Crowdsourced

"If corporations founded by Stanford alumni were to form an independent nation, it would be the tenth..."

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 01:37:41 -0500

“If corporations founded by Stanford alumni were to form an independent nation, it would be the tenth largest economy in the world, with an annual revenue of $2.7 trillion”

- Rebecca Solnit · Diary: Google Invades · LRB 7 February 2013 (via interestingsnippets)

inbonobo: ..our business plan didn’t involve us in any way -...

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 23:42:47 -0400

inbonobo:

..our business plan didn’t involve us in any way - it was just a description of other people making and selling products. (via xkcd: Crowdsourcing)

"Contrary to a commonly held view of crowdsourcing as a transfer of low-skill work to low cost..."

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 16:53:34 -0400

“Contrary to a commonly held view of crowdsourcing as a transfer of low-skill work to low cost locations, our analysis shows that more than half of all the crowdsourcing workers live in North America and Europe and workers are generally very well educated. Almost half have bachelor degree and only 5% are truly low skill workers with only an elementary education.”

- in Forbes

Work Without Jobs: A Trend For The Educated Elite

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 16:38:41 -0400

Work Without Jobs: A Trend For The Educated Elite:

The rapid shift to non-employment should concern us for a number of reasons. Routine employment data, which underpins economic optimism or pessimism, is unlikely to reflect the full range of opportunity that the economy is creating as we move away from jobs as a primary form of engagement with work. Add to that the fact that emerging types of work tend towards the extremes. They can be entrepreneurial, creative and full of opportunity but they can also be very low paid.

A troubling development is the drift to highly educated, low paid labor. That combination seems to be characteristic of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing has the potential to enable a new elasticity in the use of labor but it also has the capacity to drive income through the floor.

Introducing: Flathead Thomas Friedman

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 15:01:38 -0500

Introducing: Flathead Thomas Friedman

"The awareness that we live in a system or, better, that our lives and livelihoods are articulated..."

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:49:00 -0500

“The awareness that we live in a system or, better, that our lives and livelihoods are articulated through systemic forces, does not need to lead us to despair. Knowledge of these forces does not make us weaker; on the contrary, it makes us stronger, because the system reveals its Achilles heel by showing what it must do in order to survive: it must promote enclosures and it must pit producers, both waged and unwaged, against each other, thus creating the appearance of abundance, but instead reproducing scarcity.”

- Massimo De Angelis. The Beginning of History. (2007, p. 225-226, emphasis in original).

stickyembraces: Everything has an end, except for history,...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:43:09 -0500

stickyembraces:

Everything has an end, except for history, which has many endings, since it ends every time a thinker on the continent is feeling particularly confident.

"Any existing structures and all the conditions of doing business are always in a process of change...."

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:44:33 -0500

“Any existing structures and all the conditions of doing business are always in a process of change. Every situation is being upset before it has had time to work itself out.”

- Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942, p. 31-32), obviously plagiarizing one of the early chapters of the Communist Manifesto, in which I believe the phrase was about relations that become “antiquated before they can ossify.”

"As a matter of fact, capitalist economy is not and cannot be stationary. Nor is it merely expanding..."

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:34:00 -0500

“As a matter of fact, capitalist economy is not and cannot be stationary. Nor is it merely expanding in a steady manner. It is incessantly being revolutionized from within by new enterprise, i.e., by the intrusion of new commodities or new methods of production or new commercial opportunities into the industrial structure as it exists at any moment. Any existing structures and all the conditions of doing business are always in a process of change. Every situation is being upset before it has had time to work itself out. Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.”

- Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942, p. 31-32, emphasis included).

If I understand correctly, a good way to become a hugely influential economist is to plagiarize Marx while you repudiate Marx.

"The possibility of the privatisation of the general intellect was something Marx never envisaged in..."

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 13:30:00 -0500

“The possibility of the privatisation of the general intellect was something Marx never envisaged in his writings about capitalism (largely because he overlooked its social dimension). Yet this is at the core of today’s struggles over intellectual property: as the role of the general intellect – based on collective knowledge and social co-operation – has increased in post-industrial capitalism, so wealth accumulates out of all proportion to the labour expended in its production. The result is not, as Marx seems to have expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated through the privatisation of knowledge.”

- Slavoj Žižek · The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie · LRB 11 January 2012

The best Zizek piece in a while (probably since the height of Occupy). He handily explains the becoming-rent of profit, performs a hat-tip and drive-by criticism of Hardt & Negri, and does an eloquent job of making the fairly obvious point that capital’s assault on the middle-class is counterproductive to its own stability.

(via towerofsleep)

mediabytes: New Yorker cartoon on crowdsourcing - what does it...

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:39:59 -0500

mediabytes:

New Yorker cartoon on crowdsourcing - what does it mean? The metaphor seems backwards to me.

"…spec work devalues the communication design profession. It reduces communication design to a..."

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:19:58 -0500

“…spec work devalues the communication design profession. It reduces communication design to a commodity, rather than to a specialized service.”

- NO!SPEC.

Commodities are here understood in their simplest sense, as undifferentiated goods such as wheat or oil, which are exchanged in a market according to supply and demand, such that their prices are generally determined without the consideration of qualitative differences in their production, e.g. wheat is wheat, no matter where or by what methods it is grown and harvested, and oil is oil, no matter where or by what methods it is extracted and refined; the key term in this definition of a commodity is ‘undifferentiated good,’ which is contrasted against the definition of communication design as ‘a specialized service.’ The seeming triviality of commodities, famously remarked upon by Marx, allows its use in this pejorative sense, as a sphere of production somehow less ‘valuable’ than that of communication design services.

It is surprisingly difficult to engage with this commonsensical understanding of commodities!

"Marx is not only selling well, he has also been praised most recently by German Finance Minister..."

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 11:49:24 -0500

“Marx is not only selling well, he has also been praised most recently by German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück, who recently told the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, ‘Certain parts of Marx’s thinking are really not so bad.’”

- High praise for Marxism

"To confront these issues, we, along with many others, have proposed possible initial steps, such as..."

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 11:05:00 -0500

“To confront these issues, we, along with many others, have proposed possible initial steps, such as establishing a guaranteed income, the right to global citizenship, and a process of the democratic reappropriation of the common. But we are under no illusion that we have all the answers. Instead we are encouraged by the fact that we are not alone asking the questions. We are confident, in fact, that those who are dissatisfied with the life offered by our contemporary neoliberal society, indignant about its injustices, rebellious against its powers of command and exploitation, and yearning for an alternative democratic form of life based on the common wealth we share – they, by posing these questions and pursuing their desires, will invent new solutions we cannot yet even imagine. Those are some of our best wishes for 2012.”

- Hardt and Negri, What to expect in 2012

"On the economic terrain we need to discover new social technologies for freely producing in common..."

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 11:03:00 -0500

“On the economic terrain we need to discover new social technologies for freely producing in common and for equitably distributing shared wealth. How can our productive energies and desires be engaged and increased in an economy not founded on private property? How can welfare and basic social resources be provided to all in a social structure not regulated and dominated by state property? We must construct the relations of production and exchange as well as the structures of social welfare that are composed of and adequate to the common.”

- Hardt and Negri, What to expect in 2012

"We will sing of the great crowds who can finally free themselves from the slavery of wage labour and..."

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 10:51:39 -0500

“We will sing of the great crowds who can finally free themselves from the slavery of wage labour and through solidarity revolt against exploitation. We will sing of the infinite web of knowledge and invention, the immaterial technology that frees us from physical hardship. We will sing of the rebellious cognitariat who is in touch with her own body. We will sing to the infinity of the present and abandon the illusion of a future.”

- Franco Berardi, The Post-Futurist Manifesto

"We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the..."

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 10:49:37 -0500

“We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.”

- F. T. Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto

"AIGA was advised by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) not to publish a spec work position in any..."

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 11:04:28 -0500

“AIGA was advised by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) not to publish a spec work position in any statement that might be referred to, even indirectly, as an ethical standard that might elicit censure within the profession… or it might risk being cited for a restraint of trade through price fixing (i.e., making it unethical to work for nothing) for which we would have lost our 501.3.c status and possibly been subject to a regulatory action.”

- Ric Grefé

"Time is the room of human development. A man who has no free time to dispose of, whose whole..."

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 16:39:37 -0500

“Time is the room of human development. A man who has no free time to dispose of, whose whole lifetime, apart from the mere physical interruptions by sleep, meals, and so forth, is absorbed by his labour for the capitalist, is less than a beast of burden. He is a mere machine for producing foreign wealth, broken in body and brutalised in mind. Yet the whole history of modern industry shows that capital, if not checked, will recklessly and ruthlessly work to cast down the whole working class to this utmost state of degradation.”

- Marx, in Value, Price and Profit (1935, p. 54).

"We have till now supposed that the working day has given limits. The working day, however, has, by..."

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 16:32:00 -0500

“We have till now supposed that the working day has given limits. The working day, however, has, by itself, no constant limits. It is the constant tendency of capital to stretch it to its utmost physically possible length, because in the same degree surplus labour, and consequently the profit resulting therefrom, will be increased. The more capital succeeds in prolonging the working day, the greater the amount of other people’s labour it will appropriate.”

- Marx, in Value, Price and Profit (1935, p. 52).