Platforms extract free labor from users in exchange for recognition and perks

Evidence

No doubt, under feudalism, serfs toiling away on their ancestral lands would have suffered great hardships but still found it undesirable, if not unfathomable, to have their way of life taken away from them, their shared culture and traditions. Still, the harsh reality remained: at the end of the harvest, the landlord would send the sheriff to extract the lion’s share of their produce – without paying the serfs a penny for it. So it goes with the billions of us unwittingly producing cloud capital. The fact that we do so voluntarily, happily even, does not detract from the fact that we are unpaid manufacturers – cloud serfs whose daily self-directed toil enriches a tiny band of multibillionaires residing mostly in California or Shanghai. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 338 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Later, corporations found ways to ‘gamify’ work that added to their cloud capital. Like Amazon preferring to refer to its workers as ‘associates’, these workers are not called workers but, instead, ‘players’, ‘users’, ‘taskers’, etc. To keep them working hard on its behalf, cloud capital (e.g. Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s cloud sweatshop, where workers in 2020 made less than 2 per hour while 90 per cent of tasks paid less than 0.10 per task) uses a plethora of non-monetary, token-based payments and, crucially, on-screen rankings in order to motivate almost Stakhanovite levels of competition between workers. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 1034 (#expands, via linked claim)

As Tiziana Terranova has been analysing for more than a decade, the internet today offers capitalism a vast hunting ground which is teeming with FREE LABOUR. It freely provides the labour for ‘building websites, modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing lists, and building virtual spaces’: ‘free labour is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into excess productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited’. The magic of electrified attention presents us with boundless and virtually free riches; we work on these riches often with enchanted and generous jubilation; businesses have learned how to take advantage of this, profiting financially from our enchantment. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 197 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Social media participation constitutes unpaid labor from which platforms extract value — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 505; Sharing-economy platforms fuse data extraction with labor at unprecedented scale; Free digital services are paid for by users’ attention. (+26 more)

Related

• Platform users become unpaid servants who train algorithms. (similarity 0.93)
• Platforms extract free work while paying recognition and perks instead of wages (similarity 0.92)
• Platforms’ real novelty is making users unpaid laborers reproducing their own capital (similarity 0.91)
• Voluntary and enjoyable platform use still constitutes unpaid extraction like feudal serfdom (similarity 0.89)
• Platform ‘gamified’ labor substitutes token payments and rankings for wages (similarity 0.89)
• Platforms extract data as a form of unpaid payment from users (similarity 0.88)
• Voluntary user content creation constitutes unpaid labor enriching platform owners (similarity 0.88)
• An everything app charges vendors rent and extracts free labor from users (similarity 0.88)
• Users, not paid employees, produce the most valuable capital of platform firms (similarity 0.87)
• Digital capitalism profits from unpaid pleasurable user activity. (similarity 0.86)
• Platforms create an essentially new servitude for users distinct from workplace exploitation (similarity 0.86)
• Social media participation constitutes unpaid labor from which platforms extract value (similarity 0.86)
• Quality-content rules extract unpaid user labor benefiting platforms (similarity 0.85)
• Algorithmic services extract unpaid user labor that trains the very algorithms (similarity 0.84)
• Free digital services are paid for by users’ attention. (similarity 0.84)

Broader Connections

• Voluntary user content creation constitutes unpaid labor enriching platform owners #corroborates (0.92) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 338
• Platform ‘gamified’ labor substitutes token payments and rankings for wages #expands (0.90) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 1034
• Digital capitalism profits from unpaid pleasurable user activity. #corroborates (0.88) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 197
• Users freely did unpaid labor that increased Facebook’s own value #exemplifies (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1011
• Platform users become unpaid servants who train algorithms. #corroborates (0.85)
• An everything app charges vendors rent and extracts free labor from users #corroborates (0.80) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 513
• Platforms steer how people value themselves through reputation metrics and gamified data extraction. #expands (0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 406