Simply put, if you need to raise money on Kickstarter, it helps to have fifty thousand Twitter followers, not fifty. It helps enormously if Google puts your product on the first page of search results, and making sure it stays there might require an investment in search-engine optimization. Some would view this new kind of immaterial labor as “virtual craftsmanship”; others as vulgar hustling. The good news is that now you don’t have to worry about getting fired; the bad news is that you have to worry about getting downgraded by Google.
Hatch assumes that online platforms are ruled by equality of opportunity. But they aren’t. Inequality here is not just a matter of who owns and runs the means of physical production but also of who owns and runs the means of intellectual production—the so-called “attention economy” (or what the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger, in the early sixties, called the “consciousness industry”). All of this suggests that there’s more politicking—and politics—to be done here than enthusiasts like Anderson or Hatch are willing to acknowledge.
A great reminder that technology doesn’t live on its own.