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.
Crowdsourced
Andrew made a Tumblr for his forthcoming thesis. Sometimes he will get off topic though.
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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.
To any mind not warped by the habit of fingering the Marxian rosary it should be obvious that…
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.
The will of the capitalist is certainly to take as much as possible. What we have to do is not to talk about his will, but to enquire into his power, the limits of that power, and the character of those limits.
Crowdsourcing as a Declaration of Class War
So you’ve lost your job, maybe even your career or livelihood, and maybe even your home. But don’t fret: your suffering is helping to usher in the era of mass collaboration.
Jeff Howe, who coined the term and literally wrote the book on crowdsourcing, suggests we look toward Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s platform for unskilled, ill-paid labour:
In early 2007, Mechanical Turk’s success was anything but assured. Companies seemed unwilling to experiment with it, and the pool of ‘Turkers’ (the people who accept these menial assignments) looked to be a diminishing resource. Then a cottage industry of third-party firms sprung up specializing in helping companies exploit the service and filtering out the inevitable low-quality responses. Add in a recession, and the service has blossomed into a 200,000-person strong workforce.
His point is that “our current economic downturn plays a role” in the proliferation, or mainstreaming, of crowdsourcing. “If crowdsourcing runs on people’s ‘spare cycles’ — their downtime not claimed by work or family obligations — that quantity is now in surplus.”
You losing your job is great news for the proliferation of crowdsourcing. Now you have more time to perform “simple, rote tasks like tagging images, transcribing audio materials, or culling records from online databases.”
While accurate, only the most detached, morally-bankrupt apologist could view such a development as a ‘success.’ The ‘blossoming’ of Mechanical Turk, a platform that literally pays pennies for unskilled, repetitive labour, can provide no comfort and no consolation to those who lost their jobs, their homes, and their livelihoods to gambles taken by bankers, executives, and other inept, irresponsible casino-capitalists.
In this period of foreclosures, high unemployment rates, and unprecedented levels of wealth concentrated in so few hands, the proliferation of crowdsourcing should not be celebrated as the dawning of a new, post-industrial age, but condemned as a declaration of class war issued by the winning side.
Crowdsourcing is, at bottom, no more or less than an ascendent business model, the latest in a centuries-long history of revolutions in production. With this understanding, crowdsourcing is indeed part of a revolutionary movement happening today, but it is not a revolution that advocates of horizontality and democratization would find desirable; it is instead an unambitious revolution, a revolution in production that serves to rescue capital from its current crisis. As we will see in our analysis of iStockphoto, far from posing an existential threat to century-old corporations, crowdsourcing is being easily assimilated into the supply chains of these apparent relics of the industrial age. Large, mature firms are not threatened by small crowdsourcing start-ups; they are buying them.
Now the advocates of a critical (autonomist) position towards free labour may validly respond that free labour only becomes an issue in spheres of activity where there has been extensive commodification, and that the vast social reach of certain digital technologies makes it important to highlight the labour that they depend upon. The development of the internet might be an example of this, or more specific sites such as YouTube. Even here, however, there are problems that we might want to consider, and which do not seem to have been raised in the debates about free labour. Terranova’s seminal account usefully pointed to the huge amount of unpaid work necessary to create the internet. But it may be said in response that those who undertook such unpaid digital labour might have gained a set of rewards from such work, such as the satisfaction of contributing to a project which they believed would enhance communication between people and ultimately the common good; or in the form of finding solutions to problems and gaining new skills which they could apply later in other contexts. In some cases, it might be possible to think of their work as involving the building of skills which lead to higher wages being paid in the longer term – a kind of deferred wage. Without denying for a moment the fundamental importance of a living wage, it seems dangerous to think of wages as the only meaningful form of reward, and it would surely be wrong to imply that any work done on the basis of social contribution or deferred reward represents the activities of people duped by capitalism. Actually, it seems to me that this would run the danger of internalising capitalism’s own emphasis on commodification.
To put it simply, Steve Jobs is no better than Bill Gates: whether it be Apple or Microsoft, global access is increasingly grounded in the virtually monopolistic privatization of the cloud which provides this access. The more an individual user is given access to universal public space, the more that space is privatized.
