Quotes From the article:
Post-Mortem Conference Mashup: The Internet as Playground and Factory 
by Trebor Scholz scholzt@newschool.edu

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Frequent reference points in the animated conversations included practices like gold farming, game modding, blogging, “turking” on Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk, gaming in World of Warcraft, outsourcing through LiveOps.com, collaborating on Wikipedia articles, reputation scamming through SubvertandProfit.com and sweating in “captcha sweatshops.” Theoretical cues were repeatedly given to Paolo Virno, Harry Braverman, Hannah Arendt, Dallas Smythe, Jean Baudrillard, Bernhard Stiegler, Maurizio Lazzarato, Johan Huizinga, and Tiziana Terranova.

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Shifts in labor markets have drawn attention to places where labor does not look like labor at all. The Internet has created new markets that can be accessed from anywhere with a net connection. While managerial royalty like Don Tapscott celebrated the business potential of “crowdsourcing” in books like “Wikinomics,” scholars such as Andrew Ross see digital labor as a non-surprising continuation of exploitative capitalist modes of operation. At the prelude to the conference Ross stated that “those who see the digital realm as a technology of de-skilling, outsourcing and work degradation are far outnumbered by those who see it as a medium of reskilling, innovation, and common value creation.” Interactive input is just another transfer of work from more regulated kinds of labor markets, Ross stated. There is a great deal of overlap between intensified forms of expropriation of digital labor and traditional economies of unpaid work, especially in the home.      
Several speakers claimed that we are all falling victim to a technocratic fetishization of the Internet that takes away from a full acknowledgment of the “real” places of exploitation: the heavily populated slums in what some participants called the “global south.” Are the discussed processes of monetization and coercion of “free” relations of exchange on the Social Web, as discussed at the conference, in fact a luxury problem in the overdeveloped world alone? The fact that cell phones are now widely used all throughout economical developing countries like Brazil, Russia, India, and China should lead to a re-evaluation of the worldwide participation gap.

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In the session “Ideology and the Erotics of Playbor,” Jonathan Beller correctly stated that the word “digital” does not sum up our entire condition. At the same time, however, the questions created by new expressions of labor markets in the financial-crisis world are increasingly urgent. There is a participatory turn in online sociality; the scale of participation is unprecedented. It is true that it is only a small segment of people with Internet access contributes material to the Web but this “small segment” of you-sers posted more than 150,000 videos a day to YouTube in 2008. Questions of expropriation of net users have a great deal of urgency given that the data of 350 million people are locked up under the rule of a single private entity like Facebook. 
Sisyphus might have ultimately been convinced to pay a monthly fee for the pleasure of pushing that rock up the hill.
- Scott Rettberg on iDC, http://is.gd/39X7S

We decide with one click what’s “hot” and what is not, we “follow,” or like, we save, refer, and bookmark. Why do we upload our boredom or perform our addictions online?  I quoted Tim O’Reilly who stated that “…they are participating without thinking that they participate. That’s where the power comes.” (Scholz, http://is.gd/5jQm2) There are manifold reasons for social participation online but fun is one of them.
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It’s fun, right?

Chris Kelty continued Martin Robert’s line of inquiry. Kelty started by outlining how crucial fun is to get people involved in working with computers and software. There is an endless stream of books with fun in the title. “Programming is fun.” “Computer literacy is fun.” The argument of many of these books is that your new paid job with computers is more fun than your old job delivering pizza, for example. Few books would be called “The serious labor of software programming.” Fun has often dominated the discussion about how to activate people and much research funding has been funneled into social psychology research for that reason. Some of this mentality is a hold-over from William Whyte’s “Organization Man” (1956) and Ted Nelson’s “Computer Lib” (1974). Fun is also used as category to explain why people contribute to free software. Linus Torvald’s autobiography is titled “Just for Fun.” It’s fun to stay up all night and see if you can get Linux to run on your machine. People seem to like fun better than not-fun. Even if they have to work to have fun, they’ll do it to avoid not-fun work or no work at all,” Kelty said. With regard to free software, it is especially important to understand why people are working without having been paid to do so. Why do hacker-types produce high quality software and then give it away for free? That still surprises some skeptics. Why do people work? Individuals do Free Software work for a plurality of reasons. Kelty emphasized that some of them do it for “Free Software reasons”: creating something for the public, making something freely available. Others want to “stick it to the man,” so to speak. Yet others do it for the fun, the joy, the pleasure, the fame, or the Boy Scout badge, or they are learning new skills and meet new people. With Free Software, people do not just argue about the way the world should be, they provide a proof of concept. Kelty introduced Hannah Arendt to think about the various ways in which we are dividing up the problem of labor, and that at least some at the conference seemed to think that Marx might be getting in the way of conceptual progress with this topic.

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