#free labour

[y-breathe-when-u-can-talk]

debunking a capitalist thing

"people will only work if u pay them" holds true when the worker doesn't actually like what they're doing, and when they live in a society where they cannot live without being paid decently. it's all well and good for some ppl to work for free, but that is not a reality for many. they rely on an income to survive; their family may not have money, they may be completely financially independent. it's nice that some ppl (w/ privilege no doubt) are using to do good, but we shouldn't berate others in less fortunate circumstances for not following suit. if u were in their position, would u work for free?? hell nah. bc iN tHis eCoNoMy working for free without financial stability is unsustainable and frankly impossible for so so many. and this causes them to demand, no- deserve, payment for their work- whether they enjoy it or not. but i'm pretty sure ppl are willing to work for less pay when they enjoy the job, it's not exactly a revelation :// and as great as 'doing what u love' is, we can't let capitalists exploit our passions by providing our free labour to them- at least, not until something changes. they will spout all this "passion for your work" talk, and it's bullshit and irrelevant rn, bc that's idealistic and not realistic. they know this and are trying to appear progressive but actually they're benefiting from the current system, so keep that in mind. don't give them what they want.

(passionately written after seeing post fr @bravecrab, raised some very good points here. so good that i had to make an account pronto)

[literaryanxiety]

Things English majors always hear from friends and acquaintances

Can you help me look through my essay/blog post/résumé/thesis? I could use some pointers thanks.

[tetrapaec]

How do I tell this guy I'm sexting with I'm only doing it to use in a fanfiction without making him feel bad?

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"During the early depression years, the rhetoric surrounding the prison labor debate intensified as Baltimore laborers expressed fears of unemployment and made appeals to basic needs of food and clothing. In November, 1929, an article titled “If You Want to Work Become a Criminal” was published in the Baltimore Federationist, the journal of the Baltimore Federation of Labor, and emphasized the hardship prison labor imposed on working men and their dependents. The article’s contents and subtitle, “Honest Men and their Families Starve While Murderers Take their Jobs Behind Prison Walls” reveal the opposition of organized labor against prison contracts. Further antagonism was voiced in a news clipping entitled “Goes to Jail to Eat” printed in the Maryland Leader, the news source of the Maryland Socialist party. The report provides a brief account of a prisoner who escaped from jail in 1929. One year and a half later, he turned himself in to the Detroit police and, upon being sentenced to prison, expressed, “I could at least eat regularly in prison.”  By caustically emphasizing the state’s provision of basic necessities to the criminal population, these articles highlighted a view that the state neglected the welfare of its law-abiding civilians. 

Examples of biting rhetoric were also voiced in local meetings of organized labor. During a meeting of the Baltimore Federation of Labor in June 1930, F. C. Bandell of the Electrical Workers’ Union expressed disapproval of the Board of Welfare’s plans to employ inmates in the construction of the new penal institution. He argued that unionized electrical workers should be hired to do the electrical wiring in order to prevent fires caused by faulty wiring and assure quality control. With dramatic flourish, Bandell asserted, “I want the wiring in our Penitentiary to be good, because I may be an inmate some day, and I don’t want to be burnt up.” When pressed to explain his remark regarding future imprisonment, Bandell cited the dismal economic opportunities. As “the unemployment situation was becoming alarmingly worse,” he said he feared “that honest laboring men may be obliged to turn to crime to support their families.” By this argument, Bandell cast the lack of state relief in moral terms. While criminal action was ethically suspect, Bandell implied that the lack of state aid to “honest laboring men” was even more reprehensible. The inability of the state to provide for the needs of its citizens during the Great Depression created a crisis of disillusionment and a questioning of state authority among members of the working class. 

By discussing prison labor in terms of the harsh economic conditions, wage laborers pointed out the state’s double neglect of unionized workers. The state not only refused to provide public aid to unemployed workers, but state administrators deliberately took labor opportunities away from Baltimore free workers by employing inmates in the construction project of the state penal farm. In protest, workers agitated for the right to be awarded contracts for state prison construction. Members of unions highlighted the unfairness of being passed over for contracts by prison inmates—criminals who were already guaranteed adequate food and shelter by state during their sentencing period."

- Erin Durham, “In Pursuit of Reform, Whether Convict or Free: Prison Labor Reform in Maryland in the Early Twentieth Century,” Master’s thesis, University of Maryland, 2018. p. 74-76

[anhthyho048]

Week 9 - New Era of Gaming - The Era of Monetisation

The gaming culture within the era of digital transformation has experienced a significant shift that goes beyond the playful characteristic.

The live streaming and monetisation

Addressed by Taylor (2018), the emergence of live streaming goes beyond esports, reflecting wider changes in gaming culture. Platforms like Twitch have transformed gaming into a shared experience, where gamers of all kinds can engage with audiences in real-time, turning private play into public entertainment with interactive features like synchronous chat windows, surpassing the capabilities of traditional video platforms like YouTube before it enabled the live-streaming feature (Taylor, 2018). This shift in gaming central to the platform’s affordance creates new space for gamers to not only interact through broadcasting to small audiences of friends and family but also attract the mass audience with profitable practice (Taylor, 2018). Specifically, Taylor (2018) indicated that participants blend gameplay, humour, commentary, and live interaction, with some aspiring to professional status through various monetization methods. Therefore, monetising has become a noteworthy aspect of gaming in this digital era. Taking Twitch as an example, Johnson and Woodcock (2019) pointed out seven monetising methods that are mostly popular on Twitch, including:

Subscriptions: Viewers pay a monthly amount to a streamer for special username recognition.

Donations and Cheering: Viewers give money directly or through Twitch, with the platform taking a cut, but viewers receive automatic recognition.

Advertising: Streamers run adverts for corporate products on their channel.

Sponsorships: Streamers secure deals with game companies or brands for free products or promotions during broadcasts.

Competitions and Targets: Viewers are encouraged to participate in buy-ins for individual or global prizes.

Unpredictable Rewards: Drawing on the psychology of gambling, viewers donate in hopes of recognition.

Monetary "Channel Games": A gamified approach to Twitch's platform, engaging its user base with incentives for financial support.

Being one of the most prominent platforms for streamers to monetise their labour, Twitch’s position in this process is explained by the norm of Twitch’s users in which viewers consistently support their favourite streamers while aspiring streamers actively seek donations (Johnson & Woodcock, 2019). Therefore, Twitch's culture and infrastructure are deeply intertwined with money exchange, fostering a welcoming environment for new monetisation methods, and it also makes Twitch a community that fosters an audience accustomed to digital play, making them receptive to gamified approaches to monetisation.

But there is another way of monetising...

Another form of monetisation from the video game community is the in-app purchase with the potential of user exploitation. This has been addressed by King et al. (2019) stating that major video game companies have developed technical systems aimed at encouraging repeated in-game purchases, potentially in ways that could be perceived as unfair or exploitative. Specifically, these systems utilise player data to customise offers and purchasing opportunities, optimising them to incentivise in-game spending within dynamically evolving game environments, as pointed out by King et al. (2019). The example below of the 'Love Fantasy' can vividly depict how the monetisation is processed.

Figure 1: Love Fantasy's In-game purchase

As shown above, when the players lost the game, there would be a pop-up banner showing the invitation to use 900 purple gems to continue the pausing game. This is designed to be hard to win, and when the players use the gems to resume halfway through the game, it would be easier to win this level.

This, as criticised by King et al. (2019), potentially exploits player behaviour while leaving consumers with few protections and exposing them to financial risks, especially among underage players and their guardians.

Moreover, in the form of in-app purchases, free labour is also a part of it as due to their financial vulnerability, the users, especially young ones engage more in free social labour such as sending invitations to recruit gamers and sending hearts to increase usage in the example of Kakao game usage by young female users conducted by Lee and Seo (2023). The example above and given below also contain the invitation for free labour as the alternative for making the in-game purchase.

Figure 2: The Pop-up for in-game advertising in Love Fantasy

In the pop-up banner before starting to play, there is an option of 'Free Power' with a symbol of television beside it. The first picture in the example above also presents that symbol. As the players choose those options, there would be a video advertising playing around 30 seconds to one minute as shown below.

Figure 3: The In-game Advertising of Love Fantasy

Lee & Seo (2023) suggest that this free social labour is significant and often unconscious, impacting the financial dynamics significantly. As a result, to protect gamers, especially the adolescents who are more vulnerable in terms of finance and psychology as well as dedicated to gaming, from being exploited, King et al. (2019) suggested effective policies, interventions informed by psychology, and ethical game design principles are necessary to safeguard the welfare and interests of consumers.

In conclusion, the aspect of game streaming and monetisation can signify a new trend of media consumption and platformisation that media practitioners need to pay more attention to. Meanwhile, in-app purchases, despite lucrative advantages to the game producers, need comprehensive regulatory measures and ethical considerations to ensure the fair treatment and protection of consumers, particularly adolescents who are often the primary targets of such monetisation strategies.

References

Johnson, M. R., & Woodcock, J. (2019). “And Today’s Top Donator is”: How Live Streamers on Twitch.tv Monetize and Gamify Their Broadcasts. Social Media + Society, 5(4), 205630511988169. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119881694

King, D. L., Delfabbro, P. H., Gainsbury, S. M., Dreier, M., Greer, N., & Billieux, J. (2019). Unfair play? Video games as exploitative monetized services: An examination of game patents from a consumer protection perspective. Computers in Human Behavior, 101(101), 131–143. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.07.017

Lee, C. S., & Seo, H. (2023). Being social for whom? Issues of monetization, exploitation, and alienation in mobile social games. Journal of Consumer Culture. https://doi.org/10.1177/14695405231195711

Taylor, TL 2018, ‘Broadcasting ourselves’ (chapter 1), in Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming, Princeton University Press, pp.1-23

[sarahkhoojijean]

Free Labour, from smaller creators to bigger (Sarah Khoo)

In this week's reading, Free Labour, Terranova (2013) posits that the active users of media contribute greatly to the engagement and activeness of these online platforms. By creating and uploading content that engages the community and perpetuate interactions, users provide free labour to the bigger corporations behind these social media platforms. Terranova elaborates that this free labour substantiates the economic value in the digital economy, while also being a voluntary contribution that these creators are not compensated for by the beneficiaries of their efforts.

While Terranova's theory focused on how the larger corporations were exploiting these individual creators for free labour, I would like to apply this theory to how larger creators might make use of the labour of their fans to propel their own popularity and income, without reimbursing the original creator for their labour. This phenomenon of free labour is reflected in the content produced by YouTuber Felix Kjellberg, known on YouTube as Pewdiepie. The introduction sequences of his recent videos makes use of fan creations that mimic the introduction sequence of another popular YouTube channel, Cocomelon. PewDiePie is a Swedish YouTuber, who had garnered great popularity as a gaming channel back in 2010. Currently, the majority of his content has deviated from gaming, instead focusing more on reviewing other online content, such as internet memes curated by his viewers on his Reddit channel, to episodes from reality television. Mid 2020, it was brought to media attention that CocoMelon, a YouTube channel that produced content for children, has been gaining traction and was close to surpassing Pewdiepie's massive follower count. In hopes to maintain being the second-most subscribed YouTube channel, Kjellberg had taken parodying CocoMelon's introduction sequence in an attempt to 'trick children into thinking they are watching CocoMelon's video'. While this was meant to be jest, his followers had taken this in stride, posting their own versions of parodies to both YouTube and Pewdiepie's Reddit forum. The sheer amount of effort and creativity that went into incorporating Kjellberg into the introduction sequence subsequently led Kjellberg to use these clips as introduction videos, where every video Kjellberg put out had a unique, fan-made introduction video. This led to the growing meme that was CocoMelon introduction parodies, which circulated among most social media platforms and further boosted the popularity of Kjellberg 's channel. I had found this a very sweet and touching gesture on Kjellberg's end, as he was actively acknowledging the hard work of his fans and going a step further to appreciate their efforts. It allowed these creators to gain more attention and recognition for their art and thus had helped some of these creators grow in followers.

However, through the lens that Terranova's theory has provided, this seems to be a prime example of a large creator "exploiting" the works of smaller creators — there was no monetary compensation by Kjellberg for the efforts that had gone into creating these introductions. In this case, the creators of the CocoMelon parody videos are only rewarded with the honour of being recognised by the YouTuber they idolise, and the attention that comes with the millions of views that Kjellberg's videos accumulate. While Kjellberg periodically mentions individual creators by name and credits every contributor in the description of his videos, a majority of these creators often remain unknown to most of Kjellberg's audience. Furthermore, these parody submissions propel the activity and relevance of Kjellberg's channel, perpetuating the thriving and hyperactive space that is Kjellberg's social media accounts. These parody videos tap on a lot of creativity, with some making use of stop-motion, to a hand-drawn sequence inspired by Japanese anime. Therefore, I notice the semblance between Terranova's theory of free labour and how Kjellberg has been using of his fans' creations as his introduction videos.

These are some videos from Kjellberg's channel to further substantiate my point. First video mentioning CocoMelon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ill-HXjQWUs&t=135s First video using Cocomelon parody intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpP02s3EJ44 Compilation of many fan-made CocoMelon parody introduction videos (not from Kjellberg's Channel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOhNXs-0dE8&t=700s A recent video (3rd December 2020): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOhNXs-0dE8&t=700s

Terranova, T. (2013). Free labor. Chapter 2 in T. Scholz (Ed.). Digital labor: The internet as playground and factory. New York and London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group. Pp. 33-54.

[worklabournewsresearch]

Buy American and Boost Prison Labour

“The public sentiment against outsourcing has…offered prison labor programs unique opportunities for expansion under the rubric of providing a competitive alternative to low-cost foreign workers,” writes Lan Cao, a professor of international economic law at the Dale E. Fowler School of Law at Chapman University.”

“Cao argues that the increasing use of low-wage or free prison labor by companies seeking to manufacture in the US also calls for a re-examination of claims that such labor is rehabilitative for inmates on the grounds that it provides “moral, psychological, and economic benefits to prisoners and communities.”

“Instead, Cao maintains, the economics of prison labor programs, which are strongly focused on productivity and cost reductions, suggest that rehabilitation is at best a secondary goal to generating profit.”

“The use of inmates as a revenue-generating workforce should actually be reframed in a context that connects it to its real purpose “as reflected in facts on the ground – market, profit and employment.”

The Crime Report, April 5, 2018: “How ‘Buy American’ Mood Boosts Private Sector Use of Prison Labor,” by Victoria Mckenzie

Forced prison labour in U.S. and China

“Prisoners make cheese for Whole Foods, underwear for Victoria Secret as well as service call centers for financial institutions. Prison-made products and services are increasingly sold not only to state agencies, but also on the open market in the United States and even exported abroad. Even as the United States berates China about its use of forced prison labor or its exports of products made by convicts, the United States, with its own burgeoning inmate pool, has ironically engaged in similar practices. While U.S. laws ban imports of prison labor goods, there is no parallel statutory provision prohibiting U.S. exports of such goods.

Moreover, the historical intersection of race and incarceration in the United States, with the post-Civil War development of convict leasing and chain gangs as modes of prison labor, raises the troubling prospect of pervasive racial bias. This systemic bias, combined with the requirement that all prisoners must work, render U.S. prison labor programs morally suspect in ways not so remote from China’s use of political dissidents in reeducation camps.”

SSRN, May 2018: Made in America: Race, Trade, and Prison Labor, by Lan Cao (PDF can be downloaded)

UNICOR is the trade name for Federal Prison Industries (FPI): a wholly owned, self-sustaining Government corporation that sells market-priced services and quality goods made by inmates. 

[pxssagat]

FREE LABOUR AND THE FUCKING WORK OF ART