The Unwanted Labour of Social Media: Women of Colour Call Out Culture As Venture Community Management

Abstract

As Ursula Huws has written, digital labour is 'difficult to conceptualise' because the internet creates new styles of labour: it not only traffics far more in the immaterial, it is also arrayed along new axes of production, new forms of compensation, and new forms of gendering and racialisation. (1) It is this kind of labour that interests me. I am specifically interested in the hidden and often-stigmatised and dangerous labour performed by women of colour, queer and trans people, and racial minorities who call out, educate, protest, and design around toxic social environments in digital media. Social media platforms benefit from the crowd-sourced labour of internet users who, with varying degrees of gentleness or force, intervene in racist and sexist discourse online. This labour is uncompensated by wages, paid instead by affective currencies such as 'likes', followers, and occasionally, acknowledgement or praise from the industry. Cheap female labour is the engine that powers the internet. Some of this labour occurs in the fabrication laboratories and electronic assembly plants in East Asia where almost all of the world's chips and digital devices are produced. Women of colour are the majority of this workforce, as has been the case since the industry's early days. Over a thousand indigenous Navajo worked at a state of the art plant on the reservation in Shiprock, New Mexico producing chips from 1965-1975, receiving less than U.S. minimum wage. (2) Labour must be cheap in order for digital culture to exist. Though Moore's Law, which dictates that processor speed doubles every eighteen months, has been credited for the vast gains in computing power and miniaturisation that has enabled the transition to digital mobile sociality, offshore workers who make the devices at a competitive price are a crucial part of the economics of this shift. Digital labourers became newly visible in 2010 when eighteen workers, unable to continue working in untenable conditions, attempted suicide, resulting in fourteen deaths in one year at the massive Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, China. (3) The idea of 'digital labour' is often associated with more highly paid, white, and male workers in the global North. As Gina Neff writes, however, these digital jobs are defined by precarity: 'YOYO' (you're on your own) economics, and the need for individuals to accept high levels of risk. (4) The software developers and workers she studied at start-up companies in Silicon Alley were expected to add their cheap or free labour to their paid labour by talking up their companies at key social events and trade shows, thereby blurring the line between paid work and play. She terms this 'venture labour' --workers willingly took up this burden because firstly, it didn't seem like a burden; self-interest was at the core of the motivation for contributing this kind of digital labour. As she writes, 'there is clearly a great degree of work involved in building and maintaining these regional economies, and this work is disproportionately done after hours by people who have the time, ability, and social capital to navigate such events (p160).' Neff shows that the business of software production is not only 'knowledge work,' but affective work as well. Clearly there are sharp differences between overworked female labourers in an electronics plant, precariously employed as software and game developers, and social media users who 'call out' and critique racism and misogyny online. They may all be labouring in the digital economy, but just as they are gendered and racialised differently, they are rewarded differently and under different conditions. David Hesmondhalgh says as much when he asks, 'are we really meant to see creating code or writing about favourite shows online as 'exploited' in the same way as those who endure appalling conditions and pay in Indonesian sweatshops?' (5) Many of the 'venture labourers' that Neff writes about were white, male, and from middle class backgrounds, giving them a leg-up in the fend-for yourself-economy of software development work, while the mostly-female Asian assembly workers at Foxconn labour with no jackpot in sight. …