The MAAFiA Mystique

918831 TVNXXX10.1177/1527476420918831Television & New MediaMayer research-article2020 Article The MAAFiA Mystique Television & New Media 2020, Vol. 21(6) 616–620 © The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476420918831 DOI: 10.1177/1527476420918831 journals.sagepub.com/home/tvn Vicki Mayer1 Abstract What would a manifesto look like for media and creative workers in the twenty-first century? How would we account for decades of the transformation of work to fit the political economies of labor and data? This essay for the twentieth anniversary of Television & New Media attempts to answer these questions. Keywords data economy, creative labor, media labor, labor, political economy, work Imagine media studies were to write a counternarrative of creative labor in the twentyfirst century. It might begin something like this: The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of workers. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that they suffered in the beginnings of the twenty-first in the digital economy. Each college-educated worker struggled with it alone. As they made informational interviews, shopped for online credentials, matched LinkedIn profiles, drank crafted cappuccinos and cocktails with the team, managed professional networks, lay beside their cell phone at night—they were afraid to ask even of themselves the silent question—“Is this all?” The answer to the question posed here is one media studies must offer urgently. We all know it’s cool to work in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Broadway. All of these index a “hot” creative industry that exerts world dominance over intellectual property. As such, creative industries both advertise themselves and control the means for the production and distribution of advertising through media (Neff et al. 2005). The refrain to “be creative” has been repeated to young people today almost as much as “Love 1 Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA Corresponding Author: Vicki Mayer, Department of Communication, School of Liberal Arts, Tulane University, 1229 Broadway, New Orleans, LA 70118, USA. Email: vmayer@tulane.edu Mayer 617 Yourself” on a Spotify playlist. It is trumpeted through popular media that celebritize their own executive elites and piped like muszak through educational programs focused on employability. What creativity actually means, however, is a form of endless precarity for workers in these industries, which rely on tightly clustered networks of largely contract workers. This songbook for exploiting creative workers materially and ideologically has passed from media industries of yesterday to the new media data robber barons of today. Media studies has had long truck in tracking the salience of creativity in corporations. It began, at least in the United States, with the slow transformation of intellectual property law, which reassigned the value of creative ideas from a producer’s control to what the consumer market would bear. Over the nineteenth century, this allowed corporations to replace labor as the arbiters over their workplace knowledge with themselves as the arbiters for what the final product is worth. Corporations could rationalize the creativity a product demands and hire a workforce that ceded their ideas as corporate property. “By the second decade of the twentieth century, middle class independence connoted steady and respectable corporate employment rather than entrepreneurship, and freedom to consume rather than produce” (Fisk 2009, 8). Then, another series of cultural transformations ceded the locus of creativity from the worker who sold it as property to the corporation to an individual as a business that entered a service agreement with the corporation. The change, effected over the booms and recessions of the digital era, signaled the difference in the valence of creativity, from a property the employee traded in return for long-term stability, to a service that helped employees become their own businesses. Writes the cultural sociologist Ilana Gershon (2017), [W]hat companies are supposed to do under this new model is become good places to leave—to allow people to cycle in and out of their tenure at the workplace, supposedly improving the business while they are there, and in turn having the business improve them. Work became performative of new identities for the workers. Young women flocked to the dry outposts of early film studios not just to pay the rent, but to achieve freedom, class status, and perhaps even stardom (Stamp 2000). The Internet was created by computer programmers working in a culture of romantic individualism, in they were both protagonists and proselytizers of nerdiness as a heroic masculinity (Streeter 2011). Creative workers today assume an autonomy, individuality, and originality that can be marketed to add to their own value as an enterprise and to a property owned by their employer. Yet each creative field is itself hierarchized internally according to social identities. Creative workers participate in these strategic identity performances. As independent enterprises, they are competing with each other even as much of creative work involves collaboration with team members or coordination across geographies. Media studies has shown how the balancing between personal and group success has relied on a reputation-based economy (Hearn 2010) that perpetuates the success of those already in and excludes those not in—a recipe for racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and classism in creative industries. 618 Television & New Media 21(6) Those in a creative job find little rest for the weary. Maintaining creative networks becomes a part-time profession in itself, a continuous self-performance that is “always on-call” (Gregg 2011) from grade school until the social-media afterlife. Anxiety is endemic because no one ever can feel they’ve completely “broken in” to creative industries, which then can demand more from the surplus pool of aspirants. “Work becomes akin to a romantic relationship,” as young people reprioritize friendships and family below the ongoing conquest of a creative career (McRobbie 2016, 3). To achieve, the creative working-self is assertive yet compliant, a leader yet a teamplayer. Each person is uniquely (over)qualified yet imminently flexible to retrain, reskill, and reboot. The medicalization of a condition known as “burn-out” has spurred another industry to help workers cope with this schizophrenic personality project and the sadomasochism involved in foregoing sleeping or physical movement in order to make a deadline. The cartelization of data among a handful of high-tech industries has brought creative work to these ignoble ends. As ever more human minds are replaced with artificial intelligence and creative inspiration with algorithmic knowledge, the desire to work in the industrial complex ending regular employment continues unabated. Critiques of workplace surveillance, mandatory sociality, and toxic masculinity in The Circle and The Social Network have done little to tarnish the image of a career in the MAAFiA (Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Alphabet). In the Netherlands, a hub for the European high-tech investment in data and platforms, the lure of MAAFiA membership exacerbates labor market shortages everywhere else. At a career fair in Utrecht in 2018, I met one conflicted recruiter who was guaranteeing work–life balance with normal work hours and no weekends. Meanwhile, a video above his head streamed images of dudes playing foosball at the office, a reference to the subsumption of work-as-play branded by Silicon Valley (Turner 2009). After his pitch to me, I showed him the free career fair magazine which listed the results of a national survey of Dutch students and first-time workers. Among “the best workplace to start your career,” his company was on the list, but well below the top four: Google, Apple, Booking.com, and Microsoft (First Employers 2017). “That makes sense,” he responded off-script. “Everyone wants to work for Google.” In under a decade, the MAAFiA has captured the myth of the mediated center (Couldry 2003) for the future of work, becoming the source for information about the symbolic value of their own creativity aka “innovation.” Apple animated its new technologies through exuberant performances by Steve Jobs, a prelude to what would become a rite of entrepreneurial passage through TED (Cornfeld 2018). Facebook promises applicants “the most meaningful work of your career” on, unsurprisingly, Facebook, which now boasts more users than the population of China and the United States combined. The Google mystique has been confirmed in popular media through an array of insider guides, such as How to Get a Job at Google, The Google Resume, and Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? Celebrity coverage of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos—his wealth, his sex life, his philanthrocapitalism—have coincided with the company’s highly publicized contest for the location of its next administrative headquarters. Cities raced to the bottom to win the 50,000 “high-paying” jobs that work to Mayer 619 rationalize the entire global supply chain. And Microsoft is basically the mascot of every office workplace application. Silicon Valley successfully took a page from the Hollywood playbook. MAAFiA executives have colonized the term “innovation” much as Walt Disney managed to occupy the term “magic” to obscure the factory-like conditions that characterize both animation and amusement parks. Locating alternative sources for information about innovation work are increasingly hard to come by. Much like the blurbs found in trade magazines, there are no unmediated performances in creative workers’ production cultures (Caldwell 2008). Beyond the pressures to self-promote or put a positive face on your own alienation, the MAAFiA ensures they can control the narrative. Google is under investigation for the anti-competitive practices they use in job search boards to direct employment traffic and collect worker data. The widespread use of nondisclosure agreements to blanket not just creative workers, but everyone in the innovation sector, squelches all potential critique among workers. On the Internet, PR shils act as proxies for happy workers at Amazon. Even the burnout therapy these companies provide to workers may be monitored to enforce total compliance with corporate confidentiality rules. Instead there is just the malaise, the feeling that something is not right. In diagnosing the condition, media studies offers an answer to the question “Is this all?”—just as it did nearly 60 years ago. In 1963, a college graduate began talking with fellow alumnae after her employer forced her into a condition of stay-at-home motherhood: The problem laid buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid even to ask herself the silent question—“Is this all?” (Friedan 1963, 1) The Feminine Mystique captured the malaise women felt who strived to be the ideal worker in a space overdetermined by scientific explanations and mediated paths to fulfillment. The book helped them recognize the span of contradictory emotions that supported patriarchy around the most invisible and unpaid labors. It helped them name a solution in feminism. The media studies version for creative and innovation workers is similarly needed for a politics of solidarity today. Like Friedan, it begins with our own workplace identities. Like the women’s movement, it depends on mediation. Publicized beyond the conference paper and unshackled by the laws of academic metrics and citation manuals, media studies has stories about creative labor the field should tell before our software apps do. Beyond the cell phone or Alexa, who knows who might be listening? Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 620 Television & New Media 21(6) Funding The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. References Caldwell, John Thornton. 2008. Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television. Durham: Duke University Press. Cornfeld, Li. 2018. “Babes in Tech Land: Expo Labor as Capitalist Technology’s Erotic Body.” Feminist Media Studies 18 (2): 205–20. Couldry, Nick. 2003. Media Rituals. London: Routledge. First Employers. 2017. “De Populairste Werkgevers om Je Carrière te Starten [The Most Popular Employers to Start Your Career With].” https://www.firstemployers.nl/firstemployers-2017/ (accessed August 15, 2019). Fisk, Catherine. 2009. Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800–1930. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton. Gershon, Ilana. 2017. Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gregg, Melissa. 2011. Work’s Intimacy. London: John Wiley. Hearn, Alison. 2010. “Structuring Feeling: Web 2.0, Online Ranking and Rating, and the Digital ‘Reputation’ Economy.” Ephemera 10 (3/4). http://www.ephemerajournal. org/contribution/structuring-feeling-web-20-online-ranking-and-rating-and-digital%E2%80%98reputation%E2%80%99-economy (accessed April 6, 2020). McRobbie, Angela. 2016. Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries. London: John Wiley. Neff, Gina, Elizabeth Wissinger, and Sharon Zukin. 2005. “Entrepreneurial Labor among Cultural Producers: ‘Cool’ Jobs in ‘Hot’ Industries.” Social Semiotics 15 (3): 307–34. doi:10.1080/10350330500310111. Stamp, Shelley. 2000. Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Streeter, Thomas. 2011. The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet. New York: New York University Press. Turner, Fred. 2009. “Burning Man at Google: A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production.” New Media & Society 11 (1–2): 73–94. Author Biography Vicki Mayer is professor of communication at Tulane University. Her research encompasses media and communication industries, and their political economies, infrastructures, and organizational work cultures. Her publications seek to theorize and illustrate how these industries shape workers and how media and communication work shapes workers and citizens. Her theories inform her work in the digital humanities and pedagogy, most recently on ViaNolaVie and NewOrleansHistorical.