felizabeth has 46 post(s)

“Return to the Crowds,” the title of Ahyan Aytes’s essay about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, already gives us some clues about the relationship between Amazon.com’s micropayment-based crowdsourcing platform and the 18th-century Automaton Chess Player from which its name is derived. If we can begin to understand the mechanical function Aytes affiliates with the crowd for the 18th-century chess player, I believe we will come closer to understanding the argument he is making.

Kempelen himself admits that the automatic function of the chess player is just a “happy deception” (Aytes 2013:105; Cook 1995). The general public or “crowd” is made aware of their status and privilege through their knowledge that the chess master assistant is the one who actually operates the automaton. But Aytes’s interest is not just in the automaton. He suggests aspects of “immaterial labor” pertinent to our contemporary political economic conditions can be understood as deriving from the game of chess itself, as it is connected to conceptualizations of subjectivity during the Enlightenment era. He argues that the game of chess is a representation of all that is possible for subjects in the Enlightenment universe, and suggests therefore that the actions of subjects are already coded by regulations, of the power and structure of the game (Aytes 2013:107).

Aytes views subjectivity in the era of Enlightenment as already limited by a power that is inherent to the way society is conceptualized and structured. But how then should we understand the relationship Aytes describes between the subject of enlightenment and the docility he attributes to the Oriental? As he (2013:107) writes, “the chess-playing Turk embodied an integration of the self-regulating liberal subject with the mechanical docility of the Oriental, performed within the coded socioeconomic universe of the game of chess.” Aytes proposes that the self-regulating liberal subject and the mechanical docility of the Oriental are functioning in tandem in this game.

Pointing to the work of Aihwa Ong (2006), Aytes argues that neoliberalism is a global system of exception. The mechanical function Aytes attributes to cognitive labor is described in relationship to crowdsourcing, but for this work there is “labor arbitrage” as well. Labor arbitrage “breaks apart the traditional relationship between the national labor legislations and the worker as citizen” (Aytes 2013:114). So we have a crowdsourcing system operating in a global market where the experience of exploitation depends primarily on whether interest in Mechanical Turk is motivated by the novelty of the experience, as it is in the U.S., or as a primary source of income, as Aytes suggests it is viewed by workers in India and China.

In her chapter, Tiziana Terranova (2013:46) describes the excessive activity online that is “free labor,” activity she views as at once both a feature of the cultural economy and a source of value, albeit unacknowledged, for advanced capitalist societies. To elaborate on this concept, she directs our attention to the work of Italian autonomist marxists including Maurizio Lazzarato and Paul Virno. With his concept “immaterial labor,” Lazzarato stresses two different aspects of labor. On one side we have the “informational content” of the commodity or the transition of labor processes once performed by workers to computers and cybernetics. On the other side we have the “cultural content” of the commodity, activities that do not appear as work because they are more a matter of “defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumers norms, and, more strategically, public opinion” (see Lazzarato 1996:133).

Connected to Lazzarato’s immaterial labor, is the collective dimension of a networked intelligence that these scholars view as a force in the historical development of capitalism. Paul Virno notes passages in Marx’s Grudrisse where scientific knowledge is described as “the principle productive force” a force that will “[relegate] repetitive and compartmentalized labor to a residual position” (1996:266). No longer driven by human labor, the productive force of capitalism is driven by scientific knowledge, what Marx describes as “incarnate.. in the automatic system of machines” a “horrific monster of metal and flesh” (1996:266).

I highlight these passages relative to the question Terranova raises about subculture so we can begin to recognize some of what is difficult to address in a digital economy and the transition to cultural production online. As I’ve tried to convey with the advertisements and blogs we’ve surveyed, we are tempted to believe that we have within us the elements of a movement to resist capital “from the outside.” Marx himself predicted production would become a process where labor is no longer a governing unity and appears instead “merely as a conscious organ scattered among the individual workers at numerous points of a mechanical system” (Marx 1973:693). We should keep these passages in mind this week, particularly as we move forward to consider Ayhan Aytes’s discussion of the Mechanical Turk.

Hi everyone,

One of your classmates was struggling with the reading and our hybrid assignment for this week. I’m posting my response to her question in case there are others searching for a little more guidance.

We can begin to understand Terranova’s argument by breaking down the concepts she uses. With this question I want students to begin to think about the relationship of capitalism to culture and sub-cultural movements in particular (see Terranova, pages 52-53).

A good place to begin is by making sure you understand what a subcultural movement is. Some would argue that the 1970s punk rock movement was a subcultural movement, but there are many other examples. Try to come up with a good working definition of this concept. What is the function of a subcultural movement? Next, return to Terranova’s text to try to see the point she is making. Why might we be tempted to think such movements are outside the reach of capitalism? Terranova makes a compelling argument for why this is not the case. With this assignment I want you to try to understand and explain what you think her argument about subculture is. This will help us begin to understand her argument about free labor and the digital economy.

See you Thursday!

Elizabeth

Commenting on Ross’s argument, that digital media gives us a cheapened or discounted labor, many of you noted the different feelings that come with “no collar” work or with labor that can be done anywhere, requiring so little concentration that the word “labor” hardly seems to qualify. Others noted how uneven the playing field has become, when, for example, those who can afford to buy unpaid internships in hopes that these opportunities will lead to fruitful employment later in life. Meanwhile those less fortunate are forced into “precarious work,” or a marketplace for work that doesn’t come with the same regulations afforded to standardized forms of employment. Still others of you focused on the implications of machines taking over tasks that people were once paid to do, noting how the age of “self-service” is cheapening labor by making production part of the process of consumption.

Relative to all these issues are questions about whether and how technology contributes to the production of capital. Understanding Ross’s perspective on this issue requires we focus on his reading of Marx. He stresses that “cheapened” labor should be understood alongside Marx’s discussion of “living labor” and “dead labor.” In Capital Vol. 1, (1867:217), Marx notes how the production of capital involves “dead labor,” or a labor that is already embodied in the materials used to produce a new commodity. For Marx (and I think for Ross too) technology cannot directly produce value. Instead it alters the social conditions of human labor, on which Marx’s labor theory of value is based. We should keep this point in mind as we move through Scholz’s edited volume, as so many of these essays return to this point, to ask: what is the relationship of digital technology to the wealth that is produced in our contemporary political economy?

Digital Media and Society – Midterm Exam

In considering what circulates in an attention economy, many of you pointed to the new forms of waste and notoriety that have come with the rise of digital media. Along with this understanding of what digital media generates (more celebrities and e-waste), Taylor suggests, albeit indirectly, that we ourselves are changing.

A pivotal moment in American media history that is mostly forgotten today, Taylor (2014:192) explains how the quiz show affair helped pave the way for public service broadcasting as well as for the principle that there should be clear boundaries that separate programming from marketing and editorial from advertising. But, she argues, digital media is allowing marketers to finally break through the wall that separates art and editorial information from product information. Advertisers no longer have to rely on publications to purchase audiences. The “content industry” has not been abandoned. But content “about the world” is no longer understood as divisible from “what is for sale.”

The Internet appears to be shattering an older, more established form of order that made self-promotion unnecessary and unsavory. But all of this has happened before. Technology commentators invoke Max Weber’s explanation of the Protestant Reformation to celebrate this transformation while Taylor notes a transformation of long-held views about the accumulation of capital in and for itself facilitated by the Reformation (Taylor, 2014:208-9). Accumulation of wealth became attached to a moral vision: a life viewed as both efficient and productive. The accumulation wealth was evidence, therefore, of an individual’s spiritual significance.

Perhaps we should ask whether these two realms (the “existing” world and what is “made for sale”) were ever as clearly distinguishable as we imagine them to be? Are we in the midst of another Reformation today where, with the rise of an “attention economy,” ourselves and our relationships are available for sale?