FIRST IN A SERIES OF BIENNIAL CONFERENCES ABOUT THE POLITICS OF DIGITAL MEDIA THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY NOVEMBER 12–14, 2009 AT , CITY www.digitallabor.org

The conference is sponsored by Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts and presented in cooperation with the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons The New School for Design, Yale Information Society Project, 16 Beaver Group, The New School for Social Research, The Change You Want To See, The Vera List Center for Art and Politics, ’s Council for Media and Culture, and n+1 Magazine. Acknowledgements General Event Support Lula Brown, Alison Campbell, Alex Cline, Conference Director Patrick Fannon, Keith Higgons, Geoff Trebor Scholz Kim, Ellen-Maria Leijonhufvud, Stephanie Lotshaw, Brie Manakul, Lindsey Medeiros, Executive Conference Production Farah Momin, Heather Potts, Katharine Trebor Scholz, Larry Jackson Relth, Jesse Ricke, Joumana Seikaly, Ndelea Simama, Andre Singleton, Lisa Conference Production Taber, Yamberlie Tavarez, Brandon Tonner- Deepthie Welaratna, Farah Momin, Connolly, Jolita Valakaite, Cynthia Wang, Julia P. Carrillo Deepthi Welaratna, Tatiana Zwerling Production of Video Series Voices from Registration Staff The Internet as Playground and Factory Alison Campbell, Alex Cline, Keith Higgons, Assal Ghawami Geoff Kim, Stephanie Lotshaw, Brie Manakul, Overture Video Lindsey Medeiros, Heather Potts, Jesse Assal Ghawami Ricke, Joumana Seikaly, Andre Singleton, Deepthi Welaratna, Tatiana Zwerling Video Mashup James Blake Video Documentation Matt Sussman (CEA), Alex Cline, Jean Claire Web Design Dy, Stephanie Lotshaw, Lindsey Medeiros, Chris Barr Heather Potts, Jesse Ricke, Joumana Seikaly, Ndelea Simama, Brandon Tonner-Connolly, Conference Discussion Jolita Valakaite, Tatiana Zwerling, 99 all members of the iDC mailing list Advice and Encouragement Mailing List Moderator Neil Gordon, Ken Wark, Arien Mack, Trebor Scholz Roberta Sutton, Colleen Macklin, Victoria iDC Stream Vesna, Katie Salen, Michael Schober, Trebor Scholz Gabriella Coleman, Jenny Perlin, Kathleen Breidenbach, Sven Travis, Alexander Event PR, Marketing, Poster Design Drai!nger, Rachel Sherman, Orit Halpern, Communications and External Affairs, Karl Mendoca, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Verna de The New School LaMothe, Dawnja Burris, Robin Mookerjee, Photo Documentation Julia Foulkes, Stefania deKenessey, Timothy Conway Liao Quigley, Caveh Zahedi, Ely Kaplan, Shannon Mattern, Jonah Bossewitch, Dmitri Nikulin, Collaboration Prelude Events Ella Turenne, Scott Rosenberg, Laura Beka Economopoulos (November 11), DeNardis at the Yale Information Society Carin Kuoni, Alyssa Phoebus (September 29) Project, Dorothy Kidd, Leah Belsky at Kaltura, Ted Magder at New York University’s Live Streaming Council for Media and Culture, Mark Greif Victoria Vesna, Simeon Poulin at n+1 Magazine and Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri at 16 Beaver Group, and all our colleagues at The New School who enthusiastically and generously support this conference series.

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Text stock: Rolland Enviro 100 Print, 60 lb.,100% post- consumer waste, certi!ed Ecologo, Processed Chlorine Free, FSC recycled and manufactured using biogas energy. Dear all, Welcome to Eugene Lang College The New Labor: Digital Democracy or Centralized School for Liberal Arts for the !rst event in Sweatshop?” took place at The Change You a series of biennial conferences about the Want To See Gallery. politics of digital media. Moving forward, the next conference in the This inaugural conference, The Internet as Politics of Digital Media series, The Internet Playground and Factory, alerts us to the as Playground and University, will be held fact that hundreds of millions of people at Eugene Lang College in the fall of 2011. continuously make the totality of their life It will focus on a novel kind of participatory energy available to a handful of businesses. media literacy that underwrites students for the commons. A preparatory event in April At this international event about 100 2010 will focus on the death of !lm school activists, lawyers, media scholars, and the rebirth of screen education. anthropologists, artists, activists, students, programmers, historians, and social media In 2013, the third conference in the series, experts come together to reevaluate free The Internet as Barricade and Soap Box, labor, play, and pleasure in an economy that will focus on media activism outside is increasingly driven by the expropriation of the and Europe. Internet online sociality. cultures have radically internationalized over the past !ve years. English-language One aspiration of this conference is to content no longer dominates the Web. offer an accessible analysis of the ways in The digital divide is not what it used to which people are used—from traditional be. The Internet is not accessible to the labor markets to the Internet. Most people vast majority of people in economically who are active users of social networking developing countries, these populations services are not aware of the ways in which have a larger density of mobile phones than their attention is captured and their data those in the overdeveloped world. tracks are collected, analyzed, and sold. Enjoy the presentations and discussions, Many speakers will investigate the changing make new friends, tweet, blog, catch up with sites of speculative and actual !nancial colleagues, start a collaboration, have a value creation. In response to the awareness glass of wine, dance, walk through New York of patterns of expropriation, they will point to City at night, and stay in touch with us here a few starting points where we can tangibly at Eugene Lang College. politicize our lives. Trebor Scholz Beyond dreams of refusal of Internet cultures we propose support for data portability, decentralization, Free and Open Source Software, peer-created and owned public media, and alternative business models that do not merely strive for the biggest pro!t. If we better understand the granularities of today’s labor we will be able to discuss the lives we may lead tomorrow with more con!dence. Two prelude events have set the stage for The Internet as Playground and Factory conference. “Changing Labor Value” at the Vera List Center for Art Politics discussed the changing meaning of labor in the digital era. The second event, “Crowdsourced

1 Play the BackChatter THE INTERNET Conference Game! AS PLAYGROUND BackChatter is a game about predicting Twitter trends designed to be played AND FACTORY at conferences like this one. Beating BackChatter means sharpening your First in a series of biennial conferences sociolinguistic smarts. The game is divided about the politics of digital media into rounds that correspond to sessions at event where BackChatter is taking place. November 12–14, 2009 at Each round, you pick three words that you The New School, think will be popular in tweets about the conference during the next game round. You Live Stream send in your votes with a direct message to Sections of this conference will be live streamed the game consisting of the three words you at www.streamingculture.parsons.edu want to pick. During the next round, you get points whenever anyone uses your words Twitter in a tweet about the event (tweets marked The hash tag for this event is #IPF09. with #IPF09). The value of a word is based Add this to the end of each tweet. on how many people voted on it: the MORE people that picked a word, the LESS valuable it is. So the most valuable words are the words that no one else selected. A website keeps track of player scores from round to round, and has other useful info, like a dynamic word cloud formed from tweets about the event. If you do visit the game site, just remember that a game might not be in session so there might not be any game data showing. BackChatter is a project by Mike Edwards, Colleen Macklin, John Sharp and . www.backchatter.org

Play Rooms You did not come to this conference just to get inspired, learn, dance, and network. You’ll want to catch up with friends, compare notes, and start collaborations. This is not always easy at an urban campus and in the context of a conference. The play rooms are empty rooms reserved for you to use as you see !t.

Thursday: 6 East 16th Street, 8 to 10 p.m. Rooms 910 and 1009 Friday: 6 East 16th Street, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Rooms 734, 906, 913, 1002, 1132 Saturday: 6 East 16th Street, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Rooms 704, 705, 901, 902, 903, 904, 908, 911, 912, 1004, 1008

2 AGENDA Friday, November 13 Thursday, November 12 10:30 a.m.–1:15 p.m. SESSION A: VIRTUAL WORLDS, 5:00 p.m. CIVIL RIGHTS, AND SLAUGHTER Location Sheila Johnson Design Center, Kick-off film screening: Sleep Dealer 66 Fifth Avenue, Kellen Auditorium Location: Alvin Johnson Building, Digital Labor, Digital Immigration, and 66 West 12th Street, room 404 Transnationality or Why Virtual Worlds Need a Q&A with director Alex Rivera Civil Rights Movement, Lisa Nakamura; The 7:15–10:00 p.m. Absolute and the Virtual, Alexander Galloway; Digital Slaughter, Timothy Pachirat; Whatever Registration and Reception Blogging, Jodi Dean. Moderator Ferentz Location: Eugene Lang College Café, LaFargue. 65 West 11th Street (across the courtyard from the SESSION B: PERFORM OR ELSE: Alvin Johnson Building) AMAZON.COM’S MECHANICAL TURK Location: Alvin Johnson Building, Friday, November 13 66 West 12th Street, room 404 Exploitation and Agency in Amazon’s 8:00–9:30 a.m. Registration Mechanical Turk, Lilly Irani; Emoji Dick, Fred Benenson; Cognitive Labor, Crowdsourcing, 10:00 a.m. and the Cultural History of Human/Machine OPENING PLENARY Assemblages, Ayhan Aytes; The Mechanical Location: Tishman Auditorium, Turk Performance Handbook, Francesco 66 West 12th Street, main #oor Gagliardi. Moderator Edward Maloney. Remarks by SESSION C: IDEOLOGY AND THE Bob Kerrey, President of The New School EROTICS OF “PLAYBOR” Neil Gordon, Dean of Eugene Lang College Location: Alvin Johnson Building, The New School for Liberal Arts 66 West 12th Street, room 407 Trebor Scholz, conference convener, member On Social Lubrication: Between the Digital of the faculty of Eugene Lang College and Chthonic, Dominic Pettman; The Digital Ideology, Jonathan Beller; Work Hard, Play Harder—Labor, Playbor, and the Ideology of Play, Julian Kücklich; Estranged Free Labor, Mark Andrejevic. Moderator Deborah Levitt. SESSION D: ARE THE POETS USING YOU? Location: Alvin Johnson Building, 66 West 12th Street, room 510 Reading from “Implementation,” “Mystery House Taken Over,” “Book and Volume,” and “ppg256,” Nick Montfort; The Poetics of Uncreativity, Darren Wershler. Moderator Kate Eichhorn.

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3 Friday, November 13 6:00–6:30 p.m. FACEBOOK USER LABOR ENACTMENTS 1:15–2:15 p.m. Break Performance by Ursula Endlicher in collaboration with Burak Arikan 2:15–5:00 p.m. Location: 66 West 12th Street, room 404 SESSION A: THE GIFT OF 6:00–7:15 p.m. IMMATERIAL LABOR Location: Wollman Hall, 65 West 11th Street, SESSION A: WORK, LABOR, AND 5th #oor THE PRODUCTIVITY OF FUN After Tolerance, Sean Cubitt; Gift, Game, Location: 66 West 12th Street, room 510 Work, and Labor, McKenzie Wark; Where’s the Fun in ERPs? Labor, Logistics Immaterial Labor 2.0, Mark Cote; America and the Frontier of Biopolitical Regimes, Online Volunteers: Lessons from an Early Ned Rossiter; Work/life: Gatekeeping, Co-production Community, Hector Postigo. Ethics, Online Culture, Catherine Driscoll; Respondent: Julian Dibbell. Moderator Productivity is Fun, Martin Roberts; Class Meredith McGill. and Exploitation on the Internet: Theoretical Foundations and the Example of Social SESSION B: JUSTICE, ETHICS, Networking Sites, Christian Fuchs. AND EQUALITY: DIRECTIONS AND Moderator Joseph Heathcott. NEAR FUTURE SCENARIOS Location: 66 West 12th Street, room 407 SESSION B: COPYRIGHT AND HEALTH: Workers of the Net, Disassemble!, Ulises PRACTICE AS LABOR Mejias; The Ethical Economy, Adam Location: 66 West 12th Street, room 407 Arvidsson; Distributive Justice Online, Frank Governing Content in the Social Web, Niva Pasquale. Moderator Mark Larrimore. Elkin-Koren; Ends and Means: Digital Labor in the Context of Health, Robert Mitchell; SESSION C: EXPROPRIATING LABOR Ethical Visions of Copyright Law, James IN VIRTUAL WORLDS Grimmelman. Moderator Elizabeth Stark. Location: 66 Fifth Avenue, Kellen Auditorium Free Labor, Collective Intelligence, SESSION C: THE CHANGING SITES OF VALUE and Artistic Production, Christiane Paul; Location: 66 Fifth Avenue, Kellen Auditorium Software Art-Work For-Itself, Geoff Cox; The Digital Affect and Measure Beyond Invisible Threads, Stephanie Rothenberg; Biopolitics, Patricia Ticineto Clough; No Matter, Scott Kildall, Victoria Scott; The Scanning Eye: Knowledge and Visuality Performing Value: Labor and Contingency in Cybernetics, Orit Halpern; Affective Labor: in Virtual Worlds, Thomas Malaby. Past and Present, Melissa Gregg. Moderator Amanda McDonald Crowley. Moderator Judith Rodenbeck. SESSION D: ATTENTION, ELITISM, 7:30-10:00 p.m. AND VOLUNTEERISM: Friday Evening Party with DJ N-RON INTERROGATING MODES OF LABOR Wine will be served (ID may be needed) Location: 66 West 12th Street, room 510 Location: Wollman Hall, 65 West 11th Street, How Play Works Out and Work Plays Out in 5th #oor (enter at 66 West 12th Street) an Attention-Centered Economy, Michael Goldhaber; Old Skill, New Skill, or No Skill, Paolo Carpignano; Volunteerism at Global Voices, Ivan Sigal. Moderator Julia Sonnevend.

4 Saturday, November 14 1:45–4:30 p.m. SESSION A: THE EMANCIPATORY 8:00–9:45 a.m. Second Day Registration POTENTIAL OF PLAY Location: 66 Fifth Avenue, Location: 66 Fifth Avenue, Kellen Auditorium Ground #oor lobby outside Kellen Auditorium Pleasure: Labor: Labor: Pleasure, Gabriella 10:00 a.m.–12:45 p.m. Coleman; Dreaming the End of Bureaucracy: Network Theory and the Legacy of SESSION A: GOVERNANCE IN THE AGE Counterculture, Fred Turner; No Fun: Work OF VULNERABLE PUBLICS and Labor in Free Software, Chris Kelty; Location: 66 Fifth Avenue, Kellen Auditorium Arendt and the Creative Toil of Counting, Internet Governance: Where Digital Labor Ben Peters. Moderator Ted By!eld. Determines Digital Freedom, Laura DeNardis; Minds for Sale, Jonathan Zittrain; From Open SESSION B: LABOR METRICS: Source to Crowdsourcing: How Corporations ATTENTION, IDENTITY, COMPENSATION Co-Opt Collaboration, Douglas Rushkoff; Location: 6 East 16th Street, room 1009 Predatory Networks, Self-Defense, and Society, Are peer producers the subject of the P2P Brian Holmes. Moderator Laura Y. Liu. Revolution?, Michel Bauwens; Now What? Beyond Expropriation, Trebor Scholz; Identity SESSION B, PANEL DISCUSSION: and the Social: Data Politics and Ethics, PARTICIPATION LITERACY AND Hendrick Speck; Play and the Constitution of DIGITAL LABOR the Net, Pat Kane. Moderator Heather Chaplin. Location: 6 East 16th Street, room 1009 Howard Rheingold; Panarchy: Politics, and SESSION C: USER LABOR: Polycentrism, Paul Hartzog; Queer Theory and CREATIVE RESPONSES The Dichotomies of Work and Play, Christina Location: 6 East 16th Street, room 906 McPhee; Learning in the Networked Factory, User Generated Social Structures (UGSS), Alex Halavais. Moderator Yuri Takhteyev. Jonah Brucker-Cohen; Capital Implications, Kenneth Rogers; User Labor, Burak Arikan; SESSION C: DIGITAL LABOR AND THE BODY Caught You Looking: A Report from the Location: 6 East 16th Street, room 906/913 Bureau of Workplace Interruptions, Chris Barr. Catching Up With Color Online: Against The Moderator Brooke Singer. Concept of Immaterial Labor, Carolyn Lee Kane; Putting Everybody To Work, Lauren SESSION D: FAN LABOR, RISKY BUSINESS, Ellsworth; The Digital Securitization of Labor, AND THE SOCIAL WEB David Golumbia; The Internet Is a Totalitarian Location: Wollman Hall, 65 West 11th Street, Regime, Luis Vincent Nuñez; Digital Bodies, 5th #oor. Session D starts 2:00 p.m. Digital Labor: De/Reconstructing the Post- Fan Labor as Paid Labor, Abigail De Kosnik; human Subject, Brittany Anne Chozinski. Writing for the Algorithm: Digital Labor and Moderator Sumita Chakravarty. Mobile Work, Laura Forlano; Venture Labor: The Risks of Work in Social Media, Gina Neff; 12:45–1:45 p.m. Break Creative Resistance in the Brave New Workplace, Jesse Drew. Moderator Banu Bargu. 4:30–5:00 p.m. Break 5:00–7:00 p.m. CLOSING PLENARY DISCUSSION Location: Wollman Hall, 65 West 11th Street, 5th #oor Lisa Nakamura, Trebor Scholz, Howard Rheingold, Idil Abshir, Gabriella Coleman, Jonathan Beller, André D. Singleton, Fred Turner, Pat Kane, Ellen Goodman, and you.

5 Speakers and Abstracts productive formations—online phenomena like Web 2.0 and FLOSS, off-line practices like urban Mark Andrejevic, Estranged Free Labor “creative scenes” and booming local alternative Abstract: Accounts of free, immaterial, and economies, and new business !elds like Open effective labor invoke both the notion of autonomy Innovation and Ethical Consumerism. This paper and that of exploitation. This presentation focuses argues that these diverse phenomena take part on the role of exploitation, drawing on examples in the common emergence of a new and radically taken from commercial social networking different economic system, an Ethical Economy applications to explore what it might mean, where production is mainly collaborative and following Antonio Negri, to de!ne exploitation socialized and value is based on the quality in terms of the “production of an armory of of social relations (rather than on the input of instruments for the control of the time of social productive time). The talk proposes the beginnings cooperation.” The presentation argues for the of a theory of this ethical economy with particular centrality of estrangement and structural forms of emphasis on its new ethical value logic. It coercion to a critical conception of exploitation in suggests an analysis of its historical emergence, the digital era. showing how it can be understood to result from “My work focuses on the productive aspect of a dialectic between cooperation and competition surveillance and monitoring in the digital era. In inherent to industrial capitalism from the start. particular I explore the ways in which the capture Finally it indicates how the concept of an ethical of detailed information about citizens becomes a economy can cast new light on present struggles source of value creation and generation within the around the capitalist of digital context of the emerging interactive commercial labor and other forms of social production and model. I am an associate professor in the how such a perspective can cast new light on the Department of Communication Studies at the future of capitalism. University of Iowa and a postdoctoral researcher Adam Arvidsson teaches sociology at the University at the University of Queensland, where I am of Milano. He is the author of Brands. Meaning researching attitudes toward the disclosure of and Value in Media Culture (London; Rouledge personal information online.” www.uiowa.edu/ 2006), and has published on social production, ~commstud/people/faculty/andrejevic creativity and creative industries, and the political Burak Arikan, User Labor economy of cognitive capitalism in general. Abstract: We propose an open data structure, Presently he is involved in four major projects: User Labor Markup Language (ULML), to outline activist research on the conditions of “creative the metrics of user participation in social web labor” in the fashion industry in Milano; a research services. Our aim is to construct criteria and project on the !nancial value of reputation housed context for determining the value of user labor, at the Copenhagen Business School; an EU funded which is currently a monetized asset for the attempt to develop bottom-up collaborative brands service provider but not for the user herself. We for small entrepreneurs in the creative industries, believe that universal, transparent, and self- and a new book, The Ethical Economy, co-authored controlled user labor metrics will ultimately lead with Nicolai Peitersen and forthcoming from to more sustainable social web. User Labor is Columbia University Press in 2010. initiated by Burak Arikan and Engin Erdogan. www.ethicaleconomy.com/info/book Burak Arikan is an artist and researcher based Ayhan Aytes, Cognitive Labor, Crowdsourcing, and in New York and Istanbul. He creates networked Cultural History of Human/Machine Assemblages systems that evolve with the interactions of Abstract: Amazon’s MTurk is a signi!cant example people and machines. His work confronts issues of valorization of collective intelligence in the ranging from cultural sustainability to participatory networked economy. Mediated by this online economy to art and politics in networked platform, the workers of the “arti!cial arti!cial environments. www.burak-arikan.com; www.twitter. intelligence” system search, !nd, and ful!ll human com/arikan; www.facebook.com/burakarikan intelligence tasks (HITs) requested by developers. Adam Arvidsson, The Ethical Economy This assemblage represents a crucial formation Abstract: We are witnessing a wave of new on a global scale as it facilitates the supply of the intellectual labor needs of (mainly) U.S. based

6 businesses by workers from across the world. Turkey, 2000-2007. Her research and teaching The particular conditions of intellectual labor in interests include modern, late modern, and critical this crowdsourcing scheme maintain a transient, theory, theories of sovereignty, violence (particularly task-based, and limited-time relationship between different forms of political self-sacri!ce), labor, and the worker and the requester and do not require democracy. www.newschool.edu/NSSR/faculty direct communication between the parties. The Chris Barr, Caught You Looking: A Report from Chess Playing Automaton of 18th-century inventor the Bureau of Workplace Interruptions von Kempelen is the metaphor for the relationship Abstract: Recent shifts in labor constructs to this system establishes between intellectual what is being termed “immaterial labor” or “Post- labor and seemingly automated complex tasks Fordism,” parallel the rise of artistic practices since, in both cases, the performance of workers that have as their basis viewer collaboration and who animate the arti!ce is obscured by the participation. This presentation looks at artworks spectacle of the machine. This relationship can by the presenter and others that engage the be further scrutinized by approaching the concept digital workplace. Speci!cally, pieces such as of automata in the entire cultural history of the “Bureau of Workplace Interruptions” aim to human machine assemblage in the West. Within intervene in the communication "ow of a normal this genealogy of machine animating specters, workday in order to free bandwidth for more the linkage between von Kempelen’s Chess intimate communication. This discussion revolves Playing Automaton and Amazon’s crowdsourcing around tactics to slow workplace production with enterprise appear to be more than a mere communication technologies and invisible theater. trade insight, especially in the context of the disembodiment of information formulated Chris Barr is an artist and designer concerned with through the postwar cybernetic discourse, contemporary labor patterns, communication, and which has largely contributed to the current workspace dynamics. His work spans various media conceptualization of cognitive labor. including networked performance, installation, and video, and has been exhibited internationally, Ayhan Aytes is a media researcher studying notably at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, cultural interfaces by means of media archaeology. the Lab in San Francisco, and Centre de Cultura His focus is on understanding pre-modern media Contemporània de Barcelona. Chris is an assistant such as maps, automata and clocks within professor in the Department of Art and Design at their social, cultural and political context. His West Virginia University. www.chrisbarr.net photography and multimedia works were recently exhibited in a joint project in Istanbul, Reading the Michel Bauwens, Are Peer Producers the City of Signs: Istanbul: Revealed or Mysti!ed. He Subject of the P2P Revolution? holds a master’s degree in Communication Design Abstract: Addressing social contracts and social from the Institute of Design in . He is a con"icts in peer production, the presentation PhD candidate at the University of at covers three different models of online value San Diego in the Department of Communication creation characterized by different social and a research assistant in the University contracts and social con"icts. The contradiction of California multi-campus research group between users/value creators and platform Transliteracies. www.ayhanaytes.net owners is assessed for its emancipatory potential in the new context of knowledge labor. Banu Bargu (moderator) is an assistant professor of Political Science at The New School Michel Bauwens is an active writer, researcher, for Social Research and Eugene Lang College, and speaker on the subject of technology, culture, teaching political theory. She received her PhD and business innovation. He is the founder of the from the Department of Government at Cornell Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives and works University in 2008. She has received numerous in collaboration with a global group of researchers teaching and research awards, including the John in the exploration of peer production, governance, M. and Emily B. Clark Award for Distinguished and property. He has been an analyst for the United Teaching, Luigi Einaudi Fellowship, and the Janice States Information Agency, knowledge manager for N. and Milton J. Esman Prize for Best Dissertation. British Petroleum, and eBusiness strategy manager She is currently !nishing a book manuscript, for Belgacom, as well as an internet entrepreneur in Human Weapons: The Death Fast Struggle of native Belgium. He coproduced the TV documentary

7 Technocalyps with Frank Theys and co-edited a Beller is the author of The Cinematic Mode of two-volume book about the anthropology of digital Production: Attention Economy and the Society society with Salvino Salvaggio. Michel is Primavera of the Spectacle and Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam and Visuality, Nationalist Struggle and the World- an external expert for the Ponti!cal Academy of Social Media System. He has taught in the History of Sciences. He currently lives in Bangkok, Thailand. In Consciousness and Literature program at University February 2009, he joined Dhurakij Pundit University’s of California at Santa Cruz, at San Francisco State International College as a lecturer, assisting with the University, at Barnard College, and is currently development of the Asian Foresight Institute. professor of Humanities and Media Studies at www.p2pfoundation.net; www.re-public.gr/en . www.jonathanbeller.wordpress.com Ted Byfield (moderator) is an assistant professor Jonah Brucker-Cohen, User-generated in the School of Art, Media, and Technology of Social Structures Parsons The New School for Design. He has worked Abstract: Digital communication tools are a for more than a decade as a freelance book critical component of everyday life for many editor for academic and public-interest publishers, people. The appropriate or inappropriate design of including Cambridge University Press, the Dia Center communication tools in"uences and shapes how for the Arts, the New Press, Scribner/Macmillan, we connect, interact, and collaborate in local and and Zone Books, and has been co-editor of “ICANN distributed groups. Many of the digital tools we use Watch” since 2001 and co-moderator of the Nettime arose organically, without explicit understanding of mailing list since 1998. He has presented at many the complex effects they have on human behaviour. conferences, including Tulipomania (Amsterdam, For example, mailing lists emerged more than 30 2000), blur_02 (New York City, 2002), the Next 5 years ago, and yet the social experience of mailing Minutes 4 (Amsterdam, 2003), Library 2.0 (Yale lists has remained nearly unchanged, e.g. mailing University, 2008). His writings on subjects ranging lists do not exist that are designed to explicitly from space photography to internet governance have support business processes. THWONK is an been published in First Monday, Frieze, Le Monde ongoing collaborative project (with Mike Bennett) Diplomatique, and Mute to name a few. He has to research Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and consulted for the BBC, the Kitchen, the Open Society Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). CMC Institute, and the Waag Society for Old and New is concerned with the design and study of online Media. His honors include contributing to the winner communication tools like email, instant messaging, of the 1997 Rotterdam Design Prize, a Design Trust text messaging, social networks, and Twitter. for Public Space Fellowship in Journalism in 2002, THWONK is a free website, authoring application, and a 2003 grantfrom the Open Society Institute. and infrastructure designed for crowd-sourcing and He was a contributor in 2003-2004 to the Social simplifying the creation and rapid prototyping of Science Research Council’s Information Technology novel CMC systems so that non-technical users can and International Cooperation workgroup. invent and explore their own CMC. Our purposes Jonathan Beller, The Digital Ideology with THWONK are to shed new light on possible Abstract: “Digital” has become the mantra for all CMC designs and to simplify the process of CMC things contemporary and, as such, signals that the implementation and research. capitalist market is present in the very articulation Jonah Brucker-Cohen, researcher and artist, is a of digitality. We can be sure that unless we PhD candidate in the Disruptive Design Team of ourselves develop an antagonistic relation to “the the Networking and Telecommunications Research digital” and “digital culture,” our creativity, if that’s Group (NTRG) of Trinity College, Dublin. His work what it is, will continue to serve that system, which and thesis focuses on the theme of “Deconstructing structurally guarantees the accumulation of wealth Networks,” which includes projects that attempt by a tiny minority and the intensifying immiseration to critically challenge and subvert accepted of the global majority. Thus, from the standpoint of perceptions of network interaction and experience. social justice, any theory of labor/value that does He received his masters degree from the Interactive not reckon with structural inequality and the larger Telecommunications program of New York contradictions of capitalism is pernicious. University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Since 2003, he has co-led the Scrapyard Challenge Workshops with Katherine Moriwaki, held in more than 14 countries

8 across Europe, South America, North America, Asia, Sumita Chakravarty (Moderator), is associate and Australia. His work has been exhibited at the professor of Media Studies, former chair of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College The of Modern Art (MoMA, New York), Institute of New School for Liberal Arts in New York. She is Contemporary Art (London), Whitney Museum of the author of National Identity in Indian Popular American Art ArtPort, Ars Electronica, ZKM Museum Cinema, 1947–1987 (Univ. of Texas Press, of Contemporary Art, Dutch Electronic Art Festival, 1993); The Enemy Within: The Films of Mrinal Art Futura, SIGGRAPH, ISEA, Chelsea Art Museum, Sen (London: Flicks Books, 2000); “Fragmenting and others. www.coin-operated.com; www.twitter. the Nation: Images of Terrorism in Indian Popular com/coinop29 Cinema” in Terrorism, Media, Liberation (2005); Paolo Carpignano, Old Skill, New Skill, or No Skill? “The Erotics of History: Gender and Transgression Abstract: The paper traces the genealogy of the in New Asian Cinemas” in Rethinking Third World current crisis of work by revisiting the canonical Cinema (2003). Recent publications include transition between Fordism and Post-fordism and “Cultural Studies Legacies: Visiting James proposes a historical and conceptual context Carey’s Border Country” and essays on media for the discussion of digital labor. Rather than globalization. She is currently working on two book focusing on the institutional changes in labor projects: one on technology and the erotic, and processes and management strategies, it looks the other on media and immigration. at them from the point of view of the changing www.newschool.edu/lang/faculty nature of skill, critically examining notions such Heather Chaplin (Moderator) is a professor of as craftsmanship, deskilling, and multitasking, journalism at The New School and author of the which have been used to describe the quality of acclaimed book, Smartbomb: The Quest for Art labor in manufacturing, mass production, and Entertainment and Big Bucks in the Videogame distributed production. It questions traditional Revolution. She recently participated in a Ford dichotomies such as unproductive and productive Foundation grant looking at issues of the public labor, employment and unemployment, expertise interest in the next generation of the Internet focusing and amateurism, free labor and waged labor, on digital literacy and journalism. She has been etc. In particular, the paper focuses on the interviewed for and cited in publications such as the present !nancial crisis and what it dramatically New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, New York Times reveals about the structural changes taking Magazine, Businessweek, and the Believer and has place in the nature of labor practices. It argues appeared on shows such as Talk of the Nation, and that the !nancialization of daily life and the CBS Sunday Morning. Her work has appeared in the systemic condition of “precarity” and “forced New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, GQ, Details, entrepreneurship” are but aspects of the blurring and Salon. She is a regular contributor on game of the distinction between labor skills and “naked culture for All Things Considered. living.” Ultimately, the paper expects to contribute Mark Coté, Immaterial Labour 2.0 to the questioning of the notion of labor, not Abstract: In previous research, I proposed the only as an analytical category but as subjective concept of immaterial labour 2.0 as one way in practice. which we might unpack the relationship between Paolo Carpignano is an associate professor of play and labour in distributed digital networks. For Sociology and Media Studies at The New School this conference, I explore more basic questions and coordinator of the MA/PhD program in the raised about the relation between the human and sociology of media. He is also a writer, consultant, technology as suggested by contemporary media and producer for production companies in the theory, particularly via Bernard Stiegler and Mark United States, Brazil, and Italy. He is the author Hansen. Following the proposition that technics of articles on sociology, social history and media marks an originary condition of the human, I theory, and co-author of Crisis and Workers’ want to consider the latest prosthetic condition Organization and The Formation of the Mass of social networks as mapped by a “medium Worker in the USA, and of the online project cartography” inspired by Deleuzian ethology. As Televisuality. He is currently working on a new such, play would transpire on an immanent plane book on the relationship between work and media. marking the power of socially-networked selves www.newschool.edu/mediastudies/faculty in terms of both temporal-spatial extensions and

9 affective capacity. Conversely, labour would be earlier co-authored work on affect itself, the captured on a plane of transcendence in all its conceptualization of which involves reevaluating technico-jurudical forms. What social bodies can certain assumptions necessary to theorizing do in these contested spaces remains in tension. digital labor. These assumptions concern For the past two years Mark Coté has been the relationship of energy, matter, work and an assistant professor in Cultural Studies at information on one hand and on the other the Trent University with a focus on media and relationship of measure and value. In suggesting communication. He has published extensively that the digital is instigating a transvaluation of on networked new media in Theory & Event value, I offer comments on labor power, economy, (under review), Ephemera, Canadian Journal of and governmentality. The presentation is meant Communications, Derive Approdi La Revista, and as an intervention or an inserted re"ection borderlands, among others. His work deploys raising the question who or what is laboring in the contemporary media theory, autonomist theory and conceptualization of digital labor? continental thought to understand the relations Patricia Ticineto Clough is professor of Sociology between the human and technology and affect and and Women’s Studies at the City University of New political economy. www.facebook.com/cote.mark York-Queens College and the Graduate Center. Brittany Anne Chozinski, Digital Labor: She is the author of Autoaffection: Unconscious Re/Deconstructing the Post-human Subject Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (2000), Abstract: How does this invisible interaction labor Feminist Thought: Desire, Power and Academic affect our bodies? What were key steps in the Discourse (1994), and The End(s) of Ethnography: history of interaction design that managed to From Realism to Social Criticism (1998). She is mobilize and structure the social participation of editor of The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social bodies and psyches in order to capture value? (2007) and, with Craig Willse, editor of Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Brittany Anne Chozinksi is currently completing Death (forthcoming). Clough’s work has drawn on her PhD in sociology at The New School for theoretical traditions concerned with technology, Social Research, where she previously earned a affect, unconscious processes, timespace, and master’s degree in sociology. By day, she works as political economy. She is currently working on a multimedia specialist for a nonpro!t adoption Ecstatic Corona an ethnographic historical agency, handling everything from social media to research and experimental writing project about digital video and web editing. She has taught as where she grew up in Queens, New York. an adjunct professor of sociology at Marymount www.soc.qc.cuny.edu/faculty/clough College and is currently in her second year as a research assistant for Dr. Jaeho Kang on Gabriella Coleman, his work involving propaganda, the Frankfurt School, Pleasure: Labor: Labor: Pleasure and communications studies. Her work revolves Abstract: One of the distinctive features of around media and subjectivity, with particular contemporary Internet labor is pleasure. Whether interest in the digital screen, alterity and mimesis, it is the pleasure of writing a review on Amazon or and the body and subject is highly mediated digital crafting your own clothes (and then selling them environments. Though labor has not been a key on Etsy), a sense of pleasure and pride often focus of her work, it is a reoccurring them, and follows from these activities of labor common on she has previous written on televisual labor and the Internet. In this talk, I examine the politics of how this shifts with battles of convergence with the labor and pleasure by addressing a new class internet and mobile media. Chozinksi has a strong of character also common on the Internet, the background in cinema studies and the Frankfurt griefer and troll who, as their name suggests, School and seeks to apply critical theoretical cause grief on the Internet for the sake of the lulz analysis to media and technology studies within (aka pleasure). With a focus on recent battles sociology. www.facebook.com/brittany.chozinski; between Anonymous (the trolls) and the Church of www.twitter.com/topshelf Scientology, I explore the importance of pleasure (that often bubbles directly from labor) for Patricia Ticineto Clough, The Digital Affect understanding not only this speci!c case but for and Measure Beyond Biopolitics critically grappling more generally with the nexus Abstract: My presentation returns to an between labor and pleasure on the Internet.

10 Trained as an anthropologist, Gabriella Coleman (2007) and is currently working on a book project. is an assistant professor in the Department of He is an editor for the DATA Browser book series Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. (published by Autonomedia) and co-edited She teaches courses on hacking and digital Economising Culture (2004), Engineering Culture politics and has done the bulk of her research (2005) and Creating Insecurity (2009). on the politics of free software. www.anti-thesis.net/work www.steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/ Jeff Crouse (participant in Prelude event, Gabriella_Coleman; gabriellacoleman.org/blog Nov. 11) talks about a few projects of his that Geoff Cox, Software Art-Work For-Itself use Internet labor, including Invisible Threads, a Abstract: With software, not only is the virtual online sweatshop; Crowded, a radio show programmer’s work dif!cult to identify (often produced by Mechanical Turk workers; Dirt Party, hidden behind the interface) but the user’s labor where personal information about party-goers is also disappears into the operating system. In a gathered by online workers to create a live visual contemporary scenario, this is exempli!ed by presentation; and You3b, a community site for the the operations of “social media,” wherein the creation of YouTube triptychs. social relation is produced in restrictive form, Jeff Crouse makes playful parodies commenting underpinned by the socio-technical hierarchical on the role of technology in our lives. His work logic of server-client relations. The participatory takes many forms, including software, Web work-play ethic of social media can thus be applications, installations, games, and video. understood as an expression of new forms of His piece Invisible Threads, a mixed-reality control, such that the value stolen no longer installation about virtual labor, was featured at relates simply to labor power but to subjectivity the New Frontiers Gallery at the Sundance Film too. The associated dislocation of social Festival in 2007. James Chimpton, a robotic antagonism remains useful to conceptualize monkey, interviewed the artists of the 2008 the way that exploitation is subsumed into the Whitney Biennial using information harvested from wider social realm. Consequently, the control of the web in real time. Another piece, Dirt Party, social media, and the labor related to it, are key made people at the 2008 Futuresonic Festival sites of antagonism that need to be identi!ed in Manchester confront their online identities by for alternatives to be engaged. The presentation crowdsourcing the task of digging up “dirt” about refers to a number of artistic projects that draw them from the Internet. His work has also been attention to the contradictions expressed in the shown at the DC FilmFest, the Come Out and Play complexities of production, and the continued Festival in Amsterdam, Laboral in Gíjon, Spain, the importance of antagonism as a mechanism for Obie Awards, and the Eyebeam Art & Technology social change. The phrase software-art-work is Center in New York. He has received grants from expressed in a deliberately ambiguous way—to Rhizome and Turbulence, and is has been a fellow indicate the work involved in making software, at Eyebeam since 2007. BS, Individualized Study, the work involved in using software, as well as the New York University; MS, Digital Media, Georgia work that software does in-itself—taken together Tech. Crouse joined the Bennington faculty in to establish the necessity of software-art-work Computing in the fall of 2009. www.jeffcrouse.info operating “for-itself.” Amanda McDonald Crowley (Moderator) Geoff Cox is a lecturer at the University of brings to Eyebeam a substantial and international Plymouth (UK), an occasional artist, writer, background in media arts. She is a cultural and associate curator of Online Projects at worker, curator and facilitator who specialises in Arnol!ni, Bristol (UK). He is part of Art & Social creating new media and contemporary art events Technologies Research at Plymouth, as well as and programs that encourage cross-disciplinary an adjunct faculty member at Transart Institute practice, collaboration and exchange. She moved (Donau University, Austria). He has a research to New York in October 2005, relocating from her interest in software (art) studies expressed in native Australia where she had been based while various projects such as the co-curated touring working nationally and throughout Europe and exhibition Generator (2002/03), his PhD thesis Asia. She served as the executive producer of the Antithesis: The Dialectics of Software Art (2006), 2004 International Symposium of Electronic Art the co-curated public art project Social Hacking

11 (ISEA2004), developing the event from concept the idea of “whatever being” as a tag for a to major conferences, exhibitions, performances, contemporary mode of belonging unbound by concerts and site speci!c installations on a ferry in the inscriptions of disciplinary identity. Some the Baltic Sea and locations in Estonia and . agree that this mode could herald a better She was associate director for the Adelaide Festival coming community. Linking whatever being 2002 where she was also chair of the working to appearances of whatever in networked group that curated the exhibition and symposium communications and positioning it within a brief conVerge: where art and science meet. From 1995 history of the interconnections between media to 2000 McDonald Crowley was Director of the and identity, I argue that whatever being is the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT), wrong model for a subject capable of left political an organization with a national brief to foster links practice and opposition. between the arts, sciences and new technology. Jodi Dean is professor of Political Science at She has done residencies in Berlin, Germany Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Erasmus (1994/5), Banff Center for the Arts (2002), and at Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Sarai in Delhi, India (2002/3), regularly speaks at Philosophy at Erasmus University. She is the international conferences and festivals, and lurks on author or editor of nine books. The most recent a lot of media, technology, and culture email lists. is Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: www.eyebeam.org/people/amanda-mcdonald- Communicative Politics and Left Politics. crowley www.deanicite.typepad.com; www.twitter.com/ Sean Cubitt, After Tolerance Jodi3425; www.facebook.com/jodidean Abstract: Where the gift of labor has been Laura E. DeNardis, Internet Governance: commercialized, as it has in social networking, the Where Digital Labor Determines Digital Freedom surveillance functions of the database economy Abstract: The work of Internet governance—such as serve not only to target but to average. Here the managing Internet resources and setting technical virtual nature of the crowd, its power to act, is standards—is not only an issue of technical design removed by a process of forecasting how much but a form of technological rulemaking about the deviance is tolerable in a population. The challenge public’s civil liberties online. For example, some then is to challenge the auto-archiving of network Internet standards are at the center of technology activity with its extension. What is essential is not and law questions about copyright !ltering, the actual, nor identity, but precisely non-identity: surveillance and censorship, and individual privacy. the non-identical nature of the world to which The work of Internet governance is primarily done Western thought perpetually ascribes identity. by private institutions, often operating outside The challenge is to drive the logic of individualism the jurisdiction of traditional governments and to its far side, to turn the compulsory choice of completely out of public view. While the production consumerism into actual freedom. of content may be increasingly democratized, the Sean Cubitt is director of the program in production of technical architecture is not. DeNardis Media and Communications at the University will examine the shift from the traditional policy work of Melbourne and Honorary Professor of the of governments and citizens to the more diffusive University of Dundee. His publications include and private institutional labor of Internet governance Timeshift: On Video Culture, Videography: Video structures and will examine the role of openness, Media as Art and Culture, Digital Aesthetics, transparency, and other democratic values in Simulation and Social Theory, The Cinema helping to legitimate such a shift. Effect and EcoMedia. He is the series editor for Dr. Laura DeNardis is the executive director of Leonardo Books at MIT Press. His current research the Yale Information Society Project. She is an is on public screens and the transformation of Internet scholar, teaches at Yale Law School, and public space and on genealogies of digital light is the author of Protocol Politics: The Globalization technologies. www.culture-communication. of Internet Governance (The MIT Press 2009), www.unimelb.edu.au/media-communications; Information Technology in Theory (Thompson www.seancubitt.blogspot.com 2007 with Pelin Aksoy), and numerous book Jodi Dean, Whatever Blogging chapters and articles. www.lauradenardis.org; Abstract: Giorgio Agamben has introduced www.twitter.com/LauraDeNardis; yaleisp.org

12 Julian Dibbell (Moderator) has been writing of gifts, of social networking from maintaining about online culture for nearly two decades. He family bonds to dating or socialising with friends, is the author of two books about online worlds, and of just passing the time—overlap in so many Play Money: Or How I Quit My Day Job and Made ways with work spaces, work tools, and the Millions Trading Virtual Loot (Basic, 2006) and virtually compulsory elements of everyday life like My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual banking or schooling. I draw for this discussion World (Henry Holt, 1999). He has written essays not only on critical theoretical approaches to and articles about hackers, computer viruses, labour, including speculative terms such as online communities, encryption technologies, affective and immaterial labour, but also on policy music pirates, and the heady cultural, political, documents designed to manage the incursion and philosophical questions that tie these and of life on work, on activist claims regarding the other digital-age phenomena together. He lives in protection of life against the uncursions of work, Chicago, Illinois. www.juliandibbell.com and on ethnographic research across MMORPG Jesse Drew, Creative Resistance gaming, MUVE participants, fan !ction journal in the Brave New Workplace communities and archives, and academic use of Abstract: Communications has always been social networking sites. a key component of wage labor’s attempts to Catherine Driscoll is senior lecturer in Gender leverage better pay, improve conditions of work, and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. or creatively protest the boredom and monotony She works in a range of !elds, including cultural of work. How have these practices evolved as the theory, online culture, modernity, rural studies, digital workplace has supplanted more traditional and youth culture. Her publications include employment? Is there a continuity between the Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture fax machine and the photocopier and social and Cultural Theory (Columbia UP, 2002) and networking and mobile technologies? What is the Modernist Cultural Studies (UP of Florida, 2009). relationship between individual acts of creative Forthcoming publications include Teen Film: A expression and a collective labor response to new Critical Introduction (Berg, 2010), Broadcast forms of exploitation in the new workplace? These Yourself: Intimacy, Presence and Community are the questions I will explore in my presentation. Online (with Melissa Gregg), and a book on Jesse Drew is a writer and media artist whose work Australian country girlhood. Other current projects on participatory media in a democratic society, include an Australia Research Council project on labor communications and media technology country towns. www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/ have appeared in numerous publications gcs/staff/pro!les/cdriscoll.shtml and anthologies. Drew’s documentary and Kate Eichhorn (Moderator), Are the Poets experimental !lm/video work has been exhibited Using You? A Reading and Discussion internationally and domestically in many different with Nick Montford and Darren Wershler venues. For many years he was a labor activist in Abstract: Corporations are not alone in the both traditional smokestack factories and modern desire to expropriate the value of online users’ electronic assembly plants. He is currently director labor. Alongside corporate entities, writers and and associate professor of Technocultural Studies artists are redeploying users’ work and works, at the University of California at Davis. words and images, codes and innovations. In www.jessedrew.com contrast to corporations, however, their gain is Catherine Driscoll, Work/Life: Gatekeeping, primarily aesthetic rather than monetary, but is Ethics, Online Culture expropriated labor for aesthetic gain necessarily Abstract: In this presentation I want to think about less problematic than expropriated labor for the messiness of what is often referred to as monetary gain? More importantly, what might we work/life balance and understood by distinctions learn about the complexity and contradictions between leisure and labour in moves to manage of digital labor from writers and artists who what online culture means in the everyday lives chose to work within commercial platforms, of participants. It is not enough to acknowledge especially those actively appropriating other that work and life can’t be distinguished in the users’ labor? Is their work a mere extension and/ same way when the tools of leisure—of games, or enacted critique of corporate expropriations of online users’ everyday forms of participation

13 and creation? More broadly, what decisions institutions which govern access to content— drive writers and artists to work within or copyright and contracts. Social production is outside commercial platforms, and to what driven, to a large extent, by social motivation; it is extent do these decisions affect their status as often collaborative in nature, and it is created and cultural workers, the nature of their work and shared within a social context designed by social its long-term archivability? In this reading and media platforms. This social dimension is currently moderated discussion, writers Nick Montfort and missing from our regulatory approach to content. Darren Wershler investigate the possibilities and While the current intellectual property regime limitations of cultural production produced both focuses on central control, social production within and against commercial platforms and requires us to articulate a matrix of relationships the meaning of digital labor across literary and which has three pillars: the individual, the artistic communities. facilitator (either commercial or non-commercial, Kate Eichhorn is an assistant professor of Culture private or governmental) and the community of and Media Studies at The New School. Her research users. A better understanding of this complex focuses on material culture, the theory and practice dynamics—between individuals, crowds and of the archive, and the poetics of everyday life. social media platforms— is necessary in order to Recent articles have appeared or are forthcoming design adequate policies for the social web. The in Public Culture, Invisible Culture, Cultural Studies paper underlines the limitations of the current = Critical Methodologies and Women’s Studies: An regime and points to the need for rethinking Interdisciplinary Journal. She is also the author of our conceptual framework. I describe the social two books of poetry, including Fond (2008), and nature of UGC and analyze the implications of co-editor of Prismatic Publics (2009). She serves social production for the different stakeholders. as review editor for Topia: Canadian Journal of The social web creates a mixture of commercial Cultural Studies and is currently completing a book- and non-commercial interactions, transitory length study entitled Reading the Refuse: Archiving and enduring stakes, ad-hoc collaboration and and the Poetics of Everyday Life. www.newschool. sustainable communities. I explain why social edu/lang/faculty production and UGC might be incompatible with the current copyright regime. I also discuss market Beka Economopoulos, (Moderator; also analysis and argue that the view of users-platform participant in Prelude event, Nov. 11), has 15 interaction as a market transaction for goods and years experience as a grassroots !eld and online services governed by contracts, is rather limited. organizer, working with local, national, and Finally, I offer several insights on the institutions international NGOs and activist mobilizations. She that should govern access to User Generate is currently the vice president of Fission Strategy, Content in the social web. a consultancy specializing in Web 2.0 and new media approaches to online advocacy, organizing, Niva Elkin-Koren is the dean of the University of marketing, and communications. Prior to joining Haifa Faculty of Law. She is the founding director Fission, she directed the Online Organizing team of the Haifa Center for Law & Technology (HCLT). at Greenpeace USA, managing online/of"ine She received her LLB from Tel-Aviv University integration, distributed labor, and social media School of Law in 1989, her LLM from Harvard strategy. Beka is also a co-founder of Not An Law School in 1991, and her SJD from Stanford Alternative, a volunteer-run non-pro!t organization Law School in 1995. Her research focuses on the based in Brooklyn, New York, whose mission aims legal institutions that facilitate private and public to integrate art, activism, technology and theory in control over the production and dissemination order to affect popular understandings of events, of information. She has written and spoken symbols and history. www.!ssionstrategy.com; extensively about the privatization of information www.notanalternative.net policy, copyright law and democratic theory, the effects of cyberspace on the economic analysis Niva Elkin-Koren, Governing Content in the of law, liability of information intermediaries, Social Web the regulation of search engines, and the legal Abstract: The prevalence of social production strategies for enhancing the public domain. and the rise of user generated content (UGC) www.law.haifa.ac.il/faculty/eng/elkin.htm destabilize the fundamental premises of the legal

14 Lauren Ellsworth, Putting the Entire Population using also data from an ULML stream, which is To Work getting updated from a running system. In the Abstract: Lauren Ellsworth explores social media, presentation/show the participants, the audience, and the way in which media and interpersonal the students, are able to submit “movement relationships shift with the introduction of descriptions”—describing what the lead dancer international communities of communication. Is creates from scratch—and submit this to the participation in these communities labor? Are database, to be used again by the second dancer. we putting the entire population to work? Or are The returned data from the live-stream is used we transferring existing work to a new medium, as well and, together with the submissions, that coincidentally yields a greater capacity for in"uences the course of the show and co-creates aggregating and processing consumer data. a new physical representation of the Web. Ellsworth is a senior at the University of Chicago Since the mid-90s the Internet has had an studying computer science and law, with a focus impact on Ursula Endlicher’s practice, which on legal implications of Internet technologies, bridges the Web and physical reality. She uses particularly surrounding data portability, reputation the Web’s ‘hidden’ languages—its HTML code—to regulation, and expectation of privacy. She is choreograph performances, visualizes HTML in interested in the role that developers play in installations, and translates it into sound. Her work innovation, the shifting role of media with the was recently shown at Light Industry, Brooklyn; at introduction of social media, and the internet as a Theater am Neumarkt in Zürich, Switzerland; at network, in which personal network relations still Quartier21/Museumsquartier, Vienna, Austria; at reign supreme. www.redyaf"e.com; www.twitter. BM-Suma Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul, com/redyaf"e Turkey; at Woodstreet Galleries, Pittsburgh, PA; and Ursula Endlicher, Facebook User Labor Enactments at the LMCC Swing Space@Seaport in New York. Abstract: For the conference I am staging a She received commissions from Turbulence.org/ performance, which will translate XML (an New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., and from HTML-based language) into dance movements. the Whitney Museum for its artport website. Her The code “behind” the Web will be made visual, work is included in Rhizome’s Art Base, and in physical, and experiential. My artwork resides the ursula blicke videoarchiv at Kunsthalle Wien, on the intersection of Internet, performance, and Austria. Endlicher has lectured about her work installation. Previous works include a net art internationally and has contributed to several piece called “html_butoh”, and a live performance publications about net art, performance and series, Website Impersonations, both translate interactivity; she discusses these topics on her HTML tags into movements. In the performance blog, Curating Netart, which she runs together with series, dancers were creating new dance Ela Kagel. She was born in Vienna, Austria and movements based on the functionality of HTML lives in New York since 1993. www.ursenal.net tags; the dance vocabulary was added to an Laura Forlano, Writing for the Algorithm: online archive, the “html-movement-library”, and Digital Labor and Mobile Work reused on stage by other dancers. The audience Abstract: The Internet has enabled the emergence played an active role during these shows: they of virtual, decentralized and digital labor, which were invited to interpret the dance movements has reorganized the way people work, where into descriptions, brief sentences, and add them they work and what they do. Based on a 3-year to the ever growing HTML movement alphabet. study of mobile work practices and an ongoing Trebor Scholz introduced me to Burak Arikan, experiment in mobile work called Breakout!, this asking both of us if we might be interested presentation will examine individual accounts working on a performance piece together for of these changing work practices, environments the conference. The plan is to perform ULML and professions. For example, the growing ranks (user-labor mark-up language), based on Burak of freelance, self-employed and independent Arikan’s website “userlabor.org.” I have extended workers have formed new types of face-to- my current HTML-movement library and included face “communities” including membership in ULML tags. I will practice with my performers coworking spaces such as New Work City in New and introduce this new content, based on the York, which are supported by a range of social ULML grammar, to them. Burak suggested networking tools such as Twitter and MeetUp

15 groups; the "exibility and mobility of labor has of the exploited class is advanced. The relationship allowed for new spaces like cafes, parks and of class and knowledge labor is outlined and public spaces to be appropriated for work; and, implications for new media are discussed. The new jobs such as search engine optimizers (SEO) paper also discusses how useful categories such have been created. Such phenomenon point as the multitude by Antonio Negri and Michael towards the reorientation of individual identities Hardt, reproductive labor by Marxist feminism, away from !rms and towards ad-hoc, place-based and audience commodity by Dallas Smythe, are networks of likeminded individuals that perform for a concept of class in informational capitalism. various forms of unpaid labor for one another in The contemporary proletariat constantly creates absence of !rm-structured relations. In contrast and recreates spaces of common experience, to mass media and advertising accounts of such as the Internet, educational institutions, virtual, decentralized and mobile work, which knowledge spaces, culture, etc through their present a vision of anytime, anywhere work, these practices. These spaces and experiences are new forms of labor are contextual and deeply appropriated and thereby expropriated and rooted in place. It is vital that these place-based exploited by capital in order to accumulate capital. aspects of digital labor are taken into account in The notion of the Internet prosumer commodity is order to understand the overall socio-economic introduced as theoretical category that describes transformations that are occurring. contemporary Internet-based capital accumulation Laura Forlano is a visiting fellow at the Information strategies. Social networking sites (SNS) such Society Project at Yale Law School. She received as MySpace, Facebook, or studiVZ are Internet- her PhD in Communications from Columbia based integrated forms of communication and University in 2008. Her dissertation, When Code community-building. Based on this theoretical Meets Place: Collaboration and Innovation at foundation, a case study of social networking site WiFi Hotspots, explores the intersection between usage by students is presented. An online survey organizations, technology (in particular, mobile was based on a questionnaire consisting of 35 and wireless technology) and the role of place (single and multiple) choice questions, 3 open- in communication, collaboration and innovation. ended questions, and 5 interval-scaled questions, Forlano is an adjunct faculty member in the was carried out (N=674). The respondents were Design and Management department at Parsons asked about the major perceived advantages and the graduate programs in International Affairs and disadvantages of SNS. The results show and Media Studies at The New School, where she that public information and discussion about teaches courses on innovation, new media and surveillance and social networking platforms global affairs, technology and the city, technology is important for activating critical information policy, sustainable design and business ethics. behaviour. The results also allow the conclusion She serves as a board member of NYCwireless and that there are no easy solutions to economic the New York City Computer Human Interaction and political surveillance on SNS in an age of Association. Forlano received a master’s in surveillance and new imperialism and that the International Affairs from Columbia University, a topic should be analyzed critically by framing it diploma in International Relations from the Johns the context of larger societal issues. Hopkins University and a bachelor’s in Asian Christian Fuchs holds a venia docendi in the Studies from Skidmore College. research !eld of ICTs and society. His main www.law.yale.edu/intellectuallife/forlano research interests are critical social theory, general Christian Fuchs, Class and Exploitation social theory, media and society, critical political on the Internet: Theoretical Foundations and economy, critique of the political economy of the the Example of Social Networking Sites media and information, and information society Abstract: In this paper, I argue that class is a studies. He is author of more than 100 academic central concept for understanding the economic publications, including the monograph Internet processes of informational capitalism. The category and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age of class is conceived based on Marxian theory (Routledge 2008). www.fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at as a process of exploitation. It is not con!ned to Francesco Gagliardi, The Mechanical Turk capital as the exploiting class and wage labour as Performance Handbook the exploited class, but rather an expanded notion Abstract: While Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is

16 often regarded as a paramount example of neoliberalism, race and class today have been exploitation, according to a number of surveys “liberated,” but at the same time, they exist now several (western) MTurk workers engage with in a purely simulated form. I suggest that the the outrageously underpaid “HITs” (Human age-old logic of exploitation has never been more Intelligence Tasks) crowdsourced through the alive, never more purely actualized, than in today’s service for reasons other than monetary gain. The computer simulations. repetitiveness and mechanical nature of many Alexander R. Galloway is an author and tasks offered through Amazon’s “crowdsourcing programmer. He is a founding member of the marketplace” dovetails with deep-seated habits of software collective RSG and coauthor, with Eugene compulsive multitasking to generate a troubling Thacker, of The Exploit: A Theory of Networks form of entertainment. This performance/ (, 2007) as well as two other books on presentation will report on an ongoing project digital culture. He teaches at New York University. exploring the performative aspects of this www.cultureandcommunication.org/galloway; mode of engagement with MTurk (and similar) www.r-s-g.org tasks. The project, which involves designing and commissioning tasks through the Amazon service, Michael Goldhaber, How Play Works Out and is funded entirely by working on HITs. Work Plays Out in an Attention-centered Economy Abstract: While many see the Internet and digital Francesco Gagliardi is a performance artist, labor on it as simply a new source of capitalist historian of performance, and !lmmaker based in pro!ts, I see it rather differently. What I will call New York City. He has been working internationally the attention system is a new, post-capitalist as an actor, director and performance artist for “mode of production” that revolves around the over a decade. In 2000 he translated, directed, paying and receiving of what is most intrinsically and performed in the !rst Italian production of scarce: attention from other human beings. The Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. recipients are also individual people, much more Programs of his work were recently presented than either groups or corporations. Thus it is a in Los Angles (The Wulf, December 2008), new class system, composed of net attention Berlin (Miss Micks, January 2009), Torino, Italy receivers, stars, and net attention payers “fans.” (quindicifebbraio, June 2009), and New York City The class relations are quite different from those (Ontological-Hysteric Theater, September 2009). of capitalism. Paying attention is a form of labor, He is currently working on a series of invisible even though under most conditions it seems performances of mental tasks, and on a video fully voluntary. One is aligning one’s mind to that series exploring the performative aspects of of the attention recipient, and in this state one translation. He is writing about the photographic is in general willing to try to some extent to do documentation of in the 1960s what that recipient wants. When one has a huge and 70s, and researching the work of Stuart number of fans, this attention wealth can be Sherman. He holds a BPhil from Oxford University quite powerful. While it is true that companies and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of seek and sometimes make large pro!ts through Turin. www.francescogagliardi.net the Internet, I view that as entirely a secondary Alexander Galloway, The Absolute and the Virtual phenomenon. One way to demonstrate that this Abstract: While the new condition of digital life new mode is already very nearly dominant over is one in which the distinction between play and the old capitalist one is in terms of an index that I labor has collapsed, at the same time a number call the TPI index, which can be roughly evaluated of new divisions have appeared: segregations according to the different kinds of “transaction” between us and them, segregations between in each mode. The index value for the attention text and image, or segregations between race system turns out to be far higher today than that and class. Drawing primarily on the game World of the capitalist mode. of Warcraft, I examine the way in which many I began my professional life as a theoretical games today subscribe to a speci!c concept physicist and early on was a founder of Science of class and race, one still based on all the old for the People. I soon turned to questions of demons: segregation, division, essentialism, and technology and society, taught socialism and exploitation. How did this happen? After the labor Marxism, authored Reinventing Technology: Policies movement, after Jim Crow, after civil rights, after

17 for Democratic Values and about 24 years ago and on questions of the relationship between originated the idea of a new kind of economy culture and language diversity. He has published based on attention, which I think has come to widely on digital media and cultural studies; his dominate. This is the attention system. Formerly !rst book, The Cultural Logic of Computation, was I called it the Attention Economy though that published by Harvard University Press in Spring expression has been hijacked as far as its common 2009. www.people.virginia.edu/~dg6n meaning. It is an extremely prominent aspect of Ellen Goodman, Public Media 2.0: the Internet. I’ve written many articles, columns New Policy Directions and blog entries relating to this. Other interests Abstract: I will present the emerging conception include extending human rights, human evolution, of public media 2.0 and how the original abstract painting, photography, gardens, elephants, mandate of public broadcasting to engage in philosophy and post-modernism, and Democratic outreach and engagement is evolving. Public Party politics. I live in the SF Bay area. media entities are both inviting and resisting www.goldhaber.org; www.twitter.com/mgoldh; public contributions to new media productions www.facebook.com/michael.goldhaber and activities. The relationship between public David Golumbia, The Digital Securitization of Labor media professionals and publics in the work of Abstract: While the lines between “digital haves” creation, curation, and connection implicates and “digital have-nots” do not map precisely onto private and public media policies. the line between the lower and middle classes, Ellen Goodman is a professor at Rutgers University the association is close enough to raise disturbing School of Law at Camden, specializing in questions. Because the system of capital and the information law and policy. Professor Goodman’s economic exploitation on which it rests ultimately scholarship probes the appropriate role of determine the strati!cation of society into classes, government policy, markets, and social norms in only changing that system can change class supporting a robust information environment. She relations in any signi!cant way. In this sense, has focused recently on the future of public media “crossing the digital divide” for a member of the and recently authored a book chapter entitled lower class is poorly understood in isolation, even Public Service Media 2.0. This and recent law if it sometimes occurs in isolation. Rather, it must review articles are available at ssrn.com. Professor be seen as a species of class mobility in capitalist Goodman has spoken before a wide range of societies that is characteristic of other forms audiences around the world, has consulted with of such mobility—in principle available to many, the U.S. government on communications policy, but in practice distributed very unevenly. When and has served as an advisor to President Obama’s industries are digitized, part of what happens presidential campaign and transition team. She is is a process parallel to what Wall Street calls a Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s securitization—the conversion of a “non-derivative” Annenberg School of Communications and has asset (e.g., a share of stock that provides direct visited at Penn’s Wharton School and Law School. ownership in a company)—to a “derivative” asset. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty in 2003, Typically, the part of an asset most valuable to Professor Goodman was a partner at Covington & capital is arti!cially separated from the less Burling LLP, where she practiced in the information valuable part. This division profoundly distorts technology area. A graduate of Harvard College the nature of the assets themselves, by dividing and Harvard Law School, Professor Goodman was industries like mining and agriculture even more a law clerk for Judge Norma Shapiro on the federal fully than they had previously been into their court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. She “control” aspects and their “execution” assets— lives near Philadelphia with her husband and three and labor. Here we ask how we might theorize the children. www-camlaw.rutgers.edu/bio/1020 role for non-digital labor in a world managed by what is largely a digital elite. Melissa Gregg, Affective Labour: Past and Present Abstract: This paper provides an overview of the David Golumbia is Assistant Professor of Media concept of “affective labour” in media and cultural Studies, English, and Linguistics at the University theory to isolate two trends that seem speci!c of Virginia, and holds a PhD in English (University to the digital era. It begins with an overview of of Pennsylvania, 1999). His teaching and research feminist writings on immaterial labour that precede focus on issues of representation in digital media

18 both the Italian tradition lately dominant (in the implicit ethics, which are used to validate a vision work of Hardt and Negri, Virno, Lazzarato) and of respectful and market-oriented exchange the fan tradition of affective labour highlighted between creator and consumer. Proponents of by Henry Jenkins and others interested in expansive copyright law and strong enforcement “playbour” (Kucklich), the rise of the “pro-am” regularly deploy ethical rhetoric rooted in this (Leadbeater and Miller), “prosumer” (Tof"er) and/ vision. Perhaps more surprisingly, so do some or “produser” (Bruns). Bourdieu’s taxonomy of of their critics. I use this ethical lens to explore capital is used to suggest that current attempts some of the ways in which people envision an to quantify the exchange value of online digital ethical or unethical copyright system of production labour underestimate the signi!cance of social and and exchange and to illustrate some interesting cultural capital in social networking practices and tensions in the arguments of copyright critics. the degree of resistance to corporate exploitation James Grimmelmann, a former programmer, is already evident in online communities. Situating an Associate Professor of Law at New York Law today’s online social networking practices in a wider School. www.james.grimmelmann.net history of professionally-oriented “instrumental leisure” (Banks), the paper shows how affective Alex Halavais, Learning in the Networked Factory labour has become standardised in a wider range Abstract: The school is a factory for factory of white collar professional work than the male- workers. The school environment, traditionally one dominated work cultures of the past. Drawing on a of enclosure, intended to shape behaviors around three year study of information professionals, the the time-and-space regulation of the factory uniqueness of digital affective labour is shown to (and hospital and prison), has of late begun to lie in its anticipatory and prospective dimensions. dissolve into networked systems. This shift from In the digital era, workers engage in networking for the place to the networked space of the student the end goal of employability rather than security has been gradual, but has accelerated with the of employment (Boltanski & Chiapello). This shift help of networking technologies in the last few in the career narratives imagined by information years. As this shift occurs, we can locate shear professionals will be shown to necessitate a new points in the fabric of the life of the learner: a labour politics organised around “event” as opposed sixth grader expelled for what is found on his to “clock” time (Adkins). contraband mobile phone, a !fty-year-old !nishing her BA via an entirely price-driven online learning Melissa Gregg is a leading !gure in the !eld of network. Five-year-olds with demanding calendars affect theory and work. She is the author of Cultural that (as with “recess” for older students and Studies’ Affective Voices (2006) and co-editor of “3-day weekends” for adults) carefully hem in The Affect Theory Reader (with Gregory J. Seigworth, “play dates” designed to re"ect the “work hard, Duke UP, forthcoming). Her writing on digital play hard” motto of their parents. At the same culture and labour has been published in a range time, the decentralization of control provides of journals including Convergence, Continuum, for temporary pockets of play within the larger Feminist Media Studies and Media International network. The shift in production from temporally Australia. With Mark Andrejevic, Melissa convened and spatially restricted factory to ubiquitous and one of the !rst graduate courses on digital labour always-on freelance learning re"ects and shapes post-Web-2.0, The Work of Media Consumption, at the networked factory. the University of Queensland. She currently teaches in the Gender and Cultural Studies Department at I am a social architect, interested in ways of helping the University of Sydney where she is !nishing two form a culture of creativity, freedom, and justice. manuscripts on professional identity, friendship and In particular, I help people to understand how labour: Work’s Intimacy (Polity, forthcoming 2010) social media is changing the nature of scholarship and Broadcast Yourself: Presence, Intimacy, and and learning, and allowing for new forms of Community Online (with Catherine Driscoll). collaboration and self-government. I also have www.homecookedtheory.com; www.twitter.com/ institutional af!liations. www.alex.halavais.net melgregg Orit Halpern, The Scanning Eye: James Grimmelman, Ethical Visions of Knowledge and Visuality in Cybernetics Copyright Law Abstract: This paper investigates attitudes to Abstract: Copyright law comes with a set of pedagogy and perception in post-war design,

19 architecture, and cognitive science. This is part on panarchy hybridizes political philosophy/ of a longer history of interactivity; situating economy, network culture, complex systems, our contemporary forms of spectatorship and critical social theory. His work online ranges and interactivity. One site to investigate these from “Panarchy and the Wiki!cation of Politics” changes in perception is at the locus of science, to an important conversation with Trebor Scholz, design, !lm and architecture in the works of “Toward a Critique of the Social Web.” In addition Charles and Ray Eames and Gyorgy Kepes. to articulating emerging dynamics, Paul also is a In these works, including many science education cofounder of the Forward Foundation a consulting and pedagogy !lms, advertising, and corporate group that develops open-source infrastructure architectures, the nature of spectatorship was for collaboration and sharing. His clients include being rethought, and retrained. In their work, we Howard Rheingold, Stanford University, and the can !nd evidence of a more global reformulation Institute for the Future. He lives in Ann Arbor with between science, technology, aesthetics, his wife and two sons. www.paulbhartzog.org and visuality. These are transformations in Joseph Heathcott (Moderator) is a writer, representation and epistemology that are educator, and curator living in New York. He is the blueprints to contemporary information an associate professor at The New School where economies and architectures. he teaches in Eugene Lang College and Parsons Dr. Orit Halpern is an assistant professor of History The New School for Design. He currently serves and Media Studies at The New School in New as chair of the department of urban studies and York City. She received her PhD from Harvard co-chair of the committee on university-wide urban University in the History of Science in 2006 and programs. Heathcott has lectured, consulted, and was a Franklin Institute Fellow at Duke University published widely in the !elds of architectural in 2006–07. Currently, she works on histories history, comparative urbanism, and the design of perception and representation related to and planning of cities in a post-industrial age. He cybernetics. Her current book project is labeled: has been awarded fellowships from the American The Eye of Time: Histories of Representation, Council of Learned Societies, the U.S. Fulbright Perception, and Archiving in Cybernetics. Senior Specialist Program, the Brown Center for www.orithalpern.net Public Humanities, and the Erasmus Institute, and Paul Hartzog, Panarchy: Politics, Production, frequently gives time for design studio reviews, and Polycentrism community projects, and service to non-pro!t Abstract: The current transition into a "uctuating organizations. www.newschool.edu/lang/faculty multitude is a moment for both celebrating Brian Holmes, Predatory Networks— freedoms as well as acknowledging new dangers. Self-Defense and Society Current conceptions of work and play, production Abstract: In the age of asymmetric information and consumption, mass and individual, succumb gathering, computer networks can no longer be to the weight of history and lose clarity in the celebrated as potentially autonomous spaces light of new constellations of labor and value. of interaction. Instead they must primarily be Where might we look for guidance and insight seen as hunting grounds for the major economic in our attempts to navigate the waters ahead? A and ideological predators. With the growth of hybrid political philosophy of panarchy, informed computerized !nance since the early 1970s, a by network and complexity theory, offers some large number of “digital laborers” have come to hope for those who resist despair and seek a be employed in this psycho-social predation, sustainable way through. of which they are simultaneously agents and Paul B. Hartzog, one of the coiners of the word objects. A public health crisis ensues, where self- “panarchy,” is an independent scholar and hacker, defense against dominant ideas and behavioral currently teaching at the University of Michigan’s routines becomes the necessary prelude to any School of Information. Recipient of an NSF IGERT recovery of collective decision-making capacities. to study complex systems, he has a master’s in Artist-activists have led the way in responding Globalization and Environmental Politics from to these threatening conditions. Is it not time for the University of Utah, and a master’s in Political the academy to drop the !ctions of technological Theory from the University of Michigan. His work progress and commercial neutrality, and make critical network studies into the operational hub

20 for a revolt of the prey? and design. Prone to side projects, she has been Brian Holmes is a cultural critic, living in Paris and haunted my Amazon Mechanical Turk since summer Chicago, moving restlessly around the world. He 2008. In response to workers’ own complaints holds a doctorate in Romance Languages and about AMT, she co-authored Turkopticon with Six Literatures from the University of California at Silberman. Turkopticon is a Firefox extension that Berkeley, was the English editor of publications for allows Turk workers to review employers and avoid Documenta X in Kassel, Germany, was a member ones with bad records, but it also stands witness to of the editorial collective of the French journal Amazon’s neglect of worker welfare. Previously, she Multitudes from 2003 to 2008, and has recently worked as a user interface Designer at Google, and published a collection of texts on art and social so is quite implicated in the digital economies she movements entitled Unleashing the Collective critiques. www.ics.uci.edu/~lirani Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering (New Carolyn Lee Kane, Catching Up with Color Online: York: Autonomedia, 2007). His new book, Escape Against the Concept of Immaterial Labor. the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society, is Abstract: Some web pages "aunt extremely bright, forthcoming from WHW/VanAbbemuseum and is eye-straining colors, juxtaposed and animated available online at brianholmes.wordpress.com. at rapid paces, often to upbeat, synthetic music. Holmes was awarded the Vilém Flusser Prize for Digital imaging technology can increase the Theory at Transmediale in Berlin in 2009. speed, saturation, and pace of color shapes and www.brianholmes.wordpress.com animations to such a degree that they not only Lilly Irani, Killing Time on MTurk exceed human cognitive capacities, but also Abstract: Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) is an our physiological and optical ability to perceive Internet “marketplace” in which employers can them. This research presentation explores the have large volumes of digital tasks performed way in which internet based artists use HTML by workers at very low cost, often less than a Color to intentionally produce these hyperactive dollar per hour. Yet several surveys report that the visual effects. I argue that these works make vast majority of AMT workers participate for fun the physical and material labor of attention and or to kill time, quite thrilled to get paid for their control involved in using computers, explicit. entertainment rather than paying for it. Eleven Carolyn Kane is a PhD Candidate in the percent of workers, however, always or sometimes department of Media, Culture, and Communication rely on the AMT earnings to make ends meet. at New York University where she is currently The experiences of exploitation are dramatically writing her dissertation on Synthetic Color: varying in degree. This talk describes ways of Electronic Signal Processing & The Recon!guration thinking about modes of exploitation in AMT: of Perception at the End of the Twentieth Century. social thinness, response-ability, and precarity. Her research !elds include digital media, new First, social thinness is James Ferguson’s account media art, aesthetics, and critical theory. of what made 1990s African mineral extraction www.!les.nyu.edu/clk267/public practices particularly exploitative; I describe Pat Kane, Taking Reality Lightly: Play and the social thinness and ways in which AMT is—and is Constitution of the Net not—socially thin. Second, Donna Haraway offers Abstract: In scholarly debates about the nature response-ability as an aesthetic of ethical labor; I of our interactions (or ‘digital labors’) on socio- explain how AMT has been designed to reduce the technical networks, play is often invoked as burden of response-ability. And third, I situate AMT a descriptor or modi!er of existing behaviour. in broader trends in labor precarity. These different But rarely is there any deeper connection ways of seeing labor con!gurations in AMT suggest made between the multi-disciplinary zone of different kinds of activist responses and af!nities. contemporary play scholarship—particularly in Lilly is a PhD candidate in Informatics with a biology, ethology, neuroscience and complexity graduate feminist emphasis. Her current work looks theory—and the constitutive forces that maintain at circulation of design methods and knowledge, (despite various enclosures) the openness and particularly between the U.S., Europe, and India. creativity of the internet society. This paper She works at the intersection between feminist and explores these connections and claims that the postcolonial STS, human-computer interaction, age of informational plenitude has disclosed

21 a socio-biological “ground of play,” or generic Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott, No Matter capacities of potentiation that might explain Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott will present an the enduring resilience and inventiveness of overview of their artwork, No Matter, which is an cyberculture. The paper also draws on the author’s installation of imaginary objects made both in direct and daily experience as a web entrepreneur Second Life and physical space. They discuss in music and journalism. This will illustrate how the the labor issues surrounding the project, which constitutively playful structure of the Net, and its uses virtual labor from anonymous builders in ambiguous and open social dynamics, shapes the Second Life. No Matter traf!cs imaginary objects development of network enterprises at least as in simulated and physical spaces. These objects crucially as commercial or governmental forces. appear repeatedly in myth, literature, in thought Pat Kane, 45, is a musician, writer, consultant and experiments, popular culture, and as placeholder activist. His book The Play Ethic (Macmillan 2004, objects in language. Items such as the Holy Grail, and see www.theplayethic.com) has been praised Time Machine or Schrödinger’s Cat, do not exist by !gures like Will Hutton, Charles Leadbeater, in the material realm, except as replicas, and Daniel Pink and Douglas Ruskhoff. His band Hue embody the tension between the ideal and real. And Cry (www.hueandcry.co.uk) have supported The project explores the tension between the Madonna, U2, James Brown, and Van Morrison and virtual and real economies by 1) commissioning Al Green, and their thirteenth album Open Soul 25 builders and artists to produce 40 cultural was released in 2008. Pat writes for the Guardian artifacts in Second Life space; 2) paying them and Independent, and was a founding editor of The in Linden dollars at an equivalent scale of $1.50 Sunday Herald. He has consulted for organizations to $12 per object; 3) extracting the objects as diverse as Lego, Nokia, the Cabinet Of!ce and from Second Life—a closed system where 3D Bartle Bogle Hegarty about the power and potential models cannot be exported; 4) reconstructing of play, and is a regular global keynote speaker on these objects as 3D paper replicas with high- this topic. www.theplayethic.com; www.twitter.com/ quality printed textures in physical space. The theplayethic; www.facebook.com/patkane artists discuss tactics of economic engagement from developing relationships with anonymous Christopher M. Kelty, No Fun: Work and Labor freelance builders to imbuing psychological in Free Software investments in a conceptual project to making Abstract: This presentation looks at the case of !ve-step sales pitches using an Imaginary Objects Free Software through the lens of work and labor. Showroom. The results are vast differences in pay Free Software is presented as an exemplary case scale, ranging from $55/hour (for a 10-minute of technically and morally speci!c world-making build) to 60¢/hour (for a 50-hour build) and that emphasizes particular ideals of freedom widely divergent interpretations of the form of forged in the liberal tradition and worked over various imaginary objects. by the emergence of the Internet, the expansion of intellectual property and the globalization of Scott Kildall (USA) and Victoria Scott (Canada) social imaginaries of moral order. started their collaboration in 2006, after meeting in the Art & Technology graduate program at the Christopher M. Kelty is an associate professor at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Their !rst the University of California, Los Angeles. He has project series, 2x2, experimented with physically a joint appointment in the Center for Society and materializing the psychology of online relational Genetics and in the department of Information spaces and was conceived at the Banff Centre for Studies. His research focuses on the cultural the Arts as part of the residency, the signi!cance of information technology, especially Future of Idea Art. In 2007, they were awarded the in science and engineering. He is the author most Turbulence.org-sponsored Mixed Realities Juried recently of Two Bits: The Cultural Signi!cance of International Networked Art commission, for their Free Software (Duke University Press, 2008), as second project, No Matter. Both the physical and well as numerous articles on open source and simulated installations of No Matter premiered free software, including its impact on education, simultaneously on February 7, 2008 in both nanotechnology, the life sciences, and issues of Second Life and Emerson College, Boston. This peer review and research process in the sciences was recently shown at the Subtle Technologies and in the humanities. www.kelty.org/about Festival in Toronto in June, 2009. Their most recent

22 relational installation, Ghost in The Machine, By de-ideologizing the material processes of provides a hired philosopher to assist the public in exploitation and accumulation that take place in drawing or writing a response to the question “What virtual worlds, it is possible to recognize virtual is the Ghost in the Machine?” www.nomatter.org worlds’ precarious sovereignty, and arrive at a Abigail De Kosnik, Fan Labor as Paid Labor? conceptualization of virtual worldliness that takes Abstract: Fan labor is often given away for free, this precariousness into account. yet it is an increasingly a popular form of mass Julian Kücklich teaches game design at entertainment and creates value for the owners of Mediadesign Hochschule Berlin. He has been “source” material (the (moving) images, sounds, doing research on the politics, aesthetics, and and text that serve as the basis for fan creations semiotics of digital games since 2000. More such as mash-ups, remixes, fan !ction, etc). I will information on his research can be found at be asking the question, Under what circumstances www.playability.de; www.twitter.com/cucchiaio can fan labor be paid labor? As the entertainment Ferentz Lafargue (Moderator), assistant industry shifts from mass broadcast to narrowcast professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang formats, and as tools for appropriating media College, is the author of a memoir, Songs in the and publishing appropriations become more Key of My Life. www.ferentz.com common, questions about how fan creators can be compensated deserve serious consideration. Mark Larrimore (Moderator) directs the Religious Studies program at Eugene Lang College. Abigail De Kosnik is an assistant professor at the Editor of The Problem of Evil: A Reader and The University of California, Berkeley, at the Berkeley German Invention of Race (with Sara Eigen), Center for New Media (BCNM) and the Department Mark’s current research projects concern the of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies. problem of good, interpretations of the Book of www.twitter.com/De_Kosnik Job, and the future of religion. Julian Kücklich, Work Hard, Play Harder— Deborah Levitt (Moderator) focuses on sites Labour, Playbor and the Ideology of Play of conjugation of media and rhetorics of life, Abstract: In my paper, I argue that much of the from classical tableau vivants to medical !lms current scholarly discourse about virtual worlds of the 20s and 30s to forms and practices fails to recognize the mode of governmentality of animation. She is interested in how new that characterizes these new social formations. media technologies have dovetailed with the Rather than to see them as analogous to development of biopolitical logics, from the societies in the real world, with their own Enlightenment to the present day, as well as in cultures, economies, and political systems, I the manner in which the sometimes eccentric suggest to regard them as “social factories” sites at which cultural de!nitions of life are in in which the social fabric is inextricably shot fact generated may help us think life beyond the through with economic production. While the narrowly scienti!c paradigms which structure governmentalization of the global economy, and contemporary political programs. Her current the concomitant economization of governments publications include a book chapter on Giorgio are processes, which originate in the (increasingly Agamben’s work on media and biopolitics and virtualized) real world, they also result in a another on forms of arti!cial life in Mamoru “naturalization” of virtual worlds, a tendency Oshii’s anime feature, Innocence (2004). Levitt is which also becomes obvious in the way virtual assistant professor in the department of Culture worlds are discussed in terms of population and and Media Studies at Eugene Lang College. territory. At the same time, the integration of the www.newschool.edu/lang/faculty economies of the real world with those of virtual worlds leads to similar results as the virtualization Laura Y. Liu (Moderator) is assistant professor of real-world economies, which is contingent upon of Urban Studies at Eugene Lang College. Her the increasing valorization of immaterial labor. research interests include community organizing In virtual worlds, the suffusion of governance and urban social justice; migration and work; and with economic production thus leads to the race, gender, and labor politics. She is writing formation of precarious forms of governmentality, a book tentatively called Sweatshop City which which are veiled by a pertinent ideology of play. looks at identity, space, and political strategy in community organizing within Chinatown and other

23 immigrant communities in the New York City area. at the blog Terra Nova. www.thomasmalaby.com She has published in Gender, Place and Culture; Edward Maloney (Moderator) is an assistant Social and Cultural Geography; and Urban professor of English at Georgetown University Geography. www.newschool.edu/lang/faculty and the director of research and development Thomas Malaby, Performing Value: at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Labor and Contingency in Virtual Worlds Scholarship, a think tank for the exploration of the Abstract: Massively multiplayer online games and relationship between new media technologies and worlds (MMOs, or virtual worlds) have exploded teaching and learning. He is a narrative theorist onto the cultural landscape, and exploded in size with specialties in modern and postmodern as well. They clearly generate cash, connections, literature and digital media and a particular competencies, and credentials for their interest in the apparatus of the book. He has participants, and we can now begin to ask why published on Joyce (both James and Michael), this is possible at all. What are the fundamental !lm, and new media technologies. features of these digital domains that account www.explore.georgetown.edu/people/ejm for the accumulation in them of human labor Meredith L. McGill (Moderator) associate into these various forms of capital, and how professor of English and director of the Center for is the character of labor itself transformed in Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University. She is the them? Most obviously, their persistence allows author of “American Literature and the Culture of the labor of their participants to have durable, Reprinting, 1834-1853” (2003), a study of 19th- cumulative effects. But persistence alone cannot century American resistance to tight control over account for these emergent and consequential intellectual property. Her research in the digital phenomena. This is because the effects of digital humanities seeks to bring the vexed history of the labor cannot be meaningful without an element regulation of print to bear on the adoption of new of contingency. That is, the possibilities of failure, technologies for writing, publishing, and reading. of accident, and of unintended consequences are www.english.rutgers.edu/faculty/pro!les/mcgill essential to understanding why virtual worlds can generate these real stakes. The multi-layered and Christina McPhee, Queer Theory and implicit contingency of MMOs is, importantly, an the Dichotomies of Play and Work architected feature that owes a great deal to game Abstract: I am interested in exploring the potential design, and it enables them to begin to approach of queer theory with regard to the space of the texture of the everyday. In this presentation internet-based play. I think that it’s possible I discuss virtual worlds as landscapes of to develop a different understanding of what possibility, and explore the performative and other constitutes a relational, participatory space online contingencies that together constitute the rich and the power relations between subjectivities horizon for failure (and success) within virtual in the space of the internet through pursuit of worlds. Based on ethnographic research at a site some of queer theory’s most notable modes of of virtual world production, Linden Lab (makers of thought, especially, how identities self construct Second Life), I chart how these contingencies lie at through embodiment and performance, and how the heart of digital labor within them. a “queer” critique of social relations and aesthetic production online can extend much beyond Thomas Malaby is associate professor in the stylings and performance of gender, and actually department of Anthropology at the University of reach some new insights about how an aesthetics Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Thomas has published of play “works” online. By paying attention to numerous works on virtual worlds, games, and the ways that language use and text may work indeterminacy. He is continually interested by the in net based interfaces—both “corporate” and ever-changing relationships among institutions, “opensource”—I think we may adapt some of unpredictability, and technology, especially as the strengths of queer theory’s ability to analyze they are realized through games and game-like “non-normative” rhetoric. Considering both the processes. His newly published book, Making conference theme of playground as a spatial Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life (2009, metaphor, and speci!cally as a “scene” for Cornell University Press), is an ethnographic political interactivity, I also am interested in how examination of Linden Lab and its relationship to its a democratic space evolves through the clash of creation, Second Life. He is also a featured author

24 performed identities-playground as a rough and collectivist society that heralds—as Kevin Kelly tumble, potentially violent space of participation. I asserted—a new form of socialism. Digital labor am considering how this constitutes a productive is portrayed as a rejection of the commodity form assemblage, how the very ambiguities of labour/ that gives shape to gift economies where goods play relations produce from the margins a new are produced and exchanged without the need for kind of social conscience from within the mix of money. Of course, the fact that the physical layer of so-called corporate control spaces and marginal the Internet as well as the most popular sociable open source fora. I am especially interested in media platforms end up being controlled by a how this play of relations actually returns us to handful of corporate conglomerates means that a more intense experience of materiality and a world without money is only possible when it is subjective presence; and I ask how queer theory build on top of a world where money is everything. might be adapted to challenge play/work and In this presentation, I explore the contradictions post-human/corporate dichotomies. inherent in contemporary theorizings of digital Christina McPhee (born Los Angeles, based in labor and propose a framework for imagining central coast and San Francisco, California) spaces where disidenti!cation from the Net develops remote performance works, site- is possible. I argue that it is in these forms of abstractiondrawing, and landscape assemblage disassembly that an authentic alternative to in !lm and photography. She was a participating exploitation and inequality is contained, and where editor at Documenta 12 for -empyre-, Sydney. She new modes of labor may arise. was an invited artist in Violence of Participation Ulises A. Mejias is an assistant professor in the at the Lyon Biennial 2007. Tesserae of Venus, Communication Studies department at SUNY at a science !ction assemblage, is at Silverman Oswego. His research interests include network Gallery San Francisco through December 5, studies, critical theory, philosophy of technology, 2009. Recent exhibitions include Carrizo-Park!eld and political economy of new media. Diaries at the American University Museum. Her www.ulisesmejias.com most recent commission was for Thresholds Robert Mitchell, Ends and Means: Artspace Perth, with La Conchita mon Amour, Digital Labor in the Context of Health also a Turbulence.org project with support from Abstract: My recent research has focused on the Experimental Television Center. She lectures ways in which digital medical resources (both in the Digital Arts and New Media graduate web-based databases and electronic patient program, University of California at Santa Cruz. records) are being used to facilitate what Melinda Her new media writing and artwork appear on Cooper and Catherine Waldby have called “clinical DrunkenBoat, Soundtoys, Rhizome Artbase, and labor,” that is patient practices that contribute Neural. www.christinamcphee.net; to the health of the patient but at the same time www.vimeo.com/channels/tesseraeofvenus; also create either research or economic value www.silverman-gallery.com/artist/view/1615 for academic researchers or for-pro!t medical Ulises Mejias, Workers of the Net, Disassemble! groups. (The dynamic is similar in principle to Abstract: Extrapolating from trends in the what occurs when one’s purchasing decisions at sociable media industry, I argue that the digital sites such as Amazon become part of databases technosocial network is a machine for increasing designed to increase the value and pro!tability participation while simultaneously maintaining or of the company). This example is less oriented deepening inequalities between its participants. toward the entertainment and/or participatory This is because network dynamics like preferential democracy uses that one often associates with attachment tend to create monopsonies digital labor, but it also highlights the conceptual (increasingly fewer repositories where Internet dif!culties we encounter when labor seems to users can trade their cultural products). The very become an end in itself. In the examples that I rich-get-richer dynamics that make scale-free outline in my presentation, “health” is invariably networks so effective also guarantee that there presented as an unambiguous end: that is, health will be fewer viable alternatives to services like is not a means for something else, but rather the YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter. At the same time, end for which most other things are means. As a however, the Internet is often wishfully described consequence, the clinical labor that an increasing as a space that escapes capitalism, an emerging number of people are asked to perform may seem

25 like part of a virtuous circle: though my labor digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of provides economic value for others (and in this Technology. Montfort has collaborated on the blog sense I am a means), it also creates health for me Grand Text Auto, the sticker novel Implementation, (and in this sense is itself an end: through such and 2002: A Palindrome Story. He writes poems, laboring, I am practicing health). However, what I text generators, and interactive !ction such as want to underline in this presentation is that this Book and Volume and Ad Verbum. Most recently, circle can appear virtuous only if we accept a very he and Ian Bogost wrote Racing the Beam: The speci!c understanding of what “health” can mean. Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2009). Robert Mitchell is an associate professor in the Montfort also wrote Twisty Little Passages: An department of English, af!liated faculty member Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003) in Women’s Studies, and a faculty member of the and co-edited The Electronic Literature Collection Institute of Genome Sciences and Policy at Duke Volume 1 (ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader University. His research focuses on late 18th and (MIT Press, 2003). www.nickm.com early 19th century intersections between science Lisa Nakamura, Digital Labor, Digital and literature, as well as more contemporary Immigration, and Transnationality, or, Why Virtual relationships among biological materials, Worlds Need a Civil Rights Movement economics, and information technologies. His Abstract: “They want our labor, not our lives.”—Vijay published work includes Sympathy and the State Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk. “All of the work, in the Romanic Era: Systems, State Finance, and without the worker.”—Alex Rivera, Cybracero project the Shadows of Futurity (Routledge, 2007); Tissue Media scholars have a bias towards Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late understanding digital labor as content creation, Capitalism), co-authored with Catherine Waldby, which is the form of labor that they have the most (Duke University Press, 2006; and Data Made familiarity with. It enrages them to see their and Flesh: Embodying Information (Routledge, 2003) other users’ labor monetized without their getting and Semiotic Flesh: Information and the Human any pro!ts or even credit—and they have a point, Body (University of Washington Press, 2002), both the reality of the digital commons as a digital co-edited with Phillip Thurtle. He is also editor, with shop or even factory is a sad result of the political Phillip Thurtle, of the book series In Vivo: Cultural economic system we have today. The basic tenet Mediations of Biomedical Science, published by the of the information society—that intellectual University of Washington Press. property is the most valuable commodity of all— www.fds.duke.edu/db/aas/English/faculty/rmitch enables the struggle over digital labor. It is both Nick Montfort, A Reading from the justi!cation for copyright and the motivation “Implementation,” “Mystery House Taken Over,” behind the copyright reform movement. But what “Book and Volume,” and “ppg256” is rarely discussed is the racialization of labor Abstract: I read from and present a series of that is not content creation. In Czech, robota digital writing projects that involve collaboration, means drudgery—labor that nobody enjoys doing. participation by large groups of contributors, the Bodies of color engage with the digital economy appropriation of and commentary on commercial as both labor and value. To paraphrase Lisa Lowe and industrial technologies, and the use of free and through race and gender scholar Grace Hong, open source software, including “Implementation” how are bodies of color both labor and capital? (Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg, 2004), What do the Mechanical Turk worker, the Twitter “Mystery House Taken Over” (Nick Montfort, Dan user, the citizen journalist, the gold farmer, Shiovitz, Emily Short, and the MHTO Occupation and the game level author or modder have in Force, 2005), “Book and Volume” (Nick Montfort, common? And how are their interests (part of 2005) and the ppg256 series (Nick Montfort, what makes this conference exciting is that it 2007-2009). These projects are entertwined with views digital laborers are both more numerous systems of digital labor, but they also question and a broader category than we thought, and whether the labor/leisure or employment/ also as even having interests, rather than simply consumption distinction should control our demographics) similar to or different from those experience of the computer and the network. of people of color? Nick Montfort is an associate professor of Lisa Nakamura is the director of the Asian

26 American Studies Program, professor in the author of the forthcoming book Venture Labor, Institute of Communication Research and which traces the change in U.S. employment Media Studies program and professor of Asian structures through the experience of the early American Studies at the University of Illinois, pioneers of the commercial internet. Her research Urbana Champaign. She is the author of Digitizing focuses on organizational dynamics in the face Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of technological change in areas such as green of Minnesota Press, 2008), Cybertypes: Race, commercial architecture and new media industries. Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, She holds a PhD in sociology from Columbia 2002) and co-editor of Race in Cyberspace University, where she is now an external faculty (Routledge, 2000). She has published articles af!liate at the Center on Organizational Innovation. in Critical Studies in Media Communication, www.com.washington.edu/faculty/neff PMLA, Cinema Journal, Women’s Review of Luis Vincent Nuñez, Books, Camera Obscura, and the Iowa Journal The Internet Is a Totalitarian Regime of Cultural Studies. She is editing a collection Abstract: Opinionating is a full time job. Voting, with Peter Chow-White entitled Digital Race: An moding, reviewing, and recommending require Anthology (Routledge, forthcoming) and is working more social engagement than Rousseau could on a new monograph on social inequality in shake a stick at. Is it political? Web 2.0 was virtual worlds. Her research focuses on race and built around social networking, which in a past gender in online social spaces such as massively life was known as civic engagement. But does multiplayer online role playing games, and she is that mean the digital community has really built currently investigating the racializaton of labor in a political realm. Logs and logs of personal transnational contexts and avatarial operations in preferences, patterns, and habits are being a “postracial” world. www.sites.google.com/site/ collected every second. To what end? Is it only theresearchsiteforlisanakamura noise or will we !nally pick up that signal and its Gina Neff, Venture Labor: purpose after all these years? The Risks of Work in Social Media Luis Nuñez is a senior at Eugene Lang College. Abstract: Several social theorists note that Growing up in New York City, he built his !rst contemporary jobs entail a lack of job security and computer out of spare parts liberated from his observe the increase in the precarity of modern building’s trash piles. Next fall he hopes to study life. While there is much writing on theories of international law in New York and concentrate on these changes, less has been done on why people social justice and human rights in an increasingly accept riskier work and how they are adapting, connected society. especially within technology industries. I examine what I call “Venture Labor”—the investment of Timothy Pachirat, Digital Slaughter !nancial, human, and social capital that ordinary Abstract: What difference does it make when employees make in the companies they work an internet playground is deployed to rupture using a case study from the early pioneers of the physical walls of an actual factory? I draw the commercial internet. I argue that not only is on events preceding and following the Humane Venture Labor applicable to many different high- Society of the United States January, 2008 risk and innovative industries, but it arises during YouTube release of undercover footage !lmed a particularly charged moment in the transition at an industrialized slaughterhouse in Chino, of the U.S. economy from an industrial economy California to explore the promises and pitfalls of to a post-industrial economy. Drawing on ten digital labor that attempts to collapse, subvert, years of research in “Silicon Alley,” New York’s or otherwise short-circuit the spatial and Internet industry, I outline the origins and rise of psychological separation between material sites employees’ entrepreneurial behavior, the dynamics of production and consumption. I contextualize of risk during the dot-com boom and bust, and this exploration through my own ethnographic employees’ strategies for managing this risk. research on the kill "oor of an industrialized slaughterhouse, both juxtaposing and seeking Gina Neff is an assistant professor in the similarities between the visceral materiality of Department of Communication at the University slaughterhouse work and digital labor. of Washington. She is co-editor of Surviving the New Economy (Paradigm Press, 2007) and Timothy Pachirat (Ph.D. Yale, 2008) is an

27 assistant professor of politics at The New School director of the Gibbons Institute for Law, Science for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. and Technology. In spring 2009, he was a visiting His research and teaching interests include professor at Yale Law School, and he is presently comparative politics, the politics of Southeast an af!liate fellow of Yale’s Information Society Asia, spatial and visual politics, the sociology of Project. He has served as a fellow at the Institute domination and resistance, the political economy for the Defense of Competition and Protection of dirty and dangerous work, and interpretive and of Intellectual Property in Lima, Peru. He joined ethnographic research methods. He is the author the Seton Hall faculty after practicing at Arnold of chapters in edited volumes on interpretive and & Porter LLP, where his work included antitrust ethnographic research methods. A book, Killing and intellectual property litigation. In 2009, Work: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Pasquale testi!ed before the House Judiciary Sight (under contract from Yale University Press), Committee (along with the general counsels of draws on an ethnography of immigrant labor on , Google, and Yahoo), presenting Internet the kill "oor of an industrialized slaughterhouse Nondiscrimination Principles for Competition in the Great Plains of the United States to explore Policy Online. www.cardozo.yu.edu; how violence that is seen as both essential www.facebook.com/frankpasquale and repugnant to modern society is organized, Christiane Paul, Free Labor, Collective disciplined, regulated, and reproduced. Intelligence, and Artistic Production www.gpia.info/pachirat Abstract: In the digitally networked information Frank Pasquale, Distributive Justice Online economy, information feeds into the production Abstract: The Web 2.0 backlash has begun. process of commodities, provides the basis for For example, Andrew Keen voices a cultural the control of the market, and is materialized and conservatism uneasy with the new egalitarianism sold as a commodity. Information systems and of networked media, claiming that established communications networks produce “immaterial “media and culture industries’ [purpose]… commodities” consisting of informational or is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent.” cultural content. Free labor—building Web sites Trebor Scholz worries that new intermediaries and virtual spaces, modifying software packages, will recapitulate old patterns of exploitation. The contributing to Web 2.0 platforms—has become labor of millions on their MySpace page results, an important element of the digital economy, most often, in nothing paid to them and vast sums voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and going to Rupert Murdoch. Concerns about cultural exploited. While digital communication networks formation and distributive justice risk being short- have enabled unprecedented forms of collective circuited by the opacity of many sites. I believe agency and activism, the inherent structure that those who contribute to Web 2.0 sites like of economies, industries, and institutions in Facebook and MySpace deserve a right to know which digital technologies are embedded can how their contributions are ordered and distributed work against the idealistic belief in grass-roots and to contribute to that governance. We should change and activism that is driven bottom-up be prepared to challenge “black boxes,” and not rather than top-down. Art in the networked to simply accept site founders’ claims that they commons cannot avoid addressing the larger need to keep us in the dark about how they’re run context of the sustainability of cultural production because that’s the trade secret they need to keep in information societies. Using networked art ahead of competitors. We also need to question projects as examples, the presentation will the claim that sites are successful because of outline relationships between free labor, collective their great innovation; rather, their innovation may intelligence, and artistic production. well be deemed to be great only because the site Christiane Paul is an associate professor and is successful. Hagiographers in the business press director of the graduate programs in Media have many incentives to rationalize the existing Studies at The New School and adjunct curator order. Uncritical acceptance of these claims can of new media arts at the Whitney Museum of make regulation and transparency seem more American Art. She has written extensively on new costly than it actually is. media arts and lectured internationally on art and Frank Pasquale is Loftus Professor of Law at technology. An expanded new edition of her book Seton Hall Law School, where he is also associate Digital Art (Thames& Hudson, UK, 2003) came

28 out in spring 2008 and her edited anthology New on cold war cybernetics, or how communication Media in the White Cube and Beyond—Curatorial became computer-compatible. www.columbia. Models for Digital Art was published by UC Press edu/~bjp2108/blog in December 2008. She is responsible for artport, Dominic Pettman, On Social Lubrication: the Whitney Museum’s online portal to Internet Between the Digital and the Chthonic art, and has curated several exhibitions for the Abstract: One of the more striking maxims framing museum. Other recent curatorial work includes this conference on contemporary labor practices Feedforward—The Angel of History (co-curated is that “Social participation is the oil of the digital with Steve Dietz; Laboral Art Center, Gijon, Spain, economy.” My paper taps this metaphor in order Oct. 2009) and INDAF Digital Art Festival (Inchon, to explore the ways in which debates surrounding Korea, Aug. 2009). www.christianepaul.info “peak oil” set the cultural tone for our lives and Ben Peters, Arendt and the Creative Toil of Counting interactions to a degree that even Hubbert and Abstract: Our problem, to update Arendt’s phrase, Co. could not foresee. Working, as we do, not lies in that not Human but humans now inhabit only within a market economy, but a libidinal one, the earth. Ours is a question of counting. In means that the very notion of the social (and by general, the capacity to calculate, to self-re"ect or extension, participation) are in"ected through the feed back in the process of calculation, and thus often subliminal erotics of transactions. I therefore to regularly manipulate symbols characterizes trace some of the pulsions of this concept both digital and human agents online and off. through Lyotard to more recent theorists such In particular, this paper attempts to map three as Alan Stoekl and Bernard Stiegler, speci!cally orders of counting—rote arithmetic, statistics, in order to understand the relationship between and probability—onto Arendt’s distinctions among economy, energy, and ecology. What happens to labor, work, and action. As a sort of compulsory digital labor, in other words, when oil runs out— cognitive labor, rote arithmetic appears to predate both literally and metaphorically writing (Goody) and functionally equate neural Dominic Pettman is an associate professor of networks with computer processors (Turing, Culture and Media at Eugene College and The New McCulloch). Statistics, on the hand, has driven School for Social Research. He has previously social, purposive work since at least the late taught in Melbourne, Geneva, and Amsterdam. His seventeenth century to the contemporary collapse books include After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of of !nance markets. Lastly, this paper considers Exhaustion, Avoiding the Subject: Media, Culture that probability may be to action what statistics and the Object (with Justin Clemens), and Love is to work. As a creative act itself, probability and Other Technologies: Retro!tting Eros for the presents itself as a type of computational !ction— Information Age. A forthcoming book is titled good to think with but better to read closely Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines. and critically. It is at once a !ctive straddling www.blackjelly.com/pettman of an empirical numerator over a philosophical denominator, a baf"ing expression of previous Hector Postigo, America Online Volunteers: work (i.e. statistics) thrust upon any range of Lessons from an Early Co-production Community imagined futures, and a mixture of liberating Abstract: My discussion for this conference possibility and certain uncertainty. In conclusion, continues previous work that analyzed the case this paper calls for fresh, critical consideration of America Online volunteers (AOL) from critical of probability as a sociotechnical mindset that perspectives and incorporates newly acquired !xates on the future in exchange for a (literal) documents and interviews by the US Dept. of chance to act. Labor with volunteers. Speci!cally, I put forth the AOL volunteers’ case as an instance of co- Ben studies humanistic and social media theory, production that eventually met its demise when broadly understood, and enjoys his work in new organizational changes and the rise of a work media history, the critical study of information, consciousness among some volunteers made and comparative Eastern European and American the ongoing relationship impossible. I discuss studies. He is currently a visiting fellow at the the types of co-productive labor that took place Information Society Project at Yale Law School during the height of the AOL/volunteer relationship and a doctoral candidate in Communications and the structures put in place to help AOL at Columbia University. His dissertation focuses

29 harness the power of a free distributed workforce. language of humor, satire, and metaphor, has I suggest that the success of the co-productive also been screened at the Berlin International relationship was a function of a balance between Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, the the perceived reasonable compensation on the Guggenheim Museum, PBS, Telluride, and other part of volunteers, social factors and attitudes international venues. www.alexrivera.com; towards work such as a sense of community, www.sleepdealer.com creativity, and a sense of accomplishment. Martin Roberts, Productivity Is Fun My research focuses on new digital media. Abstract: With regard to the concerns of the Speci!cally, I study video game culture and conference around digital labor, I’m interested online environments and I’m pursuing two lines of in the relation between labor and leisure, and research. The !rst line of research focuses on value the disappearance of the distinction between production on the internet. I was one of the !rst the two: if labor in the digital economy is often researcher to study video game fan communities characterized as a form of play, the "ipside is that make valuable modi!cations to popular PC that leisure has become a new form of labor. games (modders). The second line of research is a The contemporary discourse on productivity study of social movements and their use of hacking continually exhorts us to make even what and social networking technologies. My work on little free time remains to us to become more social movements is funded in part by the National productive citizens. Within this context, I’m Science Foundation. www.hectorpostigo.com interested in the deployment of the concept Howard Rheingold is author of Tools for of FUN in the contemporary discourse on Thought, www.rheingold.com/texts/tft; The productivity. Historically, fun is an experience Virtual Community, www.rheingold.com/vc/ of pleasure which has tended to be associated book; Smart Mobs, www.smartmobs.com. He was with spheres of experience “outside” labor time: editor of Whole Earth Review, en.wikipedia.org/ its archetypal example remains Coney Island, a wiki/Whole_Earth_Review, and The Millennium kind of benign inversion of industrial production Whole Earth Catalog, www.well.com/user/ in which decommissioned coal trucks are hlr/mwecintro, and founding executive editor converted into adventure rides. The very concept of Hotwired, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotWired. of an “amusement park” seems antithetical to He has taught courses on participatory media everything the factory stands for in terms of and social networks at UC Berkeley. His current production, commodi!ed labor, and clocked time. projects include Social Media Classroom, www. In contemporary digital culture, a proliferating socialmediaclassroom.com; The Cooperation chorus of voices insist that productivity is “fun,” Project, www.cooperationcommons.org; and or explain how we can have fun while also Participatory Media Literacy www.socialtext.net/ being productive. Contrary to such assertions, medialiteracy; www.rheingold.com; www.twitter. I’m interested in exploring new forms of non com/hrheingold; vlog.rheingold.com productive fun, and dedicated to the idea that fun is by de!nition non-productive. Updating Veblen, Alex Rivera, Sleep Dealer (screening and Q&A) I’d suggest that we need a contemporary theory Alex Riviera’s Sleep Dealer is a 2008 futuristic, of the productive class, which would consider , science-!ction !lm. Set in a near- amongst other things how productivity has future, militarized world marked by closed borders, replaced leisure as the basis for social distinction virtual labor and a global digital network that joins in postmodern society. minds and experiences, three strangers risk their lives to connect with each other and break the I teach !lm and media studies at Eugene Lang barriers of technology. College The New School for Liberal Arts. My research interests focus on the cultural dimension Alex Rivera is a New York based digital media of globalization and the relation of transnational artist and !lmmaker. Sleep Dealer, his !rst feature media to these processes. My work explores !lm, premiered at Sundance 2008 and won two questions such as the role of media in the awards, including the Waldo Salt Screenwriting production of national identities; transnational Award. Rivera is a Sundance Fellow and a cultural imaginaries; and the transformation of Rockefeller Fellow. His work, which addresses television from a public-service medium into an concerns of the Latino community through a instrument for the governance of consumer society.

30 I am currently working on a book that studies inextricably folded into rapidly mutating forms of the implications of globalization for subcultural media technology. Professor Rogers has been a identities. www.newschool.edu/lang/faculty fellow at the Center for Ideas and Society at UC Judith Rodenbeck (Moderator) holds the Riverside, is a recipient of a Mellon grant on affect Noble Foundation Chair in Art and Cultural History and interactive media, and has lectured at various at Sarah Lawrence College, where she teaches venues, including the Getty Research Institute and modern and contemporary art. Her writing on the Kitchen. Some recent publications include “LA contemporary art has appeared in magazines Freewaves, Too much Freedom?: Alternative Video such as Grey Room, Artforum, and Modern and Internet Distribution” (2007), “From Media to Painters; she served as editor-in-chief of the Remediation: Transitions in Early Video Culture” Art Journal from 2007 to 2009. A specialist in (2009), and “Capital Implications: The Function the neo-avant-gardes of the 1950s and 1960s, of Labor in the Video Art of Juan Devis and she has written and lectured extensively on Yoshua Okón” (2009). His current book project participatory and open art; her book, Radical is Economies of Attention: Media Technology and Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Biopolitics. www.twitter.com/ken_rogers , is forthcoming in 2010. Ned Rossiter, Where’s the Fun in ERPs? Labour, www.pages.slc.edu/~jrodenbe Logistics and the Frontier of Biopolitical Regimes Kenneth Rogers, Capital Implications Abstract: With militaristic origins, logistics Abstract: This presentation builds off some emerged as a business concept in the 1950s my earlier research in a paper titled “Capital concerned with the management of global supply Implications” that addressed how advanced chains. Today, the complex task of logistics is forms of speculative value that are central to aided by specially engineered computer software the globalized neoliberalist market systems and information technology (IT) tracking devices are nonetheless inextricably bound to and that facilitate the organization of labour, storage dependent upon more informal and local market and goods. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems based on the spontaneous organization databases are standard platforms used within of exploitable, precarious, marginalized, and logistics in combination with customised software ultimately undervalued forms of labor. By applications to manage global supply chains, addressing what has become known as the organizational conditions and labour ef!ciencies. “attention economy,” this next phase of the The prospect of labour and life governed through research will continue to work through the the biopolitical regimes of logistics software is not deep inextricable link between speculative, some cooked up dystopian fear, but a concrete immaterial, and digital forms of labor and more reality on the horizon of the future-present. traditional, wage-based, manual forms of labor. While the rise of software studies presents novel It will suggest that it is in direct proportion to terrain for understanding emergent social- neoliberalist market logics that the issue of technical systems and collaborative practices, attention has gained currency within a wide array more often than not the focus here is on open of institutional, cultural, and material practices. source software and associated cultural-political Dispersed, heterogeneous, de-regulated, de- movements. Yet with few exceptions, software governmentalized forms of capitalization, and studies has very little to say about the existence the diversi!cation of labor endemic to it, have of free labour so heavily invested in developing demanded new diversi!ed kinds of self-regulating open source software. The sooner software studies attentive subjects, that exist within every sector of gets out of its bourgeois-anarchist ghetto of the precarious trans-national labor system of the open source celebration and starts to engage global economy. the banality of labour and logistics software, then the sooner we will see the question of Kenneth Rogers is assistant professor in the software politics addressed by digital media Media and Cultural Studies department of the research. This presentation makes the case for University of California at Riverside. His work is broadening the spectrum of software studies to broadly concerned with the way in which the nexus take into account the “multiplication and division of power, affect, institutional practices, and global of labour” (Mezzadra/Neilson) in the global political economy become articulated by and logistics industries. How informational labour goes

31 about organizing itself will be key to developing media to create provocative interactions that strategies of autonomy and inventing new question the boundaries and social constructs institutional forms. of manufactured desires. She has lectured Ned Rossiter, an Australian media theorist, is an and exhibited at venues including the 2008 associate professor of Network Cultures at the Sundance Film Festival, International Symposium University of Nottingham in Ningbo, China and an of (ISEA), Zer01 Festival, Banff adjunct senior research fellow of the Centre for New Media Institute, Hallwalls Media Art Center, Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney. ConFlux Festival, Amsterdam International Film He is author of Organized Networks: Media Theory, Festival and the Central Academy of Fine Art in Creative Labour, New Institutions (2006) and Beijing. Recent awards include a 2009 Creative co-editor of numerous volumes, including (with Capital, 2008 New York State Council on the Arts Geert Lovink) MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Individual Artist award (NYSCA), a 2007 Eyebeam Creative Industries (2007). His essays of creative Artist-in-Residence in NYC and a free103point9 labour, media theory and organized networks have Artist-in-Residence. She received her MFA in appeared in Fibreculture Journal, Cultural Politics, 2003 in Film, Video and New Media from the Theory, Culture & Society, Topia, emphemera and School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is borderlands. www.orgnets.net; www.orgnets.cn; currently an assistant professor of Visual Studies www.nedrossiter.org at SUNY at Buffalo. www.pan-o-matic.com; www.doublehappinessjeans.com Stephanie Rothenberg, Invisible Threads Abstract: “Invisible Threads” is a project co-created Douglas Rushkoff, From Open Source to with Jeff Crouse. The mixed reality performance- Crowdsourcing: How Corporations Co-opt Collaboration installation explores the growing intersection Abstract: The renaissance in digital technology between labor, emerging virtual economies and may be more like the original Renaissance than real life commodities through the creation of a we think. What appears to be an explosion of designer jeans “sweatshop” in Second Life that human ingenuity and participation may actually manufactures wearable jeans on demand. Using be the emergence of a new array of institutions a just-in-time production process, customers in and technologies for the further centralization of the real world are able to purchase their jeans our culture and economy. directly from the manufacturer, Double Happiness. Douglas Rushkoff is the author of a dozen A microphone and web cam connected to a bestselling books on media, culture, and computer create a live stream of customer orders technology, most recently Life Inc: How the World into the virtual factory. The webcam stream, Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back. projected inside the factory enables SL workers He has made three Frontline documentaries and to see each customer and hear their order. On hopes to get a job at The New School. the assembly line, the !rst worker starts the www.rushkoff.com; www.twitter.com/rushkoff production process that involves loading cotton Trebor Scholz, Now What? Beyond Expropriation bales into a Jacquard loom. Once the fabric is Abstract: The Social Web makes people easier to made it moves down the assembly line through use. In the United States and Europe, participation each machine. Each worker stationed at a has become a personal and professional machine is responsible for selecting the correct imperative rather than a choice. Social media option based on the customer’s order, men’s services dictate modes of life. They shape mental or women’s size for example. At the end of the and bodily habits, opinions, tastes. Every day, the production process, the jeans go through the SL Internet makes billions of hours of spare time of to the real life “portal,” resulting in an output from people in the overdeveloped world available to a a large-format printer. Customers can watch their handful of businesses. Through the rapid global jean orders being produced in the factory via a adaption of mobile devices this is becoming computer projection in the physical space. Once in increasingly true also for people in economically the real world, the jeans made from cotton canvas developing countries. They create !nancial require simple assembly before being worn. value without being aware of it. Data traces Stephanie Rothenberg is an artist and educator are collected, analyzed, processed, and sold. using performance, installation, and networked Companies put a prize at our friendships. Social

32 participation is the oil of the digital economy, at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and yet exploitation is the exemption. Social and today is a nonpro!t foundation based in the networking services encourage Internet users to Netherlands. The organization has a small paid provide data while taking advantage of their desire staff, most working part-time (disclosure: that to be entertained and stay connected. In this talk, includes myself). The work that we produce for I focus on what we can do to politicize our life the site is published under a Creative Commons projects, quite tangibly, rather than stopping at the license, and the community, and the site, is dark realization of our expropriation. I speci!cally invested in the idea of sharing information address data portability, pro!t sharing, non- through links and networks. The typical Global pro!t infrastructures for online sociality, artistic Voices story is a kind of bricolage: built of links, practices and Free and Open Source software, excerpts, translations of excerpts, paraphrase, public media, and greed-free businesses. analysis, and links to or embeds of images, Trebor Scholz teaches in the department of Culture audio, video, graphics, and maps. The role of and Media Studies at Eugene Lang College The the writer is to highlight important issues and New School for Liberal Arts in New York City. He conversations occurring in developing world citizen graduated from the Art Academy in Dresden media. I discuss the formation and growth of (Germany), University College London (UK), the this community, and make explicit the questions Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, the surrounding resources that we encounter. The Hochschule für Kunst und Gestaltung in Zürich initiative as it is currently structured requires (Switzerland) and the University of Plymouth funding; as a nonpro!t anything we raise goes to (UK). Over the last two years, Scholz’s work has support the mission of the organization. How do comprised writing, teaching, and conference we merge volunteer participation with some paid organization. Dr. Trebor Scholz’s research interests staffers, and the collection of revenue for certain focus on social media, especially in education, kinds of activities? I discuss work and leisure as it art, and media activism (speci!cally outside the relates to the Global Voices experience and relate United States and Europe). His artwork has been it to other examples of both. I also suggest some shown at several biennials. He has contributed alternative perspectives to the case, focusing on numerous book chapters and articles in the area civic engagement and citizenship, activism, and of Internet studies and has presented at many philanthropy. conferences worldwide. In 2004, he founded Ivan Sigal is the executive director of Global Voices the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC). Its (globalvoicesonline.org), a non-pro!t online global mailing list, which he moderates, is a leading citizens’ media initiative. Previously, as a senior discussion forum in network culture. Autonomedia fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, he focused published The Art of Free Cooperation, of which on how increased media and information access he is co-editor, in 2007. He has convened several and participation using new technologies affect major conferences, including Kosova: Carnival in con"ict-prone areas. He spent more than ten years the Eye of the Storm, Free Cooperation (with G. working in media development in the former Soviet Lovink), Share Widely, and Situated Technologies Union and Asia, supporting and training journalists (with M. Shepard and O. Khan), and The Internet and working on media co-productions, and also as Playground and Factory (2009). He is currently working as a photographer. During that time, Sigal working on a monograph and an anthology on worked for Internews Network, as regional director “digital labor.” www.collectivate.net; for Asia, Central Asia, and Afghanistan. He has a www.digitallabor.org; www.twitter.com/trebors masters’ degree from the Fletcher School of Law Ivan Sigal, Volunteerism and Global Voices and Diplomacy, and an undergraduate degree Abstract: I discuss the experience of Global from Williams College. www.globalvoicesonline.org; Voices, an online community of volunteer authors www.twitter.com/globalvoices; www.ivonotes. who collectively write globalvoicesonline.org. wordpress.com; www.twitter.com/ivonotes The community includes several hundred Brooke Singer (Moderator) is a media artist authors, translators, freedom of speech activists, who lives in New York City. Her work blurs the and individuals interested in supporting the borders between science, technology, politics, development of online media skills and practice in and art practices. She works across media to the developing world. Global Voices was founded provide entry into important social issues that are

33 often characterized as specialized to a general für die Kommunikationsgesellschaft (2007), Die public. She has exhibited at the Warhol Museum Macht der Suchmaschinen/The Power of Search of Art, the Banff Centre, Neuberger Museum Engines (2007), Suchen und Finden im Internet of Art, Diverseworks, Exit Art, FILE Electronic (2007), and Die Google Gesellschaft (2005). Festival, Sonar Music and Multimedia Festival, Professor Speck’s work is focused on media and the Whitney Artport. Recent awards and theory and philosophy, information operations and commissions include a New York State Council systems, online marketing, media management, on the Arts (NYSCA) Individual Artist award, a intellectual property, open source, e-learning, Headlands Center for Arts residency, a New York cyberwar, netwar, and the ethical, social, and legal State Energy Research and Development Authority implications and limitations of these things. He (NYSERDA) award, a New York Foundation for has designed distance and e-learning systems, the Arts (NYFA) fellowship and an Eyebeam and developed online viral marketing strategies, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Social worked on information architecture projects for Sculpture commission. She is currently associate governments, corporate clients, and academic professor of New Media at Purchase College, State institutions. He works as a consultant for Quaero University of New York, and co-founder of the art, and Theseus, exploring the next generation of technology, and activist group Preemptive Media. intelligent search, information retrieval and www.bsing.net visualization systems for the German Federal Hendrick Speck, Identity and the Social: Ministry of Economics and Technology; he is a Data Politics and Ethics member of the advisory council of the Search Abstract: The presentation focuses on the Marketing Expo SMX (Munich). He is a recipient concepts of identity, personality and community of a Fulbright and DAAD scholarships and within computer mediated environments. Rules scholarships from Heinrich Böll Stiftung, The New and value systems hidden within the legal School, and the European Graduate School. signi!ers, the terms and conditions, of several www.hendrikspeck.com social media, networks and applications will be Julia Sonnevend (Moderator) is a doctoral used to analyze the philosophy and data politics student in Communications at Columbia University, of technological frameworks. The presentation a visiting fellow of the Information Society Project will discuss the social contract of the social, the at Yale Law School, and a pre-doctoral fellow at impact of ownership,availability, informational the Center for Cultural Sociology (Yale University), self determination, and data portability; explore the Center on Organizational Innovation (Columbia the networks of ownership and belonging, University), and the Center for Media and relationships and desire; investigate distributed Communications Studies (Central European concepts of identity, represented by technological University). She studies the intersections between solutions and philosophies; and examine how communications, art history, visual studies and societies accept, foster, and embrace new legal theory. Her research areas include icons and technologies. global society, visual culture, the theory of digital Hendrik Speck is a professor of Digital Media at photography, critical communications studies, the the University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern canon of media studies, visual representations of in the department of Computer Sciences/ justice in art and media, law and performance, Interactive Media, and head of the Information art and activism, cultural trauma, access to Architecture/Search Engine Laboratory. He has knowledge, law in the digitally-networked taught and lectured at the European Graduate environment, global media policy and post- School, where he held the Ada Byron Chair, communist identities. www.julia-sonnevend.com The New School for Social Research, Columbia Elizabeth Stark (Moderator) is a leader in the University, Donau University (Krems), Hochschule global free culture movement. She is a fellow of der Medien (Stuttgart), and the International the Yale Information Society Project, a lecturer School of New Media (Lübeck). Professor Speck, in computer science at Yale University, and an based in New York and Berlin, is a regular speaker adjunct associate professor at NYU. A graduate of and conference panelist. He is the author of many Harvard Law School, Stark founded the Harvard articles and (co)authored several books, including Free Culture Group and served on the board of Medien auf Abruf—Folgen der Individualisierung directors of Students for Free Culture. While at

34 Harvard, she was editor-at-large of the Harvard department of Communication at Stanford Journal of Law & Technology and worked with the University. He’s the author of From Counterculture Harvard Advocates for Human Rights to make to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth better use of new media to promote human rights. Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism Elizabeth spent years researching for the Berkman (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and Echoes Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. She of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory has taught courses ranging from Cyberlaw to IP, (Anchor/Doubleday, 1996; 2nd ed., University Technology and Politics, and Electronic Music. of Minnesota Press, 2001). Before coming to She recently produced the inaugural Open Video Stanford, he taught communication at Harvard’s Conference in New York City, which garnered nearly John F. Kennedy School of Government and MIT’s 9,000 participants in person and across the Web. Sloan School of Management. He worked for ten Elizabeth regularly gives talks around the world years as a journalist. His writing has appeared in on free culture and has collaborated with myriad publications ranging from the Boston Globe Sunday organizations on promoting shared knowledge and Magazine to Nature. fredturner.stanford.edu the open Web. She has lived and worked in Berlin, McKenzie Wark, Gift, Game, Work, and Labor Singapore, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro, and speaks Abstract: A critical look at four categories of French, German, and Portuguese. what we might call praxis, or the process of self- www.law.yale.edu/intellectuallife/stark transformation. In the digital era, it is no longer Fred Turner, Dreaming the End of Bureaucracy: clear what the difference is between them. Network Theory and the Legacy of the Counterculture Hence the need for a comprehensive approach Abstract: Over the last few years, scholars that considers all forms of praxis together. and pundits alike have argued that new media A critical approach, moreover, does not just technologies are driving the blurring of the concern itself with the ways in which praxis is playground and the factory, and with it, the transformative, but with the ways in which praxis democratization of civic and commercial itself can be transformed. participation. This talk challenges that account. McKenzie Wark is the author of A Hacker While not denying the power of information Manifesto (Harvard 2004), Gamer Theory technologies today, it demonstrates that the (Harvard 2007), and various other things. ideals underlying contemporary fusions of work He is the associate dean of Eugene Lang College and play !rst appeared decades ago, in response The New School for Liberal Arts. to then-ubiquitous critiques of bureaucracy. www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKenzie_Wark According to critics ranging from C. Wright Mills to Lewis Mumford, bureaucracies tended to produce Darren Wershler, The Poetics of Uncreativity psychological fragmentation and social partition. Abstract: This lecture reads from “status update” How, they wondered, could work be re-organized so and “apostrophe,” texts generated from a custom- as to allow individuals to bring their whole selves built Google search application and Facebook into the labor process and to integrate their labors and Twitter RSS feeds respectively, and discusses into everyday life? This talk brie"y traces two them in terms of the poetics of uncreativity and historically sequential answers to that question: conceptual writing. Discussion includes reference !rst, the rise of New Communalism in the 1960s, to and critique of recent theories of affective and and second, the rise of peer production today. It “immaterial” labour. notes that each movement has sought to restore Darren Wershler is assistant professor in the a psychological and social wholeness that critics Communication Studies department of Wilfrid have long thought bureaucracy destroys. Yet, it Laurier University, part of the faculty at the also shows how these searches for an egalitarian CFC Media Lab TELUS Interactive Art and social world have at times corroded the cultural Entertainment program, and a research af!liate and political scaffolding on which such a world of the IP Osgoode Intellectual Property Law and depends. The talk concludes then, by pointing Technology program. His most recent book is The to the forgotten virtues of bureaucracy and with Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting them, to new principles for a sustained critique of (Cornell University Press, 2007). He has written the networked production emerging around us. or co-written !ve other books about technology Fred Turner is an assistant professor in the and culture and three books of poetry, including

35 apostrophe (with Bill Kennedy), the !rst book range of projects is making the application of written with a search engine. Forthcoming books human brainpower as purchasable and fungible as include a book about Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg additional server rackspace. What are some of the and the !rst monograph on the work of Kenneth issues arising as armies of thinkers are recruited Goldsmith. www.alienated.net/dwh by the thousands and millions? Xtine (participant in Prelude event, Nov. 11), Jonathan L. Zittrain is a professor of Internet law The Mechanical Olympics at Harvard Law School and a faculty co-director of Abstract: The Mechanical Olympics is a YouTube Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. video competition of Olympic performances Previously, Zittrain was professor of Internet made by the elastic workforce on Amazon.com’s Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Mechanical Turk website. Every viewer gets a Institute of the University of Oxford and visiting chance to vote on the gold medalists. Winners professor at the New York University School of Law receive a bonus payment. Three videos were and Stanford Law School. He is the author, most commissioned for each event and event polls recently, of The Future of the Internet and How change daily on this interactive alternative to the to Stop It and co-editor Access Denied. Zittrain Olympic Games. The rules are simple: workers works in several intersections of the Internet with have to wear the Mechanical Olympic signage, law and policy, including intellectual property, perform for the country and event described in censorship and !ltering for content control, and the HIT (Human Intelligence Task) they accept, computer security. He founded an organization and create a 30–60 second video of their that develops classroom tools. www.cyber.law. performance. Any abstraction on the idea of the harvard.edu/people/jzittrain event is encouraged. They post the URL to their video and in return are paid from $1 to $3 US. This project aims to offer the human intelligence task (HIT) workers a creative and physical alternative to their typical HITs. The videos posted on the blog create an Olympic event for the masses, where every viewer has the opportunity to vote on the medalists. Participants and viewers are reminded that the amateur can often be just as engaging and entertaining as the professional. Xtine is a media artist and educator, and the co-author of Digital Foundations: Intro to Media Design with the Adobe Creative Suite (New Riders/AIGA 2009). She is informed by the history of conceptual art and practices in the era of social-networking. Using tools common to consumer web practices, such as databases, search engines, blogs, and applications, sometimes in combination with popular sites like Facebook, YouTube, or Mechanical Turk, she creates web projects and communities that foster interpretation and autonomy. Xtine believes that art can shape social experiences by in"uencing consumer culture with imaginary practices. As an educator, she is interested in the art of instruction. www.missconceptions.net Jonathan L. Zittrain, Minds for Sale Abstract: Cloud computing is not just for computing anymore: you can now !nd as much mindshare as you can afford out in the cloud too—a new

36 The New School Eugene Lang College The New School was founded in 1919 as The New School for Liberal Arts the New School for Social Research by a is The New School’s four-year college for group of prominent progressive scholars undergraduates coming out of high school. including Charles Beard, John Dewey, James Beginning as an experimental program Harvey Robinson, and Thorstein Veblen. in 1973, it became a full division of the They organized their school as an alternative university in 1985 thanks to the generous to the traditional university and offered an support of well-known philanthropist and open curriculum, minimal hierarchy, and free New School board member Eugene M. intellectual exchange. In 1933, New School Lang. Emphasis is still on small seminar- President Alvin Johnson gave a home to style classes with a student-faculty ratio of the University in Exile, a refuge for scholars 15-1. Majors include traditional academic driven out of Germany by the Nazis. In subjects and innovative transdisciplinary 1934, the University in Exile was organized areas of study like environmental studies as the Graduate Faculty of Political and and media studies. Social Science (now called The New School The department of Culture and Media for Social Research), and The New School Studies offers a program of study leading became a university. to the Bachelor of Arts degree in Culture After 90 years, The New School’s and Media and has a new Screen Studies commitment to transcending the boundaries program in development. Teaching in this between traditional academic disciplines, !eld is at a crossroads, and the department its ties to the cosmopolitan cultural and supports this conference because it raises professional life of New York City, and important issues for teaching as well as for its willingness to reinvent itself remain research. At Eugene Lang College, we are unchanged, as does its dedication to the committed to combining our faculty’s high ideal of lifelong education for all citizens. quality research and creative work with the Currently, there are close to 10,000 students continuous re!nement and revision of our enrolled in the university’s degree programs. teaching mission. The study of “new media” Additional thousands of students enroll in cannot be simply added onto the existing our continuing education courses every year. pedagogy. It calls rather for a thorough The eight divisions of The New School rethinking of both the form and content of offer undergraduate and graduate degrees media education. Neither the division of and certi!cates and continuing education teaching into separate !elds of radio, !lm, courses in the liberal arts, humanities, television, etc. nor the separation of the social sciences, public policy, design, and study of media as an object from the skills performing arts. The university’s divisions of media production will survive the ongoing are The New School for General Studies, transformation of media architectures and The New School for Social Research, cultures. Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy, Parsons The New School for Design, Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, Mannes College The New School for Music, The New School for Drama, and The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music.

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