Heteromation, and Other Stories of Computing and Capitalism

by Hamid R. Ekbia & Bonnie A Nardi

First posted May 2018

Hey! I moved into my own website only a year later. Good for me.

Not keen to start a review with a definition, buuut….

We are concerned with...what one astute reviewer of our manuscript described as the common phenomenon of “term entrepreneurship.” We are quite sympathetic to the reviewer’s self-reflexive observation that finds in much of academic writing “an extension of a capitalist logic not unlike that seen in commodity fetish and trademark.”

The term in question is the titular ‘heteromation:’ labor outsourced—crowdsourced—and largely under- or uncompensated. It can be understoof as Frinkiac, the means by which I can yank a meme with nary a thought. Someone built a search engine containing all of The Simpsons, repackaged a ready to be inserted as gifs, in their spare time. For fun!

Heteromation thrives closer to home, in the irony of a book review that I originally posted on Goodreads.com, where content is farmed by a content-provider-platform that provides nothing but what its users give it: clearly, there is enough heteromated value there that Amazon.com bought it.

I know I’ve heteromated the milk for free nearly two-hundred times on the lovely website goodreads, but I never claimed not to be part of the problem. I face the same lady or tiger that we all do in information capitalism—silent obscurity or acquiescent peonage.

The authors of Heteromation, and Other Stories of Computers and Capitalism reach the same conclusion as I did: “We are, after all, the hapless, if not helpless, subjects of the current moment in human history, which is largely defined by the logic of late capitalism.” So while you continue to read this completely free piece of content, please note that I recognize the hours I spend writing reviews are mere grains of sand on the beach of monolithic corporate profits, and that these toils are the exact types of labor of which this book posits. Filling this particular review with other people’s works as “an efficient metonymic approach in which the brand or product, with its coherent narrative and identity, bears a lot of the conceptual load for an artist communicating a position to their audience,” is both a shorthand metatextual statement and very fun for me to do.

To continue my grand theft of inter-net-tual property (there’s my term entrepreneurship, mf’er), this article hit me at a convenient time, and covers both the content-industrial complex, aka heteromated labor, AND contains within its pages a sick Simpsons’ reference:

To state what is already known: the advent and proliferation of social media has irreparably transformed these modes of exchange, resulting in an epidemic of unpaid digital labor. Today we are all Krusty the Clown after his TV show is cancelled: standing by the highway with a sign reading “WILL DROP PANTS FOR FOOD,” only to learn that someone else is already dropping their pants for free.

And why shouldn’t we be inspired by The Simpsons? Heteromation, and Other Stories of Computing and Capitalism is the type of academic text that can admit low culture has high influence, that knows Let’s Plays are a thing, that cites twitch.tv—the mother of all heteromated sites (that also got scooped up by Amazon.com) —is the way online entertainment is moving. We’ve jumped from questioning the legality of deeplinking past a website’s homepage to remix culture, to influencers showcasing themselves interacting with other media while relying on niche audience participation in, what, twenty years? The acceleration of the consumer doing it themselves—with it covering self-checkout, self-entertainment, self-exploitation—showcases heteromation as the cancerous growth frontier au courant of exploitation capitalism.

This dude is very rich, which is basically a type of brain poisoning I think. Nice cars, though.

It should not shock you that those with financial means continue to search for ways to accumulate wealth off masses of people dropping their pants for free. What should gall is that it is framed as a favor to us that we are allowed to generate profit for them.