Exploitation and Media Labor

In the upsurge of interest in media and cultural labor since the turn of the century, the concept of exploitation has been neglected. Take two books that are rightly among the most widely cited and used sources in the recent “turn to labor” in media and cultural studies: Mark Banks’s The Politics of Cultural Work and Andrew Ross’s Nice Work If You Can Get It. ¹ They hardly mention exploitation at all. Given that both books are extremely accomplished and insightful, this might be taken as evidence that the concept of exploitation is not needed for a critical understanding of media labor. But exploitation is a concept that will not go away in considering the politics and ethics of work. Significant attention has been paid to it in recent debates on digital work, partly because of interest in the concept of “free labor” introduced in a seminal and brilliant article by Tiziana Terranova. ² Another has been the important but problematic notion of “self-exploitation.” ³ Yet, even in this recent wave of digital labor studies, there have been no sustained efforts to theorize exploitation or to address systematically problems of definition and conceptualization that inevitably haunt a term with such a long and complex history in critical thought. ⁴ This short chapter offers the beginnings of such an effort. It does so in the hope of offering “common ground” to advance debates about exploitation in media work, including the topical issue of whether changing forms of information production and circulation provide new spaces of positive potential or “new forms of labour exploitation.” ⁵