Hi Christian, Maxigas, all- I agree with both of you! :-) AMT is not a focus of the call but it was indeed suggested to us as a good example of the co-optation of the p2p method of production by exploitative interests. cheers Mathieu ________________________________________ From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of maxigas <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, June 6, 2015 5:35 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [JoPP-Public] RFC - peer production and work From: Christian Siefkes <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [JoPP-Public] RFC - peer production and work Date: Fri, 05 Jun 2015 18:34:26 +0200
Hi Mathieu, all,
On 01/06/15 09:48, Mathieu ONeil wrote:
Please find below a request for comments for a planned issue on peer production and work.
I'm somewhat astonished at the following paragraph:
*Peer production in a paid work society*
Nowadays firms extract ever-more value from the unpaid labour of volunteer 'prosumers' (Frayssé & O'Neil, 2015), or attempt to monetize crowdsourced labour. The paradigmatic example is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk labourers (popularly known as ‘Turkers’, ‘cloud workers’ or ‘click workers’) who accomplish micro-tasks such as tagging and labeling images, transcribing audio or video recordings, and categorizing products.
What does Amazon Mechanical Turk have to do with peer production? As far as I can see, nothing. There are no peers, no commons is created, and all work is paid (though badly) rather than volunteered freely. If the focus is on monetizing the unpaid work of volunteers, proprietary platforms such as Facebook or Youtube might be a better example.
Otherwise the call reads good to me.
I find Amazon Mechanical Turk a kind of Evil Twin of CBPP: even though it is completely different in its trajectory, it does have many structural similarities with CBPP. For instance it exhibits the criteria given by Benkler for dealing with complicated tasks through peer production practices: 1. modularity (easy integration of contributions) 2. granularity (small and big tasks are both available) 3. self-selection of tasks (participants can make autonomous decisions about what they take on) It is different from Facebook and Youtube in that big and complicated goals can be reached and it is oriented towards organising cooperation (well, production/exploitation, but still) in order to realise an end product. In Here Comes Everybody, Shirky proposes a typology of Sharing/Cooperation/Collective Action, where Facebook and Youtbe would be sharing and AMT would be cooperation, just like Linux kernel development or making Wikipedia. So maybe it is an abomination to call AMT peer production but including it in your analytical framework of PP and work/labour is analytically advantageous, I guess, because you can learn how capital appropriates PP practices. Well, it is just my quick take on it -- I am happy to see some theoretical debate on the list, we should do this more. :) -- maxigas, kiberpunk FA00 8129 13E9 2617 C614 0901 7879 63BC 287E D166 http://research.metatron.ai/ A: Because it breaks the logical sequence of discussion. Q: Why is top-posting bad? _______________________________________________ JoPP-Public mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/jopp-public