Core Post - Labor

Within each of the readings a common theme resounds around obfuscation, secreted modes in which labor is extracted and monetized for late capitalism. Be it racialized and distributed unevenly, extracted from non- so-called work time, broken apart across crowds so as to be unrecognizable, disguised as non-human labor, or outsourced to precarious employees who quickly burn out—in all these ways exploitative practice gets hidden. So in ‘cognitive’ labor we see the illusion of ease, the offer of un-thinking, for one class, which folds up the work of every other class into systems for profit. This reminds me again of the “Anatomy of an AI” diagram through which a giant layered multiplex allows extraction at every tier and every branch, building on orders of magnitude. At the same time as this digital platform mediation creates zones of extraction, as Aytes points out it creates “states of exception” (176) that lie outside of potential regulation, unionization, or enfranchisement. But as Roberts argues, through their ‘invisibility’ as part of those systems, these labor practices tell us much about what is trying to be valued, normalized, palatable, codified, reified within those systems—in the case of social media content management, she shows how content is selected not merely for broader social good or ill (were that to exist) but for “the palatability of that content to some imagined audience and the potential for its marketability and virality, on the one hand, and the likelihood of it causing offense and brand damage, on the other. In short, it is evaluated for its potential value as commodity.” I was familiar with CMM work, however the work of gold farming and the precarity of ‘virtual migrants’ was new to me. No matter how much I realize it still goes on, it’s still shocking to me that people can view digital spaces as post-racial or not see the level of bias Nakamura describes writ so plainly. I felt her description of neoliberal ‘colorblindness’ and ‘cultural assimilation’ was particularly useful—because of course the argument that people have simply failed “to behave in ways that are normatively colorless or sexless” ignores the normativity of that standard of race or gender decided to be set as -less (that is, imbued with power in its neutrality, unmarked). I wish she could have unpacked this perhaps obvious thread just a bit more, but I think it’s useful in relation to the notion of ‘avatarial capital’ or virtual self-possession—and I’d like to think more about how the ability to have virtual self possession connects with what we do with our cognitive “free labor” and our agency over its outputs, in the ways that Terranova points out.