Uberworked and Underpaid How workers are disrupting the digital economy Trebor Scholz polity Uberworked and Underpaid How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy Uberworked and TreborUnderpaid Scholz How workers are disrupting the digitalPolity economy Press 2016 Trebor Scholz polity Table of Contents Epigraph Dedication Title page Copyright page Acknowledgments Author's Note Introduction: Why Digital Labor Now? About This Book The Digital Labor Conferences Notes Part I 1: Waged Labor and the End of Employment 1) Toward a Typology of Digital Labor Overview 2) Crowdsourcing: All Together Now! 3) Digital Labor in the Shadows: Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) 4) The Ecosystem of Compensated Digital Labor 5) Ethical Crowdwork? MobileWorks and Samasource 6) Content Farming 7) Competitive Crowdsourcing 8) User-led Innovation 9) In-game Labor 10) Online Labor Brokerages 11) On-demand Labor 12) Online Assistance 13) Conclusion Notes 2: Playbor and Other Unpaid Pursuits Overview 1) Data Labor 2) The Development of an Ecosystem of Digital Work 3) The Performance of Self 4) Free Labor is not the Problem 5) Hybrid Public/Private Business Models 3 6) Hope Labor 7) Gamification 8) Fan Labor 9) Universal Basic Income Notes 3: Vocabulary Overview 1) The Myth of Immateriality 2) Work vs. Labor 3) The Fence Around the Produser Factory 4) Against a Surrender of the Language of Labor Notes 4: Crowd Fleecing Chapter Overview and Omissions 1) Is This Still Exploitation? 2) The Living Museum of Human Exploitation 3) Crowd Fleecing 4) Historical Context 5) Sleep as a Site of Crisis Notes Part II 5: Legal Gray Zones Overview 1) What is the Holdback for Regulators? 2) Independent Contractors, Employees, or What? 3) Widening the Definition of Employment 4) Lawsuits by Workers 5) Toward a Living Wage 6) Toward a Bill of Rights for All Platform Workers 7) The French Internet Tax Proposal Notes 6: On Selective Engagement When the Factory Turns Cold: A Manifesto Overview 1) Targeting the Centers of Power 2) Break Off, Switch Off, Disengage, Unthink 3) A Reprieve from Monetized Data Labor 4 4) “There is No CLOUD, Just Other People's Computers” 5) On Withdrawal, Defection, and Refusal 6) Toward Tactical Refusal and Selective Engagement Notes 7: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism Overview 1) Consequences of the Sharing Economy 2) Possible Futures 3) Solidarity 4) The Rise of Platform Cooperativism 5) Toward a Typology of Platform Co-Ops 6) Ten Principles for Platform Cooperativism 7) The Cooperative Ecosystem 8) For All People Notes Epilogue Index End User License Agreement 5 “Bringing together the rich and long tradition of cooperativism and worker self-management with the digital economy of the twenty-first century, Scholz's timely and groundbreaking new book provides both in-depth analysis and practical steps to make the Internet economy truly work for all who most rely on it.” Zeynep Tufekci, writer at The New York Times, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, professor at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill “Trebor Scholz has written a unsparing and bracing critique of platform capitalism. Moreover, he's developed a blueprint for transcending it: a tough-minded platform cooperativism that eschews the utopianism of ‘sharing economy’ bromides. Anyone concerned about the future of work should read this book.” Frank Pasquale, author of The Black Box Society “Based on years of research and cooperation, Uberworked and Underpaid passionately and sharply tracks down the dark side of the ‘sharing economy,’ that is the reduction of labor to a cheap and disposable commodity, without protections or benefits. Against such hyper-precarization, Scholz believes in the possibility of autonomous self-organization of digital work. Posing platform cooperativism against crowd fleecing and the on-demand service economy, Scholz's book is an invaluable contribution to a much needed reinvention of a socialism for the twenty-first century.” Tiziana Terranova, author of Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age 6 Acknowledgments This book is based on years of research, taking into consideration work from the arts, law, technology studies, and the social sciences. It is informed by many exchanges with participants at the Digital Labor Conferences that I have convened at The New School in New York City since 2009. I enjoy critical thought wherever I can find it, which meant that while writing this book I focused not only on printed matter but also on mailing lists, e-books, jounalistic accounts, and blog essays. I couldn't have written Uberworked and Underpaid without the conversations on the Institute for Distributed Creativity mailing list, which I founded in 2004. Many of its members offered commentary and prodded me into starting this project. This book, then, reflects what I learned about digital labor. Some readers may search the pdf of this book and will be most interested in a particular chapter. Therefore, in the process of writing, I aimed for each chapter to hold up on its own, also outside of the context of the entire book. This book greatly benefited from many discussions. I would like to thank those who invited me to present and test the ideas and arguments for this book through lectures at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, Harvard University, Warsaw's Center for Contemporary Art, Yale University, Transmediale, Re:publica, Schloss Solitude, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Cologne, Georgetown University, McGill, and universities in Berlin, Chiang Mai, Athens, Uppsala, Mexico City, and Hong Kong. I am especially grateful to the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy at the University of Toronto for inviting me to deliver the Grafstein Lecture in March of 2014 and to Hampshire College for asking me to present the 8th Erick Schocket Memorial Lecture a year later. Many people helped to shape the ideas by offering helpful comments on the manuscript. First of all, my New School colleague McKenzie Wark, along with various undisclosed academic reviewers, deserves special thanks for persuading Polity Press to give this book a chance. Thank you also to my editor at Polity, Elen Griffiths, for helping me to make this a better book. I owe gratitude to The New School, and Eugene Lang College in particular, for sustaining my cross- disciplinary practice as a scholar-activist, cultural catalyst, and educator. My faculty colleagues across the university, at Lang, Media Studies, and Parsons, have been extraordinarily congenial and supportive of my work, for which I would like to thank them as well. At the University of Maryland School of Law, I would like to thank Frank Pasquale for his unceasing invaluable input and enduring friendship. He kept me going; I owe him much. At Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, I would like to thank Jefferson Cowie for his enthusiastic comments. Fred Turner read and commented on earlier versions of this book. (I hope that it reads more like a waterfall now.) At Leuphana Universität, many thanks to Mercedes Bunz, for her graceful comments and encouragement. At Ryerson University, I would also like to thank Henry Warwick for his support of the project. My gratitude goes out also to Rochelle LaPlante, Winifred Poster, David Carroll, Antonio A. Casilli, Orit Halpern, Karen Gregory, Samuel Tannert, Nathan Schneider, Natalie Bookchin, and Roger Brishen. During my sabbatical in 2012–13, the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI) in Berlin hosted me in its magnificent quarters through a guest fellowship. Thank you, Christopher Holtzey, director of the ICI, and Corinna Haas, ICI's librarian. I would like to extend a special thanks to my smart and wonderfully quirky New School students for their 7 curious questions and useful input, in particular those who participated in my seminars on digital labor in 2011 and 2014. I hope that this book will help them to navigate their own work lives with greater critical awareness. Life during the time of writing this was filled with speaking engagements at conferences and the work of chairing The Politics of Digital Culture series at The New School. There have been many convivial meetings, much time preparing for class and teaching, and advising. On a personal note, these past years were also about raising my two daughters Rosa and Emma with my partner in life, the artist Jenny Perlin. They make me proud in more ways than I can name. I was only able to take on the bleak realities of digital labor because of their giggles and loving embrace. 8 Introduction: Why Digital Labor Now? No one would have believed, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, that the ideological bubble of the “sharing economy” would deflate so quickly, or that workers, labor advocates, programmers, and activists would soon start to build structures for democratic ownership and governance on the Internet. It is likely that we will look back to this era and understand it as a turning point for both the nature of work and our lifestyles. The title of this book purports to be about the “sharing economy” but it goes beyond that. In fact, it starts off with an atlas of sites of digital work – from on-demand work to in-game labor, and finishes with proposals for ways in which workers and their allies can start to take back the digital economy. Fairly compensated digital work with reliable hours holds considerable potential for low-income immigrants and those living in geographically remote or economically precarious regions. Such digital work could also provide a decent income for the more than 650,000 people1 who are released from prison each year, struggling to find a well-paying job. People who care for a child or a sick relative or those who have phobias or other restrictions that do not allow them to leave their homes could also benefit.