Creating the Crowd: How Collective Labor Organized the Internet

• In Event: So Far, So Good, Part 1: Organizational Communication Research Escalator

Abstract

As much as the Internet has been envisioned as an “electronic frontier” giving individual users the freedom of choice and influence over a vast array of information, the “good life” allowed by such access is the result of collective labor, produced explicitly and implicitly for various entities on the web ranging from non-profit crowdsourced initiatives, to large multinational corporations. This paper will advocate that collective labor should be placed as the central paradigm for web communication. Utilizing the theories advocated by Soviet scholar Aleksandr Bogdanov, historical analysis of the Internet, as well as US and Soviet cybernetics, and a case study of an illicit international organization which utilizes collective labor to preserve one of the world’s largest collection of pirated books, this paper aims to showcase how the actions of the whole, over the desires of the individual, are an organizing principle of web activity.

Author

• Maxwell Foxman, Columbia University