The Imaginary App (Software Studies) by Paul D. Miller & Svitlana Matviyenko

Author:Paul D. Miller & Svitlana Matviyenko [Miller, Paul D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: new media, design, media studies, branding, cell phones, smart phones, Korea, apps
ISBN: 9780262320801
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2014-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

III Economics

10

App Worker

Nick Dyer-Witheford

A new and enigmatic figure has recently appeared in North America’s anxious dreams about jobs, prosperity, and the very fate of global capitalism: that of the app worker. Within a few years of Apple opening its App Store, rumors of a burgeoning “app economy” began to spread through IT, business, and job-finding websites, through company prospectuses, and through app-making-for-dummies manuals.1 Stories of young men abandoning day jobs or school to make millions writing apps proliferated in the media, and enthusiastic business reports declared that apps were “where the jobs are.”2 These were among the very few sparks of light in the general darkness of the post-2008 slump. Even as Occupy Wall Street seized city squares across North America, apps promised a revival of capitalist growth.

Today, it is estimated that there are more than half a million software application workers in the United States, many of them developing software for mobile devices, and the numbers are anticipated to increase rapidly in the next several years.3 Yet the nature of work in the app economy—the remuneration, the conditions, the prospects, and the long-term significance—remains contested and controversial. Focusing on the value networks of the North American smartphone industry, the epicenter of the app explosion, this chapter discusses the crowdsourcing of app development by giant platform providers, the technological and subjective resources it mobilizes, the labor processes it activates, and the conflicts it generates. Distributed app development is, I suggest, an apparatus in which “immaterial labor” is captured by “cognitive capitalism,” a highly successful mechanism that might, however, become increasingly unstable in a context of world labor markets and algorithmic automation.

Value Networks

The cover of the December 1, 2012 issue of The Economist depicts a colossal under-sea struggle. Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon are portrayed as giant squids battling to the death, entangled in each other’s tentacles. With a cheerful ruthlessness, this image dispenses with any illusions that the digital is the domain of the small or beautiful. The article’s title, “Survival of the Biggest,” conveys the complexity and the reach of the corporate entities that dominate the networks. The image of squirming, suction-cupped tentacles suggests a concept that is crucial for understanding the app economy: that of the value network.

The value network revises an older concept: that of the “value chain,” which described how a dominant capitalist enterprise organizes subordinate aspects of the commodification process, dispersing each value-adding activity to global locations and organizational forms that optimize labor costs, access to raw materials, or proximity to markets, and then links the chain in a continuous, integrated sequence.4 The original form of the value chain of headquarters research, design, and marketing in the high-wage areas of the global economy subcontracts manufacturing, assembly, and back-end office functions to newly industrialized territories, where they can be rapidly scaled up or down, while resource extraction or waste disposal are sent to abyssal sacrifice zones. In the last two decades this has become a standard process for producing cars, cappuccino, and cell phones.

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