å Tuesday, October 6th, 2015

Marisa Chung
Hybrid Assignment 05
10/06/15

In this week’s reading, Ross explains the cheapened and discounted form of labor that affiliates with the rise of digital media by sharing many different examples throughout the chapter. One of the examples that stood out to me most was the white collar / no collar interns. I can personally relate to this because this is something I also experienced, as well as many people that I associate myself with. From my personal experience, I feel as though internships have become the new entry-level job that consists of the same responsibilities and basic experience, except it is only without one of the most important factors; without compensation or benefits. I absolutely understand that getting an internship is a great opportunity to learn and build experience, however I also think that unpaid internships requires as much hard work and effort as a real “job”. In addition, internships do not guarantee an individual with a job when the internship is finished. Therefore, I believe that it is extremely unfair for interns to work hard without getting paid for their work. Unfortunately, as Ross mentions in the chapter, Corporate America takes advantage of this system and gets a “$2 billion annual subsidy from internships alone”.

Ross also mentions that the financial profile of some companies are extremely high. According to Ross, Facebook alone took in an estimated $4.3 billion in revenue in 2011, and almost 1 billion of that was net profit. The firm only had a little more than 2,000 employees on payroll. And how do companies such a Facebook make a huge financial success? It is through the subscription base of Facebook’s half a billion users. (Us) Ross adds that the users are not consumers in any traditional sense of paying customers. They make their money by what we share, as well as from advertisers or behavior market vendors. The users become the “products being sold”. Everything has become business related which in many ways seems unfair. Facebook claims to be “free” but it really isn’t.

I’m fascinated in particular with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system, a program that is a crowd-sourced marketplace for requesters and workers to bid on “tasks” otherwise known as piecemeal jobs that are not able to be completed by computers. Less exotic and more routinized, this program reduces those that bid on jobs or tasks to the very embodiment of alienated labor. Ross suggests that this and “other e-lance operations would not be thought of as remotely resembling temporary employees… leave no trace of their employment… [and function as] a discrete lump, or piece, or work that exists only for the duration of its fulfillment.” (27-28) These tasks yield not much more than cents to dollars per completed and accepted task per hour – which suggests that though this labor while in demand might also be something that someone performs as a supplement or when bored and using the web while at their other computer-based job (which is almost all jobs at this point.) E-lance (another terrible digital media portmanteau of electronic and freelance) labor, is not as attractive as it sounds. The lure of working as an e-lancer is the promise of self-determined workflow and that the only qualifications required are internet access and usage of the open source software is very appealing, but given the amount of work that one must perform in order make the time worth it, and that there is no guarantee of payment depending on the task hardly seems like all its cracked up to be. It sounds more like e-serfdom or the e equivalent of working in a nail salon (anybody read that NY Times investigative report this past spring?)

Ross also houses the model of the reality television show star as a participant in the volunteer or amateur economy, which he identifies as “a degraded labor sector.” (32) That this highly successful phenomenon emerged long before web 2.0 says more about the entertainment industry than it does about technological innovation. However social media is the perfect vehicle for an even cheaper and more rapidly deployable or accessible reality based entertainment industry to flourish. While Ross doesn’t explicitly name or make connections about particular apps (I’m thinking of Vine) its worth investigating the efficacy of how these user based networks and apps as they utilized by old media or corporate interest at verily no cost to generate viral content. For the average person wanting their 15 minutes of fame or in the case of Vine, 6 seconds, this technology could totally be used to catapult a career as a reality television personality. Youtube is another popular favorite – ever take note of the amount of page views or video plays certain personalities have garnered? What amount of unwaged labor did these people have to perform in order to rack up the hits? How base or humiliating must some content be in order to acquire the necessary amount of views that put a youtuber on the radar of a reality television production house? Subscriptions and followers don’t come cheap, and in many ways it appears that these venues function as no pay internships for aspiring reality television personalities.

When Ross uses the term “false consciousness” in the very last sentence on page 37, he is referring to a Marxist concept that has typically categorized those workers who do not subscribe to a Marxist ideology as being duped or brainwashed by the capitalist overlords. Essentially, it’s a way to enforce pressure on individuals to fall in line with Marxist or rather communist platforms, where the definition of the worker self is in agreement with the necessity for a communist or Marxist revolution against the capitalist system.

Ross begins this section by delving into what the commonly agreed upon (from Marx onward to present day) definitions of work or labor are, in a historic sense. To apply an equally outdated (and definitely intended as a pejorative) term to a subsection of the population that works but not in the traditionally (and rigidly) defined way that waged labor is historically classified as, exposes the limitations that Marxist applications for understanding the way labor has shifted in the digital age. By advocating for a more flexible analysis or perspective on the types of labor being performed in the present day (unwaged labor which is indeed more common across the board in many nations and across many derivations of individual identities of workers) Ross frees the subset of the workforce that might be considered superfluous or in denial about the exploitation of their own labor contributions. By flipping the last two sentences at the close of page 37, Ross is basically saying that perhaps these workers (the under-40’s contending with the mutable conditions and rapidly shifting age of neoliberal economic and cultural mores) are not as naïve or brainwashed as a traditional Marxist analysis of waged labor would suggest.

I liked this section because Ross applied an intersectional analysis of labor through raising the issue of the how these terms have hegemonically dominated ideas of what labor and work look like. When I hear the term unwaged labor I immediately think of several different models of workers that have never had access to the protections of a labor analysis, one that is based on the ideas and models developed out of the organizing of union card carrying cismale industrial workers. This group includes sex workers and undocumented workers; these folks are largely charged with having a false consciousness about their situations… as if agreeing to assume positions that are typically outside of the moral and often nationalistic concerns of society are inherently evil, wrong, or due to the misgivings of an individual. That line of thinking fails to put the onus of the conditions that created a space for this kind of labor to exist – the systems and structures of the capital and the state, these hierarchies are what drive people to participate in “illicit” labor, it’s basic survival of the fittest. (I might even include those who work other street economies – but most folks are going to have a hard time understanding the previous two categories I suggested.)

According to Ross Distributed labor is suggested as a way of describing the use of the Internet to mobilize the spare processing power of a widely dispersed crowd of discrete individuals. Distributed Labor, is categorized in two terms. First, it doesn’t necessarily refer to the old term in applied in the last decade when technology was not as advanced as it is today. Instead, distributed labor refers as the technology work-flow and work place that is known as the mobile office because it could be performed everywhere. The “privilege” of distributed labor is that it could be performed anywhere as long as there is a connection. According to Ross the ones to perform this type of task are the freelancers or e-lancers he categorized them. Obviously, distributed labor as the term refers, tasks are distributed in an organized manner according to the existing talent of micro-division but a lower cost. Meaning that the labor being done isn’t free of cost; the costs is a lot less than the traditional. But as long as there is a network connecting and the job is being performed and productive it does not matter. Distributed Labor, is seen everywhere, obviously when production can be performed at a lower cost by more individuals and be even more profitable it does not matter. Obviously, corporations benefit from individuals such as freelancers, and others who are skilled and have the ability to complete task according to their business needs.