Crowdsourced

…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!

4 months ago | 11 notes | Reblog |
crowdsourcing, spec, no spec, spec work, commodity, marx,

[I]t could be argued that crowdsourcing transcends commodity fetishism –- albeit, only to a certain point. Labour is at the forefront of discussions of crowdsourcing, implied by the very term itself. Whereas the deskilling of Fordism reduces workers to mere cogs, and whereas their work goes unrecognized and is divorced from the final product, discussions of crowdsourcing often make visible once more the labour and labourer(s) responsible for a given product. For instance, if one is inclined to purchase the best-selling Threadless T-shirt, The Communist Party, from the Threadless online store, one sees that its designer is Tom Burns. One sees that he is in his early-thirties, has been a member of Threadless since 2005, and is quite a prolific Threadless user. One can see his photograph, his other designs, and his Flickr photos. One can read his blogs, critiques, and slogans. One can visit his website, or even contact him through AIM. One would be hard-pressed to have such a relation to whomever helped build, say, one’s new Ford.

At the same time, this relation to Tom Burns is primarily to his identity as-designer; one gets to know Tom Burns principally as Threadless-user ‘tomburns.’ It is perhaps a less fetishized relation than one may have with the seemingly nameless Ford employees who manufactured one’s automobile, but nonetheless does not affirm the complexities of Tom Burns as a person. With this in mind, the vocation can hardly be relegated to an allegedly obsolete industrial-era. The vocation, as a limited -– and limiting -– facet of individual identities, thrives within crowdsourcing; we may now know the names and faces of individual producers, but we approach them through their role in the market. Moreover, this partial overcoming of commodity fetishism can be read also as a model offering increased surveillance, the internalization of worker discipline, and overall a form of commodity fetishism which regards the partial humanization of producers as part of a branding strategy –- in all, that the blurring of public and private identities through crowdsourcing resolves itself in a way that intensifies, rather than alleviates, the commodification of the individual.

Early thoughts on commodity fetishism in relation to crowdsourcing, from my (hopefully soon-finished!) case study of Threadless.