IEEE Spectrum October, 2012 - 32

From Surf to Serf
By putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from
those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, Web 2.0 provides
an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor
provided by the very, very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very, very few.
-writer Nicholas Carr

I

and Web 2.0 has been no
t seems like only yesterday
exception. By offering the
that we were extolling
means of production free to
the virtues of such socially
their users, other leviathan
produced wonders as Linux
sites, such as Facebook,
and Wikipedia. These
Twitter, and YouTube,
communal endeavors
have generated enormous
heralded a utopian age of
unparalleled access to systems amounts of content at almost
no expense. Even better, this
and information at little or
content is a gold mine for
no cost, and converted Web
targeted advertising.
2.0 from a mere collection of
Over in Utopia, the
technologies to a system of
liberation and empowerment. "workers" who generated all
those articles, photos, tweets,
But the road to Utopia all
and videos would get a cut
too often ends up detouring
through the business district, of the profits they helped to
32

NA * iEEE SpEctrum * OctObEr 2012

By paul mcFedries

generate. In the business district, however, users retain
their amateur status, while
the companies they labor for
rake in billions. Worse, contributors don't even own
the content they create. The
smallest of the small print in
the terms of use, which you
must agree to in order to get
an account, states that the
company can use your content as it sees fit.
To Nicholas Carr, this
smacks of exploitation rather
than emancipation, and he
coined a term for it: digital
sharecropping. Just like
the farm laborers of old
who worked the land but
didn't own it, digital share-
croppers grow the product
that earns Web 2.0 companies
their profits, but they relinquish ownership. Heck, even
the most put-upon sharecropper earned a share of the crop
he worked so hard to cultivate;
today's digital serfs work on
their profiles, timelines, and
feeds for free, with targeted
ads their only "compensation."
To be sure, no one on these
sites sees their uploading of
posts, photos, and videos
as "work." But this ad hoc
content creation isn't enough
for many companies, so
now they're outright asking
nonemployees to contribute.
This was preceded by crowd-
sourcing, which involves
obtaining labor, products, or
content from people outside
the company, particularly
from a large group of
customers or amateurs who
work for little pay. A good
example is the phenomenon
of microwork, a short,
simple task that a company
crowdsources for a small
fee, particularly to workers in
the underdeveloped world.

But even microworkers
get paid, even if it's just
a few pennies. The latest
trend is unsourcing,
where companies transfer
internal functions from
paid employees to unpaid
volunteers, particularly
customers on social networks.
If the task is related to
product support, as it often is,
it's called social support.
Why would people do a
company's work for free? Part
of the answer lies in a kind
of prestige that comes from
answering a large number of
customer questions or solving
a large number of problems.
Companies coax helpers
to participate by offering
points for useful answers,
connecting total points to specific achievement levels, and
encouraging users to level up,
for even greater prestige. (The
phrase comes from the game
industry, and the way concepts and ideas move from the
game culture to the broader
one is called gamification.)
Anthony De Rosa, a
product manager at Reuters,
calls this digital feudalism
and laments that we "are
being played for suckers
to feed the beast, to create
content that ends up creating
value for others." What's
the solution? For many it's
simply keeping your content
to yourself by running your
own blog, website, and even
Web server. But it's really
more about being aware.
As the writer Tim Carmody
has said, "Nobody is under
any obligation to allow other
people to make money off
of them or their data. To
pretend otherwise is just silly."
Unfortunately, he said that
on Twitter, so I suppose they
own those words now.
o
spectrum.ieee.org

GreG Mably

technically speaking
http://spectrum.ieee.org
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum October, 2012
