[P2P-F] are hackers complicit in their exploitation?

Sat Jul 9 14:21:46 CEST 2011

see item 2 from the moral economies conference,
http://www.moraleconomies.leeds.ac.uk/abstracts/

links on the authors and their thesis would be appreciated,

see

Hesmondhalgh, David: *Free creative labour and exploitation*

A dominant theme of recent critical analysis of digital media,
user-generated content and cultural industries is that they involve unpaid
work (‘free labour’) on the part of participants. Critiques of ‘free labour’
have provided some stimulating and necessary interventions against
complacent celebrations of creative labour, and of the relations between
production and consumption in the digital era, but some significant
conceptual issues concerning capitalism, exploitation, power and freedom
remain underexplored. I argue that the frequent pairing of the term ‘free
labour’ with the concept of exploitation is often unconvincing and rather
incoherent, at least as so far developed by the most-cited analysts; and I
explore what political demands might and might not coherently be derived
from critical accounts of free labour (arguing that the internship system is
by far the most significant example of free labour in the contemporary
cultural industries).
Hunsinger, Jeremy: *From Hacklabs to Hacker Markets: becoming complicit in
self-exploitation*

Hacklabs and Hackerspaces are a global movement where individual rent spaces
online and off in order to have a shared workspace in which to create or
reproduce technologies and techniques that they value. As these labs have
developed, their members have become complicit in their own
self-exploitation and marketization, developing open systems that are
commoditized and marketed through the community, using its networks, and
developing the community, some of whom explicitly against elements of the
commoditization of their work. Based in an analysis of over 300 hackerspace
and hacklab’s blogs, wikis, and related social media outlets, this research
describes the tensions between the community and the market they create by
examining what these groups post in the public arena. From this data, we can
see a wide variety of conflicting statements about the nature of their
participation in their community and the markets in which they participate.
These conflicts are even occasionally recognized reflexively with and across
groups creating arenas for discussion, debate, and consensus-building. This
reflexive reconstruction and renegotiation of their relative perspectives is
an emotional and affective politics of becoming complicity and
self-legitimizing a form of self-exploitation. Granted, most of the members
of the community does not see the relationship between market and community
as self-exploiting, but they cover their affective responses with
normalizing encodings and justifications.

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