2.3: Cogenitariat

And labor? The Entertainment & Leisure Software Publishers Association celebrates women and video games, ignoring women’s part in their manufacture and disposal. Britain’s report on harm to children from games neglects the children whose forced labor makes and deconstructs them. And a study prepared for capital and the state entitled Working in Australia’s Digital Games Industry does not refer to mining rare earth metals, making games, or handling electronic waste—all of which should fall under “working in Australia’s digital games industry.”³³ Such research privileges the consciousness of play and the productivity of industry. Materiality is forgotten, as if it were not part of feelings, thoughts, experiences, careers—or money, oddly. By and large, the people who actually make media technologies are therefore excluded from the dominant discourses of high technology. It is as if telecommunications, cell phones, tablets, televisions, cameras, computers, and so on sprang magically from a green meritocracy of creativity.

Then there is the question of “you,” this dominant, imperialistic figure of prosumption. Audience members spy on fellow spectators in theaters to see how they respond to coming attractions. Opportunities to vote in the Eurovision Song Contest or a reality program disclose the profiles and practices of viewers, who can be monitored and wooed in the future. End-user licensing agreements ensure that online players of corporate games sign over their cultural moves and perspectives to the very companies they are paying to participate.³⁴

More than that, Silicon Valley, Alley, Roundabout, and other hopeful variants speak mystically of “the Singularity.” If it comes—current messianic predictions estimate between 2030 and 2045—then “you” will be rendered very secondary indeed. For the Singularity is “the last machine.”³⁵ It will allegedly permit us “in the fairly near future [to] create or become creatures of more than human intelligence . . . ushering in a posthuman epoch . . . beyond human ken . . . intrinsically unintelligible.”³⁶ The “us” will no longer be the masters of our technological world, no longer all-powerful prosumers, but one more cog in a wheel that is not even capitalist or socialist—a fleshy cog of HAL, the totalitarian computer from 2001 (1968).³⁷

Such proletarianization is already upon us. Back in 1980, Toffler acknowledged the crucial role of corporations in constructing prosumption—they were there from the first, cutting costs and relying on labor undertaken by customers to externalize costs through what he termed “willing seduction.” This was coeval with, and just as important as, the devolution of authority that would emerge from the new freedoms.³⁸ And most of the exciting new activities I have mentioned involve getting customers to do unpaid work, even as they purchase goods and services.

Just as Toffler imagined prosumers emerging from technological changes to the nature and interaction of consumption and production, he anticipated that these transformations would forge new relationships between proletarians and more educated workers. At the same time as he coined the term prosumer, Toffler introduced the idea of the “cognitariat”: people undertaking casualized cultural work who have heady educational backgrounds yet live at the uncertain interstices of capital, qualifications, and government in a post-Fordist era of mass unemployment, chronic underemployment, zero-time contracts, limited-term work, interminable internships, and occupational insecurity. Drawing on his early childhood experiences with Marxism, Toffler welcomed this development as an end to alienation, reification, and exploitation, because the cognitariat held the means of production in its sinuous mind rather than its burly grasp. The former could not be owned and directed as per the latter’s industrial fate.³⁹

Cognitarians are sometimes complicit with these circumstances, because their identities are shrouded in autotelic modes of being: work is pleasure and vice versa; labor becomes its own reward. Dreams of autonomous identity formation find them joining a gentried poor dedicated to the life of the mind that supposedly fulfills them and may one day deliver a labor market of plenty.⁴⁰ But they also confront inevitable contradictions, “the glamour as well as the gloom of the working environment of the creative economy.”⁴¹

From jazz musicians to street artists, cultural workers have long labored without regular compensation and security. That models the expectations we are all supposed to have today, rather than our parents’ or grandparents’ assumptions about lifelong—or at least steady—employment. Cultural production shows that all workers can move from security to insecurity, certainty to uncertainty, salary to wage, firm to project, and profession to precarity—and with smiles on their faces.⁴² Contemporary business leeches love it because they crave flexibility in the people they employ, the technologies they use, the places where they do business, and the amounts they pay—and inflexibility of ownership and control.⁴³

When I migrated to New York City in 1993, interviewers for broadcast stations’ news shows would come to my apartment as a team: a full complement of sound recordist, camera operator, lighting technician, and journalist. Now they are rolled into one person. More content must be produced from fewer resources, and more and more multiskilling and multitasking are required. In my example, the journalist has taken over the other tasks. The job of the editor is also being scooped up into the new concept of the “preditor,” who must perform the functions of producer and editor. And if journalists work for companies like NBC, they often write copy for several web sites and provide different edited versions of the original story for MSNBC, CNBC, CNBC Africa, CNBC Europe, and CNBC Asia.

This precariousness also sees new entrants to such labor markets undermining established workers’ wages and conditions. Consider the advertising agency Poptent, which undercuts big competitors in sales to major clients by exploiting prosumers’ labor in the name of “empowerment.” That empowerment takes the following form: Poptent pays the creators of homemade commercials $7,500; it receives a management fee of $40,000; and the buyer saves about $300,000 on the usual price.⁴⁴

Because this volume is concerned more with fictional than factual screen genres, it’s worth recalling that such examples also apply wherever labor is not organized in strong unions (the cable versus broadcast TV labor process is a notorious instance). For example, thousands of small firms with unorganized workforces are dotted across the hinterland of California. They produce DVD film commentaries, music for electronic games, and reality TV shows ⁴⁵ and are increasingly looking for opportunities in visual effects, animation, and video game development.⁴⁶ They might also be making programs for YouTube’s hundred new channels, the fruit of Google’s hundred-million-dollar production (and two-hundred-million-dollar marketing) wager that five-minute online shows will kill off TV. Explosions were routinely filmed for these channels near my late lamented loft in downtown Los Angeles. The workers blowing things up were paid $15 an hour.⁴⁷

Clearly, cultural labor incarnates this latter-day loss of lifelong employment and relative income security among the Global North’s industrial proletarian and professional-managerial classes. A rarefied if exploitative mode of work—that of the artist and artisan in the field of culture—has become a shadow-setter for conditions of labor elsewhere in the economy. Even reactionary bodies like the U.S. National Governors Association recognize the reality: “Routine tasks that once characterized middle class work have either been eliminated by technological change or are now conducted by low-wage but highly skilled workers.”⁴⁸

This new division of labor is becoming as global as the manufacturing one that preceded it. For alongside a casualization of middle-class jobs within the Global North, there is also a New International Division of Cultural Labor. By the 1980s, as culture became increasingly commodified and governmentalized and drew closer to the center of the world economy, it fell subject to the same pressures as secondary industries. Hence the success of Mindworks Global Media, a company outside New Delhi that provides Indian-based journalists and copy editors to newspapers whose reporters are supposedly in the United States and Europe. It promises 35–40 percent cost savings by contrast with workers at the outlets in question.⁴⁹