Gershon, 2019

We All Work for Facebook 17/8/2020, 3:42 PM
We All Work for Facebook

Digital labor is valuable even when we do it for free. Should we get paid?
Carol Yepes / Getty, Illustration by Homestead
Livia Gershon | Longreads | April 2019 | 9 minutes (2,270 words)
When I was a kid, in the pre-internet days of the 1980s, my screen time
was all about Nickelodeon. My favorite show was “You Can’t Do That
on Television.” It was a kind of sketch show; the most common
punchline was a bucket of green slime being dropped on characters’
heads. It was pretty dumb. It was also created by professional writers,
actors, and crew, who were decently paid; many of them belonged to
unions.
Today, my kids don’t have much interest in that sort of show. For them,
TV mostly means YouTube. Their preferred channels collect memes
and jokes from various corners of the internet. In a typical show, a host
puts on goofy voices to read posts from r/ChoosingBeggars, a Reddit
message board devoted to customers who make absurd demands of
Etsy vendors. It’s significantly funnier than “You Can’t Do That on
https://longreads.com/2019/04/26/we-all-work-for-facebook/ Page 1 of 11
Television,” I admit. It also involves no unionized professionals.
The production of the shows my kids enjoy goes something like this:
Unpaid redditors post original material to amuse their online friends.
Unpaid moderators keep the subreddit functioning by cleaning out
spam and abuse. Reddit gets a little money from ads posted on the
subreddit. Then a YouTube channel called Sorrow TV—apparently a
one-man operation run by a 20-something guy—harvests the best posts
and creates the video. YouTube, which is part of Google, runs more
ads, while collecting valuable data about the viewing patterns of users
like my kids. YouTube shares some of the money it makes with
SorrowTV, based on a formula that Google controls and can alter at any
time.
Today’s media is ruled by a handful of corporations with enormous

market power. One thing that makes these companies so valuable is
how few people they employ, relatively speaking, for each dollar
earned. A New York Times analysis last year found that Facebook makes
just a hair under $635,000 in profit for each of its 25,000 employees.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, makes about $158,000 per worker.
(At Walmart, it’s $4,288.) These calculations often get spun as
representing a victory for automation and algorithms—machines,
rather than humans, creating value. But the truth is, these media
companies have billions of people working for them—they’re just not
on staff. Whenever you post a photo on Instagram, write an Amazon
review, or skim through complaints about potholes on your
neighborhood’s Facebook group, you’re helping generate profit for the
world’s richest corporations. A growing movement is making the case
that you ought to get paid for it.
***
Typically, we don’t think of social media use as labor. Finding your

way with Google Maps seems (particularly to those of us old enough
to remember planning a trip with paper maps) like a luxurious free
service. Keeping up with distant friends on Facebook feels like
recreation. Answering questions on Yelp about whether the library you
just visited has a wheelchair ramp is like a tiny public service.
But, of course, these companies aren’t providing anything for free. In

Radical Markets (2017), Eric A. Posner, a law professor at the University
of Chicago, and E. Glen Weyl, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research
and visiting scholar at Princeton University, make the case that
companies should pay for the information they collect from us. They
point to Big Tech’s use of our data, not just to choose what ads we’ll see
—or to sell to questionable political targeting operations—but also to
create new technology. Facebook and Instagram (a Facebook property)
use the images and videos we upload to power machine learning.
That’s where new artificial intelligence products like face recognition
and automated video editing come from. Translating a photo caption
for your friends helps teach Google Translate how languages work.
When you click the boxes on ReCAPTCHA, the ubiquitous anti-spam
tool owned by Google, it helps computers learn to digitize text and
—probably—improves self-driving car technology.
“A growing movement is making the case that

you ought to get paid for your social media
posts.”
How big a deal this is for the economy depends on how successful
artificial intelligence will be in replacing workers over the coming
decades. “As the digital sector grows, it could wind up being very
large,” Weyl told me. In fact, he said, treating data as labor could help
AI technology develop faster—companies would be able to explicitly
ask us for the information they need rather than trick us into providing
it. But that would mean that they’d have to divvy up the spoils. “These
companies have addicted themselves so much to being labor light,”
Weyl said. “It’s impacting AI’s ability to make a broad impact on the
economy.”
Writing in the Harvard Business Review with Jaron Lanier, a prominent

critic of social media, Weyl argues that if Americans were paid for our
data, many would make $500 to $1,000 a year the way things stand
now (an estimate that the authors believe is low). If AI were to grow to
represent 10 percent of the U.S. economy, Weyl and Lanier add, that
amount could rise to $20,000 for an average family of four—though in
that information economy, we’d all pay a little more for the services we
use.
***
Even absent economically powerful machine learning, companies

benefit in a variety of ways from the work we do for free online—
including in the least profit-driven settings. Dorothy Howard, a Ph.D.
student and digital labor scholar at the University of California San
Diego, became interested in digital labor while volunteering for
Wikipedia. “I was spending a lot of time editing and moderating and
helping to solve disputes, and then also doing some diversity work,
organizing around Wikipedia’s gender gap,” she said. “I developed
some burnout. I felt really exhausted.”
Howard began researching burnout among activists and volunteers

and soon ran into feminist critiques of traditionally unpaid women’s
work. Howard pointed me to “Wages for Facebook,” a project created
in 2014 by Laurel Ptak, a curator and visual artist. The project’s name is
a twist on Wages for Housework, a radical 1970s feminist assault on
the idea of housework as an extension of natural, nurturing
womanhood. More than a practical demand for payment, Wages for
Housework tried to recast domestic life as unpaid, unacknowledged
labor that contributed to capitalism by making men’s paid work
possible.
Echoing “Wages Against Housework,” a classic 1975 essay by Silvia

Federici, a feminist theorist, Ptak designed a website, Wages for
Facebook, with bold, all-caps text that scrolls down readers’ screens.
“By denying our Facebook time a wage while profiting directly from
the data it generates and transforming it into an act of friendship,
capital has killed many birds with one stone,” it reads. “First of all, it
has got a hell of a lot of work almost for free, and it has made sure that
we, far from struggling against it, would seek that work as the best
thing online.”
Wikipedia is a nonprofit, and a much-cited example of the utopian

promise of collective online work. Still, Howard argues, anything
produced online serves to the advantage of big tech companies.
“Wikipedia seeds the Google knowledge engine,” she told me.
“Licensing is so open, contributing to Wikipedia also means you’re
creating this knowledge that could be used in a number of other
settings.”
That’s also true of many other voluntary and collective online

enterprises, including open source software projects. The most
significant of these is probably Linux, a slightly modified version of
which helps power Google’s Android operating system, the core of
Amazon Web Services, and servers that host the vast majority of the
world’s websites. “The project itself is really committed to the politics
of making code freely available for anyone to use, and the volunteers
are committed to that,” Howard said. “That creates resources for
companies to use.”
***
Entertainment companies take advantage of another type of free labor:

the work of fans. Producers of movies, TV shows, and other projects
often lean heavily on fans to act as vast, informal focus groups, and to
promote their products. “Paid advertisements used to fill that sort of
role,” Mel Stanfill, a digital media scholar at the University of Central
Florida and the author of Exploiting Fandom (2019), told me. “To
whatever extent that’s been pulled back, that’s monetary gain.”
Devoted fans are more likely than casual social media users to think of
their efforts as real work. But Stanfill said that they still don’t
necessarily want wages. For them, creating interesting stories, videos,
or memes—or promoting and supporting others’ work—is a source of
status. “There’s two economies happening at the same time,” Stanfill
explained. “There’s the market economy where these activities are
valuable labor, but there’s also what people refer to as the gift economy
where people are producing things as expressions of love.”
Sometimes the two economies clash dramatically, as in the case of

“Serenity,” a science fiction movie from 2005 based on “Firefly,” a cult
TV show. Universal Studios unleashed a marketing campaign that

revolved around fans’ work—enthusiasts organized viewing sessions,
posted about the movie online, and created art using the official movie
logo. A year later, however, Universal turned on fan artists, in one case
threatening the owner of a Café Press store selling “Serenity”-themed
merchandise with a retroactive $8,750 licensing fee and statutory
damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work. Fans responded by
drawing up an invoice covering the hours they had spent promoting
the movie. The figure they came up with, for some 28,000 hours, was
more than $2.1 million.
The fans acknowledged in their statement that they weren’t really

expecting to collect cash. “We just believe that there is a point to be
made,” they wrote. The development and enforcement of copyright
law consistently favors wealthy companies over individuals. Still,
Stanfill told me, “It’s a huge power imbalance that has to be resolved
somehow.”
“Fans drew up an invoice covering the time they

had spent promoting the movie: 28,000 hours
for $2.1 million.”
Fans are trying to gain recognition. A prominent example is the

Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), a fan-run nonprofit
that was founded in 2007. One of its projects, An Archive of Our Own,
recently received a Hugo Award nomination for its work hosting
nearly five million pieces of fan fiction and art, catering to the needs of
fans rather than entertainment companies. OTW also does legal
advocacy, defending fans’ interests in cases regarding copyright and
fair use, and lobbying for more favorable laws.
***
Digital labor rights, like any labor rights, depend on workers’ ability to
organize in pursuit of their interests. The idea of demanding pay for

data depends on internet users coming together in something like a
labor union or a craft guild, bargaining with data buyers and using
strike threats to win contracts. Skilled translators or people with a
specific medical condition might band together based on their
knowledge of the value that their data could provide. Weyl suggested
to me that users start with Wikipedia, since it has its own complicated,
semi-democratic governance system.
“They should try to bargain,” he said. “And government should give

them the power to bargain: ‘We’re going to stop you from using our
content in some kind of way if you don’t offer some shared value to
support our community.’” In the case of fan labor, Stanfill added, a
union might be less interested in money than in shared credit and the
right to remix commercial products in fan communities.
Recently, Instagram memers announced the formation of their own

union, IG Meme Union 69-420, with actually-serious demands for
better communication with the company, a more transparent appeals
process for account bans, and protection from other users stealing and
monetizing creators’ content.
“Digital labor rights, like any labor rights,

depend on workers’ ability to organize.”
Users might also seek to collectively own their own data. Trebor
Scholz, a culture and media scholar at The New School who writes
about paid and unpaid digital labor, points to MIDATA, a Switzerland-
based nonprofit cooperative that collects data on everything from
blood tests to debit card usage, and then allows people to determine
how their own information used. Members can actively choose to share
selected parts of their data with others, like medical researchers. Scholz
envisions extending that kind of model to other applications, like
“smart cities,” where sensors and mobile apps gather data on traffic
jams, water supply, and library needs. Big tech companies frequently
propose organizing these kinds of projects, but are met by local
communities with well-justified skepticism, since it’s easy to glean
information on individuals from collections of supposedly anonymous
data. Scholz suggests that a better plan would be a cooperatively run,
locally governed organization that collaborates with companies like
Google and Facebook to help collect information without letting them
run the show.
“The cooperative could govern and own the raw data, essentially
encrypt it,” Scholz said. “They can then pass on data models to those
companies. That means that they are able to financialize the data, but
not the raw data. They could never identify a person.”
Ultimately, any fight for digital workers’ rights depends partly on

action by government, on the municipal to the national and
international levels—to affirm rights to personal data, force companies
to improve their terms of service, change copyright law, and grant
labor protections for data creators. Some people despair at pitting
government bureaucrats against rich, fast-moving tech giants. But
Howard thinks we shouldn’t. “Government should not operate on the
model that science is always going to outpace our ability to regulate it,
that somehow science moves faster than law can,” she said. “But that is
a very useful argument for science.” What is crucial—whether we’re
Wikipedians, fan fiction writers, or just occasional Facebook users—is
to push governments for better regulations and appeal directly to
media companies to acknowledge the value we’re providing for them.
And that means recognizing that we’re all digital laborers.
***
This article has been corrected to reflect that Mel Stanfill is a scholar at the
University of Central Florida.
***
Livia Gershon is a freelance journalist based in New Hampshire. She has

written for the Guardian, the Boston Globe, HuffPost, Aeon and other
places.
Editor: Betsy Morais
Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel
! " # Posted by Livia Gershon on April 26, 2019

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We All Work for Facebook 17/8/2020, 3:42 PM

We All Work for Facebook

Carol Yepes / Getty, Illustration by Homestead

Livia Gershon | Longreads | April 2019 | 9 minutes (2,270 words)

Television,” I admit. It also involves no unionized professionals.

Today’s media is ruled by a handful of corporations with enormous

Typically, we don’t think of social media use as labor. Finding your

But, of course, these companies aren’t providing anything for free. In

“A growing movement is making the case that

Writing in the Harvard Business Review with Jaron Lanier, a prominent

Even absent economically powerful machine learning, companies

Howard began researching burnout among activists and volunteers

Echoing “Wages Against Housework,” a classic 1975 essay by Silvia

Wikipedia is a nonprofit, and a much-cited example of the utopian

That’s also true of many other voluntary and collective online

Entertainment companies take advantage of another type of free labor:

Sometimes the two economies clash dramatically, as in the case of

TV show. Universal Studios unleashed a marketing campaign that

The fans acknowledged in their statement that they weren’t really

“Fans drew up an invoice covering the time they

Fans are trying to gain recognition. A prominent example is the

organize in pursuit of their interests. The idea of demanding pay for

“They should try to bargain,” he said. “And government should give

Recently, Instagram memers announced the formation of their own

“Digital labor rights, like any labor rights,

Ultimately, any fight for digital workers’ rights depends partly on

Livia Gershon is a freelance journalist based in New Hampshire. She has

Editor: Betsy Morais

Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel

! " # Posted by Livia Gershon on April 26, 2019

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