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154 posts

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#dorothy smith #sociology

inbonobo

..our business plan didn’t involve us in any way - it was just a description of other people making and selling products. (via xkcd: Crowdsourcing)

Contrary to a commonly held view of crowdsourcing as a transfer of low-skill work to low cost locations, our analysis shows that more than half of all the crowdsourcing workers live in North America and Europe and workers are generally very well educated. Almost half have bachelor degree and only 5% are truly low skill workers with only an elementary education.

[in _Forbes_](http://www.forbes.com/sites/haydnshaughnessy/2012/03/10/a-little-more-on-work-without-jobs-for-the-educated-elite/)

#crowdsourcing

>The rapid shift to non-employment should concern us for a number of reasons. Routine employment data, which underpins economic optimism or pessimism, is unlikely to reflect the full range of opportunity that the economy is creating as we move away from jobs as a primary form of engagement with work. Add to that the fact that emerging types of work tend towards the extremes. They can be entrepreneurial, creative and full of opportunity but they can also be very low paid. >A troubling development is the drift to highly educated, low paid labor. That combination seems to be characteristic of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing has the potential to enable a new elasticity in the use of labor but it also has the capacity to drive income through the floor.

#crowdsourcing #employment #economy #jobs #education #occupy

Introducing: Flathead Thomas Friedman

#globalization #tom friedman #thomas friedman #friedman

The awareness that we live in a system or, better, that our lives and livelihoods are articulated through systemic forces, does not need to lead us to despair. Knowledge of these forces does not make us weaker; on the contrary, it makes us stronger, because the system reveals its Achilles heel by showing what it must do in order to survive: it _must_ promote enclosures and it _must_ pit producers, both waged and unwaged, against each other, thus creating the appearance of abundance, but instead reproducing scarcity.

Massimo De Angelis. The Beginning of History. (2007, p. 225-226, emphasis in original).

#autonomist marxism #autonomist #marx #marxism #surplus #scarcity #enclosure

As a matter of fact, capitalist economy is not and cannot be stationary. Nor is it merely expanding in a steady manner. It is incessantly being revolutionized _from within_ by new enterprise, i.e., by the intrusion of new commodities or new methods of production or new commercial opportunities into the industrial structure as it exists at any moment. Any existing structures and all the conditions of doing business are always in a process of change. Every situation is being upset before it has had time to work itself out. Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.

Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942, p. 31-32, emphasis included).

If I understand correctly, a good way to become a hugely influential economist is to plagiarize Marx while you repudiate Marx.

#schumpeter #capitalism #socialism #democracy #marx #marxism #creative destruction

...spec work devalues the communication design profession. It reduces communication design to a commodity, rather than to a specialized service.

NO!SPEC.

Commodities are here understood in their simplest sense, as undifferentiated goods such as wheat or oil, which are exchanged in a market according to supply and demand, such that their prices are generally determined without the consideration of qualitative differences in their production, e.g. wheat is wheat, no matter where or by what methods it is grown and harvested, and oil is oil, no matter where or by what methods it is extracted and refined; the key term in this definition of a commodity is 'undifferentiated good,' which is contrasted against the definition of communication design as 'a specialized service.' The seeming triviality of commodities, famously remarked upon by Marx, allows its use in this pejorative sense, as a sphere of production somehow less 'valuable' than that of communication design services.

It is surprisingly difficult to engage with this commonsensical understanding of commodities!

#crowdsourcing #spec #no spec #spec work #commodity #marx

Marx is not only selling well, he has also been praised most recently by German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück, who recently told the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, 'Certain parts of Marx's thinking are really not so bad.'

High praise for Marxism

#marx #recession #abc #germany

To confront these issues, we, along with many others, have proposed possible initial steps, such as establishing a guaranteed income, the right to global citizenship, and a process of the democratic reappropriation of the common. But we are under no illusion that we have all the answers. Instead we are encouraged by the fact that we are not alone asking the questions. We are confident, in fact, that those who are dissatisfied with the life offered by our contemporary neoliberal society, indignant about its injustices, rebellious against its powers of command and exploitation, and yearning for an alternative democratic form of life based on the common wealth we share – they, by posing these questions and pursuing their desires, will invent new solutions we cannot yet even imagine. Those are some of our best wishes for 2012.

Hardt and Negri, What to expect in 2012

#occupy #borders #commons #neoliberalism #2012 #hardt #negri

On the economic terrain we need to discover new social technologies for freely producing in common and for equitably distributing shared wealth. How can our productive energies and desires be engaged and increased in an economy not founded on private property? How can welfare and basic social resources be provided to all in a social structure not regulated and dominated by state property? We must construct the relations of production and exchange as well as the structures of social welfare that are composed of and adequate to the common.

Hardt and Negri, What to expect in 2012

#commons #hardt #negri

We will sing of the great crowds who can finally free themselves from the slavery of wage labour and through solidarity revolt against exploitation. We will sing of the infinite web of knowledge and invention, the immaterial technology that frees us from physical hardship. We will sing of the rebellious cognitariat who is in touch with her own body. We will sing to the infinity of the present and abandon the illusion of a future.

Franco Berardi, The Post-Futurist Manifesto

#solidarity #exploitation #cognitariat #futurism #futurist #technology #manifesto #crowd #crowdsourcing

We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

F. T. Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto

#futurism #futurist #crowd #crowdsourcing #manifesto

AIGA was advised by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) not to publish a spec work position in any statement that might be referred to, even indirectly, as an ethical standard that might elicit censure within the profession... or it might risk being cited for a restraint of trade through price fixing (i.e., making it unethical to work for nothing) for which we would have lost our 501.3.c status and possibly been subject to a regulatory action.

[Ric Grefé](http://www.icograda.org/feature/current/articles1804.htm)

#aiga #crowdsourcing #spec #no spec #spec work #ftc #trade #federal trade commission #regulation

Time is the room of human development. A man who has no free time to dispose of, whose whole lifetime, apart from the mere physical interruptions by sleep, meals, and so forth, is absorbed by his labour for the capitalist, is less than a beast of burden. He is a mere machine for producing foreign wealth, broken in body and brutalised in mind. Yet the whole history of modern industry shows that capital, if not checked, will recklessly and ruthlessly work to cast down the whole working class to this utmost state of degradation.

Marx, in Value, Price and Profit (1935, p. 54).

#marx #social factory #crowdsourcing #capital #capitalism #cognitive surplus #clay shirky

We have till now supposed that the _working day_ has given limits. The working day, however, has, by itself, no constant limits. It is the constant tendency of capital to stretch it to its utmost physically possible length, because in the same degree surplus labour, and consequently the profit resulting therefrom, will be increased. The more capital succeeds in prolonging the working day, the greater the amount of other people's labour it will appropriate.

Marx, in Value, Price and Profit (1935, p. 52).

#crowdsourcing #marx #cognitive surplus #social factory

[A]s the costs of producing labouring powers of different quality do differ, so must differ the values of the labouring powers employed in different trades. The cry for an _equality of wages_ rests, therefore, upon a mistake, is an inane wish never to be fulfilled. It is an offspring of that false and superficial radicalism that accepts premises and tries to evade conclusions. Upon the basis of the wages system the value of labouring power is settled like that of every other commodity; and as different kinds of labouring power have different values, or require different quantities of labour for their production, they _must_ fetch different prices in the labour market. To clamour for _equal or even equitable retribution_ on the basis of the wages system is the same as to clamour for _freedom_ on the basis of the slavery system. What you think just or equitable is out of the question. The question is: What is necessary and unavoidable with a given system of production?

Marx, in Value, Price and Profit (1935, p. 39-40).

#marx

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