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FIRST IN A SERIES OF BIENNIAL CONFERENCES

ABOUT THE POLITICS OF DIGITAL MEDIA

THE INTERNET
AS PLAYGROUND
AND FACTORY
NOVEMBER 12–14, 2009
AT THE NEW SCHOOL, NEW YORK CITY
www.digitallabor.org

The conference is sponsored by Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts and
presented in cooperation with the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons The New School for
Design, Yale Information Society Project, 16 Beaver Group, The New School for Social Research,
The Change You Want To See, The Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New York University’s Council
for Media and Culture, and n+1 Magazine.
Acknowledgements General Event Support
Lula Brown, Alison Campbell, Alex Cline,
Conference Director Patrick Fannon, Keith Higgons, Geoff
Trebor Scholz Kim, Ellen-Maria Leijonhufvud, Stephanie
Lotshaw, Brie Manakul, Lindsey Medeiros,
Executive Conference Production Farah Momin, Heather Potts, Katharine
Trebor Scholz, Larry Jackson Relth, Jesse Ricke, Joumana Seikaly,
Ndelea Simama, Andre Singleton, Lisa
Conference Production Taber, Yamberlie Tavarez, Brandon Tonner-
Deepthie Welaratna, Farah Momin, Connolly, Jolita Valakaite, Cynthia Wang,
Julia P. Carrillo Deepthi Welaratna, Tatiana Zwerling
Production of Video Series Voices from Registration Staff
The Internet as Playground and Factory Alison Campbell, Alex Cline, Keith Higgons,
Assal Ghawami Geoff Kim, Stephanie Lotshaw, Brie Manakul,
Overture Video Lindsey Medeiros, Heather Potts, Jesse
Assal Ghawami Ricke, Joumana Seikaly, Andre Singleton,
Deepthi Welaratna, Tatiana Zwerling
Video Mashup
James Blake Video Documentation
Matt Sussman (CEA), Alex Cline, Jean Claire
Web Design Dy, Stephanie Lotshaw, Lindsey Medeiros,
Chris Barr Heather Potts, Jesse Ricke, Joumana Seikaly,
Ndelea Simama, Brandon Tonner-Connolly,
Conference Discussion
Jolita Valakaite, Tatiana Zwerling, 99
all members of the iDC mailing list
Advice and Encouragement
Mailing List Moderator
Neil Gordon, Ken Wark, Arien Mack,
Trebor Scholz
Roberta Sutton, Colleen Macklin, Victoria
iDC Twitter Stream Vesna, Katie Salen, Michael Schober,
Trebor Scholz Gabriella Coleman, Jenny Perlin, Kathleen
Breidenbach, Sven Travis, Alexander
Event PR, Marketing, Poster Design Draifinger, Rachel Sherman, Orit Halpern,
Communications and External Affairs, Karl Mendoca, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Verna de
The New School LaMothe, Dawnja Burris, Robin Mookerjee,
Photo Documentation Julia Foulkes, Stefania deKenessey, Timothy
Conway Liao Quigley, Caveh Zahedi, Ely Kaplan, Shannon
Mattern, Jonah Bossewitch, Dmitri Nikulin,
Collaboration Prelude Events Ella Turenne, Scott Rosenberg, Laura
Beka Economopoulos (November 11), DeNardis at the Yale Information Society
Carin Kuoni, Alyssa Phoebus (September 29) Project, Dorothy Kidd, Leah Belsky at
Kaltura, Ted Magder at New York University’s
Live Streaming
Council for Media and Culture, Mark Greif
Victoria Vesna, Simeon Poulin
at n+1 Magazine and Ayreen Anastas and
Rene Gabri at 16 Beaver Group, and all
our colleagues at The New School who
enthusiastically and generously support this
conference series.
XX%

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Text stock: Rolland Enviro 100 Print, 60 lb.,100% post-


consumer waste, certified Ecologo, Processed Chlorine Free,
FSC recycled and manufactured using biogas energy.
Dear all,

Welcome to Eugene Lang College The New Labor: Digital Democracy or Centralized
School for Liberal Arts for the first event in Sweatshop?” took place at The Change You
a series of biennial conferences about the Want To See Gallery.
politics of digital media.
Moving forward, the next conference in the
This inaugural conference, The Internet as Politics of Digital Media series, The Internet
Playground and Factory, alerts us to the as Playground and University, will be held
fact that hundreds of millions of people at Eugene Lang College in the fall of 2011.
continuously make the totality of their life It will focus on a novel kind of participatory
energy available to a handful of businesses. media literacy that underwrites students for
the commons. A preparatory event in April
At this international event about 100 2010 will focus on the death of film school
activists, lawyers, media scholars, and the rebirth of screen education.
anthropologists, artists, activists, students,
programmers, historians, and social media In 2013, the third conference in the series,
experts come together to reevaluate free The Internet as Barricade and Soap Box,
labor, play, and pleasure in an economy that will focus on media activism outside
is increasingly driven by the expropriation of the United States and Europe. Internet
online sociality. cultures have radically internationalized
over the past five years. English-language
One aspiration of this conference is to content no longer dominates the Web.
offer an accessible analysis of the ways in The digital divide is not what it used to
which people are used—from traditional be. The Internet is not accessible to the
labor markets to the Internet. Most people vast majority of people in economically
who are active users of social networking developing countries, these populations
services are not aware of the ways in which have a larger density of mobile phones than
their attention is captured and their data those in the overdeveloped world.
tracks are collected, analyzed, and sold.
Enjoy the presentations and discussions,
Many speakers will investigate the changing make new friends, tweet, blog, catch up with
sites of speculative and actual financial colleagues, start a collaboration, have a
value creation. In response to the awareness glass of wine, dance, walk through New York
of patterns of expropriation, they will point to City at night, and stay in touch with us here
a few starting points where we can tangibly at Eugene Lang College.
politicize our lives.
Trebor Scholz
Beyond dreams of refusal of Internet
cultures we propose support for data
portability, decentralization, Free and Open
Source Software, peer-created and owned
public media, and alternative business
models that do not merely strive for the
biggest profit. If we better understand the
granularities of today’s labor we will be able
to discuss the lives we may lead tomorrow
with more confidence.

Two prelude events have set the stage for


The Internet as Playground and Factory
conference. “Changing Labor Value” at the
Vera List Center for Art Politics discussed
the changing meaning of labor in the digital
era. The second event, “Crowdsourced

1
THE INTERNET Play the BackChatter
Conference Game!
AS PLAYGROUND BackChatter is a game about predicting

AND FACTORY Twitter trends designed to be played


at conferences like this one. Beating
BackChatter means sharpening your
First in a series of biennial conferences sociolinguistic smarts. The game is divided
about the politics of digital media into rounds that correspond to sessions at
event where BackChatter is taking place.
November 12–14, 2009 at Each round, you pick three words that you
The New School, New York City think will be popular in tweets about the
conference during the next game round. You
Live Stream send in your votes with a direct message to
Sections of this conference will be live streamed the game consisting of the three words you
at www.streamingculture.parsons.edu want to pick. During the next round, you get
points whenever anyone uses your words
Twitter in a tweet about the event (tweets marked
The hash tag for this event is #IPF09. with #IPF09). The value of a word is based
Add this to the end of each tweet. on how many people voted on it: the MORE
people that picked a word, the LESS valuable
it is. So the most valuable words are the
words that no one else selected.
A website keeps track of player scores from
round to round, and has other useful info,
like a dynamic word cloud formed from
tweets about the event. If you do visit the
game site, just remember that a game might
not be in session so there might not be any
game data showing.
BackChatter is a project by Mike Edwards,
Colleen Macklin, John Sharp and Eric
Zimmerman. www.backchatter.org

Play Rooms
You did not come to this conference just to
get inspired, learn, dance, and network. You’ll
want to catch up with friends, compare notes,
and start collaborations. This is not always
easy at an urban campus and in the context
of a conference. The play rooms are empty
rooms reserved for you to use as you see fit.

Thursday: 6 East 16th Street, 8 to 10 p.m.


Rooms 910 and 1009

Friday: 6 East 16th Street, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.


Rooms 734, 906, 913, 1002, 1132
Saturday: 6 East 16th Street, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Rooms 704, 705, 901, 902, 903, 904, 908,
911, 912, 1004, 1008

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AGENDA Friday, November 13
10:30 a.m.–1:15 p.m.
Thursday, November 12
SESSION A: VIRTUAL WORLDS,
5:00 p.m. CIVIL RIGHTS, AND SLAUGHTER
Location Sheila Johnson Design Center,
Kick-off film screening: Sleep Dealer
66 Fifth Avenue, Kellen Auditorium
Location: Alvin Johnson Building,
Digital Labor, Digital Immigration, and
66 West 12th Street, room 404
Transnationality or Why Virtual Worlds Need a
Q&A with director Alex Rivera
Civil Rights Movement, Lisa Nakamura; The
7:15–10:00 p.m. Absolute and the Virtual, Alexander Galloway;
Digital Slaughter, Timothy Pachirat; Whatever
Registration and Reception Blogging, Jodi Dean. Moderator Ferentz
Location: Eugene Lang College Café, LaFargue.
65 West 11th Street
(across the courtyard from the SESSION B: PERFORM OR ELSE:
Alvin Johnson Building) AMAZON.COM’S MECHANICAL TURK
Location: Alvin Johnson Building,
Friday, November 13 66 West 12th Street, room 404
Exploitation and Agency in Amazon’s
8:00–9:30 a.m. Registration Mechanical Turk, Lilly Irani; Emoji Dick, Fred
Benenson; Cognitive Labor, Crowdsourcing,
10:00 a.m.
and the Cultural History of Human/Machine
OPENING PLENARY Assemblages, Ayhan Aytes; The Mechanical
Location: Tishman Auditorium, Turk Performance Handbook, Francesco
66 West 12th Street, main floor Gagliardi. Moderator Edward Maloney.

Remarks by SESSION C: IDEOLOGY AND THE


Bob Kerrey, President of The New School EROTICS OF “PLAYBOR”
Neil Gordon, Dean of Eugene Lang College Location: Alvin Johnson Building,
The New School for Liberal Arts 66 West 12th Street, room 407
Trebor Scholz, conference convener, member On Social Lubrication: Between the Digital
of the faculty of Eugene Lang College and Chthonic, Dominic Pettman; The Digital
Ideology, Jonathan Beller; Work Hard, Play
Harder—Labor, Playbor, and the Ideology of
Play, Julian Kücklich; Estranged Free Labor,
Mark Andrejevic. Moderator Deborah Levitt.

SESSION D: ARE THE POETS USING YOU?


Location: Alvin Johnson Building,
66 West 12th Street, room 510
Reading from “Implementation,” “Mystery
House Taken Over,” “Book and Volume,”
and “ppg256,” Nick Montfort; The Poetics
of Uncreativity, Darren Wershler. Moderator
Kate Eichhorn.

CAMPUS MAP ON BACK COVER

3
Friday, November 13 6:00–6:30 p.m.
FACEBOOK USER LABOR ENACTMENTS
1:15–2:15 p.m. Break Performance by Ursula Endlicher
in collaboration with Burak Arikan
2:15–5:00 p.m. Location: 66 West 12th Street, room 404
SESSION A: THE GIFT OF 6:00–7:15 p.m.
IMMATERIAL LABOR
Location: Wollman Hall, 65 West 11th Street, SESSION A: WORK, LABOR, AND
5th floor THE PRODUCTIVITY OF FUN
After Tolerance, Sean Cubitt; Gift, Game, Location: 66 West 12th Street, room 510
Work, and Labor, McKenzie Wark; Where’s the Fun in ERPs? Labor, Logistics
Immaterial Labor 2.0, Mark Cote; America and the Frontier of Biopolitical Regimes,
Online Volunteers: Lessons from an Early Ned Rossiter; Work/life: Gatekeeping,
Co-production Community, Hector Postigo. Ethics, Online Culture, Catherine Driscoll;
Respondent: Julian Dibbell. Moderator Productivity is Fun, Martin Roberts; Class
Meredith McGill. and Exploitation on the Internet: Theoretical
Foundations and the Example of Social
SESSION B: JUSTICE, ETHICS, Networking Sites, Christian Fuchs.
AND EQUALITY: DIRECTIONS AND Moderator Joseph Heathcott.
NEAR FUTURE SCENARIOS
Location: 66 West 12th Street, room 407 SESSION B: COPYRIGHT AND HEALTH:
Workers of the Net, Disassemble!, Ulises PRACTICE AS LABOR
Mejias; The Ethical Economy, Adam Location: 66 West 12th Street, room 407
Arvidsson; Distributive Justice Online, Frank Governing Content in the Social Web, Niva
Pasquale. Moderator Mark Larrimore. Elkin-Koren; Ends and Means: Digital Labor
in the Context of Health, Robert Mitchell;
SESSION C: EXPROPRIATING LABOR Ethical Visions of Copyright Law, James
IN VIRTUAL WORLDS Grimmelman. Moderator Elizabeth Stark.
Location: 66 Fifth Avenue, Kellen Auditorium
Free Labor, Collective Intelligence, SESSION C: THE CHANGING SITES OF VALUE
and Artistic Production, Christiane Paul; Location: 66 Fifth Avenue, Kellen Auditorium
Software Art-Work For-Itself, Geoff Cox; The Digital Affect and Measure Beyond
Invisible Threads, Stephanie Rothenberg; Biopolitics, Patricia Ticineto Clough;
No Matter, Scott Kildall, Victoria Scott; The Scanning Eye: Knowledge and Visuality
Performing Value: Labor and Contingency in Cybernetics, Orit Halpern; Affective Labor:
in Virtual Worlds, Thomas Malaby. Past and Present, Melissa Gregg.
Moderator Amanda McDonald Crowley. Moderator Judith Rodenbeck.

SESSION D: ATTENTION, ELITISM, 7:30-10:00 p.m.


AND VOLUNTEERISM: Friday Evening Party with DJ N-RON
INTERROGATING MODES OF LABOR Wine will be served (ID may be needed)
Location: 66 West 12th Street, room 510 Location: Wollman Hall, 65 West 11th Street,
How Play Works Out and Work Plays Out in 5th floor (enter at 66 West 12th Street)
an Attention-Centered Economy, Michael
Goldhaber; Old Skill, New Skill, or No Skill,
Paolo Carpignano; Volunteerism at Global
Voices, Ivan Sigal. Moderator Julia Sonnevend.

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Saturday, November 14 1:45–4:30 p.m.

SESSION A: THE EMANCIPATORY


8:00–9:45 a.m. Second Day Registration
POTENTIAL OF PLAY
Location: 66 Fifth Avenue,
Location: 66 Fifth Avenue, Kellen Auditorium
Ground floor lobby outside Kellen Auditorium
Pleasure: Labor: Labor: Pleasure, Gabriella
10:00 a.m.–12:45 p.m. Coleman; Dreaming the End of Bureaucracy:
Network Theory and the Legacy of
SESSION A: GOVERNANCE IN THE AGE Counterculture, Fred Turner; No Fun: Work
OF VULNERABLE PUBLICS and Labor in Free Software, Chris Kelty;
Location: 66 Fifth Avenue, Kellen Auditorium Arendt and the Creative Toil of Counting,
Internet Governance: Where Digital Labor Ben Peters. Moderator Ted Byfield.
Determines Digital Freedom, Laura DeNardis;
Minds for Sale, Jonathan Zittrain; From Open SESSION B: LABOR METRICS:
Source to Crowdsourcing: How Corporations ATTENTION, IDENTITY, COMPENSATION
Co-Opt Collaboration, Douglas Rushkoff; Location: 6 East 16th Street, room 1009
Predatory Networks, Self-Defense, and Society, Are peer producers the subject of the P2P
Brian Holmes. Moderator Laura Y. Liu. Revolution?, Michel Bauwens; Now What?
Beyond Expropriation, Trebor Scholz; Identity
SESSION B, PANEL DISCUSSION: and the Social: Data Politics and Ethics,
PARTICIPATION LITERACY AND Hendrick Speck; Play and the Constitution of
DIGITAL LABOR the Net, Pat Kane. Moderator Heather Chaplin.
Location: 6 East 16th Street, room 1009
Howard Rheingold; Panarchy: Politics, and SESSION C: USER LABOR:
Polycentrism, Paul Hartzog; Queer Theory and CREATIVE RESPONSES
The Dichotomies of Work and Play, Christina Location: 6 East 16th Street, room 906
McPhee; Learning in the Networked Factory, User Generated Social Structures (UGSS),
Alex Halavais. Moderator Yuri Takhteyev. Jonah Brucker-Cohen; Capital Implications,
Kenneth Rogers; User Labor, Burak Arikan;
SESSION C: DIGITAL LABOR AND THE BODY Caught You Looking: A Report from the
Location: 6 East 16th Street, room 906/913 Bureau of Workplace Interruptions, Chris Barr.
Catching Up With Color Online: Against The Moderator Brooke Singer.
Concept of Immaterial Labor, Carolyn Lee
Kane; Putting Everybody To Work, Lauren SESSION D: FAN LABOR, RISKY BUSINESS,
Ellsworth; The Digital Securitization of Labor, AND THE SOCIAL WEB
David Golumbia; The Internet Is a Totalitarian Location: Wollman Hall, 65 West 11th Street,
Regime, Luis Vincent Nuñez; Digital Bodies, 5th floor. Session D starts 2:00 p.m.
Digital Labor: De/Reconstructing the Post- Fan Labor as Paid Labor, Abigail De Kosnik;
human Subject, Brittany Anne Chozinski. Writing for the Algorithm: Digital Labor and
Moderator Sumita Chakravarty. Mobile Work, Laura Forlano; Venture Labor:
The Risks of Work in Social Media, Gina Neff;
12:45–1:45 p.m. Break Creative Resistance in the Brave New Workplace,
Jesse Drew. Moderator Banu Bargu.

4:30–5:00 p.m. Break

5:00–7:00 p.m.
CLOSING PLENARY DISCUSSION
Location: Wollman Hall, 65 West 11th Street,
5th floor
Lisa Nakamura, Trebor Scholz, Howard
Rheingold, Idil Abshir, Gabriella Coleman,
Jonathan Beller, André D. Singleton,
Fred Turner, Pat Kane, Ellen Goodman,
and you.

5
Speakers and Abstracts productive formations—online phenomena like
Web 2.0 and FLOSS, off-line practices like urban
Mark Andrejevic, Estranged Free Labor “creative scenes” and booming local alternative
Abstract: Accounts of free, immaterial, and economies, and new business fields like Open
effective labor invoke both the notion of autonomy Innovation and Ethical Consumerism. This paper
and that of exploitation. This presentation focuses argues that these diverse phenomena take part
on the role of exploitation, drawing on examples in the common emergence of a new and radically
taken from commercial social networking different economic system, an Ethical Economy
applications to explore what it might mean, where production is mainly collaborative and
following Antonio Negri, to define exploitation socialized and value is based on the quality
in terms of the “production of an armory of of social relations (rather than on the input of
instruments for the control of the time of social productive time). The talk proposes the beginnings
cooperation.” The presentation argues for the of a theory of this ethical economy with particular
centrality of estrangement and structural forms of emphasis on its new ethical value logic. It
coercion to a critical conception of exploitation in suggests an analysis of its historical emergence,
the digital era. showing how it can be understood to result from
“My work focuses on the productive aspect of a dialectic between cooperation and competition
surveillance and monitoring in the digital era. In inherent to industrial capitalism from the start.
particular I explore the ways in which the capture Finally it indicates how the concept of an ethical
of detailed information about citizens becomes a economy can cast new light on present struggles
source of value creation and generation within the around the capitalist appropriation of digital
context of the emerging interactive commercial labor and other forms of social production and
model. I am an associate professor in the how such a perspective can cast new light on the
Department of Communication Studies at the future of capitalism.
University of Iowa and a postdoctoral researcher Adam Arvidsson teaches sociology at the University
at the University of Queensland, where I am of Milano. He is the author of Brands. Meaning
researching attitudes toward the disclosure of and Value in Media Culture (London; Rouledge
personal information online.” www.uiowa.edu/ 2006), and has published on social production,
~commstud/people/faculty/andrejevic creativity and creative industries, and the political
Burak Arikan, User Labor economy of cognitive capitalism in general.
Abstract: We propose an open data structure, Presently he is involved in four major projects:
User Labor Markup Language (ULML), to outline activist research on the conditions of “creative
the metrics of user participation in social web labor” in the fashion industry in Milano; a research
services. Our aim is to construct criteria and project on the financial value of reputation housed
context for determining the value of user labor, at the Copenhagen Business School; an EU funded
which is currently a monetized asset for the attempt to develop bottom-up collaborative brands
service provider but not for the user herself. We for small entrepreneurs in the creative industries,
believe that universal, transparent, and self- and a new book, The Ethical Economy, co-authored
controlled user labor metrics will ultimately lead with Nicolai Peitersen and forthcoming from
to more sustainable social web. User Labor is Columbia University Press in 2010.
initiated by Burak Arikan and Engin Erdogan. www.ethicaleconomy.com/info/book
Burak Arikan is an artist and researcher based Ayhan Aytes, Cognitive Labor, Crowdsourcing, and
in New York and Istanbul. He creates networked Cultural History of Human/Machine Assemblages
systems that evolve with the interactions of Abstract: Amazon’s MTurk is a significant example
people and machines. His work confronts issues of valorization of collective intelligence in the
ranging from cultural sustainability to participatory networked economy. Mediated by this online
economy to art and politics in networked platform, the workers of the “artificial artificial
environments. www.burak-arikan.com; www.twitter. intelligence” system search, find, and fulfill human
com/arikan; www.facebook.com/burakarikan intelligence tasks (HITs) requested by developers.
Adam Arvidsson, The Ethical Economy This assemblage represents a crucial formation
Abstract: We are witnessing a wave of new on a global scale as it facilitates the supply of the
intellectual labor needs of (mainly) U.S. based

6
businesses by workers from across the world. Turkey, 2000-2007. Her research and teaching
The particular conditions of intellectual labor in interests include modern, late modern, and critical
this crowdsourcing scheme maintain a transient, theory, theories of sovereignty, violence (particularly
task-based, and limited-time relationship between different forms of political self-sacrifice), labor, and
the worker and the requester and do not require democracy. www.newschool.edu/NSSR/faculty
direct communication between the parties. The Chris Barr, Caught You Looking: A Report from
Chess Playing Automaton of 18th-century inventor the Bureau of Workplace Interruptions
von Kempelen is the metaphor for the relationship Abstract: Recent shifts in labor constructs to
this system establishes between intellectual what is being termed “immaterial labor” or “Post-
labor and seemingly automated complex tasks Fordism,” parallel the rise of artistic practices
since, in both cases, the performance of workers that have as their basis viewer collaboration and
who animate the artifice is obscured by the participation. This presentation looks at artworks
spectacle of the machine. This relationship can by the presenter and others that engage the
be further scrutinized by approaching the concept digital workplace. Specifically, pieces such as
of automata in the entire cultural history of the “Bureau of Workplace Interruptions” aim to
human machine assemblage in the West. Within intervene in the communication flow of a normal
this genealogy of machine animating specters, workday in order to free bandwidth for more
the linkage between von Kempelen’s Chess intimate communication. This discussion revolves
Playing Automaton and Amazon’s crowdsourcing around tactics to slow workplace production with
enterprise appear to be more than a mere communication technologies and invisible theater.
trade insight, especially in the context of the
disembodiment of information formulated Chris Barr is an artist and designer concerned with
through the postwar cybernetic discourse, contemporary labor patterns, communication, and
which has largely contributed to the current workspace dynamics. His work spans various media
conceptualization of cognitive labor. including networked performance, installation,
and video, and has been exhibited internationally,
Ayhan Aytes is a media researcher studying notably at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo,
cultural interfaces by means of media archaeology. the Lab in San Francisco, and Centre de Cultura
His focus is on understanding pre-modern media Contemporània de Barcelona. Chris is an assistant
such as maps, automata and clocks within professor in the Department of Art and Design at
their social, cultural and political context. His West Virginia University. www.chrisbarr.net
photography and multimedia works were recently
exhibited in a joint project in Istanbul, Reading the Michel Bauwens, Are Peer Producers the
City of Signs: Istanbul: Revealed or Mystified. He Subject of the P2P Revolution?
holds a master’s degree in Communication Design Abstract: Addressing social contracts and social
from the Institute of Design in Chicago. He is a conflicts in peer production, the presentation
PhD candidate at the University of California at covers three different models of online value
San Diego in the Department of Communication creation characterized by different social
and a research assistant in the University contracts and social conflicts. The contradiction
of California multi-campus research group between users/value creators and platform
Transliteracies. www.ayhanaytes.net owners is assessed for its emancipatory potential
in the new context of knowledge labor.
Banu Bargu (moderator) is an assistant
professor of Political Science at The New School Michel Bauwens is an active writer, researcher,
for Social Research and Eugene Lang College, and speaker on the subject of technology, culture,
teaching political theory. She received her PhD and business innovation. He is the founder of the
from the Department of Government at Cornell Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives and works
University in 2008. She has received numerous in collaboration with a global group of researchers
teaching and research awards, including the John in the exploration of peer production, governance,
M. and Emily B. Clark Award for Distinguished and property. He has been an analyst for the United
Teaching, Luigi Einaudi Fellowship, and the Janice States Information Agency, knowledge manager for
N. and Milton J. Esman Prize for Best Dissertation. British Petroleum, and eBusiness strategy manager
She is currently finishing a book manuscript, for Belgacom, as well as an internet entrepreneur in
Human Weapons: The Death Fast Struggle of native Belgium. He coproduced the TV documentary

7
Technocalyps with Frank Theys and co-edited a Beller is the author of The Cinematic Mode of
two-volume book about the anthropology of digital Production: Attention Economy and the Society
society with Salvino Salvaggio. Michel is Primavera of the Spectacle and Acquiring Eyes: Philippine
Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam and Visuality, Nationalist Struggle and the World-
an external expert for the Pontifical Academy of Social Media System. He has taught in the History of
Sciences. He currently lives in Bangkok, Thailand. In Consciousness and Literature program at University
February 2009, he joined Dhurakij Pundit University’s of California at Santa Cruz, at San Francisco State
International College as a lecturer, assisting with the University, at Barnard College, and is currently
development of the Asian Foresight Institute. professor of Humanities and Media Studies at
www.p2pfoundation.net; www.re-public.gr/en Pratt Institute. www.jonathanbeller.wordpress.com
Ted Byfield (moderator) is an assistant professor Jonah Brucker-Cohen, User-generated
in the School of Art, Media, and Technology of Social Structures
Parsons The New School for Design. He has worked Abstract: Digital communication tools are a
for more than a decade as a freelance book critical component of everyday life for many
editor for academic and public-interest publishers, people. The appropriate or inappropriate design of
including Cambridge University Press, the Dia Center communication tools influences and shapes how
for the Arts, the New Press, Scribner/Macmillan, we connect, interact, and collaborate in local and
and Zone Books, and has been co-editor of “ICANN distributed groups. Many of the digital tools we use
Watch” since 2001 and co-moderator of the Nettime arose organically, without explicit understanding of
mailing list since 1998. He has presented at many the complex effects they have on human behaviour.
conferences, including Tulipomania (Amsterdam, For example, mailing lists emerged more than 30
2000), blur_02 (New York City, 2002), the Next 5 years ago, and yet the social experience of mailing
Minutes 4 (Amsterdam, 2003), Library 2.0 (Yale lists has remained nearly unchanged, e.g. mailing
University, 2008). His writings on subjects ranging lists do not exist that are designed to explicitly
from space photography to internet governance have support business processes. THWONK is an
been published in First Monday, Frieze, Le Monde ongoing collaborative project (with Mike Bennett)
Diplomatique, and Mute to name a few. He has to research Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and
consulted for the BBC, the Kitchen, the Open Society Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). CMC
Institute, and the Waag Society for Old and New is concerned with the design and study of online
Media. His honors include contributing to the winner communication tools like email, instant messaging,
of the 1997 Rotterdam Design Prize, a Design Trust text messaging, social networks, and Twitter.
for Public Space Fellowship in Journalism in 2002, THWONK is a free website, authoring application,
and a 2003 grantfrom the Open Society Institute. and infrastructure designed for crowd-sourcing and
He was a contributor in 2003-2004 to the Social simplifying the creation and rapid prototyping of
Science Research Council’s Information Technology novel CMC systems so that non-technical users can
and International Cooperation workgroup. invent and explore their own CMC. Our purposes
Jonathan Beller, The Digital Ideology with THWONK are to shed new light on possible
Abstract: “Digital” has become the mantra for all CMC designs and to simplify the process of CMC
things contemporary and, as such, signals that the implementation and research.
capitalist market is present in the very articulation Jonah Brucker-Cohen, researcher and artist, is a
of digitality. We can be sure that unless we PhD candidate in the Disruptive Design Team of
ourselves develop an antagonistic relation to “the the Networking and Telecommunications Research
digital” and “digital culture,” our creativity, if that’s Group (NTRG) of Trinity College, Dublin. His work
what it is, will continue to serve that system, which and thesis focuses on the theme of “Deconstructing
structurally guarantees the accumulation of wealth Networks,” which includes projects that attempt
by a tiny minority and the intensifying immiseration to critically challenge and subvert accepted
of the global majority. Thus, from the standpoint of perceptions of network interaction and experience.
social justice, any theory of labor/value that does He received his masters degree from the Interactive
not reckon with structural inequality and the larger Telecommunications program of New York
contradictions of capitalism is pernicious. University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Since 2003, he
has co-led the Scrapyard Challenge Workshops with
Katherine Moriwaki, held in more than 14 countries

8
across Europe, South America, North America, Asia, Sumita Chakravarty (Moderator), is associate
and Australia. His work has been exhibited at the professor of Media Studies, former chair of
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College The
of Modern Art (MoMA, New York), Institute of New School for Liberal Arts in New York. She is
Contemporary Art (London), Whitney Museum of the author of National Identity in Indian Popular
American Art ArtPort, Ars Electronica, ZKM Museum Cinema, 1947–1987 (Univ. of Texas Press,
of Contemporary Art, Dutch Electronic Art Festival, 1993); The Enemy Within: The Films of Mrinal
Art Futura, SIGGRAPH, ISEA, Chelsea Art Museum, Sen (London: Flicks Books, 2000); “Fragmenting
and others. www.coin-operated.com; www.twitter. the Nation: Images of Terrorism in Indian Popular
com/coinop29 Cinema” in Terrorism, Media, Liberation (2005);
Paolo Carpignano, Old Skill, New Skill, or No Skill? “The Erotics of History: Gender and Transgression
Abstract: The paper traces the genealogy of the in New Asian Cinemas” in Rethinking Third World
current crisis of work by revisiting the canonical Cinema (2003). Recent publications include
transition between Fordism and Post-fordism and “Cultural Studies Legacies: Visiting James
proposes a historical and conceptual context Carey’s Border Country” and essays on media
for the discussion of digital labor. Rather than globalization. She is currently working on two book
focusing on the institutional changes in labor projects: one on technology and the erotic, and
processes and management strategies, it looks the other on media and immigration.
at them from the point of view of the changing www.newschool.edu/lang/faculty
nature of skill, critically examining notions such Heather Chaplin (Moderator) is a professor of
as craftsmanship, deskilling, and multitasking, journalism at The New School and author of the
which have been used to describe the quality of acclaimed book, Smartbomb: The Quest for Art
labor in manufacturing, mass production, and Entertainment and Big Bucks in the Videogame
distributed production. It questions traditional Revolution. She recently participated in a Ford
dichotomies such as unproductive and productive Foundation grant looking at issues of the public
labor, employment and unemployment, expertise interest in the next generation of the Internet focusing
and amateurism, free labor and waged labor, on digital literacy and journalism. She has been
etc. In particular, the paper focuses on the interviewed for and cited in publications such as the
present financial crisis and what it dramatically New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, New York Times
reveals about the structural changes taking Magazine, Businessweek, and the Believer and has
place in the nature of labor practices. It argues appeared on shows such as Talk of the Nation, and
that the financialization of daily life and the CBS Sunday Morning. Her work has appeared in the
systemic condition of “precarity” and “forced New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, GQ, Details,
entrepreneurship” are but aspects of the blurring and Salon. She is a regular contributor on game
of the distinction between labor skills and “naked culture for All Things Considered.
living.” Ultimately, the paper expects to contribute Mark Coté, Immaterial Labour 2.0
to the questioning of the notion of labor, not Abstract: In previous research, I proposed the
only as an analytical category but as subjective concept of immaterial labour 2.0 as one way in
practice. which we might unpack the relationship between
Paolo Carpignano is an associate professor of play and labour in distributed digital networks. For
Sociology and Media Studies at The New School this conference, I explore more basic questions
and coordinator of the MA/PhD program in the raised about the relation between the human and
sociology of media. He is also a writer, consultant, technology as suggested by contemporary media
and producer for production companies in the theory, particularly via Bernard Stiegler and Mark
United States, Brazil, and Italy. He is the author Hansen. Following the proposition that technics
of articles on sociology, social history and media marks an originary condition of the human, I
theory, and co-author of Crisis and Workers’ want to consider the latest prosthetic condition
Organization and The Formation of the Mass of social networks as mapped by a “medium
Worker in the USA, and of the online project cartography” inspired by Deleuzian ethology. As
Televisuality. He is currently working on a new such, play would transpire on an immanent plane
book on the relationship between work and media. marking the power of socially-networked selves
www.newschool.edu/mediastudies/faculty in terms of both temporal-spatial extensions and

9
affective capacity. Conversely, labour would be earlier co-authored work on affect itself, the
captured on a plane of transcendence in all its conceptualization of which involves reevaluating
technico-jurudical forms. What social bodies can certain assumptions necessary to theorizing
do in these contested spaces remains in tension. digital labor. These assumptions concern
For the past two years Mark Coté has been the relationship of energy, matter, work and
an assistant professor in Cultural Studies at information on one hand and on the other the
Trent University with a focus on media and relationship of measure and value. In suggesting
communication. He has published extensively that the digital is instigating a transvaluation of
on networked new media in Theory & Event value, I offer comments on labor power, economy,
(under review), Ephemera, Canadian Journal of and governmentality. The presentation is meant
Communications, Derive Approdi La Revista, and as an intervention or an inserted reflection
borderlands, among others. His work deploys raising the question who or what is laboring in the
contemporary media theory, autonomist theory and conceptualization of digital labor?
continental thought to understand the relations Patricia Ticineto Clough is professor of Sociology
between the human and technology and affect and and Women’s Studies at the City University of New
political economy. www.facebook.com/cote.mark York-Queens College and the Graduate Center.
Brittany Anne Chozinski, Digital Labor: She is the author of Autoaffection: Unconscious
Re/Deconstructing the Post-human Subject Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (2000),
Abstract: How does this invisible interaction labor Feminist Thought: Desire, Power and Academic
affect our bodies? What were key steps in the Discourse (1994), and The End(s) of Ethnography:
history of interaction design that managed to From Realism to Social Criticism (1998). She is
mobilize and structure the social participation of editor of The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social
bodies and psyches in order to capture value? (2007) and, with Craig Willse, editor of Beyond
Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and
Brittany Anne Chozinksi is currently completing Death (forthcoming). Clough’s work has drawn on
her PhD in sociology at The New School for theoretical traditions concerned with technology,
Social Research, where she previously earned a affect, unconscious processes, timespace, and
master’s degree in sociology. By day, she works as political economy. She is currently working on
a multimedia specialist for a nonprofit adoption Ecstatic Corona an ethnographic historical
agency, handling everything from social media to research and experimental writing project about
digital video and web editing. She has taught as where she grew up in Queens, New York.
an adjunct professor of sociology at Marymount www.soc.qc.cuny.edu/faculty/clough
Manhattan College and is currently in her second
year as a research assistant for Dr. Jaeho Kang on Gabriella Coleman,
his work involving propaganda, the Frankfurt School, Pleasure: Labor: Labor: Pleasure
and communications studies. Her work revolves Abstract: One of the distinctive features of
around media and subjectivity, with particular contemporary Internet labor is pleasure. Whether
interest in the digital screen, alterity and mimesis, it is the pleasure of writing a review on Amazon or
and the body and subject is highly mediated digital crafting your own clothes (and then selling them
environments. Though labor has not been a key on Etsy), a sense of pleasure and pride often
focus of her work, it is a reoccurring them, and follows from these activities of labor common on
she has previous written on televisual labor and the Internet. In this talk, I examine the politics of
how this shifts with battles of convergence with the labor and pleasure by addressing a new class
internet and mobile media. Chozinksi has a strong of character also common on the Internet, the
background in cinema studies and the Frankfurt griefer and troll who, as their name suggests,
School and seeks to apply critical theoretical cause grief on the Internet for the sake of the lulz
analysis to media and technology studies within (aka pleasure). With a focus on recent battles
sociology. www.facebook.com/brittany.chozinski; between Anonymous (the trolls) and the Church of
www.twitter.com/topshelf Scientology, I explore the importance of pleasure
(that often bubbles directly from labor) for
Patricia Ticineto Clough, The Digital Affect understanding not only this specific case but for
and Measure Beyond Biopolitics critically grappling more generally with the nexus
Abstract: My presentation returns to an between labor and pleasure on the Internet.

10
Trained as an anthropologist, Gabriella Coleman (2007) and is currently working on a book project.
is an assistant professor in the Department of He is an editor for the DATA Browser book series
Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. (published by Autonomedia) and co-edited
She teaches courses on hacking and digital Economising Culture (2004), Engineering Culture
politics and has done the bulk of her research (2005) and Creating Insecurity (2009).
on the politics of free software. www.anti-thesis.net/work
www.steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/ Jeff Crouse (participant in Prelude event,
Gabriella_Coleman; gabriellacoleman.org/blog Nov. 11) talks about a few projects of his that
Geoff Cox, Software Art-Work For-Itself use Internet labor, including Invisible Threads, a
Abstract: With software, not only is the virtual online sweatshop; Crowded, a radio show
programmer’s work difficult to identify (often produced by Mechanical Turk workers; Dirt Party,
hidden behind the interface) but the user’s labor where personal information about party-goers is
also disappears into the operating system. In a gathered by online workers to create a live visual
contemporary scenario, this is exemplified by presentation; and You3b, a community site for the
the operations of “social media,” wherein the creation of YouTube triptychs.
social relation is produced in restrictive form, Jeff Crouse makes playful parodies commenting
underpinned by the socio-technical hierarchical on the role of technology in our lives. His work
logic of server-client relations. The participatory takes many forms, including software, Web
work-play ethic of social media can thus be applications, installations, games, and video.
understood as an expression of new forms of His piece Invisible Threads, a mixed-reality
control, such that the value stolen no longer installation about virtual labor, was featured at
relates simply to labor power but to subjectivity the New Frontiers Gallery at the Sundance Film
too. The associated dislocation of social Festival in 2007. James Chimpton, a robotic
antagonism remains useful to conceptualize monkey, interviewed the artists of the 2008
the way that exploitation is subsumed into the Whitney Biennial using information harvested from
wider social realm. Consequently, the control of the web in real time. Another piece, Dirt Party,
social media, and the labor related to it, are key made people at the 2008 Futuresonic Festival
sites of antagonism that need to be identified in Manchester confront their online identities by
for alternatives to be engaged. The presentation crowdsourcing the task of digging up “dirt” about
refers to a number of artistic projects that draw them from the Internet. His work has also been
attention to the contradictions expressed in the shown at the DC FilmFest, the Come Out and Play
complexities of production, and the continued Festival in Amsterdam, Laboral in Gíjon, Spain, the
importance of antagonism as a mechanism for Obie Awards, and the Eyebeam Art & Technology
social change. The phrase software-art-work is Center in New York. He has received grants from
expressed in a deliberately ambiguous way—to Rhizome and Turbulence, and is has been a fellow
indicate the work involved in making software, at Eyebeam since 2007. BS, Individualized Study,
the work involved in using software, as well as the New York University; MS, Digital Media, Georgia
work that software does in-itself—taken together Tech. Crouse joined the Bennington faculty in
to establish the necessity of software-art-work Computing in the fall of 2009. www.jeffcrouse.info
operating “for-itself.”
Amanda McDonald Crowley (Moderator)
Geoff Cox is a lecturer at the University of brings to Eyebeam a substantial and international
Plymouth (UK), an occasional artist, writer, background in media arts. She is a cultural
and associate curator of Online Projects at worker, curator and facilitator who specialises in
Arnolfini, Bristol (UK). He is part of Art & Social creating new media and contemporary art events
Technologies Research at Plymouth, as well as and programs that encourage cross-disciplinary
an adjunct faculty member at Transart Institute practice, collaboration and exchange. She moved
(Donau University, Austria). He has a research to New York in October 2005, relocating from her
interest in software (art) studies expressed in native Australia where she had been based while
various projects such as the co-curated touring working nationally and throughout Europe and
exhibition Generator (2002/03), his PhD thesis Asia. She served as the executive producer of the
Antithesis: The Dialectics of Software Art (2006), 2004 International Symposium of Electronic Art
the co-curated public art project Social Hacking

11
(ISEA2004), developing the event from concept the idea of “whatever being” as a tag for a
to major conferences, exhibitions, performances, contemporary mode of belonging unbound by
concerts and site specific installations on a ferry in the inscriptions of disciplinary identity. Some
the Baltic Sea and locations in Estonia and Finland. agree that this mode could herald a better
She was associate director for the Adelaide Festival coming community. Linking whatever being
2002 where she was also chair of the working to appearances of whatever in networked
group that curated the exhibition and symposium communications and positioning it within a brief
conVerge: where art and science meet. From 1995 history of the interconnections between media
to 2000 McDonald Crowley was Director of the and identity, I argue that whatever being is the
Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT), wrong model for a subject capable of left political
an organization with a national brief to foster links practice and opposition.
between the arts, sciences and new technology. Jodi Dean is professor of Political Science at
She has done residencies in Berlin, Germany Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Erasmus
(1994/5), Banff Center for the Arts (2002), and at Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of
Sarai in Delhi, India (2002/3), regularly speaks at Philosophy at Erasmus University. She is the
international conferences and festivals, and lurks on author or editor of nine books. The most recent
a lot of media, technology, and culture email lists. is Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies:
www.eyebeam.org/people/amanda-mcdonald- Communicative Politics and Left Politics.
crowley www.deanicite.typepad.com; www.twitter.com/
Sean Cubitt, After Tolerance Jodi3425; www.facebook.com/jodidean
Abstract: Where the gift of labor has been Laura E. DeNardis, Internet Governance:
commercialized, as it has in social networking, the Where Digital Labor Determines Digital Freedom
surveillance functions of the database economy Abstract: The work of Internet governance—such as
serve not only to target but to average. Here the managing Internet resources and setting technical
virtual nature of the crowd, its power to act, is standards—is not only an issue of technical design
removed by a process of forecasting how much but a form of technological rulemaking about the
deviance is tolerable in a population. The challenge public’s civil liberties online. For example, some
then is to challenge the auto-archiving of network Internet standards are at the center of technology
activity with its extension. What is essential is not and law questions about copyright filtering,
the actual, nor identity, but precisely non-identity: surveillance and censorship, and individual privacy.
the non-identical nature of the world to which The work of Internet governance is primarily done
Western thought perpetually ascribes identity. by private institutions, often operating outside
The challenge is to drive the logic of individualism the jurisdiction of traditional governments and
to its far side, to turn the compulsory choice of completely out of public view. While the production
consumerism into actual freedom. of content may be increasingly democratized, the
Sean Cubitt is director of the program in production of technical architecture is not. DeNardis
Media and Communications at the University will examine the shift from the traditional policy work
of Melbourne and Honorary Professor of the of governments and citizens to the more diffusive
University of Dundee. His publications include and private institutional labor of Internet governance
Timeshift: On Video Culture, Videography: Video structures and will examine the role of openness,
Media as Art and Culture, Digital Aesthetics, transparency, and other democratic values in
Simulation and Social Theory, The Cinema helping to legitimate such a shift.
Effect and EcoMedia. He is the series editor for Dr. Laura DeNardis is the executive director of
Leonardo Books at MIT Press. His current research the Yale Information Society Project. She is an
is on public screens and the transformation of Internet scholar, teaches at Yale Law School, and
public space and on genealogies of digital light is the author of Protocol Politics: The Globalization
technologies. www.culture-communication. of Internet Governance (The MIT Press 2009),
www.unimelb.edu.au/media-communications; Information Technology in Theory (Thompson
www.seancubitt.blogspot.com 2007 with Pelin Aksoy), and numerous book
Jodi Dean, Whatever Blogging chapters and articles. www.lauradenardis.org;
Abstract: Giorgio Agamben has introduced www.twitter.com/LauraDeNardis; yaleisp.org

12
Julian Dibbell (Moderator) has been writing of gifts, of social networking from maintaining
about online culture for nearly two decades. He family bonds to dating or socialising with friends,
is the author of two books about online worlds, and of just passing the time—overlap in so many
Play Money: Or How I Quit My Day Job and Made ways with work spaces, work tools, and the
Millions Trading Virtual Loot (Basic, 2006) and virtually compulsory elements of everyday life like
My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual banking or schooling. I draw for this discussion
World (Henry Holt, 1999). He has written essays not only on critical theoretical approaches to
and articles about hackers, computer viruses, labour, including speculative terms such as
online communities, encryption technologies, affective and immaterial labour, but also on policy
music pirates, and the heady cultural, political, documents designed to manage the incursion
and philosophical questions that tie these and of life on work, on activist claims regarding the
other digital-age phenomena together. He lives in protection of life against the uncursions of work,
Chicago, Illinois. www.juliandibbell.com and on ethnographic research across MMORPG
Jesse Drew, Creative Resistance gaming, MUVE participants, fan fiction journal
in the Brave New Workplace communities and archives, and academic use of
Abstract: Communications has always been social networking sites.
a key component of wage labor’s attempts to Catherine Driscoll is senior lecturer in Gender
leverage better pay, improve conditions of work, and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney.
or creatively protest the boredom and monotony She works in a range of fields, including cultural
of work. How have these practices evolved as the theory, online culture, modernity, rural studies,
digital workplace has supplanted more traditional and youth culture. Her publications include
employment? Is there a continuity between the Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture
fax machine and the photocopier and social and Cultural Theory (Columbia UP, 2002) and
networking and mobile technologies? What is the Modernist Cultural Studies (UP of Florida, 2009).
relationship between individual acts of creative Forthcoming publications include Teen Film: A
expression and a collective labor response to new Critical Introduction (Berg, 2010), Broadcast
forms of exploitation in the new workplace? These Yourself: Intimacy, Presence and Community
are the questions I will explore in my presentation. Online (with Melissa Gregg), and a book on
Jesse Drew is a writer and media artist whose work Australian country girlhood. Other current projects
on participatory media in a democratic society, include an Australia Research Council project on
labor communications and media technology country towns. www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/
have appeared in numerous publications gcs/staff/profiles/cdriscoll.shtml
and anthologies. Drew’s documentary and Kate Eichhorn (Moderator), Are the Poets
experimental film/video work has been exhibited Using You? A Reading and Discussion
internationally and domestically in many different with Nick Montford and Darren Wershler
venues. For many years he was a labor activist in Abstract: Corporations are not alone in the
both traditional smokestack factories and modern desire to expropriate the value of online users’
electronic assembly plants. He is currently director labor. Alongside corporate entities, writers and
and associate professor of Technocultural Studies artists are redeploying users’ work and works,
at the University of California at Davis. words and images, codes and innovations. In
www.jessedrew.com contrast to corporations, however, their gain is
Catherine Driscoll, Work/Life: Gatekeeping, primarily aesthetic rather than monetary, but is
Ethics, Online Culture expropriated labor for aesthetic gain necessarily
Abstract: In this presentation I want to think about less problematic than expropriated labor for
the messiness of what is often referred to as monetary gain? More importantly, what might we
work/life balance and understood by distinctions learn about the complexity and contradictions
between leisure and labour in moves to manage of digital labor from writers and artists who
what online culture means in the everyday lives chose to work within commercial platforms,
of participants. It is not enough to acknowledge especially those actively appropriating other
that work and life can’t be distinguished in the users’ labor? Is their work a mere extension and/
same way when the tools of leisure—of games, or enacted critique of corporate expropriations
of online users’ everyday forms of participation

13
and creation? More broadly, what decisions institutions which govern access to content—
drive writers and artists to work within or copyright and contracts. Social production is
outside commercial platforms, and to what driven, to a large extent, by social motivation; it is
extent do these decisions affect their status as often collaborative in nature, and it is created and
cultural workers, the nature of their work and shared within a social context designed by social
its long-term archivability? In this reading and media platforms. This social dimension is currently
moderated discussion, writers Nick Montfort and missing from our regulatory approach to content.
Darren Wershler investigate the possibilities and While the current intellectual property regime
limitations of cultural production produced both focuses on central control, social production
within and against commercial platforms and requires us to articulate a matrix of relationships
the meaning of digital labor across literary and which has three pillars: the individual, the
artistic communities. facilitator (either commercial or non-commercial,
Kate Eichhorn is an assistant professor of Culture private or governmental) and the community of
and Media Studies at The New School. Her research users. A better understanding of this complex
focuses on material culture, the theory and practice dynamics—between individuals, crowds and
of the archive, and the poetics of everyday life. social media platforms— is necessary in order to
Recent articles have appeared or are forthcoming design adequate policies for the social web. The
in Public Culture, Invisible Culture, Cultural Studies paper underlines the limitations of the current
= Critical Methodologies and Women’s Studies: An regime and points to the need for rethinking
Interdisciplinary Journal. She is also the author of our conceptual framework. I describe the social
two books of poetry, including Fond (2008), and nature of UGC and analyze the implications of
co-editor of Prismatic Publics (2009). She serves social production for the different stakeholders.
as review editor for Topia: Canadian Journal of The social web creates a mixture of commercial
Cultural Studies and is currently completing a book- and non-commercial interactions, transitory
length study entitled Reading the Refuse: Archiving and enduring stakes, ad-hoc collaboration and
and the Poetics of Everyday Life. www.newschool. sustainable communities. I explain why social
edu/lang/faculty production and UGC might be incompatible with
the current copyright regime. I also discuss market
Beka Economopoulos, (Moderator; also analysis and argue that the view of users-platform
participant in Prelude event, Nov. 11), has 15 interaction as a market transaction for goods and
years experience as a grassroots field and online services governed by contracts, is rather limited.
organizer, working with local, national, and Finally, I offer several insights on the institutions
international NGOs and activist mobilizations. She that should govern access to User Generate
is currently the vice president of Fission Strategy, Content in the social web.
a consultancy specializing in Web 2.0 and new
media approaches to online advocacy, organizing, Niva Elkin-Koren is the dean of the University of
marketing, and communications. Prior to joining Haifa Faculty of Law. She is the founding director
Fission, she directed the Online Organizing team of the Haifa Center for Law & Technology (HCLT).
at Greenpeace USA, managing online/offline She received her LLB from Tel-Aviv University
integration, distributed labor, and social media School of Law in 1989, her LLM from Harvard
strategy. Beka is also a co-founder of Not An Law School in 1991, and her SJD from Stanford
Alternative, a volunteer-run non-profit organization Law School in 1995. Her research focuses on the
based in Brooklyn, New York, whose mission aims legal institutions that facilitate private and public
to integrate art, activism, technology and theory in control over the production and dissemination
order to affect popular understandings of events, of information. She has written and spoken
symbols and history. www.fissionstrategy.com; extensively about the privatization of information
www.notanalternative.net policy, copyright law and democratic theory, the
effects of cyberspace on the economic analysis
Niva Elkin-Koren, Governing Content in the of law, liability of information intermediaries,
Social Web the regulation of search engines, and the legal
Abstract: The prevalence of social production strategies for enhancing the public domain.
and the rise of user generated content (UGC) www.law.haifa.ac.il/faculty/eng/elkin.htm
destabilize the fundamental premises of the legal

14
Lauren Ellsworth, Putting the Entire Population using also data from an ULML stream, which is
To Work getting updated from a running system. In the
Abstract: Lauren Ellsworth explores social media, presentation/show the participants, the audience,
and the way in which media and interpersonal the students, are able to submit “movement
relationships shift with the introduction of descriptions”—describing what the lead dancer
international communities of communication. Is creates from scratch—and submit this to the
participation in these communities labor? Are database, to be used again by the second dancer.
we putting the entire population to work? Or are The returned data from the live-stream is used
we transferring existing work to a new medium, as well and, together with the submissions,
that coincidentally yields a greater capacity for influences the course of the show and co-creates
aggregating and processing consumer data. a new physical representation of the Web.
Ellsworth is a senior at the University of Chicago Since the mid-90s the Internet has had an
studying computer science and law, with a focus impact on Ursula Endlicher’s practice, which
on legal implications of Internet technologies, bridges the Web and physical reality. She uses
particularly surrounding data portability, reputation the Web’s ‘hidden’ languages—its HTML code—to
regulation, and expectation of privacy. She is choreograph performances, visualizes HTML in
interested in the role that developers play in installations, and translates it into sound. Her work
innovation, the shifting role of media with the was recently shown at Light Industry, Brooklyn; at
introduction of social media, and the internet as a Theater am Neumarkt in Zürich, Switzerland; at
network, in which personal network relations still Quartier21/Museumsquartier, Vienna, Austria; at
reign supreme. www.redyaffle.com; www.twitter. BM-Suma Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul,
com/redyaffle Turkey; at Woodstreet Galleries, Pittsburgh, PA; and
Ursula Endlicher, Facebook User Labor Enactments at the LMCC Swing Space@Seaport in New York.
Abstract: For the conference I am staging a She received commissions from Turbulence.org/
performance, which will translate XML (an New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., and from
HTML-based language) into dance movements. the Whitney Museum for its artport website. Her
The code “behind” the Web will be made visual, work is included in Rhizome’s Art Base, and in
physical, and experiential. My artwork resides the ursula blicke videoarchiv at Kunsthalle Wien,
on the intersection of Internet, performance, and Austria. Endlicher has lectured about her work
installation. Previous works include a net art internationally and has contributed to several
piece called “html_butoh”, and a live performance publications about net art, performance and
series, Website Impersonations, both translate interactivity; she discusses these topics on her
HTML tags into movements. In the performance blog, Curating Netart, which she runs together with
series, dancers were creating new dance Ela Kagel. She was born in Vienna, Austria and
movements based on the functionality of HTML lives in New York since 1993. www.ursenal.net
tags; the dance vocabulary was added to an Laura Forlano, Writing for the Algorithm:
online archive, the “html-movement-library”, and Digital Labor and Mobile Work
reused on stage by other dancers. The audience Abstract: The Internet has enabled the emergence
played an active role during these shows: they of virtual, decentralized and digital labor, which
were invited to interpret the dance movements has reorganized the way people work, where
into descriptions, brief sentences, and add them they work and what they do. Based on a 3-year
to the ever growing HTML movement alphabet. study of mobile work practices and an ongoing
Trebor Scholz introduced me to Burak Arikan, experiment in mobile work called Breakout!, this
asking both of us if we might be interested presentation will examine individual accounts
working on a performance piece together for of these changing work practices, environments
the conference. The plan is to perform ULML and professions. For example, the growing ranks
(user-labor mark-up language), based on Burak of freelance, self-employed and independent
Arikan’s website “userlabor.org.” I have extended workers have formed new types of face-to-
my current HTML-movement library and included face “communities” including membership in
ULML tags. I will practice with my performers coworking spaces such as New Work City in New
and introduce this new content, based on the York, which are supported by a range of social
ULML grammar, to them. Burak suggested networking tools such as Twitter and MeetUp

15
groups; the flexibility and mobility of labor has of the exploited class is advanced. The relationship
allowed for new spaces like cafes, parks and of class and knowledge labor is outlined and
public spaces to be appropriated for work; and, implications for new media are discussed. The
new jobs such as search engine optimizers (SEO) paper also discusses how useful categories such
have been created. Such phenomenon point as the multitude by Antonio Negri and Michael
towards the reorientation of individual identities Hardt, reproductive labor by Marxist feminism,
away from firms and towards ad-hoc, place-based and audience commodity by Dallas Smythe, are
networks of likeminded individuals that perform for a concept of class in informational capitalism.
various forms of unpaid labor for one another in The contemporary proletariat constantly creates
absence of firm-structured relations. In contrast and recreates spaces of common experience,
to mass media and advertising accounts of such as the Internet, educational institutions,
virtual, decentralized and mobile work, which knowledge spaces, culture, etc through their
present a vision of anytime, anywhere work, these practices. These spaces and experiences are
new forms of labor are contextual and deeply appropriated and thereby expropriated and
rooted in place. It is vital that these place-based exploited by capital in order to accumulate capital.
aspects of digital labor are taken into account in The notion of the Internet prosumer commodity is
order to understand the overall socio-economic introduced as theoretical category that describes
transformations that are occurring. contemporary Internet-based capital accumulation
Laura Forlano is a visiting fellow at the Information strategies. Social networking sites (SNS) such
Society Project at Yale Law School. She received as MySpace, Facebook, or studiVZ are Internet-
her PhD in Communications from Columbia based integrated forms of communication and
University in 2008. Her dissertation, When Code community-building. Based on this theoretical
Meets Place: Collaboration and Innovation at foundation, a case study of social networking site
WiFi Hotspots, explores the intersection between usage by students is presented. An online survey
organizations, technology (in particular, mobile was based on a questionnaire consisting of 35
and wireless technology) and the role of place (single and multiple) choice questions, 3 open-
in communication, collaboration and innovation. ended questions, and 5 interval-scaled questions,
Forlano is an adjunct faculty member in the was carried out (N=674). The respondents were
Design and Management department at Parsons asked about the major perceived advantages
and the graduate programs in International Affairs and disadvantages of SNS. The results show
and Media Studies at The New School, where she that public information and discussion about
teaches courses on innovation, new media and surveillance and social networking platforms
global affairs, technology and the city, technology is important for activating critical information
policy, sustainable design and business ethics. behaviour. The results also allow the conclusion
She serves as a board member of NYCwireless and that there are no easy solutions to economic
the New York City Computer Human Interaction and political surveillance on SNS in an age of
Association. Forlano received a master’s in surveillance and new imperialism and that the
International Affairs from Columbia University, a topic should be analyzed critically by framing it
diploma in International Relations from the Johns the context of larger societal issues.
Hopkins University and a bachelor’s in Asian Christian Fuchs holds a venia docendi in the
Studies from Skidmore College. research field of ICTs and society. His main
www.law.yale.edu/intellectuallife/forlano research interests are critical social theory, general
Christian Fuchs, Class and Exploitation social theory, media and society, critical political
on the Internet: Theoretical Foundations and economy, critique of the political economy of the
the Example of Social Networking Sites media and information, and information society
Abstract: In this paper, I argue that class is a studies. He is author of more than 100 academic
central concept for understanding the economic publications, including the monograph Internet
processes of informational capitalism. The category and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age
of class is conceived based on Marxian theory (Routledge 2008). www.fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at
as a process of exploitation. It is not confined to Francesco Gagliardi, The Mechanical Turk
capital as the exploiting class and wage labour as Performance Handbook
the exploited class, but rather an expanded notion Abstract: While Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is

16
often regarded as a paramount example of neoliberalism, race and class today have been
exploitation, according to a number of surveys “liberated,” but at the same time, they exist now
several (western) MTurk workers engage with in a purely simulated form. I suggest that the
the outrageously underpaid “HITs” (Human age-old logic of exploitation has never been more
Intelligence Tasks) crowdsourced through the alive, never more purely actualized, than in today’s
service for reasons other than monetary gain. The computer simulations.
repetitiveness and mechanical nature of many Alexander R. Galloway is an author and
tasks offered through Amazon’s “crowdsourcing programmer. He is a founding member of the
marketplace” dovetails with deep-seated habits of software collective RSG and coauthor, with Eugene
compulsive multitasking to generate a troubling Thacker, of The Exploit: A Theory of Networks
form of entertainment. This performance/ (Minnesota, 2007) as well as two other books on
presentation will report on an ongoing project digital culture. He teaches at New York University.
exploring the performative aspects of this www.cultureandcommunication.org/galloway;
mode of engagement with MTurk (and similar) www.r-s-g.org
tasks. The project, which involves designing and
commissioning tasks through the Amazon service, Michael Goldhaber, How Play Works Out and
is funded entirely by working on HITs. Work Plays Out in an Attention-centered Economy
Abstract: While many see the Internet and digital
Francesco Gagliardi is a performance artist, labor on it as simply a new source of capitalist
historian of performance, and filmmaker based in profits, I see it rather differently. What I will call
New York City. He has been working internationally the attention system is a new, post-capitalist
as an actor, director and performance artist for “mode of production” that revolves around the
over a decade. In 2000 he translated, directed, paying and receiving of what is most intrinsically
and performed in the first Italian production of scarce: attention from other human beings. The
Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. recipients are also individual people, much more
Programs of his work were recently presented than either groups or corporations. Thus it is a
in Los Angles (The Wulf, December 2008), new class system, composed of net attention
Berlin (Miss Micks, January 2009), Torino, Italy receivers, stars, and net attention payers “fans.”
(quindicifebbraio, June 2009), and New York City The class relations are quite different from those
(Ontological-Hysteric Theater, September 2009). of capitalism. Paying attention is a form of labor,
He is currently working on a series of invisible even though under most conditions it seems
performances of mental tasks, and on a video fully voluntary. One is aligning one’s mind to that
series exploring the performative aspects of of the attention recipient, and in this state one
translation. He is writing about the photographic is in general willing to try to some extent to do
documentation of performance art in the 1960s what that recipient wants. When one has a huge
and 70s, and researching the work of Stuart number of fans, this attention wealth can be
Sherman. He holds a BPhil from Oxford University quite powerful. While it is true that companies
and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of seek and sometimes make large profits through
Turin. www.francescogagliardi.net the Internet, I view that as entirely a secondary
Alexander Galloway, The Absolute and the Virtual phenomenon. One way to demonstrate that this
Abstract: While the new condition of digital life new mode is already very nearly dominant over
is one in which the distinction between play and the old capitalist one is in terms of an index that I
labor has collapsed, at the same time a number call the TPI index, which can be roughly evaluated
of new divisions have appeared: segregations according to the different kinds of “transaction”
between us and them, segregations between in each mode. The index value for the attention
text and image, or segregations between race system turns out to be far higher today than that
and class. Drawing primarily on the game World of the capitalist mode.
of Warcraft, I examine the way in which many I began my professional life as a theoretical
games today subscribe to a specific concept physicist and early on was a founder of Science
of class and race, one still based on all the old for the People. I soon turned to questions of
demons: segregation, division, essentialism, and technology and society, taught socialism and
exploitation. How did this happen? After the labor Marxism, authored Reinventing Technology: Policies
movement, after Jim Crow, after civil rights, after

17
for Democratic Values and about 24 years ago and on questions of the relationship between
originated the idea of a new kind of economy culture and language diversity. He has published
based on attention, which I think has come to widely on digital media and cultural studies; his
dominate. This is the attention system. Formerly first book, The Cultural Logic of Computation, was
I called it the Attention Economy though that published by Harvard University Press in Spring
expression has been hijacked as far as its common 2009. www.people.virginia.edu/~dg6n
meaning. It is an extremely prominent aspect of Ellen Goodman, Public Media 2.0:
the Internet. I’ve written many articles, columns New Policy Directions
and blog entries relating to this. Other interests Abstract: I will present the emerging conception
include extending human rights, human evolution, of public media 2.0 and how the original
abstract painting, photography, gardens, elephants, mandate of public broadcasting to engage in
philosophy and post-modernism, and Democratic outreach and engagement is evolving. Public
Party politics. I live in the SF Bay area. media entities are both inviting and resisting
www.goldhaber.org; www.twitter.com/mgoldh; public contributions to new media productions
www.facebook.com/michael.goldhaber and activities. The relationship between public
David Golumbia, The Digital Securitization of Labor media professionals and publics in the work of
Abstract: While the lines between “digital haves” creation, curation, and connection implicates
and “digital have-nots” do not map precisely onto private and public media policies.
the line between the lower and middle classes, Ellen Goodman is a professor at Rutgers University
the association is close enough to raise disturbing School of Law at Camden, specializing in
questions. Because the system of capital and the information law and policy. Professor Goodman’s
economic exploitation on which it rests ultimately scholarship probes the appropriate role of
determine the stratification of society into classes, government policy, markets, and social norms in
only changing that system can change class supporting a robust information environment. She
relations in any significant way. In this sense, has focused recently on the future of public media
“crossing the digital divide” for a member of the and recently authored a book chapter entitled
lower class is poorly understood in isolation, even Public Service Media 2.0. This and recent law
if it sometimes occurs in isolation. Rather, it must review articles are available at ssrn.com. Professor
be seen as a species of class mobility in capitalist Goodman has spoken before a wide range of
societies that is characteristic of other forms audiences around the world, has consulted with
of such mobility—in principle available to many, the U.S. government on communications policy,
but in practice distributed very unevenly. When and has served as an advisor to President Obama’s
industries are digitized, part of what happens presidential campaign and transition team. She is
is a process parallel to what Wall Street calls a Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s
securitization—the conversion of a “non-derivative” Annenberg School of Communications and has
asset (e.g., a share of stock that provides direct visited at Penn’s Wharton School and Law School.
ownership in a company)—to a “derivative” asset. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty in 2003,
Typically, the part of an asset most valuable to Professor Goodman was a partner at Covington &
capital is artificially separated from the less Burling LLP, where she practiced in the information
valuable part. This division profoundly distorts technology area. A graduate of Harvard College
the nature of the assets themselves, by dividing and Harvard Law School, Professor Goodman was
industries like mining and agriculture even more a law clerk for Judge Norma Shapiro on the federal
fully than they had previously been into their court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. She
“control” aspects and their “execution” assets— lives near Philadelphia with her husband and three
and labor. Here we ask how we might theorize the children. www-camlaw.rutgers.edu/bio/1020
role for non-digital labor in a world managed by
what is largely a digital elite. Melissa Gregg, Affective Labour: Past and Present
Abstract: This paper provides an overview of the
David Golumbia is Assistant Professor of Media concept of “affective labour” in media and cultural
Studies, English, and Linguistics at the University theory to isolate two trends that seem specific
of Virginia, and holds a PhD in English (University to the digital era. It begins with an overview of
of Pennsylvania, 1999). His teaching and research feminist writings on immaterial labour that precede
focus on issues of representation in digital media

18
both the Italian tradition lately dominant (in the implicit ethics, which are used to validate a vision
work of Hardt and Negri, Virno, Lazzarato) and of respectful and market-oriented exchange
the fan tradition of affective labour highlighted between creator and consumer. Proponents of
by Henry Jenkins and others interested in expansive copyright law and strong enforcement
“playbour” (Kucklich), the rise of the “pro-am” regularly deploy ethical rhetoric rooted in this
(Leadbeater and Miller), “prosumer” (Toffler) and/ vision. Perhaps more surprisingly, so do some
or “produser” (Bruns). Bourdieu’s taxonomy of of their critics. I use this ethical lens to explore
capital is used to suggest that current attempts some of the ways in which people envision an
to quantify the exchange value of online digital ethical or unethical copyright system of production
labour underestimate the significance of social and and exchange and to illustrate some interesting
cultural capital in social networking practices and tensions in the arguments of copyright critics.
the degree of resistance to corporate exploitation James Grimmelmann, a former programmer, is
already evident in online communities. Situating an Associate Professor of Law at New York Law
today’s online social networking practices in a wider School. www.james.grimmelmann.net
history of professionally-oriented “instrumental
leisure” (Banks), the paper shows how affective Alex Halavais, Learning in the Networked Factory
labour has become standardised in a wider range Abstract: The school is a factory for factory
of white collar professional work than the male- workers. The school environment, traditionally one
dominated work cultures of the past. Drawing on a of enclosure, intended to shape behaviors around
three year study of information professionals, the the time-and-space regulation of the factory
uniqueness of digital affective labour is shown to (and hospital and prison), has of late begun to
lie in its anticipatory and prospective dimensions. dissolve into networked systems. This shift from
In the digital era, workers engage in networking for the place to the networked space of the student
the end goal of employability rather than security has been gradual, but has accelerated with the
of employment (Boltanski & Chiapello). This shift help of networking technologies in the last few
in the career narratives imagined by information years. As this shift occurs, we can locate shear
professionals will be shown to necessitate a new points in the fabric of the life of the learner: a
labour politics organised around “event” as opposed sixth grader expelled for what is found on his
to “clock” time (Adkins). contraband mobile phone, a fifty-year-old finishing
her BA via an entirely price-driven online learning
Melissa Gregg is a leading figure in the field of network. Five-year-olds with demanding calendars
affect theory and work. She is the author of Cultural that (as with “recess” for older students and
Studies’ Affective Voices (2006) and co-editor of “3-day weekends” for adults) carefully hem in
The Affect Theory Reader (with Gregory J. Seigworth, “play dates” designed to reflect the “work hard,
Duke UP, forthcoming). Her writing on digital play hard” motto of their parents. At the same
culture and labour has been published in a range time, the decentralization of control provides
of journals including Convergence, Continuum, for temporary pockets of play within the larger
Feminist Media Studies and Media International network. The shift in production from temporally
Australia. With Mark Andrejevic, Melissa convened and spatially restricted factory to ubiquitous and
one of the first graduate courses on digital labour always-on freelance learning reflects and shapes
post-Web-2.0, The Work of Media Consumption, at the networked factory.
the University of Queensland. She currently teaches
in the Gender and Cultural Studies Department at I am a social architect, interested in ways of helping
the University of Sydney where she is finishing two form a culture of creativity, freedom, and justice.
manuscripts on professional identity, friendship and In particular, I help people to understand how
labour: Work’s Intimacy (Polity, forthcoming 2010) social media is changing the nature of scholarship
and Broadcast Yourself: Presence, Intimacy, and and learning, and allowing for new forms of
Community Online (with Catherine Driscoll). collaboration and self-government. I also have
www.homecookedtheory.com; www.twitter.com/ institutional affiliations. www.alex.halavais.net
melgregg Orit Halpern, The Scanning Eye:
James Grimmelman, Ethical Visions of Knowledge and Visuality in Cybernetics
Copyright Law Abstract: This paper investigates attitudes to
Abstract: Copyright law comes with a set of pedagogy and perception in post-war design,

19
architecture, and cognitive science. This is part on panarchy hybridizes political philosophy/
of a longer history of interactivity; situating economy, network culture, complex systems,
our contemporary forms of spectatorship and critical social theory. His work online ranges
and interactivity. One site to investigate these from “Panarchy and the Wikification of Politics”
changes in perception is at the locus of science, to an important conversation with Trebor Scholz,
design, film and architecture in the works of “Toward a Critique of the Social Web.” In addition
Charles and Ray Eames and Gyorgy Kepes. to articulating emerging dynamics, Paul also is a
In these works, including many science education cofounder of the Forward Foundation a consulting
and pedagogy films, advertising, and corporate group that develops open-source infrastructure
architectures, the nature of spectatorship was for collaboration and sharing. His clients include
being rethought, and retrained. In their work, we Howard Rheingold, Stanford University, and the
can find evidence of a more global reformulation Institute for the Future. He lives in Ann Arbor with
between science, technology, aesthetics, his wife and two sons. www.paulbhartzog.org
and visuality. These are transformations in Joseph Heathcott (Moderator) is a writer,
representation and epistemology that are educator, and curator living in New York. He is
the blueprints to contemporary information an associate professor at The New School where
economies and architectures. he teaches in Eugene Lang College and Parsons
Dr. Orit Halpern is an assistant professor of History The New School for Design. He currently serves
and Media Studies at The New School in New as chair of the department of urban studies and
York City. She received her PhD from Harvard co-chair of the committee on university-wide urban
University in the History of Science in 2006 and programs. Heathcott has lectured, consulted, and
was a Franklin Institute Fellow at Duke University published widely in the fields of architectural
in 2006–07. Currently, she works on histories history, comparative urbanism, and the design
of perception and representation related to and planning of cities in a post-industrial age. He
cybernetics. Her current book project is labeled: has been awarded fellowships from the American
The Eye of Time: Histories of Representation, Council of Learned Societies, the U.S. Fulbright
Perception, and Archiving in Cybernetics. Senior Specialist Program, the Brown Center for
www.orithalpern.net Public Humanities, and the Erasmus Institute, and
Paul Hartzog, Panarchy: Politics, Production, frequently gives time for design studio reviews,
and Polycentrism community projects, and service to non-profit
Abstract: The current transition into a fluctuating organizations. www.newschool.edu/lang/faculty
multitude is a moment for both celebrating Brian Holmes, Predatory Networks—
freedoms as well as acknowledging new dangers. Self-Defense and Society
Current conceptions of work and play, production Abstract: In the age of asymmetric information
and consumption, mass and individual, succumb gathering, computer networks can no longer be
to the weight of history and lose clarity in the celebrated as potentially autonomous spaces
light of new constellations of labor and value. of interaction. Instead they must primarily be
Where might we look for guidance and insight seen as hunting grounds for the major economic
in our attempts to navigate the waters ahead? A and ideological predators. With the growth of
hybrid political philosophy of panarchy, informed computerized finance since the early 1970s, a
by network and complexity theory, offers some large number of “digital laborers” have come to
hope for those who resist despair and seek a be employed in this psycho-social predation,
sustainable way through. of which they are simultaneously agents and
Paul B. Hartzog, one of the coiners of the word objects. A public health crisis ensues, where self-
“panarchy,” is an independent scholar and hacker, defense against dominant ideas and behavioral
currently teaching at the University of Michigan’s routines becomes the necessary prelude to any
School of Information. Recipient of an NSF IGERT recovery of collective decision-making capacities.
to study complex systems, he has a master’s in Artist-activists have led the way in responding
Globalization and Environmental Politics from to these threatening conditions. Is it not time for
the University of Utah, and a master’s in Political the academy to drop the fictions of technological
Theory from the University of Michigan. His work progress and commercial neutrality, and make
critical network studies into the operational hub

20
for a revolt of the prey? and design. Prone to side projects, she has been
Brian Holmes is a cultural critic, living in Paris and haunted my Amazon Mechanical Turk since summer
Chicago, moving restlessly around the world. He 2008. In response to workers’ own complaints
holds a doctorate in Romance Languages and about AMT, she co-authored Turkopticon with Six
Literatures from the University of California at Silberman. Turkopticon is a Firefox extension that
Berkeley, was the English editor of publications for allows Turk workers to review employers and avoid
Documenta X in Kassel, Germany, was a member ones with bad records, but it also stands witness to
of the editorial collective of the French journal Amazon’s neglect of worker welfare. Previously, she
Multitudes from 2003 to 2008, and has recently worked as a user interface Designer at Google, and
published a collection of texts on art and social so is quite implicated in the digital economies she
movements entitled Unleashing the Collective critiques. www.ics.uci.edu/~lirani
Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering (New Carolyn Lee Kane, Catching Up with Color Online:
York: Autonomedia, 2007). His new book, Escape Against the Concept of Immaterial Labor.
the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society, is Abstract: Some web pages flaunt extremely bright,
forthcoming from WHW/VanAbbemuseum and is eye-straining colors, juxtaposed and animated
available online at brianholmes.wordpress.com. at rapid paces, often to upbeat, synthetic music.
Holmes was awarded the Vilém Flusser Prize for Digital imaging technology can increase the
Theory at Transmediale in Berlin in 2009. speed, saturation, and pace of color shapes and
www.brianholmes.wordpress.com animations to such a degree that they not only
Lilly Irani, Killing Time on MTurk exceed human cognitive capacities, but also
Abstract: Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) is an our physiological and optical ability to perceive
Internet “marketplace” in which employers can them. This research presentation explores the
have large volumes of digital tasks performed way in which internet based artists use HTML
by workers at very low cost, often less than a Color to intentionally produce these hyperactive
dollar per hour. Yet several surveys report that the visual effects. I argue that these works make
vast majority of AMT workers participate for fun the physical and material labor of attention and
or to kill time, quite thrilled to get paid for their control involved in using computers, explicit.
entertainment rather than paying for it. Eleven Carolyn Kane is a PhD Candidate in the
percent of workers, however, always or sometimes department of Media, Culture, and Communication
rely on the AMT earnings to make ends meet. at New York University where she is currently
The experiences of exploitation are dramatically writing her dissertation on Synthetic Color:
varying in degree. This talk describes ways of Electronic Signal Processing & The Reconfiguration
thinking about modes of exploitation in AMT: of Perception at the End of the Twentieth Century.
social thinness, response-ability, and precarity. Her research fields include digital media, new
First, social thinness is James Ferguson’s account media art, aesthetics, and critical theory.
of what made 1990s African mineral extraction www.files.nyu.edu/clk267/public
practices particularly exploitative; I describe Pat Kane, Taking Reality Lightly: Play and the
social thinness and ways in which AMT is—and is Constitution of the Net
not—socially thin. Second, Donna Haraway offers Abstract: In scholarly debates about the nature
response-ability as an aesthetic of ethical labor; I of our interactions (or ‘digital labors’) on socio-
explain how AMT has been designed to reduce the technical networks, play is often invoked as
burden of response-ability. And third, I situate AMT a descriptor or modifier of existing behaviour.
in broader trends in labor precarity. These different But rarely is there any deeper connection
ways of seeing labor configurations in AMT suggest made between the multi-disciplinary zone of
different kinds of activist responses and affinities. contemporary play scholarship—particularly in
Lilly is a PhD candidate in Informatics with a biology, ethology, neuroscience and complexity
graduate feminist emphasis. Her current work looks theory—and the constitutive forces that maintain
at circulation of design methods and knowledge, (despite various enclosures) the openness and
particularly between the U.S., Europe, and India. creativity of the internet society. This paper
She works at the intersection between feminist and explores these connections and claims that the
postcolonial STS, human-computer interaction, age of informational plenitude has disclosed

21
a socio-biological “ground of play,” or generic Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott, No Matter
capacities of potentiation that might explain Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott will present an
the enduring resilience and inventiveness of overview of their artwork, No Matter, which is an
cyberculture. The paper also draws on the author’s installation of imaginary objects made both in
direct and daily experience as a web entrepreneur Second Life and physical space. They discuss
in music and journalism. This will illustrate how the the labor issues surrounding the project, which
constitutively playful structure of the Net, and its uses virtual labor from anonymous builders in
ambiguous and open social dynamics, shapes the Second Life. No Matter traffics imaginary objects
development of network enterprises at least as in simulated and physical spaces. These objects
crucially as commercial or governmental forces. appear repeatedly in myth, literature, in thought
Pat Kane, 45, is a musician, writer, consultant and experiments, popular culture, and as placeholder
activist. His book The Play Ethic (Macmillan 2004, objects in language. Items such as the Holy Grail,
and see www.theplayethic.com) has been praised Time Machine or Schrödinger’s Cat, do not exist
by figures like Will Hutton, Charles Leadbeater, in the material realm, except as replicas, and
Daniel Pink and Douglas Ruskhoff. His band Hue embody the tension between the ideal and real.
And Cry (www.hueandcry.co.uk) have supported The project explores the tension between the
Madonna, U2, James Brown, and Van Morrison and virtual and real economies by 1) commissioning
Al Green, and their thirteenth album Open Soul 25 builders and artists to produce 40 cultural
was released in 2008. Pat writes for the Guardian artifacts in Second Life space; 2) paying them
and Independent, and was a founding editor of The in Linden dollars at an equivalent scale of $1.50
Sunday Herald. He has consulted for organizations to $12 per object; 3) extracting the objects
as diverse as Lego, Nokia, the Cabinet Office and from Second Life—a closed system where 3D
Bartle Bogle Hegarty about the power and potential models cannot be exported; 4) reconstructing
of play, and is a regular global keynote speaker on these objects as 3D paper replicas with high-
this topic. www.theplayethic.com; www.twitter.com/ quality printed textures in physical space. The
theplayethic; www.facebook.com/patkane artists discuss tactics of economic engagement
from developing relationships with anonymous
Christopher M. Kelty, No Fun: Work and Labor freelance builders to imbuing psychological
in Free Software investments in a conceptual project to making
Abstract: This presentation looks at the case of five-step sales pitches using an Imaginary Objects
Free Software through the lens of work and labor. Showroom. The results are vast differences in pay
Free Software is presented as an exemplary case scale, ranging from $55/hour (for a 10-minute
of technically and morally specific world-making build) to 60¢/hour (for a 50-hour build) and
that emphasizes particular ideals of freedom widely divergent interpretations of the form of
forged in the liberal tradition and worked over various imaginary objects.
by the emergence of the Internet, the expansion
of intellectual property and the globalization of Scott Kildall (USA) and Victoria Scott (Canada)
social imaginaries of moral order. started their collaboration in 2006, after meeting
in the Art & Technology graduate program at the
Christopher M. Kelty is an associate professor at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Their first
the University of California, Los Angeles. He has project series, 2x2, experimented with physically
a joint appointment in the Center for Society and materializing the psychology of online relational
Genetics and in the department of Information spaces and was conceived at the Banff Centre for
Studies. His research focuses on the cultural the Arts as part of the conceptual art residency, the
significance of information technology, especially Future of Idea Art. In 2007, they were awarded the
in science and engineering. He is the author most Turbulence.org-sponsored Mixed Realities Juried
recently of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of International Networked Art commission, for their
Free Software (Duke University Press, 2008), as second project, No Matter. Both the physical and
well as numerous articles on open source and simulated installations of No Matter premiered
free software, including its impact on education, simultaneously on February 7, 2008 in both
nanotechnology, the life sciences, and issues of Second Life and Emerson College, Boston. This
peer review and research process in the sciences was recently shown at the Subtle Technologies
and in the humanities. www.kelty.org/about Festival in Toronto in June, 2009. Their most recent

22
relational installation, Ghost in The Machine, By de-ideologizing the material processes of
provides a hired philosopher to assist the public in exploitation and accumulation that take place in
drawing or writing a response to the question “What virtual worlds, it is possible to recognize virtual
is the Ghost in the Machine?” www.nomatter.org worlds’ precarious sovereignty, and arrive at a
Abigail De Kosnik, Fan Labor as Paid Labor? conceptualization of virtual worldliness that takes
Abstract: Fan labor is often given away for free, this precariousness into account.
yet it is an increasingly a popular form of mass Julian Kücklich teaches game design at
entertainment and creates value for the owners of Mediadesign Hochschule Berlin. He has been
“source” material (the (moving) images, sounds, doing research on the politics, aesthetics, and
and text that serve as the basis for fan creations semiotics of digital games since 2000. More
such as mash-ups, remixes, fan fiction, etc). I will information on his research can be found at
be asking the question, Under what circumstances www.playability.de; www.twitter.com/cucchiaio
can fan labor be paid labor? As the entertainment Ferentz Lafargue (Moderator), assistant
industry shifts from mass broadcast to narrowcast professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang
formats, and as tools for appropriating media College, is the author of a memoir, Songs in the
and publishing appropriations become more Key of My Life. www.ferentz.com
common, questions about how fan creators can
be compensated deserve serious consideration. Mark Larrimore (Moderator) directs the
Religious Studies program at Eugene Lang College.
Abigail De Kosnik is an assistant professor at the Editor of The Problem of Evil: A Reader and The
University of California, Berkeley, at the Berkeley German Invention of Race (with Sara Eigen),
Center for New Media (BCNM) and the Department Mark’s current research projects concern the
of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies. problem of good, interpretations of the Book of
www.twitter.com/De_Kosnik Job, and the future of religion.
Julian Kücklich, Work Hard, Play Harder— Deborah Levitt (Moderator) focuses on sites
Labour, Playbor and the Ideology of Play of conjugation of media and rhetorics of life,
Abstract: In my paper, I argue that much of the from classical tableau vivants to medical films
current scholarly discourse about virtual worlds of the 20s and 30s to forms and practices
fails to recognize the mode of governmentality of animation. She is interested in how new
that characterizes these new social formations. media technologies have dovetailed with the
Rather than to see them as analogous to development of biopolitical logics, from the
societies in the real world, with their own Enlightenment to the present day, as well as in
cultures, economies, and political systems, I the manner in which the sometimes eccentric
suggest to regard them as “social factories” sites at which cultural definitions of life are in
in which the social fabric is inextricably shot fact generated may help us think life beyond the
through with economic production. While the narrowly scientific paradigms which structure
governmentalization of the global economy, and contemporary political programs. Her current
the concomitant economization of governments publications include a book chapter on Giorgio
are processes, which originate in the (increasingly Agamben’s work on media and biopolitics and
virtualized) real world, they also result in a another on forms of artificial life in Mamoru
“naturalization” of virtual worlds, a tendency Oshii’s anime feature, Innocence (2004). Levitt is
which also becomes obvious in the way virtual assistant professor in the department of Culture
worlds are discussed in terms of population and and Media Studies at Eugene Lang College.
territory. At the same time, the integration of the www.newschool.edu/lang/faculty
economies of the real world with those of virtual
worlds leads to similar results as the virtualization Laura Y. Liu (Moderator) is assistant professor
of real-world economies, which is contingent upon of Urban Studies at Eugene Lang College. Her
the increasing valorization of immaterial labor. research interests include community organizing
In virtual worlds, the suffusion of governance and urban social justice; migration and work; and
with economic production thus leads to the race, gender, and labor politics. She is writing
formation of precarious forms of governmentality, a book tentatively called Sweatshop City which
which are veiled by a pertinent ideology of play. looks at identity, space, and political strategy in
community organizing within Chinatown and other

23
immigrant communities in the New York City area. at the blog Terra Nova. www.thomasmalaby.com
She has published in Gender, Place and Culture; Edward Maloney (Moderator) is an assistant
Social and Cultural Geography; and Urban professor of English at Georgetown University
Geography. www.newschool.edu/lang/faculty and the director of research and development
Thomas Malaby, Performing Value: at the Center for New Designs in Learning and
Labor and Contingency in Virtual Worlds Scholarship, a think tank for the exploration of the
Abstract: Massively multiplayer online games and relationship between new media technologies and
worlds (MMOs, or virtual worlds) have exploded teaching and learning. He is a narrative theorist
onto the cultural landscape, and exploded in size with specialties in modern and postmodern
as well. They clearly generate cash, connections, literature and digital media and a particular
competencies, and credentials for their interest in the apparatus of the book. He has
participants, and we can now begin to ask why published on Joyce (both James and Michael),
this is possible at all. What are the fundamental film, and new media technologies.
features of these digital domains that account www.explore.georgetown.edu/people/ejm
for the accumulation in them of human labor Meredith L. McGill (Moderator) associate
into these various forms of capital, and how professor of English and director of the Center for
is the character of labor itself transformed in Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University. She is the
them? Most obviously, their persistence allows author of “American Literature and the Culture of
the labor of their participants to have durable, Reprinting, 1834-1853” (2003), a study of 19th-
cumulative effects. But persistence alone cannot century American resistance to tight control over
account for these emergent and consequential intellectual property. Her research in the digital
phenomena. This is because the effects of digital humanities seeks to bring the vexed history of the
labor cannot be meaningful without an element regulation of print to bear on the adoption of new
of contingency. That is, the possibilities of failure, technologies for writing, publishing, and reading.
of accident, and of unintended consequences are www.english.rutgers.edu/faculty/profiles/mcgill
essential to understanding why virtual worlds can
generate these real stakes. The multi-layered and Christina McPhee, Queer Theory and
implicit contingency of MMOs is, importantly, an the Dichotomies of Play and Work
architected feature that owes a great deal to game Abstract: I am interested in exploring the potential
design, and it enables them to begin to approach of queer theory with regard to the space of
the texture of the everyday. In this presentation internet-based play. I think that it’s possible
I discuss virtual worlds as landscapes of to develop a different understanding of what
possibility, and explore the performative and other constitutes a relational, participatory space online
contingencies that together constitute the rich and the power relations between subjectivities
horizon for failure (and success) within virtual in the space of the internet through pursuit of
worlds. Based on ethnographic research at a site some of queer theory’s most notable modes of
of virtual world production, Linden Lab (makers of thought, especially, how identities self construct
Second Life), I chart how these contingencies lie at through embodiment and performance, and how
the heart of digital labor within them. a “queer” critique of social relations and aesthetic
production online can extend much beyond
Thomas Malaby is associate professor in the stylings and performance of gender, and actually
department of Anthropology at the University of reach some new insights about how an aesthetics
Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Thomas has published of play “works” online. By paying attention to
numerous works on virtual worlds, games, and the ways that language use and text may work
indeterminacy. He is continually interested by the in net based interfaces—both “corporate” and
ever-changing relationships among institutions, “opensource”—I think we may adapt some of
unpredictability, and technology, especially as the strengths of queer theory’s ability to analyze
they are realized through games and game-like “non-normative” rhetoric. Considering both the
processes. His newly published book, Making conference theme of playground as a spatial
Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life (2009, metaphor, and specifically as a “scene” for
Cornell University Press), is an ethnographic political interactivity, I also am interested in how
examination of Linden Lab and its relationship to its a democratic space evolves through the clash of
creation, Second Life. He is also a featured author

24
performed identities-playground as a rough and collectivist society that heralds—as Kevin Kelly
tumble, potentially violent space of participation. I asserted—a new form of socialism. Digital labor
am considering how this constitutes a productive is portrayed as a rejection of the commodity form
assemblage, how the very ambiguities of labour/ that gives shape to gift economies where goods
play relations produce from the margins a new are produced and exchanged without the need for
kind of social conscience from within the mix of money. Of course, the fact that the physical layer of
so-called corporate control spaces and marginal the Internet as well as the most popular sociable
open source fora. I am especially interested in media platforms end up being controlled by a
how this play of relations actually returns us to handful of corporate conglomerates means that
a more intense experience of materiality and a world without money is only possible when it is
subjective presence; and I ask how queer theory build on top of a world where money is everything.
might be adapted to challenge play/work and In this presentation, I explore the contradictions
post-human/corporate dichotomies. inherent in contemporary theorizings of digital
Christina McPhee (born Los Angeles, based in labor and propose a framework for imagining
central coast and San Francisco, California) spaces where disidentification from the Net
develops remote performance works, site- is possible. I argue that it is in these forms of
abstractiondrawing, and landscape assemblage disassembly that an authentic alternative to
in film and photography. She was a participating exploitation and inequality is contained, and where
editor at Documenta 12 for -empyre-, Sydney. She new modes of labor may arise.
was an invited artist in Violence of Participation Ulises A. Mejias is an assistant professor in the
at the Lyon Biennial 2007. Tesserae of Venus, Communication Studies department at SUNY at
a science fiction assemblage, is at Silverman Oswego. His research interests include network
Gallery San Francisco through December 5, studies, critical theory, philosophy of technology,
2009. Recent exhibitions include Carrizo-Parkfield and political economy of new media.
Diaries at the American University Museum. Her www.ulisesmejias.com
most recent commission was for Thresholds Robert Mitchell, Ends and Means:
Artspace Perth, with La Conchita mon Amour, Digital Labor in the Context of Health
also a Turbulence.org project with support from Abstract: My recent research has focused on
the Experimental Television Center. She lectures ways in which digital medical resources (both
in the Digital Arts and New Media graduate web-based databases and electronic patient
program, University of California at Santa Cruz. records) are being used to facilitate what Melinda
Her new media writing and artwork appear on Cooper and Catherine Waldby have called “clinical
DrunkenBoat, Soundtoys, Rhizome Artbase, and labor,” that is patient practices that contribute
Neural. www.christinamcphee.net; to the health of the patient but at the same time
www.vimeo.com/channels/tesseraeofvenus; also create either research or economic value
www.silverman-gallery.com/artist/view/1615 for academic researchers or for-profit medical
Ulises Mejias, Workers of the Net, Disassemble! groups. (The dynamic is similar in principle to
Abstract: Extrapolating from trends in the what occurs when one’s purchasing decisions at
sociable media industry, I argue that the digital sites such as Amazon become part of databases
technosocial network is a machine for increasing designed to increase the value and profitability
participation while simultaneously maintaining or of the company). This example is less oriented
deepening inequalities between its participants. toward the entertainment and/or participatory
This is because network dynamics like preferential democracy uses that one often associates with
attachment tend to create monopsonies digital labor, but it also highlights the conceptual
(increasingly fewer repositories where Internet difficulties we encounter when labor seems to
users can trade their cultural products). The very become an end in itself. In the examples that I
rich-get-richer dynamics that make scale-free outline in my presentation, “health” is invariably
networks so effective also guarantee that there presented as an unambiguous end: that is, health
will be fewer viable alternatives to services like is not a means for something else, but rather the
YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter. At the same time, end for which most other things are means. As a
however, the Internet is often wishfully described consequence, the clinical labor that an increasing
as a space that escapes capitalism, an emerging number of people are asked to perform may seem

25
like part of a virtuous circle: though my labor digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of
provides economic value for others (and in this Technology. Montfort has collaborated on the blog
sense I am a means), it also creates health for me Grand Text Auto, the sticker novel Implementation,
(and in this sense is itself an end: through such and 2002: A Palindrome Story. He writes poems,
laboring, I am practicing health). However, what I text generators, and interactive fiction such as
want to underline in this presentation is that this Book and Volume and Ad Verbum. Most recently,
circle can appear virtuous only if we accept a very he and Ian Bogost wrote Racing the Beam: The
specific understanding of what “health” can mean. Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2009).
Robert Mitchell is an associate professor in the Montfort also wrote Twisty Little Passages: An
department of English, affiliated faculty member Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003)
in Women’s Studies, and a faculty member of the and co-edited The Electronic Literature Collection
Institute of Genome Sciences and Policy at Duke Volume 1 (ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader
University. His research focuses on late 18th and (MIT Press, 2003). www.nickm.com
early 19th century intersections between science Lisa Nakamura, Digital Labor, Digital
and literature, as well as more contemporary Immigration, and Transnationality, or, Why Virtual
relationships among biological materials, Worlds Need a Civil Rights Movement
economics, and information technologies. His Abstract: “They want our labor, not our lives.”—Vijay
published work includes Sympathy and the State Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk. “All of the work,
in the Romanic Era: Systems, State Finance, and without the worker.”—Alex Rivera, Cybracero project
the Shadows of Futurity (Routledge, 2007); Tissue Media scholars have a bias towards
Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late understanding digital labor as content creation,
Capitalism), co-authored with Catherine Waldby, which is the form of labor that they have the most
(Duke University Press, 2006; and Data Made familiarity with. It enrages them to see their and
Flesh: Embodying Information (Routledge, 2003) other users’ labor monetized without their getting
and Semiotic Flesh: Information and the Human any profits or even credit—and they have a point,
Body (University of Washington Press, 2002), both the reality of the digital commons as a digital
co-edited with Phillip Thurtle. He is also editor, with shop or even factory is a sad result of the political
Phillip Thurtle, of the book series In Vivo: Cultural economic system we have today. The basic tenet
Mediations of Biomedical Science, published by the of the information society—that intellectual
University of Washington Press. property is the most valuable commodity of all—
www.fds.duke.edu/db/aas/English/faculty/rmitch enables the struggle over digital labor. It is both
Nick Montfort, A Reading from the justification for copyright and the motivation
“Implementation,” “Mystery House Taken Over,” behind the copyright reform movement. But what
“Book and Volume,” and “ppg256” is rarely discussed is the racialization of labor
Abstract: I read from and present a series of that is not content creation. In Czech, robota
digital writing projects that involve collaboration, means drudgery—labor that nobody enjoys doing.
participation by large groups of contributors, the Bodies of color engage with the digital economy
appropriation of and commentary on commercial as both labor and value. To paraphrase Lisa Lowe
and industrial technologies, and the use of free and through race and gender scholar Grace Hong,
open source software, including “Implementation” how are bodies of color both labor and capital?
(Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg, 2004), What do the Mechanical Turk worker, the Twitter
“Mystery House Taken Over” (Nick Montfort, Dan user, the citizen journalist, the gold farmer,
Shiovitz, Emily Short, and the MHTO Occupation and the game level author or modder have in
Force, 2005), “Book and Volume” (Nick Montfort, common? And how are their interests (part of
2005) and the ppg256 series (Nick Montfort, what makes this conference exciting is that it
2007-2009). These projects are entertwined with views digital laborers are both more numerous
systems of digital labor, but they also question and a broader category than we thought, and
whether the labor/leisure or employment/ also as even having interests, rather than simply
consumption distinction should control our demographics) similar to or different from those
experience of the computer and the network. of people of color?
Nick Montfort is an associate professor of Lisa Nakamura is the director of the Asian

26
American Studies Program, professor in the author of the forthcoming book Venture Labor,
Institute of Communication Research and which traces the change in U.S. employment
Media Studies program and professor of Asian structures through the experience of the early
American Studies at the University of Illinois, pioneers of the commercial internet. Her research
Urbana Champaign. She is the author of Digitizing focuses on organizational dynamics in the face
Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of technological change in areas such as green
of Minnesota Press, 2008), Cybertypes: Race, commercial architecture and new media industries.
Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, She holds a PhD in sociology from Columbia
2002) and co-editor of Race in Cyberspace University, where she is now an external faculty
(Routledge, 2000). She has published articles affiliate at the Center on Organizational Innovation.
in Critical Studies in Media Communication, www.com.washington.edu/faculty/neff
PMLA, Cinema Journal, Women’s Review of Luis Vincent Nuñez,
Books, Camera Obscura, and the Iowa Journal The Internet Is a Totalitarian Regime
of Cultural Studies. She is editing a collection Abstract: Opinionating is a full time job. Voting,
with Peter Chow-White entitled Digital Race: An moding, reviewing, and recommending require
Anthology (Routledge, forthcoming) and is working more social engagement than Rousseau could
on a new monograph on social inequality in shake a stick at. Is it political? Web 2.0 was
virtual worlds. Her research focuses on race and built around social networking, which in a past
gender in online social spaces such as massively life was known as civic engagement. But does
multiplayer online role playing games, and she is that mean the digital community has really built
currently investigating the racializaton of labor in a political realm. Logs and logs of personal
transnational contexts and avatarial operations in preferences, patterns, and habits are being
a “postracial” world. www.sites.google.com/site/ collected every second. To what end? Is it only
theresearchsiteforlisanakamura noise or will we finally pick up that signal and its
Gina Neff, Venture Labor: purpose after all these years?
The Risks of Work in Social Media Luis Nuñez is a senior at Eugene Lang College.
Abstract: Several social theorists note that Growing up in New York City, he built his first
contemporary jobs entail a lack of job security and computer out of spare parts liberated from his
observe the increase in the precarity of modern building’s trash piles. Next fall he hopes to study
life. While there is much writing on theories of international law in New York and concentrate on
these changes, less has been done on why people social justice and human rights in an increasingly
accept riskier work and how they are adapting, connected society.
especially within technology industries. I examine
what I call “Venture Labor”—the investment of Timothy Pachirat, Digital Slaughter
financial, human, and social capital that ordinary Abstract: What difference does it make when
employees make in the companies they work an internet playground is deployed to rupture
using a case study from the early pioneers of the physical walls of an actual factory? I draw
the commercial internet. I argue that not only is on events preceding and following the Humane
Venture Labor applicable to many different high- Society of the United States January, 2008
risk and innovative industries, but it arises during YouTube release of undercover footage filmed
a particularly charged moment in the transition at an industrialized slaughterhouse in Chino,
of the U.S. economy from an industrial economy California to explore the promises and pitfalls of
to a post-industrial economy. Drawing on ten digital labor that attempts to collapse, subvert,
years of research in “Silicon Alley,” New York’s or otherwise short-circuit the spatial and
Internet industry, I outline the origins and rise of psychological separation between material sites
employees’ entrepreneurial behavior, the dynamics of production and consumption. I contextualize
of risk during the dot-com boom and bust, and this exploration through my own ethnographic
employees’ strategies for managing this risk. research on the kill floor of an industrialized
slaughterhouse, both juxtaposing and seeking
Gina Neff is an assistant professor in the similarities between the visceral materiality of
Department of Communication at the University slaughterhouse work and digital labor.
of Washington. She is co-editor of Surviving
the New Economy (Paradigm Press, 2007) and Timothy Pachirat (Ph.D. Yale, 2008) is an

27
assistant professor of politics at The New School director of the Gibbons Institute for Law, Science
for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. and Technology. In spring 2009, he was a visiting
His research and teaching interests include professor at Yale Law School, and he is presently
comparative politics, the politics of Southeast an affiliate fellow of Yale’s Information Society
Asia, spatial and visual politics, the sociology of Project. He has served as a fellow at the Institute
domination and resistance, the political economy for the Defense of Competition and Protection
of dirty and dangerous work, and interpretive and of Intellectual Property in Lima, Peru. He joined
ethnographic research methods. He is the author the Seton Hall faculty after practicing at Arnold
of chapters in edited volumes on interpretive and & Porter LLP, where his work included antitrust
ethnographic research methods. A book, Killing and intellectual property litigation. In 2009,
Work: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Pasquale testified before the House Judiciary
Sight (under contract from Yale University Press), Committee (along with the general counsels of
draws on an ethnography of immigrant labor on Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo), presenting Internet
the kill floor of an industrialized slaughterhouse Nondiscrimination Principles for Competition
in the Great Plains of the United States to explore Policy Online. www.cardozo.yu.edu;
how violence that is seen as both essential www.facebook.com/frankpasquale
and repugnant to modern society is organized, Christiane Paul, Free Labor, Collective
disciplined, regulated, and reproduced. Intelligence, and Artistic Production
www.gpia.info/pachirat Abstract: In the digitally networked information
Frank Pasquale, Distributive Justice Online economy, information feeds into the production
Abstract: The Web 2.0 backlash has begun. process of commodities, provides the basis for
For example, Andrew Keen voices a cultural the control of the market, and is materialized and
conservatism uneasy with the new egalitarianism sold as a commodity. Information systems and
of networked media, claiming that established communications networks produce “immaterial
“media and culture industries’ [purpose]… commodities” consisting of informational or
is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent.” cultural content. Free labor—building Web sites
Trebor Scholz worries that new intermediaries and virtual spaces, modifying software packages,
will recapitulate old patterns of exploitation. The contributing to Web 2.0 platforms—has become
labor of millions on their MySpace page results, an important element of the digital economy,
most often, in nothing paid to them and vast sums voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and
going to Rupert Murdoch. Concerns about cultural exploited. While digital communication networks
formation and distributive justice risk being short- have enabled unprecedented forms of collective
circuited by the opacity of many sites. I believe agency and activism, the inherent structure
that those who contribute to Web 2.0 sites like of economies, industries, and institutions in
Facebook and MySpace deserve a right to know which digital technologies are embedded can
how their contributions are ordered and distributed work against the idealistic belief in grass-roots
and to contribute to that governance. We should change and activism that is driven bottom-up
be prepared to challenge “black boxes,” and not rather than top-down. Art in the networked
to simply accept site founders’ claims that they commons cannot avoid addressing the larger
need to keep us in the dark about how they’re run context of the sustainability of cultural production
because that’s the trade secret they need to keep in information societies. Using networked art
ahead of competitors. We also need to question projects as examples, the presentation will
the claim that sites are successful because of outline relationships between free labor, collective
their great innovation; rather, their innovation may intelligence, and artistic production.
well be deemed to be great only because the site Christiane Paul is an associate professor and
is successful. Hagiographers in the business press director of the graduate programs in Media
have many incentives to rationalize the existing Studies at The New School and adjunct curator
order. Uncritical acceptance of these claims can of new media arts at the Whitney Museum of
make regulation and transparency seem more American Art. She has written extensively on new
costly than it actually is. media arts and lectured internationally on art and
Frank Pasquale is Loftus Professor of Law at technology. An expanded new edition of her book
Seton Hall Law School, where he is also associate Digital Art (Thames& Hudson, UK, 2003) came

28
out in spring 2008 and her edited anthology New on cold war cybernetics, or how communication
Media in the White Cube and Beyond—Curatorial became computer-compatible. www.columbia.
Models for Digital Art was published by UC Press edu/~bjp2108/blog
in December 2008. She is responsible for artport, Dominic Pettman, On Social Lubrication:
the Whitney Museum’s online portal to Internet Between the Digital and the Chthonic
art, and has curated several exhibitions for the Abstract: One of the more striking maxims framing
museum. Other recent curatorial work includes this conference on contemporary labor practices
Feedforward—The Angel of History (co-curated is that “Social participation is the oil of the digital
with Steve Dietz; Laboral Art Center, Gijon, Spain, economy.” My paper taps this metaphor in order
Oct. 2009) and INDAF Digital Art Festival (Inchon, to explore the ways in which debates surrounding
Korea, Aug. 2009). www.christianepaul.info “peak oil” set the cultural tone for our lives and
Ben Peters, Arendt and the Creative Toil of Counting interactions to a degree that even Hubbert and
Abstract: Our problem, to update Arendt’s phrase, Co. could not foresee. Working, as we do, not
lies in that not Human but humans now inhabit only within a market economy, but a libidinal one,
the earth. Ours is a question of counting. In means that the very notion of the social (and by
general, the capacity to calculate, to self-reflect or extension, participation) are inflected through the
feed back in the process of calculation, and thus often subliminal erotics of transactions. I therefore
to regularly manipulate symbols characterizes trace some of the pulsions of this concept
both digital and human agents online and off. through Lyotard to more recent theorists such
In particular, this paper attempts to map three as Alan Stoekl and Bernard Stiegler, specifically
orders of counting—rote arithmetic, statistics, in order to understand the relationship between
and probability—onto Arendt’s distinctions among economy, energy, and ecology. What happens to
labor, work, and action. As a sort of compulsory digital labor, in other words, when oil runs out—
cognitive labor, rote arithmetic appears to predate both literally and metaphorically
writing (Goody) and functionally equate neural Dominic Pettman is an associate professor of
networks with computer processors (Turing, Culture and Media at Eugene College and The New
McCulloch). Statistics, on the hand, has driven School for Social Research. He has previously
social, purposive work since at least the late taught in Melbourne, Geneva, and Amsterdam. His
seventeenth century to the contemporary collapse books include After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of
of finance markets. Lastly, this paper considers Exhaustion, Avoiding the Subject: Media, Culture
that probability may be to action what statistics and the Object (with Justin Clemens), and Love
is to work. As a creative act itself, probability and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the
presents itself as a type of computational fiction— Information Age. A forthcoming book is titled
good to think with but better to read closely Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines.
and critically. It is at once a fictive straddling www.blackjelly.com/pettman
of an empirical numerator over a philosophical
denominator, a baffling expression of previous Hector Postigo, America Online Volunteers:
work (i.e. statistics) thrust upon any range of Lessons from an Early Co-production Community
imagined futures, and a mixture of liberating Abstract: My discussion for this conference
possibility and certain uncertainty. In conclusion, continues previous work that analyzed the case
this paper calls for fresh, critical consideration of America Online volunteers (AOL) from critical
of probability as a sociotechnical mindset that perspectives and incorporates newly acquired
fixates on the future in exchange for a (literal) documents and interviews by the US Dept. of
chance to act. Labor with volunteers. Specifically, I put forth
the AOL volunteers’ case as an instance of co-
Ben studies humanistic and social media theory, production that eventually met its demise when
broadly understood, and enjoys his work in new organizational changes and the rise of a work
media history, the critical study of information, consciousness among some volunteers made
and comparative Eastern European and American the ongoing relationship impossible. I discuss
studies. He is currently a visiting fellow at the the types of co-productive labor that took place
Information Society Project at Yale Law School during the height of the AOL/volunteer relationship
and a doctoral candidate in Communications and the structures put in place to help AOL
at Columbia University. His dissertation focuses

29
harness the power of a free distributed workforce. language of humor, satire, and metaphor, has
I suggest that the success of the co-productive also been screened at the Berlin International
relationship was a function of a balance between Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, the
the perceived reasonable compensation on the Guggenheim Museum, PBS, Telluride, and other
part of volunteers, social factors and attitudes international venues. www.alexrivera.com;
towards work such as a sense of community, www.sleepdealer.com
creativity, and a sense of accomplishment. Martin Roberts, Productivity Is Fun
My research focuses on new digital media. Abstract: With regard to the concerns of the
Specifically, I study video game culture and conference around digital labor, I’m interested
online environments and I’m pursuing two lines of in the relation between labor and leisure, and
research. The first line of research focuses on value the disappearance of the distinction between
production on the internet. I was one of the first the two: if labor in the digital economy is often
researcher to study video game fan communities characterized as a form of play, the flipside is
that make valuable modifications to popular PC that leisure has become a new form of labor.
games (modders). The second line of research is a The contemporary discourse on productivity
study of social movements and their use of hacking continually exhorts us to make even what
and social networking technologies. My work on little free time remains to us to become more
social movements is funded in part by the National productive citizens. Within this context, I’m
Science Foundation. www.hectorpostigo.com interested in the deployment of the concept
Howard Rheingold is author of Tools for of FUN in the contemporary discourse on
Thought, www.rheingold.com/texts/tft; The productivity. Historically, fun is an experience
Virtual Community, www.rheingold.com/vc/ of pleasure which has tended to be associated
book; Smart Mobs, www.smartmobs.com. He was with spheres of experience “outside” labor time:
editor of Whole Earth Review, en.wikipedia.org/ its archetypal example remains Coney Island, a
wiki/Whole_Earth_Review, and The Millennium kind of benign inversion of industrial production
Whole Earth Catalog, www.well.com/user/ in which decommissioned coal trucks are
hlr/mwecintro, and founding executive editor converted into adventure rides. The very concept
of Hotwired, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotWired. of an “amusement park” seems antithetical to
He has taught courses on participatory media everything the factory stands for in terms of
and social networks at UC Berkeley. His current production, commodified labor, and clocked time.
projects include Social Media Classroom, www. In contemporary digital culture, a proliferating
socialmediaclassroom.com; The Cooperation chorus of voices insist that productivity is “fun,”
Project, www.cooperationcommons.org; and or explain how we can have fun while also
Participatory Media Literacy www.socialtext.net/ being productive. Contrary to such assertions,
medialiteracy; www.rheingold.com; www.twitter. I’m interested in exploring new forms of non
com/hrheingold; vlog.rheingold.com productive fun, and dedicated to the idea that fun
is by definition non-productive. Updating Veblen,
Alex Rivera, Sleep Dealer (screening and Q&A) I’d suggest that we need a contemporary theory
Alex Riviera’s Sleep Dealer is a 2008 futuristic, of the productive class, which would consider
cyberpunk, science-fiction film. Set in a near- amongst other things how productivity has
future, militarized world marked by closed borders, replaced leisure as the basis for social distinction
virtual labor and a global digital network that joins in postmodern society.
minds and experiences, three strangers risk their
lives to connect with each other and break the I teach film and media studies at Eugene Lang
barriers of technology. College The New School for Liberal Arts. My
research interests focus on the cultural dimension
Alex Rivera is a New York based digital media of globalization and the relation of transnational
artist and filmmaker. Sleep Dealer, his first feature media to these processes. My work explores
film, premiered at Sundance 2008 and won two questions such as the role of media in the
awards, including the Waldo Salt Screenwriting production of national identities; transnational
Award. Rivera is a Sundance Fellow and a cultural imaginaries; and the transformation of
Rockefeller Fellow. His work, which addresses television from a public-service medium into an
concerns of the Latino community through a instrument for the governance of consumer society.

30
I am currently working on a book that studies inextricably folded into rapidly mutating forms of
the implications of globalization for subcultural media technology. Professor Rogers has been a
identities. www.newschool.edu/lang/faculty fellow at the Center for Ideas and Society at UC
Judith Rodenbeck (Moderator) holds the Riverside, is a recipient of a Mellon grant on affect
Noble Foundation Chair in Art and Cultural History and interactive media, and has lectured at various
at Sarah Lawrence College, where she teaches venues, including the Getty Research Institute and
modern and contemporary art. Her writing on the Kitchen. Some recent publications include “LA
contemporary art has appeared in magazines Freewaves, Too much Freedom?: Alternative Video
such as Grey Room, Artforum, and Modern and Internet Distribution” (2007), “From Media to
Painters; she served as editor-in-chief of the Remediation: Transitions in Early Video Culture”
Art Journal from 2007 to 2009. A specialist in (2009), and “Capital Implications: The Function
the neo-avant-gardes of the 1950s and 1960s, of Labor in the Video Art of Juan Devis and
she has written and lectured extensively on Yoshua Okón” (2009). His current book project
participatory and open art; her book, Radical is Economies of Attention: Media Technology and
Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Biopolitics. www.twitter.com/ken_rogers
Happenings, is forthcoming in 2010. Ned Rossiter, Where’s the Fun in ERPs? Labour,
www.pages.slc.edu/~jrodenbe Logistics and the Frontier of Biopolitical Regimes
Kenneth Rogers, Capital Implications Abstract: With militaristic origins, logistics
Abstract: This presentation builds off some emerged as a business concept in the 1950s
my earlier research in a paper titled “Capital concerned with the management of global supply
Implications” that addressed how advanced chains. Today, the complex task of logistics is
forms of speculative value that are central to aided by specially engineered computer software
the globalized neoliberalist market systems and information technology (IT) tracking devices
are nonetheless inextricably bound to and that facilitate the organization of labour, storage
dependent upon more informal and local market and goods. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
systems based on the spontaneous organization databases are standard platforms used within
of exploitable, precarious, marginalized, and logistics in combination with customised software
ultimately undervalued forms of labor. By applications to manage global supply chains,
addressing what has become known as the organizational conditions and labour efficiencies.
“attention economy,” this next phase of the The prospect of labour and life governed through
research will continue to work through the the biopolitical regimes of logistics software is not
deep inextricable link between speculative, some cooked up dystopian fear, but a concrete
immaterial, and digital forms of labor and more reality on the horizon of the future-present.
traditional, wage-based, manual forms of labor. While the rise of software studies presents novel
It will suggest that it is in direct proportion to terrain for understanding emergent social-
neoliberalist market logics that the issue of technical systems and collaborative practices,
attention has gained currency within a wide array more often than not the focus here is on open
of institutional, cultural, and material practices. source software and associated cultural-political
Dispersed, heterogeneous, de-regulated, de- movements. Yet with few exceptions, software
governmentalized forms of capitalization, and studies has very little to say about the existence
the diversification of labor endemic to it, have of free labour so heavily invested in developing
demanded new diversified kinds of self-regulating open source software. The sooner software studies
attentive subjects, that exist within every sector of gets out of its bourgeois-anarchist ghetto of
the precarious trans-national labor system of the open source celebration and starts to engage
global economy. the banality of labour and logistics software,
then the sooner we will see the question of
Kenneth Rogers is assistant professor in the software politics addressed by digital media
Media and Cultural Studies department of the research. This presentation makes the case for
University of California at Riverside. His work is broadening the spectrum of software studies to
broadly concerned with the way in which the nexus take into account the “multiplication and division
of power, affect, institutional practices, and global of labour” (Mezzadra/Neilson) in the global
political economy become articulated by and logistics industries. How informational labour goes

31
about organizing itself will be key to developing media to create provocative interactions that
strategies of autonomy and inventing new question the boundaries and social constructs
institutional forms. of manufactured desires. She has lectured
Ned Rossiter, an Australian media theorist, is an and exhibited at venues including the 2008
associate professor of Network Cultures at the Sundance Film Festival, International Symposium
University of Nottingham in Ningbo, China and an of Electronic Arts (ISEA), Zer01 Festival, Banff
adjunct senior research fellow of the Centre for New Media Institute, Hallwalls Media Art Center,
Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney. ConFlux Festival, Amsterdam International Film
He is author of Organized Networks: Media Theory, Festival and the Central Academy of Fine Art in
Creative Labour, New Institutions (2006) and Beijing. Recent awards include a 2009 Creative
co-editor of numerous volumes, including (with Capital, 2008 New York State Council on the Arts
Geert Lovink) MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Individual Artist award (NYSCA), a 2007 Eyebeam
Creative Industries (2007). His essays of creative Artist-in-Residence in NYC and a free103point9
labour, media theory and organized networks have Artist-in-Residence. She received her MFA in
appeared in Fibreculture Journal, Cultural Politics, 2003 in Film, Video and New Media from the
Theory, Culture & Society, Topia, emphemera and School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is
borderlands. www.orgnets.net; www.orgnets.cn; currently an assistant professor of Visual Studies
www.nedrossiter.org at SUNY at Buffalo. www.pan-o-matic.com;
www.doublehappinessjeans.com
Stephanie Rothenberg, Invisible Threads
Abstract: “Invisible Threads” is a project co-created Douglas Rushkoff, From Open Source to
with Jeff Crouse. The mixed reality performance- Crowdsourcing: How Corporations Co-opt Collaboration
installation explores the growing intersection Abstract: The renaissance in digital technology
between labor, emerging virtual economies and may be more like the original Renaissance than
real life commodities through the creation of a we think. What appears to be an explosion of
designer jeans “sweatshop” in Second Life that human ingenuity and participation may actually
manufactures wearable jeans on demand. Using be the emergence of a new array of institutions
a just-in-time production process, customers in and technologies for the further centralization of
the real world are able to purchase their jeans our culture and economy.
directly from the manufacturer, Double Happiness. Douglas Rushkoff is the author of a dozen
A microphone and web cam connected to a bestselling books on media, culture, and
computer create a live stream of customer orders technology, most recently Life Inc: How the World
into the virtual factory. The webcam stream, Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back.
projected inside the factory enables SL workers He has made three Frontline documentaries and
to see each customer and hear their order. On hopes to get a job at The New School.
the assembly line, the first worker starts the www.rushkoff.com; www.twitter.com/rushkoff
production process that involves loading cotton Trebor Scholz, Now What? Beyond Expropriation
bales into a Jacquard loom. Once the fabric is Abstract: The Social Web makes people easier to
made it moves down the assembly line through use. In the United States and Europe, participation
each machine. Each worker stationed at a has become a personal and professional
machine is responsible for selecting the correct imperative rather than a choice. Social media
option based on the customer’s order, men’s services dictate modes of life. They shape mental
or women’s size for example. At the end of the and bodily habits, opinions, tastes. Every day, the
production process, the jeans go through the SL Internet makes billions of hours of spare time of
to the real life “portal,” resulting in an output from people in the overdeveloped world available to a
a large-format printer. Customers can watch their handful of businesses. Through the rapid global
jean orders being produced in the factory via a adaption of mobile devices this is becoming
computer projection in the physical space. Once in increasingly true also for people in economically
the real world, the jeans made from cotton canvas developing countries. They create financial
require simple assembly before being worn. value without being aware of it. Data traces
Stephanie Rothenberg is an artist and educator are collected, analyzed, processed, and sold.
using performance, installation, and networked Companies put a prize at our friendships. Social

32
participation is the oil of the digital economy, at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society,
and yet exploitation is the exemption. Social and today is a nonprofit foundation based in the
networking services encourage Internet users to Netherlands. The organization has a small paid
provide data while taking advantage of their desire staff, most working part-time (disclosure: that
to be entertained and stay connected. In this talk, includes myself). The work that we produce for
I focus on what we can do to politicize our life the site is published under a Creative Commons
projects, quite tangibly, rather than stopping at the license, and the community, and the site, is
dark realization of our expropriation. I specifically invested in the idea of sharing information
address data portability, profit sharing, non- through links and networks. The typical Global
profit infrastructures for online sociality, artistic Voices story is a kind of bricolage: built of links,
practices and Free and Open Source software, excerpts, translations of excerpts, paraphrase,
public media, and greed-free businesses. analysis, and links to or embeds of images,
Trebor Scholz teaches in the department of Culture audio, video, graphics, and maps. The role of
and Media Studies at Eugene Lang College The the writer is to highlight important issues and
New School for Liberal Arts in New York City. He conversations occurring in developing world citizen
graduated from the Art Academy in Dresden media. I discuss the formation and growth of
(Germany), University College London (UK), the this community, and make explicit the questions
Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, the surrounding resources that we encounter. The
Hochschule für Kunst und Gestaltung in Zürich initiative as it is currently structured requires
(Switzerland) and the University of Plymouth funding; as a nonprofit anything we raise goes to
(UK). Over the last two years, Scholz’s work has support the mission of the organization. How do
comprised writing, teaching, and conference we merge volunteer participation with some paid
organization. Dr. Trebor Scholz’s research interests staffers, and the collection of revenue for certain
focus on social media, especially in education, kinds of activities? I discuss work and leisure as it
art, and media activism (specifically outside the relates to the Global Voices experience and relate
United States and Europe). His artwork has been it to other examples of both. I also suggest some
shown at several biennials. He has contributed alternative perspectives to the case, focusing on
numerous book chapters and articles in the area civic engagement and citizenship, activism, and
of Internet studies and has presented at many philanthropy.
conferences worldwide. In 2004, he founded Ivan Sigal is the executive director of Global Voices
the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC). Its (globalvoicesonline.org), a non-profit online global
mailing list, which he moderates, is a leading citizens’ media initiative. Previously, as a senior
discussion forum in network culture. Autonomedia fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, he focused
published The Art of Free Cooperation, of which on how increased media and information access
he is co-editor, in 2007. He has convened several and participation using new technologies affect
major conferences, including Kosova: Carnival in conflict-prone areas. He spent more than ten years
the Eye of the Storm, Free Cooperation (with G. working in media development in the former Soviet
Lovink), Share Widely, and Situated Technologies Union and Asia, supporting and training journalists
(with M. Shepard and O. Khan), and The Internet and working on media co-productions, and also
as Playground and Factory (2009). He is currently working as a photographer. During that time, Sigal
working on a monograph and an anthology on worked for Internews Network, as regional director
“digital labor.” www.collectivate.net; for Asia, Central Asia, and Afghanistan. He has a
www.digitallabor.org; www.twitter.com/trebors masters’ degree from the Fletcher School of Law
Ivan Sigal, Volunteerism and Global Voices and Diplomacy, and an undergraduate degree
Abstract: I discuss the experience of Global from Williams College. www.globalvoicesonline.org;
Voices, an online community of volunteer authors www.twitter.com/globalvoices; www.ivonotes.
who collectively write globalvoicesonline.org. wordpress.com; www.twitter.com/ivonotes
The community includes several hundred Brooke Singer (Moderator) is a media artist
authors, translators, freedom of speech activists, who lives in New York City. Her work blurs the
and individuals interested in supporting the borders between science, technology, politics,
development of online media skills and practice in and art practices. She works across media to
the developing world. Global Voices was founded provide entry into important social issues that are

33
often characterized as specialized to a general für die Kommunikationsgesellschaft (2007), Die
public. She has exhibited at the Warhol Museum Macht der Suchmaschinen/The Power of Search
of Art, the Banff Centre, Neuberger Museum Engines (2007), Suchen und Finden im Internet
of Art, Diverseworks, Exit Art, FILE Electronic (2007), and Die Google Gesellschaft (2005).
Festival, Sonar Music and Multimedia Festival, Professor Speck’s work is focused on media
and the Whitney Artport. Recent awards and theory and philosophy, information operations and
commissions include a New York State Council systems, online marketing, media management,
on the Arts (NYSCA) Individual Artist award, a intellectual property, open source, e-learning,
Headlands Center for Arts residency, a New York cyberwar, netwar, and the ethical, social, and legal
State Energy Research and Development Authority implications and limitations of these things. He
(NYSERDA) award, a New York Foundation for has designed distance and e-learning systems,
the Arts (NYFA) fellowship and an Eyebeam and developed online viral marketing strategies, and
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Social worked on information architecture projects for
Sculpture commission. She is currently associate governments, corporate clients, and academic
professor of New Media at Purchase College, State institutions. He works as a consultant for Quaero
University of New York, and co-founder of the art, and Theseus, exploring the next generation of
technology, and activist group Preemptive Media. intelligent search, information retrieval and
www.bsing.net visualization systems for the German Federal
Hendrick Speck, Identity and the Social: Ministry of Economics and Technology; he is a
Data Politics and Ethics member of the advisory council of the Search
Abstract: The presentation focuses on the Marketing Expo SMX (Munich). He is a recipient
concepts of identity, personality and community of a Fulbright and DAAD scholarships and
within computer mediated environments. Rules scholarships from Heinrich Böll Stiftung, The New
and value systems hidden within the legal School, and the European Graduate School.
signifiers, the terms and conditions, of several www.hendrikspeck.com
social media, networks and applications will be Julia Sonnevend (Moderator) is a doctoral
used to analyze the philosophy and data politics student in Communications at Columbia University,
of technological frameworks. The presentation a visiting fellow of the Information Society Project
will discuss the social contract of the social, the at Yale Law School, and a pre-doctoral fellow at
impact of ownership,availability, informational the Center for Cultural Sociology (Yale University),
self determination, and data portability; explore the Center on Organizational Innovation (Columbia
the networks of ownership and belonging, University), and the Center for Media and
relationships and desire; investigate distributed Communications Studies (Central European
concepts of identity, represented by technological University). She studies the intersections between
solutions and philosophies; and examine how communications, art history, visual studies and
societies accept, foster, and embrace new legal theory. Her research areas include icons and
technologies. global society, visual culture, the theory of digital
Hendrik Speck is a professor of Digital Media at photography, critical communications studies, the
the University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern canon of media studies, visual representations of
in the department of Computer Sciences/ justice in art and media, law and performance,
Interactive Media, and head of the Information art and activism, cultural trauma, access to
Architecture/Search Engine Laboratory. He has knowledge, law in the digitally-networked
taught and lectured at the European Graduate environment, global media policy and post-
School, where he held the Ada Byron Chair, communist identities. www.julia-sonnevend.com
The New School for Social Research, Columbia Elizabeth Stark (Moderator) is a leader in the
University, Donau University (Krems), Hochschule global free culture movement. She is a fellow of
der Medien (Stuttgart), and the International the Yale Information Society Project, a lecturer
School of New Media (Lübeck). Professor Speck, in computer science at Yale University, and an
based in New York and Berlin, is a regular speaker adjunct associate professor at NYU. A graduate of
and conference panelist. He is the author of many Harvard Law School, Stark founded the Harvard
articles and (co)authored several books, including Free Culture Group and served on the board of
Medien auf Abruf—Folgen der Individualisierung directors of Students for Free Culture. While at

34
Harvard, she was editor-at-large of the Harvard department of Communication at Stanford
Journal of Law & Technology and worked with the University. He’s the author of From Counterculture
Harvard Advocates for Human Rights to make to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth
better use of new media to promote human rights. Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
Elizabeth spent years researching for the Berkman (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and Echoes
Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. She of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory
has taught courses ranging from Cyberlaw to IP, (Anchor/Doubleday, 1996; 2nd ed., University
Technology and Politics, and Electronic Music. of Minnesota Press, 2001). Before coming to
She recently produced the inaugural Open Video Stanford, he taught communication at Harvard’s
Conference in New York City, which garnered nearly John F. Kennedy School of Government and MIT’s
9,000 participants in person and across the Web. Sloan School of Management. He worked for ten
Elizabeth regularly gives talks around the world years as a journalist. His writing has appeared in
on free culture and has collaborated with myriad publications ranging from the Boston Globe Sunday
organizations on promoting shared knowledge and Magazine to Nature. fredturner.stanford.edu
the open Web. She has lived and worked in Berlin, McKenzie Wark, Gift, Game, Work, and Labor
Singapore, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro, and speaks Abstract: A critical look at four categories of
French, German, and Portuguese. what we might call praxis, or the process of self-
www.law.yale.edu/intellectuallife/stark transformation. In the digital era, it is no longer
Fred Turner, Dreaming the End of Bureaucracy: clear what the difference is between them.
Network Theory and the Legacy of the Counterculture Hence the need for a comprehensive approach
Abstract: Over the last few years, scholars that considers all forms of praxis together.
and pundits alike have argued that new media A critical approach, moreover, does not just
technologies are driving the blurring of the concern itself with the ways in which praxis is
playground and the factory, and with it, the transformative, but with the ways in which praxis
democratization of civic and commercial itself can be transformed.
participation. This talk challenges that account. McKenzie Wark is the author of A Hacker
While not denying the power of information Manifesto (Harvard 2004), Gamer Theory
technologies today, it demonstrates that the (Harvard 2007), and various other things.
ideals underlying contemporary fusions of work He is the associate dean of Eugene Lang College
and play first appeared decades ago, in response The New School for Liberal Arts.
to then-ubiquitous critiques of bureaucracy. www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKenzie_Wark
According to critics ranging from C. Wright Mills to
Lewis Mumford, bureaucracies tended to produce Darren Wershler, The Poetics of Uncreativity
psychological fragmentation and social partition. Abstract: This lecture reads from “status update”
How, they wondered, could work be re-organized so and “apostrophe,” texts generated from a custom-
as to allow individuals to bring their whole selves built Google search application and Facebook
into the labor process and to integrate their labors and Twitter RSS feeds respectively, and discusses
into everyday life? This talk briefly traces two them in terms of the poetics of uncreativity and
historically sequential answers to that question: conceptual writing. Discussion includes reference
first, the rise of New Communalism in the 1960s, to and critique of recent theories of affective and
and second, the rise of peer production today. It “immaterial” labour.
notes that each movement has sought to restore Darren Wershler is assistant professor in the
a psychological and social wholeness that critics Communication Studies department of Wilfrid
have long thought bureaucracy destroys. Yet, it Laurier University, part of the faculty at the
also shows how these searches for an egalitarian CFC Media Lab TELUS Interactive Art and
social world have at times corroded the cultural Entertainment program, and a research affiliate
and political scaffolding on which such a world of the IP Osgoode Intellectual Property Law and
depends. The talk concludes then, by pointing Technology program. His most recent book is The
to the forgotten virtues of bureaucracy and with Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting
them, to new principles for a sustained critique of (Cornell University Press, 2007). He has written
the networked production emerging around us. or co-written five other books about technology
Fred Turner is an assistant professor in the and culture and three books of poetry, including

35
apostrophe (with Bill Kennedy), the first book range of projects is making the application of
written with a search engine. Forthcoming books human brainpower as purchasable and fungible as
include a book about Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg additional server rackspace. What are some of the
and the first monograph on the work of Kenneth issues arising as armies of thinkers are recruited
Goldsmith. www.alienated.net/dwh by the thousands and millions?
Xtine (participant in Prelude event, Nov. 11), Jonathan L. Zittrain is a professor of Internet law
The Mechanical Olympics at Harvard Law School and a faculty co-director of
Abstract: The Mechanical Olympics is a YouTube Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
video competition of Olympic performances Previously, Zittrain was professor of Internet
made by the elastic workforce on Amazon.com’s Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet
Mechanical Turk website. Every viewer gets a Institute of the University of Oxford and visiting
chance to vote on the gold medalists. Winners professor at the New York University School of Law
receive a bonus payment. Three videos were and Stanford Law School. He is the author, most
commissioned for each event and event polls recently, of The Future of the Internet and How
change daily on this interactive alternative to the to Stop It and co-editor Access Denied. Zittrain
Olympic Games. The rules are simple: workers works in several intersections of the Internet with
have to wear the Mechanical Olympic signage, law and policy, including intellectual property,
perform for the country and event described in censorship and filtering for content control, and
the HIT (Human Intelligence Task) they accept, computer security. He founded an organization
and create a 30–60 second video of their that develops classroom tools. www.cyber.law.
performance. Any abstraction on the idea of the harvard.edu/people/jzittrain
event is encouraged. They post the URL to their
video and in return are paid from $1 to $3 US.
This project aims to offer the human intelligence
task (HIT) workers a creative and physical
alternative to their typical HITs. The videos posted
on the blog create an Olympic event for the
masses, where every viewer has the opportunity
to vote on the medalists. Participants and viewers
are reminded that the amateur can often be just
as engaging and entertaining as the professional.
Xtine is a media artist and educator, and the
co-author of Digital Foundations: Intro to Media
Design with the Adobe Creative Suite (New
Riders/AIGA 2009). She is informed by the
history of conceptual art and practices in the
era of social-networking. Using tools common
to consumer web practices, such as databases,
search engines, blogs, and applications,
sometimes in combination with popular sites
like Facebook, YouTube, or Mechanical Turk, she
creates web projects and communities that foster
interpretation and autonomy. Xtine believes that
art can shape social experiences by influencing
consumer culture with imaginary practices. As an
educator, she is interested in the art of instruction.
www.missconceptions.net
Jonathan L. Zittrain, Minds for Sale
Abstract: Cloud computing is not just for computing
anymore: you can now find as much mindshare
as you can afford out in the cloud too—a new

36
The New School Eugene Lang College
The New School was founded in 1919 as The New School for Liberal Arts
the New School for Social Research by a is The New School’s four-year college for
group of prominent progressive scholars undergraduates coming out of high school.
including Charles Beard, John Dewey, James Beginning as an experimental program
Harvey Robinson, and Thorstein Veblen. in 1973, it became a full division of the
They organized their school as an alternative university in 1985 thanks to the generous
to the traditional university and offered an support of well-known philanthropist and
open curriculum, minimal hierarchy, and free New School board member Eugene M.
intellectual exchange. In 1933, New School Lang. Emphasis is still on small seminar-
President Alvin Johnson gave a home to style classes with a student-faculty ratio of
the University in Exile, a refuge for scholars 15-1. Majors include traditional academic
driven out of Germany by the Nazis. In subjects and innovative transdisciplinary
1934, the University in Exile was organized areas of study like environmental studies
as the Graduate Faculty of Political and and media studies.
Social Science (now called The New School The department of Culture and Media
for Social Research), and The New School Studies offers a program of study leading
became a university. to the Bachelor of Arts degree in Culture
After 90 years, The New School’s and Media and has a new Screen Studies
commitment to transcending the boundaries program in development. Teaching in this
between traditional academic disciplines, field is at a crossroads, and the department
its ties to the cosmopolitan cultural and supports this conference because it raises
professional life of New York City, and important issues for teaching as well as for
its willingness to reinvent itself remain research. At Eugene Lang College, we are
unchanged, as does its dedication to the committed to combining our faculty’s high
ideal of lifelong education for all citizens. quality research and creative work with the
Currently, there are close to 10,000 students continuous refinement and revision of our
enrolled in the university’s degree programs. teaching mission. The study of “new media”
Additional thousands of students enroll in cannot be simply added onto the existing
our continuing education courses every year. pedagogy. It calls rather for a thorough
The eight divisions of The New School rethinking of both the form and content of
offer undergraduate and graduate degrees media education. Neither the division of
and certificates and continuing education teaching into separate fields of radio, film,
courses in the liberal arts, humanities, television, etc. nor the separation of the
social sciences, public policy, design, and study of media as an object from the skills
performing arts. The university’s divisions of media production will survive the ongoing
are The New School for General Studies, transformation of media architectures and
The New School for Social Research, cultures.
Milano The New School for Management
and Urban Policy, Parsons The New School
for Design, Eugene Lang College The New
School for Liberal Arts, Mannes College The
New School for Music, The New School for
Drama, and The New School for Jazz and
Contemporary Music.

Stay Connected
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www.newschool.edu
110TH ST.

THE NEW SCHOOL CAMPUS

BROADWAY
SCHOOLS & LOCATIONS
The New School For General Studies 1 4 7 8 9 10 Mannes 12 86TH ST.

(150 W. 85th Street)


The New School For Social Research 1 3
MANHATTAN
Milano The New School
For Management And Urban Policy 5 72ND ST.

Parsons The New School For Design 6 7 8 14


Goldmark Practice Center 13

Eugene Lang College (37 W. 65th Street)


10 11 59TH ST.
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8TH AVE.
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6TH AVE.
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1ST AVE.
Mannes College The New School For Music 12 13

The New School For Jazz


And Contemporary Music 4
Schwartz Fashion Center 14
42ND ST.

The New School For Drama 15


(560 Seventh Avenue)
34TH ST.

BRO
SERVICES

ADW
AY
23RD ST.
Affiliations
Cardozo Law Library 55 Fifth Avenue
14TH ST.
Cooper Hewitt Museum 2 E. 91st Street
Cooper Union Library Cooper Square 15
Elmer Holmes Bobst Library Washington Square S. The New School for Drama HOUSTON ST.
(151 Bank Street)
Auditoria 7 9

Cafeterias 4 10

Computing Centers 4 7 14

Human Resources 2

Libraries 7 12

Student Services 2 4 5 9

University Administration 2 4

University Writing Center 16

The New School is undergoing expansion and


renovation. Please go to www.newschool.edu
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17TH ST.

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79 Fifth Avenue 2
1 Albert and Vera List
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15TH ST. UNION SQUARE


71 Fifth Avenue 16

14th St. – Union Square


6th Ave. – 14th St. (4,5, 6,L, N,Q, R, W)
(F, L, V) 80 Fifth Avenue M

M 14TH ST.
FIFTH AVE.

Fanton Hall/Welcome Center 65 Fifth Avenue


( YOU
(72 AREAvenue)
Fifth HERE )
Arnhold Hall (55 W. 13th Street) 4 5 6 Parsons East (25 E. 13th Street)
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SEVENTH AVE.

BROADW
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7
Sheila C. Johnson 8
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AY

(66 Fifth Avenue/2 W. 13th Street) Johnson Center Annex (68 Fifth Avenue)
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12TH ST.

Johnson/Kaplan Hall 9
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10 Lang (65 W. 11th Street)


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