The fantasy of the happy worker has taken on newer and more mind-bending aspects, as has work itself. It now includes things like the unpaid microlabor of providing content for Web sites. It includes the amateur photographer who provides her images of, say, the police killing a young black man to the local news as an “iReport” for nothing but a credit and a T-shirt. Or a music lover scratching out a review on some hip site for a byline alone. Or consider the subtlest and arguably the most exemplary case: how, in wandering the byways of Facebook and Google, you are diligently rendering gratis a host of information about the preferences and habits of you and your friends—data they sell to advertisers. This, too, is unpaid labor.

In general, there is the boom in such practices that seems tied to the digital era; you can’t spell Internet without intern. As the argument goes, you are paid in access to a desirable milieu, or the chance to do good. (…)

Ideally, you don’t even know you are working at all. You think you are keeping up with friends, or networking, or saving the world. Or jamming with the band. And you are. But you are also laboring for someone else’s benefit without getting paid. And this, it turns out, was exactly Amanda Palmer’s hustle.

Joshua Clover, “Amanda Palmer’s Accidental Experiment With Real Communism.” (via marathonpacks)

Yep.

(via katherinestasaph)

So this doesn’t work because a lot of the outcry is from people who work in media for a living; by trade, they expend one another for currency. Their job is to use each other to get ahead. This isn’t how art is intended to function. I don’t think members of the media can fairly comment on how artists try to make money.

(via ohrohin)

dude, Josh Clover is not merely “a member of the media”, he’s a radical activist and badass poet.  Read the whole piece.

(via ohrohin)