What do you call a multimillion-dollar, for-profit company that's run in large part by unpaid or underpaid grunt laborers? A century ago, you might've dubbed it robber-barony or sharecropping — if not, you know, outright slavery.
In 2015, though, we call it the social web: a glorious dystopia where everybody works for likes — as in, "for free" — while a handful of tech tycoons profit.
Never has this been clearer than in the past month, as Reddit — a private company that recently accepted $50 million in venture funding — quelled an uprising among the volunteers who actually run the site: its moderators.
But in so much as Reddit relies on digital work to run its business, it is not alone. In fact, that's basically the elevator pitch of every major internet institution, from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to Wikipedia.
Even when these sites don't openly rely on "consumers" to create the content that keeps venture capital, ad revenue or donations pouring in, they're mining them for other sorts of resources that can be monetized: personal data, structured and aggregate data, clicks.
"Digital labor is like a meeting with free pizza and soda," quips the new media scholar Trebor Scholz, "but the Stasi is listening in."
That may seem like a dramatic analogy — the Stasi were, after all, a Cold War-era secret police — but it goes pretty far toward explaining exactly how blurred the lines have become between things we used to consider distinct: things like pizza parties and espionage. Or playing and working.
http://m.timesofindia.com/tech/social/Facebook-You-dont-know-it-but-you-work-for-the-social-media-giant/articleshow/48202712.cms
In 2015, though, we call it the social web: a glorious dystopia where everybody works for likes — as in, "for free" — while a handful of tech tycoons profit.
Never has this been clearer than in the past month, as Reddit — a private company that recently accepted $50 million in venture funding — quelled an uprising among the volunteers who actually run the site: its moderators.
But in so much as Reddit relies on digital work to run its business, it is not alone. In fact, that's basically the elevator pitch of every major internet institution, from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to Wikipedia.
Even when these sites don't openly rely on "consumers" to create the content that keeps venture capital, ad revenue or donations pouring in, they're mining them for other sorts of resources that can be monetized: personal data, structured and aggregate data, clicks.
"Digital labor is like a meeting with free pizza and soda," quips the new media scholar Trebor Scholz, "but the Stasi is listening in."
That may seem like a dramatic analogy — the Stasi were, after all, a Cold War-era secret police — but it goes pretty far toward explaining exactly how blurred the lines have become between things we used to consider distinct: things like pizza parties and espionage. Or playing and working.
http://m.timesofindia.com/tech/social/Facebook-You-dont-know-it-but-you-work-for-the-social-media-giant/articleshow/48202712.cms
