions into pure monetary value. People shows must have morals, even as those morals are shattered by the overflowing performances of their subjects. Within the Internet, however, this process of channeling and adjudicating (responsibilities, duties and rights) is dispersed to the point where practically anything is tolerated (sadomasochism, bestiality, fetishism and plain nerdism are not targeted, at least within the Internet, as sites whic= h need to be disciplined or explained away). The qualitative difference between people's shows and a successful website, then, does not lie in the latter's democratic tendency as opposed to the former's exploitative nature= . It lies in the operation, within people's shows, of molar discursive mechanisms of territoralization, the application of a morality that the 'excessive' abundance of material on the Internet renders redundant and even more irrelevant. The digital economy cares only tangentially about morality= . What it really cares about is an abundance of production, an immediate interface with cultural and technical labor whose result is a diffuse, non-dialectical contradiction. Conclusion My hypothesis that free labor is structural to the late capitalist cultural economy is not meant to offer the reader a totalising understanding of the cultural economy of new and old media. However it does originate from a nee= d to think beyond the categories which structure much net-debate these days, = a process which necessarily entails a good deal of abstraction. In particular I have started from the opposition between the Internet as capital and the Internet as the anti-capital. This opposition is much more challenging than the easy technophobia/technophilia debate. The question is not so much whether to love or hate technology, but try to understand whether the Internet embodies a continuation of capital or a break with it. As I have argued in this paper, it is neither. It is rather a mutation which is totally immanent to late capitalism, not so much a break as an intensification, and therefore a mutation, of a widespread cultural and economic logic. This return to immanence, that is to a flattening out of social, cultural and political connections, has important consequences for me. As Negri, Haraway, Deleuze and Guattari have consistently argued, the demolition of the modernist ontology of the Cartesian subject does not have to produce the relativism of the most cynical examples of postmodern theory. The loss of transcendence, of external principles which organize the social world from the outside, does not have to end up in nihilism, a loss of strategies for dealing with power. Such strategies cannot be conjured by critical theory. As the spectacular failure of the Italian Autonomy reveals , the purpose of critical theory is not to elaborate strategies which then can be used to direct social change. On the contrary, as the tradition of cultural studies has less explicitly argued, it is about working on what already exists, on the lines established by a cultural and material activity which is already happening. In this sense this paper does not so much propose a theory, as identifies a tendency which already exists in the Internet literature and online exchanges. This tendency is not the truth of the digital economy, it is necessary partial just as it tries to hold to the need for an overall perspective on an immensely complex range of cultural and economic phenomena. Rather than retracing the holy truths of Marxism on the changing body of late capital, free labor embraces some crucial contradictions without lamenting, celebrating, denying or synthesising a complex condition. It is, then, not so much about truth-values, as about relevance, the capacity to capture a moment and contribute to the ongoing constitution of a non-unified collective intelligence outside and in-between the blind alleys of the silicon age.
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