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CONTENTS by Routledge First published 20 13 by Routledge 71 1 Third Avenue, N ew York, NY 100 17 Simultaneously published in th e UK CONTENTS by Routledge -. 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Rout led,~ e is an imprint of the Taylor [" Francis Group, an informa business © 20 13 Taylor & Francis The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopymg and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. lrademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Libra ry of COI'\~ress CatalopiYlg -in- Publica tiol1 D ata Jligitallabor : the Internet as playground and factory / edited by 1rebor Scholz. AcknowledJ(ments Vll p. CIll. Ill eludes bibliographical references and index. I. Illtem et- Social aspects. 2. Jnformation society. Introduction: Why Does Digital Labor Matter Now? 1 I. Scholz, Trebor. II M85 1.I)S382013 Trebor Scholz :l () ~.~3' l- de23 2012012133 PART I ISllN : Y 7 ~ - () - 4 1 5 - 89694 - /j (hbk) ISllN: '.!7H -O- -I 15- 89695-5 (pbk) The Shifting Sites of Labor Markets 11 ISI3N : '.!7 8-0- 203- 14S79-1 (c bk) Typeset ill ApexBem bo 1 In Search of the Lost Paycheck 13 by Apex C oVantage, LLC Andrew Ross 2 Free Labor 33 Tiziana Terranova 3 The Political Economy of Cosmopolis 58 Sean Cubitt 4 Considerations on a Hacker Manifesto 69 McKenz ie Wark SUSTAINABLE FORESTRY ~ INITIATIVE PART II Certified Sour cing Printed and bound in [he United States of America by Interrogating Modes of Digital Labor 77 www.sfiprogram.org ~ 1-{)() 5SS___ Walsworth Publishing Company, Marceline, MO. The SF II(Jb elappli~ ' to the t ~~! 'Iexi< 5 Return of the Crowds: Mechanical Turk and Neoliberal States of Exception 79 Ayhan Aytes vi Co nLents F(l l1 dO I11 as Free Labor 98 II)/;([oil D e Kosnik 7 T he Digital, Labor, and Measure Beyond Biopolitics 112 P(/tricia Ticineto Clough -, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS H Whatever Blogging 127 Jodi Dean PART III The Violence of Participation 147 9 Estranged Free Labor 149 Mark Andrejevic 10 Digitality and the Media of Dispossession 165 Jonathan Beller Many thanks go to a great many people. I am indebted to my colleagues at The New School, a university in New York City, who have generously and enthusiasti­ 11 Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization cally supported my work, specifically The Politics of Digital Culture conference of Labor in World of War craft 187 series that I started there in 2009. Lis(/ Nakamura Nearly three years have passed since I convened The Internet as Playground and Factory conference that led to the publication of this book. I wish to recog­ nize and thank the participants of this conference who have contributed chapters PART IV to this book. Organ ized Networks in an Age of I would like to particularly thank my colleague McKenzie Wark for his intel­ Vu lnerable Publics 205 lectual fire and many helpful critical comments. Also working with Erica Wdter at Routledge has been a pleasure. 12 T hesis on Digital Labor in an Emerging P2P Economy 207 I would like to thank the following friends and colleagues, for thought­ Michel Bauwens provoking debates, challenging and constructive comments, prac ti ca l help w ith the conference, and putting this book together: Frank Pasquale, Neil Cordon, 13 Class and Exploitation on the Internet 211 Gabriella Coleman, Shannon Mattern, Laura De Nardis, Mark Greif, Sve n Trav is, Christian Fuchs Joel Towers, Jenny Perlin and the students in my spring 2012 seminar " Phy and Toil in the Digital Sweatshop." 14 Acts ofTranslation: Organized Networks as Algorithmic In addition, I would also like to thank the members of the mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity for the six-month-long pre-conference di scus­ Technologies of the Common 225 sion on the commercial geographies of unsung digital labor, value, and the fi ght Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle for fairness and economic democracy. I dedicate this book to the memory of my grandmother Herta Fritzsche, who Further Readinp' 241 was born in 1917 and labored as a home worker most of her life. Contributors 247 Index 251 R. Trebor Scholz 186 The Violence of Participation 29 Brian Holmes, Escape the Overcode, http:// brianholmes. wordpress.coml2007107 1201 escape-the-overcode/ . Additionally, Wlad Godzich, in an important essay called "Lan­ guage, Images, and the Postmodern Predicament," charts the increasing alienation ofthe 1 1 subject of language over the long durec of European modernism, linking its existential crisis to the decreasing purchase of language on reality orchestrated by the rise of mechanically reproducihle images. And Nicholas Mirzoeff finds that the term visuality DON'T HATE THE PLAYER, is first employed by Thomas Carlyle in "On Heroes and Hero Worship" to describe the perspective of the conservative hero who will save the republic from the rising HATE THE GAME power of the hordes. The suggestion is that the technomediated perceptions that are in the contemporary at once unavoidable and constitutive-perceptions that we now The Racialization of Labor identify under the rubric of visuality- continue to be tinged with this reactionary perceptual modality, in short, a suppression of the masses. Put another way, we could in World of Warcraft say that the contemporary formation of visuality continues to conspire against the progressive forces of history. Here I would also include my own work on the cinematic mode of production as the emergence ofa technology for the industrialization ofvisual Lisa Nakamura perception and the transformation of the form of both work and the wage. 30 For more on this issue of inscription on the flesh of the global-social body, see my essay, "Paying Attention," in Cabil1et 24 (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2007). The essay was republished for I )ocumenta XII. (Documenta is the largest contemporary art exhihition in Europe-similar to the Venice Uiennial but curated hy a single curator. http://d13.documcnta.de/) Cartman: "I am the mightiest dwarf in all ofAzerothl " Kyle: "Wow, look at all these people playing right now." Cartman: "Yeah, it's bullcrap. I bet half of these people are Koreans." South Park, Season 10, Episode 8, '?vlake Love Not Warcraft"l Where did all the doggies and kitty cats go Since the gold farmers started to show Don't want to know what's in the egg roll And they keep comin' back Cuz you're giving them dough Take one down and I felt inspired Corpse camp until This China-man gets fired That's one farmer they'll have to replace Not supposed to be here in the first place. r don't know any other way to convey How much we wish you'd all just go away Server economy in disarray Guess I'll just fear your mobs around all day. Ni Hao (A Gold Farmed' Story), warcraftmovies.com Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMOs) such as World of WarCl-aft (WoW), Lineage II, and Everquest are immensely profitable, skillfully de­ signed, immersive, and beautifully detailed virtual worlds that enable both exciting 188 The Violence of Participation Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game 189 game play and the creation ofreal-time, digitally embodied communities. In 2011 , insult that seems aimed more at one's style of play than one's real-world ethnicity" World of Warcraft surpassed 10 million users, confirming games economist Ed­ (S teinkuehler 2006: 200), the construction of Chinese identity in MMOs as abject, ward Castronova's (2005) predictions for exponential growth, and these players undesirable, and socially contaminated racializes the culture of online games, a are intensely interested in and protective of their investments in the virtual world culture that scholars such as Castronova (2005) have claimed are unique (and valu­ of Azeroth. This stands to reason: as Alex{ nder Galloway (2006) writes, "virtual able) because they are exempt from real-world problems such as racism, classism, worlds are always in some basic way the expression of utopian desire." One of "looksism," and other types of social inequality. 4 Though, as T. L. Taylor (2006) players' primary rallying points as a group has been to advocate strongly that notes, MMOs are distinguished by their "enormous potential in a fairly divisive American video game developer and publisher Blizzard Entertainment regulate world," the "fa ct that people play with each other across regions and often coun­ cheating within the game more stringently. However, the definition of cheating is tries" as often as not results in ethnic and racial chauvinism: "as a tag the conflation unclear, despite the game's end-user license agreement, since many players break of Chinese with gold farmer has seemed to come all too easy and now transcends these rules with impunity, a state of affairs that is actually the norm in MMOS2 any particular game" (Taylor 2006: 321). Robert Brookey (2007) expands upon As Mia Consalvo (2007) argues, it makes much less sense to see cheating within this claim; in his analysis of gaming blogs, he discovered "overt racist attitudes" to­ games as a weakness of game design or a problem with player behavior than to ward Chinese farmers; most importantly, that "some players, who harbor negative see it as an integral part of game culture, a fea ture that keeps players from getting feelings toward Chinese farmers, do not believe that these feelings denote racial stuck and quitting.
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