For example David Hakken from Indiana University presented his talk “From Labor to Playbor: Business Anthropology In the Time of Social Networking.” As a labor anthropologist he discussed the role – from an evolutionary perspective – of computerization on work. Today, similarly to technology breaking down the traditional lines between the private and public, computers are changing how we work, where we work, why we work and what qualifies as work.
Up till this fall Google had a game - called ESP - to label their gazillion images into categories. This game transformed an intensive, repetitive and certainly costly archiving chore into a fun (addictive) activity resulting in a better Google service, and all this produced by free labor.
Could this virtual collaborative project be the demonstration that surpassing the barriers of face-to-face labour results in better, less costly, and funner systems of efficiency. A sort of Ludocapitalism fuelled by playbor? Or rather is this a form of post-modern Taylorism? A 21st century feudalism – computer feudalism – in which our free bug reports, tweeking of open source projects and fun Google tags feed empires we are never rewarded by?
Leaving the panel I started to think that if technology can enable us to game our way through labor, then workers most probably will start acting like players. It doesn’t seem entirely unlikely that Wall Street traders sell, buy, negotiate and think in a similar fashion to the questing, grinding, hating factions or joining guilds World of Warcraft avatars do.
Both just as removed from the impact of their labor on the ‘real’ world but getting the addictive high of success that industrial Taylorism most probably never provided its workers.
