Core Post 5 -- Some thoughts on Immaterial Labor in 2019

The discussion of immaterial labor in this weeks readings seemed rather dated given the realities of the gig-economy, cyber-currencies, and automated bots, which to my mind challenge the idea of immaterial labor as the principle hegemonic form of labor under neoliberal capitalism. The notion of the “Gold Farmer” as a form of human labor has been largely replaced by machine learning bots, and is now a proper capitalist endeavor: most farms are run by investors who transform raw computational power—not human power—into money. This predominates in WoW, RuneQuest, and other MMOs. Whomever has the computation infrastructure and the most sophisticated bots makes the most money. 

One of the core contradictions of gig-economy, however, is that this labor market is unsustainable. As many of the “Uber-for-x” companies have found, workers in the gig-economy quickly realize the extent to which they are being exploited and demand higher wages. This is the widely-discussed, unspoken rule of companies like Uber, et al.: their business model cannot sustain itself. Without the financial manipulations of the stock market, where investor capital is continuously needed to offset losses, all of these companies would go bankrupt. As such they are locked in a cycle of constant expansion into new market segments, while cutting pay to workers in order to keep the whole endeavor from collapsing in on itself. It seems inconceivable that these extreme contradictions will not lead to worker collectives, protests, and general labor unrest. Uber has already faced a number of class-action lawsuits from workers that have threatened to topple the entire regime.

It seems to me that the phenomenon of crowd-sourced labor presents equal challenges to both labor and capital. For labor it presents a challenge to organizing and creating collective labor power, and for capital it presents a new, if not difficult stage in labor management techniques. One of the solutions that capital is pursuing is what I mentioned above: using automated bots to take over for human labor, and creating more and more creative ways to secretly crowd-source humans to train these ML models (for instance, Re-Captcha, Facebook’s face-recognition as Tagging, or Apple’s using facial recognition to open your phone). What is most interesting about Nakamura’s analysis, with the benefit of hindsight, is the ways in which capital finds new ways to exploit and reproduce racial antagonisms to divide workers against themselves, such as to head off their ability to organize collectively.