In the tech industry, this has led to a callousness regarding the communities technology conjures into existence. This isn’t to say that it’s surprising that a business would discard its user base if it was no longer profitable—but it is remarkable how inessential the things happening on platforms seem to be to the platforms themselves, in the eyes of both the people working in the upper echelons of these companies and the media covering them. This is how Tumblr can decide it’s getting out of the smut business, even though it seems to have mostly been about smut. It probably won’t hurt the company’s bottom line, but it does hurt the people who made Tumblr what it was: the photographers, painters, slash-fic writers, porn cartoonists, and sex workers who had used the platform to connect safely with an audience. The platform’s disregard for its own content hurts these creators twice: While Tumblr still functioned as their haven, they didn’t make nearly as much money on their creations as the people who created the site that hosted them did. And when it became politically difficult for Tumblr to remain their haven, they simply became an afterthought, losing their livelihood and sometimes even their work itself.
Cartoonists, sex workers, mommy bloggers, book reviewers: there’s a pretty clear gender dimension to this division of labor. The programmers at Yelp are predominantly men. Its reviewers are mostly female—and, at least in the initial years of the company, this was even more true as you got to the most active “elite” reviewers. Early rewards for elite reviewers—spa dates and skin care events—suggest that the company was aware of this and counted on it. Men build the structures; women fill them. Without users providing the content, a review portal like Yelp would be deeply pointless. Nevertheless, the users aren’t compensated, or are compensated only with stickers and perks: their labor is “gamified”; they earn special status or are sent book galleys. The problem isn’t that the act of providing content is ignored or uncompensated but rather that it isn’t recognized as labor. It is praised as essential, applauded as a form of civic engagement. Remunerated it is not.
The company, the tech, the brand, is about the platform. The content is incidental—in spite of the fact that few people come to a platform for anything but the content. This attitude is reflected in the largely quixotic attempts by users of online platforms to position themselves as employees: In Tasini et al. v. AOL, Inc. et al., a blogger using the now-defunct blog platform of The Huffington Post sued for back pay. In a 2013 class action suit brought before the Central District Court of California (Panzer v. Yelp), a number of Yelp Elite Squad reviewers charged that they were employees rather than customers. All these claims were eventually dismissed, amid much jeering from the tech press, which called them “frivolous” and “laughable.”
From a legal standpoint, these verdicts weren’t exactly surprising. But the Stanford researcher Annika Butler-Wall has analyzed the language in which the discourse around these cases was couched and found that articles about the cases actually speak volumes about what counts as “real” labor in tech. Because, sure, these people clearly were not employees in the traditional sense—but the coverage of these lawsuits went further, actually suggesting that what they did wasn’t really work, which is another, far more troubling proposition. And deciding what is and isn’t work has a long and ignominious history in the United States.
No writer who has ever been encouraged to write for free to “gain exposure” would fail to recognize that this language is on the same spectrum. And no one who has thought about the kinds of labor that habitually go unpaid in our society—affective labor, service, and care work, above all—would fail to recognize that Yelp and AOL are working pretty hard to push what their writers do into that corner. Who knows what gentle disposition moves these good-natured souls to write, what whimsy makes them review restaurants for free? It’s not their job; it’s a hobby, something to occupy their time. They are “passionate,” “supportive” volunteers who want to help other people. These excuses are scripts, in other words, developed around domestic, especially female, labor. To explain why being a mom isn’t “real” work. To explain why women aren’t worth hiring, or promoting, or paying, or paying as much. Yelp reviewers (again, largely women) usually review service providers (a female-dominated sector of the economy) for a user base that is likely half female—but the people making money on all of it are men.
There are economic reasons behind the fact that very few sites out there pay for content, of course. When you’re pitching your startup to a venture capital fund as the next “unicorn,” it’s better to have a small group of smart programmers you have to compensate than to have a million toiling minions who each might get, or even just plausibly ask for, a piece of the pie. But it isn’t just about the vagaries of funding rounds. Silicon Valley seems to genuinely believe in the primacy of the platform. The user has a role to play, but the role is about choosing which platform to be seduced by.
But even if you are lucky enough
