[JoPP-Public] RFC - peer production and work

Fri Jun 5 21:35:23 CEST 2015

From: Christian Siefkes <christian at siefkes.net>
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
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http://research.metatron.ai/

A:  Because it breaks the logical sequence of discussion.
Q:  Why is top-posting bad?