ephemera
editorial
theory & politics in organization
the author(s) 2010
ISSN 1473-2866
www.ephemeraweb.org
volume 10(3/4): 214-221
Digital labour: Workers, authors, citizens∗
Jonathan Burston, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Alison Hearn
The papers in this issue of ephemera have their origins in a conference, ‘Digital Labour:
Workers, Authors, Citizens’, held at the University of Western Ontario on October 1618, 2009. The conference was organized by the Digital Labour Group, an assembly of
scholars from within the Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS), a nondepartmentalized unit that houses programs in Library and Information Science,
Journalism, and Media Studies. While the Faculty has always, since its origins more
than a decade ago in the heady times of the dot.com boom, identified itself as ‘interdisciplinary’, the practical meaning of this claim has often been vague and sometimes
contentious. In 2008, however, in the very different climate of global economic crisis,
an exploratory meeting of faculty who saw their work as related to digital technologies
and labour revealed a surprising degree of convergence. Some studied the material
working conditions and cultural products of places like newsrooms, recording studios,
libraries or video game companies. Others analyzed more abstract processes, such as
neo-liberal regulatory regimes or struggles around intellectual property rights and
access to information. Still others examined the ways in whichever more intimate
aspects of human sociality were being rendered profitable for capital in the wake of
digital media. But what emerged from the first encounters of the Digital Labour Group
was a common commitment to understanding the complex political, social and cultural
implications of new forms of digital labour around the globe.
Of course, and in a fashion characteristic of much scholarly undertaking, once decided
upon our foundational orienting terms quickly unraveled, albeit in creative directions.
While no one would dispute that digital media technologies have profoundly altered
every aspect of our lives, their effects are far too vast to ever be fully measured or
assessed. The digitization of the cultural industries, for example, has changed every
aspect of popular culture: from the moment of production, which increasingly shuns
actors and writers in favour either of ‘real’ people or of computer generated animation,
to the aesthetics of the final product with the rise of 3D and High Definition formats;
from the heightened power of audiences in the processes of distribution as a result of
the Internet and social networks, to the ways digitization alters the terrain of authorship
and thereby challenges the regulatory parameters within which these processes take
__________
∗ Jonathan Burston, Alison Hearn, and Nick Dyer-Witheford wish to thank Jennifer Martin for her
invaluable editorial assistance on this special issue.
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place. Given these thoroughgoing changes, how is it possible to state categorically what
‘digitization’ denotes? And, more importantly, how might we analyze the economic and
power relations that run alongside, in, and through the digital technologies themselves?
To be sure the term ‘digital’ does not simply refer to digital machines and processes but
to the entire political, social and economic context and infrastructure within which they
have emerged. This is how we now live in a ‘digital age’.
The same conundrum emerges with respect to the term ‘labour’, which is increasingly
under pressure as an analytical category in a world where the boundaries between work
and life are breaking down. Labour can no longer only be seen as a factor in industrial
relations, or as a subject of interest exclusive to political economists; it must also be
understood as a larger category with which to analyze many different facets of daily
life. People still labour in the traditional sense, to be sure – in factories and on farms, in
call centres, in the newsroom and on the sound stage. But contemporary life likewise
compels us, for instance, as audiences for ever more recombinant forms of
entertainment and news programming, to labour on ever-multiplying numbers of texts
(as readers, facebook fans, mashup artists). When such labour is subsequently repurposed by traditional producers of information and entertainment products, the
producing/consuming ‘prosumer’ (or ‘produser’) is born. Additionally, as individuals
are subject to precarious, unstable forms of employment that demand they put their
personalities, communicative capacities and emotions into their jobs, they are
encouraged to see their intimate lives as resources to be exploited for profit and, as a
consequence, new forms of labour on the self are brought into being. What are the
implications of these changes in the very definitions of what constitutes ‘work’ and in
the parameters of the workplace? What are the implications for our senses of selfhood,
our political agency as citizens, and our creative freedom as artists and innovators?
Finally, how might we see these changes wrought by digital technology as potentially
politically productive or liberatory? It became immediately apparent that the goal of the
Digital Labour Group was not so much to propose a stable object of inquiry with the
phrase ‘digital labour’ or to police its meanings, but, rather, to interrogate the ways in
which the changing conditions of digital capitalism, and all of us who live and work in
the contemporary moment, comprise its very reality.
It would disingenuous to state that our interests in digital labour are purely academic.
We are all digital labourers to some extent, especially those of us who work in the
contemporary knowledge factory – the university. The figure of the purely digital
professor – or, more likely, part-time instructor – looms large, as for-profit models of
university education collide with the ease of the Internet, and accreditation processes
move away from educational, scholarly outcomes toward vocational ones. We have all
experienced the increased workload and speed up produced by the increasing
technologization of our jobs. We must constantly mind our email accounts, use
webpages and facebook and ‘service’ students on an ever-increasing number of digital
platforms; meanwhile, due to the assumed ease of research in the digital era, pressure
mounts to produce and publish ever-increasing amounts of ‘knowledge’. At the same
time, digital technologies abet the reconfiguration of the university as a corporatized
player in the knowledge economy, reducing education to a set of measurable
deliverables and professors to content and service providers. Students play the part of a
paying audience as they are encouraged to measure the efficacy of their ‘learning
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experience’ every few minutes with the use of electronic clicker devices. Professors are
discouraged from exploring the issue of academic dishonesty with their students and
encouraged instead to use plagiarism software. Not only does this move presume
students’ guilt, it appropriates students’ work and adds it to the database (and by
extension the coffers) of privately owned companies, thereby blurring conventional
definitions of student work. These are only some examples of the effects of the digital
tech push in the university setting, but there are many more. Ironically enough, within a
few months of the Digital Labour conference whose results are represented here, both
faculty and staff unions at the University of Western Ontario came to the very verge of
a strike that was only averted in eleventh hour bargaining, with several members of the
Digital Labour Group frenetically engaged in negotiations, union communications
strategy and picket-line preparation. Moreover, dramatic as these local events were for
us, they pale beside many episodes in the cycle of student and faculty strikes,
occupations, blockades and street-battle anti-cutback demonstrations that has over the
last two years pulsed through the post-crash austerity-era university systems of the
United States, Greece, Spain, Italy, France and the United Kingdom. These are systems
that have the compounded logics of neo-liberalism and the ‘IT revolution’ in accounting
practices at their managerial core, and that seem poised to rely on these logics even
more in years to come. All of us in the Digital Labour Group recognize that as teachers
and researchers in the increasingly digitized terrain of the corporate university, we have
a very personal stake in the issues we have chosen to examine.
This recognition led us to engage not only with other scholars, but also with workers
outside the academy about their experiences, insights and struggles. Hosting a
conference seemed the best way to initiate a sustained conversation about the ways in
which the confluence of ‘digital technology’ and ‘labour’ was forcing a redefinition of
work, citizenship and creativity in the 21st century. ‘Digital Labour: Workers, Authors,
Citizens’ was funded largely by monies from the Rogers Chair in Journalism and
Information Technology. Jonathan Burston was the chair in 2009-2010 and he was also
the event’s chief organizer. Joining academics from Canada, the United States, the
United Kingdom, France, Italy and New Zealand were activists from unions in Canada
and the United States representing journalists, screen actors, screenwriters, library
workers and university faculty. Indeed, the decision to seek out contributions from
unions and guilds representing various types of digital labour was one of the most
important decisions made by the conference organizers, one which, we were later told
by several participants, distinguished this event from other more purely scholarly events
on similar themes. The results were gratifying indeed, not least because so much
common ground between so many disparate kinds of worker, and between so many
different theoretical approaches, was revealed. Yet while the papers at the conference
converged around the shared problematic of digital labour, what made the event
interesting was not only commonality but conflict, implicit or explicit. The readers of
this collection will be able to tease out some of these tensions – between a strong
showing of ‘autonomist’ Marxist variants, with their characteristic sanguine emphasis
on worker power and resistance, and more classical Marxian political economy, with its
more somber insistence on the dominating force of existing relations of production;
between both of these and social democratic perspectives advocating the amelioration
of digital labour conditions within a market context; and also, sometimes, between the
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theoretical concerns of all these positions and the practical priorities of the union and
guild speakers.
It should also be noted here that some of the presentations from the conference have
found their way into publication in other venues; we call attention particularly to
articles by Brett Caraway and Nina O’Brien in Work, Organisation, Labour &
Globalisation, 4(1). Also of great importance to these debates were contributions from
Vincent Mosco (a plenary speaker) and Catherine McKercher, whose combined
perspectives on the topics under discussion can be found in their Editors’ Introduction
to that same journal issue and in their The Laboring of Communication: Will Knowledge
Workers of the World Unite? (Mosco and McKercher, 2008).
Our own volume of selected papers and speeches from the Digital Labour conference,
then, constitutes only one of its outcomes. What is more, subsequent to the conference
(and a period of recovery for the organizers) the possibilities for academic-union
collaboration continued to be explored. A series of meetings between the Digital Labour
Group and three Toronto-based labour organizations, the Alliance of Canadian Cinema,
Television and Radio Artists, the Canadian Media Guild and the Writers Guild of
Canada, investigated shared research interests. The outcome was a joint grant proposal
to Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for a three-year grant,
‘The Future of Organized Labour in the Digital Media Workplace’, to fund research
into topics including the new revenue models of digital media companies, the scale of
job-shedding in Canada’s news industries, the emergence of new pools of nonunionized labour in digital media, the effects of national media regulatory regimes on
employment in digital media, intellectual property issues and collective bargaining, and
the possibilities and problems of unions using digital media to communicate with
members and with the public in strike situations. At the time of writing this proposal is
still under adjudication, but, regardless of whether or not this specific application is
successful, the Digital Labour Group intends to follow a road of practical cooperation
with organized (and organizing) workers.
This special Digital Labour issue of ephemera is laid out along thematic lines similar to
the conference that spawned it. In the first section, Brian Holmes, Cristina Morini and
Andrea Fumagalli, and Emanuele Leonardi outline key historical and theoretical
neighbourhoods inside our heuristic terrain. Holmes, with the help of artists Lise
Autogena and Joshua Portway, provides us with a brief history of hyper-capitalism
since the collapse of Bretton-Woods and charts increasingly predatory conditions within
contemporary finance capital, where animal spirits and flexible personalities gorge
themselves even as they lay waste to their own food supply. Casting their eyes over this
same period, Cristina Morini and Andrea Fumagalli suggest that nothing short of a reexamination of the workings of the labour theory of value is required where transitions
from industrial Fordism to ‘bio-capitalism’ are in play – a re-examination, moreover,
that necessarily gives prominence to affective labour in matters of value creation. Their
exegesis is followed by that of Emanuele Leonardi, who works through Gilbert
Simondon, Yann Moulier Boutang and Carlo Vercellone to conclude in a similar
fashion that, although Marxian notions of formal and real subsumption are still
necessary to analyses of emerging formations within post-Fordism, a new concept, one
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he terms impression, is also required if new post-Fordist modalities of exploitation are
to be properly understood.
Founding assumptions pertaining to digital capitalism are likewise queried in the
following section – this time focusing on matters of digital labour more specifically.
David Hesmondhalgh wonders about the degree to which autonomist and other analyses
of ‘free’ labour have unintentionally marginalized ‘the continuing political importance
of the conditions of professional cultural production’. Understanding ‘creative labour’
as digital labour’s ‘latest manifestation’, Barry King suggests that the new dignity so
regularly afforded such labour is shot through with dubious, class-associated
assumptions about the moral worth of different kinds of labour. Jack Bratich asks us to
consider the differently digital labours adhering to a revived, precapitalist form of
cultural production, namely, the recent resurgence of DIY craft culture and the various
pro-social ‘informational and communicative practices’ embedded therein.
The next two papers focus on the daily politics of labour by way of recent policy and
contract initiatives. In providing an overview of Canadian copyright policy and recent
struggles to see it modernized, Samuel Trosow delineates the key areas where different
digital labour unions find themselves in regular disagreement. Even where organized
creative and intellectual workers ‘generally share similar positions with respect to the
rights of creators vis a vis their employers’, and even where ‘they share a basic unity of
purpose on many work related and other social and policy issues’, differences
concerning the rights of end users regarding their works and performances continue to
obstruct the ongoing development of a digital commons in Canada. Recent initiatives on
the part of the Canadian Labour Council leave Trosow encouraged, however, and his
piece begins to chart ways forward for similarly promising initiatives to take root not
only in Canada, but abroad as well. Matt Stahl then takes us south of the border to
California to examine what has quickly become the new normal for contracts in the
music industry, the 360 degree deal, which delimits musician agency even more
completely than the contractual arrangements that preceded it. With the new realities of
the 360 degree deal in mind, Stahl argues that instances of the Marxian concept of
primitive accumulation remain alive and well inside the post-Fordist moment. Indeed,
despite the ongoing ephemeralization of music under digital conditions of production
and distribution, ‘the impetus of cultural industry enterprise toward the intensification
of long term capture and control of ‘golden-egg’ laying talent appears not to disappear’.
Instead it appears merely ‘to change form and venue’.
In the following section, contributors trace both changes and continuities in the digital
workplace by providing a look inside management systems for digital workplaces
(Michael McNally) and web site design (Helen Kennedy). While McNally critically
interrogates the ways in which Enterprise Content Management Systems monitor and
deskill workers by subjecting their labour to ever-more minute processes and
procedures, Kennedy examines the ways that web site designers are effectively selfmanaging the regulation of standards and accessibility within their profession. This selfmanagement, Kennedy warns, should not be read as yet another symptom of neo-liberal
downloading, but, rather, as processes informed by an exemplary desire to address
social wrongs by doing good work. Taken together, McNally’s and Kennedy’s essays
highlight what remain the ambivalent politics of digital workplaces.
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Of course, these politics and the ideologies attached to them reverberate in different
ways across different geographic locations. The contributions of Ajit Pyati and Sandra
Smeltzer and Daniel Paré highlight and explore the implications of the ideologies of the
‘knowledge economy’ to national development strategies in India and Malaysia.
Smeltzer and Paré revisit the carriage/content distinction as it is iterated and reiterated
in Malaysian business and government discourse and reveal the extent to which it has
come to function as an ideological buttress for the agendas of each set of elites. Digital
labourers working to build venues for value-added work and to enhance civil
engagement online are the losers. Pyati likewise cocks an ear to discourses of
development and concludes that the neo-liberal tone of much Indian discussion of the
‘knowledge society’ must be countered with a more critical conception of the public,
digital and otherwise.
The next set of contributions interrogates, through different theoretical lenses, purported
shifts in the very nature of labour and the extraction of value in the digital era. Alison
Hearn examines the tensions between individual practices of online ranking and
feeding-back and the digital businesses that have arisen to structure these forms of
expression into quantifiable information for profit in the form of ‘reputation’. Vincent
Manzerolle deploys Smythe’s concept of the audience commodity to trace the ways
mobile web-enabled devices turn human communication into work and are, therefore,
deeply implicated in the accumulation practices of information capital. Edward Comor
engages the contentious term ‘prosumer’ head on, providing a corrective to celebratory
claims about the ways in which prosumption will lead to the end of alienation, and
carefully parsing the differential effects and benefits of prosumption practices across the
still class-stratified working world. Although these papers take different objects as their
focus, all explore the ways in which individual creative input, ostensibly ‘freely’ given,
is, at best, ambivalently positioned within capitalism; for the vast majority of people
these practices remain captive to and conditioned by the perennially exploitative
processes of capitalist exchange.
The possibilities and implications of organized resistance to these processes of capitalist
capture of human sociality and, indeed, human ‘being’, are taken up in the next group
of contributions. Enda Brophy’s examination of forms of resistance in call centers
provides us with concrete ways to understand contemporary processes of labour
recomposition around the world. Plenary speaker Ursula Huws explores the tensions
between individual creative expression and capitalist processes of control in the fields
of creative labour in Europe, noting the variable role of unions in either ameliorating or
exacerbating the changing conditions of work for their members. Huws notes that,
while distinct, both employer and union methods of control create significant obstacles
to workers’ attempts at effective strategies of resistance. In the face of these challenges,
Nick Dyer-Witheford argues that a nuanced redeployment of Marx’s concept of
species-being, or ‘species-becoming’, is necessary. Outlining several central concepts,
such as the global worker, bio-communism, and techno-finance, Dyer-Witheford
provides an epic and sobering overview of ‘the planet factory’ and the ways humans’
capacity to shape their own evolutionary trajectory are being conditioned and contained
by ‘singularity capitalism’. Recently, as Dyer-Witheford writes, ‘the contending
potentials of planetary labour under digital conditions have become dramatically visible
in the popular revolts sweeping North Africa and the Middle East’, revealing the extent
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to which resistance to the planet factory must happen collectively, in and through
various innovative and cooperative labours – digital and otherwise – if we are to have
any hope of survival other than as wired and bioengineered instruments of capital.
Our union and guild participants are afforded the last word here. Echoing DyerWitheford’s call for innovation and cooperation, both Lise Lareau, President of the
Canadian Media Guild, and Mark Bradley, former President of the Minneapolis and St.
Paul local of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, suggest that that
word is coalition. Lareau stresses the need for action across many guilds and unions if
digital media workers of all kinds are to win battles against the layoffs, declining wages
and job stress that digitization has provoked. Bradley takes ‘the C word’ even further,
suggesting that what is really required is a concomitant consolidation of collective
bargaining power in the face of concomitant and ongoing corporate consolidation in the
entertainment sector. Until that day arrives, however, cultivating a wider solidarity –
inside and outside the business – becomes a necessary daily practice as the industry
continues going digital. And yet, this solidarity cannot just be called into being.
Harkening back to issues raised earlier by Trosow, Mike Kraft’s observations remind us
that if wider collective actions are ever to be realized, Digital Labour must still
reconcile abiding differences between various unions regarding the equitable end uses
of intellectual property. Digital production and distribution present a whole new set of
challenges for working actors, not least among them the task of convincing the wider
world, including many brothers and sisters labouring in other digital precincts, that
rights accruing to their performances are justifiably inalienable without their consent.
Finally and not altogether unpredictably, emphases switch from compensation to access
when the librarians and the academics weigh in. Melanie Mills lists numerous ways that
the lives of academic librarians are getting more complicated and demanding alongside
digitalization’s perpetual increase. Moreover, access to varied sources of information is
becoming less flexible and open, not to mention more expensive, as librarians struggle
to negotiate new terms of practice and price with digital publishers less interested in
scholarship than in corporate profits and growth. Paul Jones also considers matters of
scholarly communication in the digital era. He concludes in part that the efforts of
intellectual workers to halt neo-liberal copyright legislation in Canada – at least to date
– constitute an important victory for academic labour. The victory here is in no small
part over media and entertainment capital which, we would argue (and as the last
Hollywood writers’ strike attests), remains to the most exceptional degree poorly suited
to the job of defending the rights of those performing labourers who have historically (if
altogether unreasonably) stood to lose from the academy’s gains.
‘Digital Labour: Workers, Authors, Citizens’ was convened in part to imagine how
contradictions such as these might resolve themselves in favour of progressive politics.
Happily, participants hailed it as a comradely event, where differences of strategy and
practice were discussed and debated in a spirit of genuine collaboration. As this special
issue of ephemera reveals, the theoretical tent was similarly big. Just as is true inside
the Digital Labour Group itself, autonomist insights germinate and grow alongside
those of other traditions. Some people in this volume seek to revisit and revamp Dallas
Smythe or Harry Braverman, some people are either indifferent to, or critical of, such
projects. Monikers change from paper to paper: creative workers, intellectual workers,
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knowledge workers – they’re all here! We haven’t tried to resolve the thorny matter of
digital nomenclature, though dialogue on this topic continued at a lively pace. The prize
of a better future for digital labour and, consequently, the commons was kept firmly in
our sights, however, and to this end the big tent format worked very well for us indeed.
We hope that our readers feel similarly.
references
Mosco, V. and C. McKercher (2008) The laboring of communication: Will knowledge workers of the
world unite? Plymouth: Lexington.
the editors
Jonathan Burston is Associate Professor and a member of the Digital Labour Group at the Faculty of
Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario.
E-mail: j.burston@uwo.ca
Nick Dyer-Witheford is Associate Professor, Associate Dean, and a member of the Digital Labour Group
at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario.
E-mail: ncdyerwi@uwo.ca
Alison Hearn is Associate Professor and a member of the Digital Labour Group at the Faculty of
Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario.
E-mail: ahearn2@uwo.ca
The editors wish to thank the Graphics, Animation and New Media (GRAND) Research Network, part of
Canada’s Network of Centres of Excellence (NCE) program, for its support of this special Digital Labour
issue of ephemera. We would also like to thank this special double issue’s reviewers, and the entire
ephemera collective for their redoubtable support and assistance on this project.
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