I wrote this short essay for a collection on race that the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity is putting together. Their premise is as follows: by 2042 we’ve made a lot of progress on racial justice and equity in the United States. (Congratulations!) Q #1 – what does it look like? #2 — suppose we know that some of the seeds of transformation are in place right now, in 2010; what are some of those? #3 — how do we get from here to there?

I have never been asked to produce a utopian vision about what the Internet might do for racial equality.  I’ve spent most of my academic career as a buzzkill, a position that we’re much more comfortable with, and one that we are often compelled to occupy given the crazy-ass industrial narratives of Internet=democracy.  So here goes!

Gaming Our Way Towards Racial Equality: the Transformative Potential of Fun Times Online
Lisa Nakamura
University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign

Craig Watkins writes that “the social ties and personal relationships that matter most to young people are managed through digital-media technologies.” (Watkins 2009)  This amount is only bound to increase as media such as music, television, and film migrate onto our digital devices.  The struggle for racial equality will only succeed if to the extent that it can involve digital media, since as Watkins writes, the Internet is increasingly where social interaction takes place.  In 2010, internet users spend more time playing digital games than they do on email. («Games overtake email as second top online time killer», Nielsen) What follows is a vision of how Internet-mediated networks and virtual world games might help us progress towards racial justice and equality in the United States.
It is 2040, and President Brittany Molina-Nguyen has passed the Digital Civil Rights Bill.  She is supported in this decision by the American public because by 2042 it has been recognized by most governments and individuals that unequal access to the Internet is a form of class, racial, and gender discrimination, and that this has stood in the way of racial harmony.   Because Americans have finally accepted that they are not currently nor will ever again be citizens of the world’s superpower, there is renewed interest in looking at alternative ways of socializing, taking care of citizens, and educating them.  In a radical move, the U.S. government, displaced by China as the world’s largest economy and the seeming inevitability of Brazil and India as contenders for the number 2 and 3 positions, pours funding into Internet access for all. The three priorities shaping the Digital Civil Rights Bill are 1) the promotion of multiracial social environments online, spearheaded by online games 2) digital media content production for a transnational audience 3) environmental transparency and accountability.

Years ago, in 2010, researchers found that most Americans were using the Internet to either form homogeneous social networks with people who were the same race and class as themselves, or were playing online games like Xbox 360 Live’s popular Modern Warfare 2 and using racist and sexist language within them. (Hargittai 2007), (Nakamura 2009).  In 2010, people of color and older were predominantly to be found in the “undesirable neighborhoods” of the Internet, within social networks and spaces like MySpace and AOL that were increasingly segregated along racial, class, and generational lines.  For example, as Internet researcher danah boyd discovered, MySpace suffered from “white flight” as white users deserted it in favor of Facebook, claiming that MySpace is “ghetto,” “ignorant” and “low class.”(boyd)  In a bold move to re-shape these practices, President Molina-Nguyen agrees to a proposal by Internet scholars who had recommended for many years that Internet access be free or state-subsidized for users who permit Facebook’s algorithms to identify users with common interests who are of a different race and class from themselves.  Because Internet access is quite expensive, as it has replaced all telephony, cable television, and other communication networks, there is plenty of incentive to participate in this program.  Those who choose not to participate in the program pay full market price, are taxed much more heavily, have slower connection speeds, and are not given access to all of its features.  In exchange for grouping with these users, Americans receive free access to any of the dozen virtual world games run by Zynga/Blizzard/Activision, the dominant maker of online role playing games such as World of Warcraft (now in its 20^th expansion, and boasting a user base containing half of the world population).  Because Zynga/Blizzard/Activision was acquired by Facebook several years ago, users find themselves enjoyably playing thrilling computer games in real time with their friends as well as with users from different races.

The best and most exciting online games can only be unlocked by hours of gameplay within a multiracial and multilingual/multinational “clan” or “guild.”  The close bonds that develop from having fun times together online creates new social networks that are much more diverse in terms of age, race, nation, and gender, and sexuality than ever before.  After a middle-aged Ivy educated white attorney has been saved from certain death in World of Warcraft 30 by the same African American teenage girl from rural Detroit, a member of his algorithmically-selected and multiracial guild, he feels a rush of relief and happiness every time she logs on.  As automatic Facebook friends and members of the same WoW guild they learn a great deal about each others’ lives by viewing each others’ pictures, updates, and sharing game strategies.  The benefits of the “old boys network” start to flow in different ways as these two and others in their multinational guild learn each others’ languages and help each other both off and online.

The penalty for the use of racist or homophobic hate speech or behavior online is a temporary loss of the Internet government subsidy.  Players who continue to engage in hate speech will eventually pay the full market price for these services, which now averages as much as a family’s mortgage.  Subsidies can be earned back by engaging in volunteer work online to improve impoverished communities here and abroad.  Formerly out of work journalists are now fully employed as fact-checkers in these online civility disputes, as paper newspapers have long disappeared and the news continues to be written by bloggers.

As a result of the Digital Civil Rights Bill, most Americans count at least five or six non-Americans as “close friends” whom they communicate with several times a week within their recreational gaming networks.  Rather than producing a nation of mouse-potatoes, the Digital Civil Rights Bill works beautifully to encourage the nation’s least wired to come online as multiple language speakers and savvy content producers.  Because the games produced by companies like Zynga/Blizzard/Activision are already popular by users around the world, it is an easy step to get users to join other groups of players in exchange for free access.  In 2042, the majority of the content on the Internet has been in Chinese almost 50 years, making Chinese one of the easiest languages to learn for non-Chinese speakers.  Phonetic charactersets have replaced ideograms, and language-learning has been accelerated tremendously by the Internet’s translation programs.  Doing business in Asia is only possible through participation in the networks produced by these social games, providing poorer Americans excellent jobs as translators, project managers, and businesspeople.

The third and last piece of the Digital Civil Rights bill requires bar-coding and RFID-chipping of all consumer goods, including fruits and vegetables.  Shoppers can use their cellphones to scan these goods and learn when they were picked or produced, by whom, under what conditions, and where.  Like calorie labeling efforts from the 2010’s, this has a strong effect upon consumer behavior.   Agricultural workers are much better protected, and the job becomes attractive to people from all racial groups.  Food starts to taste much better, people eat less of it, and obesity and diabetes rates decrease, and are evenly distributed throughout the population.  Americans are healthier, more digitally empowered, less xenophobic, and have more fun times.

References

danah boyd, Technology review: Blogs: Guest blog: Did whites flee the ‘digital ghetto’ of MySpace? b [cited 8/4/2010 2010]. Available from http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/guest/25474/ (accessed 8/4/2010).

Games overtake email as second top online time killer- US study — today’s top stories a [cited 8/4/2010 2010]. Available from http://www.netimperative.com/news/2010/august/games-overtake-email-as-second-top-online-time/ (accessed 8/4/2010).

Hargittai, Eszter. 2007. Whose space? differences among users and non-users of social network sites. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 13 (1).

Nakamura, Lisa. 2010. «Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: Internet Games, Social Inequality, and Racist Talk as Griefing.» podcast available from http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2010/06/16/lisa-nakamura-dont-hate-the-player-hate-the-game/ (accessed 8/3/2010).

Watkins, S. Craig. 2009. The young and the digital: What the migration to social network sites, games, and anytime, anywhere media means for our future Beacon Press.

I never do this, but here I am liveblogging from the concluding keynote at MacArthur’s Digital Media and Learning conference, one which heralds the arrival of “our field,” as Eszter Hargittai put it during last night’s keynote panel.  Generally I am finding this conference really really good.  One of the reasons is the evocativeness of the work here.  Even when it’s not pushing out paradigms that I want to use, it’s giving terms to react against or through from different contexts, such as education.

One of the educators’ panels asked us to come up with a definition of “digital citizenship.”  This was a lot more productive a paradigm than the “digital natives” discourse I’ve been seeing that takes off from John Palfrey’s popular recent book.  Digital native implies a special, exceptionally enabled sort of person, independent of race, class, or other factors–but as Livingstone’s ethnographies show, there is actually quite a low level of skill in young people’s use of the Internet, something that Siva Vaidhyanathan and Hargittai have noted.

Digital citizenship implies instead rights, soverignty, and a sometimes vexed relationship to affordances which works better to my mind.  The rights to free movement (across platforms, standards, virtual worlds), the rights to speak your own language, the rights to access–these are less utopian ideas than “digital natives,” who seemingly need nothing and “naturally” know how to do everything.

I am almost out of batts!  more later.

It’s been a long time with no blogging by me, but I think about Difference Engines all the time and have resolved to do better with it this year. I believe very much in collective blogging, in women’s blogging, and in the people who do this blog. Lily Irani and I got some F2F time at the New School conference on Virtual Labor, “The Internet as Playground and Factory.” Fun times, and I need to post about it before the memory is entirely gone.

This weekend I’ll be presenting at the first DML conference in LaJolla, entitled “Diversifying Participation.” I will try to blog some from there. I’m presenting on two panels: one paper is called “unfree labor: working at playing with race in digital games” and the other is “virtual labor migration in digital games: factionalized identities and racial minorities in world of warcraft” but since the presentations will be 5 minutes long or so I doubt it will be getting too deep.

So that’s the update.

Lately I’ve been thinking about conferences as performative venues and how esp. at digital media conferences the use of stickers on the laptop function like signage or endorsements, usually for causes rather than for products, though with new media those things sometimes blend together. I’m including two images of laptops to illustrate this: mine and my partner Christian Sandvig’s.

My laptop, which is what people are looking at when I give papers at conferences and sit at meetings, has four stickers on the red Speck plastic case for the macbook Air (solid state, thank you University of Illinois!) I made one myself, was given two at conferences, and the fourth was given to me by my eight year old daughter, who made it at school as part of a project to sell parents artwork that can be printed on mugs, tshirts, and other commodities. We did not choose to buy any of these things, but got the stickers for free. The one she made, of a flower, is also on Christian’s laptop:

I got the GLS sticker from the Games, Learning, and Society conference in Madison, Wisconsin last summer, along with a pair of socks with the same elf-girl knitted in them. I got the same sticker the year before, and put it on my ancient Mac g4 tower at work. The Spaceshift.org was given to me at the Internet as Playground and Factory conference by an Israeli software designer who makes an open source software project that is “an opensource layer above any website.” He seemed cool and his product is free and interesting and I like the sticker.

The little blue sticker that say “Good Job” has an interesting story. I have a Brother p-touch label maker at home, and my daughter uses it to make stickers sometimes. She made this one, which is pretty clearly imitative of the stamps that her teachers use on her homework, and I found it, and decided to put it on mine because my scholars and colleagues HARDLY EVER HEAR OR SEE THESE PARTICULAR WORDS. Digital media is, like all academics, a spectacularly praise-free environment. I wish that it was bigger, and that I could see it myself, but hopefully when people read it it does something.

I can’t decode my partner’s stickers for him–that’s really his job. I can say that he is a Berkman Fellow this year and that the ostrich sticker came from a cafe in North Portland where they had a glass dish of them.

There are lots of stickers around at cafes, conferences, and other places where people who would put them on their laptops gather. These remind me of zine culture in the early nineties–I was given a sticker from a student of mine at Vista Community College when I taught there while looking for a tenure track job. He was a skateboarder who had a zine, and was giving them to people–I put it on a notebook because I didn’t own a laptop then.

These are pretty clearly about declaring cultural affiliation. Cory Doctorow had a really big collection of laptop stickers, some of them about the EFF, last time I saw him speak at a conference. Now when I see them at conferences I see them as advertisements: for the projects/events that they reference, but mainly for the person who displays them. They seem to show that you’re still young, and will replace your laptop often enough to keep them fresh, and that you think that consumer culture *must* be modified in order to make a point about making and participation. I put mine on a case, which is totally wussing out. Though I don’t expect to keep this laptop for more than a few years, it makes me feel a little better about “taking care of it” correctly. This is no doubt about being raised as a thrifty Japanese American woman by two parents who spent time in internment camps during the war (Heart Mountain and Amache). We rarely threw things out and were not allowed to deface any parts of the house with Wacky Pack stickers; I never asked because there was no question that this was *absolutely forbidden.*”  What kind of cultural affiliation was important enough to risk damaging the value of a commodity that you might need to sell in the future?  Having consumer goods was all about preserving them.  None of our cars (Fords and Lincolns, and later, a Volvo and a Jaguar) had stickers on them.

I wonder if the relative absence of stickers on women’s and maybe people of color’s laptops (as well as the absence of these people themselves) at digital media conferences is reflective of a thrift-culture that has to do with a different stance towards obsolescence, thrift, value, and preservation?  There is a different sense of an object’s futurity if you are one of these people perhaps–“re-making” is a luxury if you know you’re handing down your machine to a relative who doesn’t have one, or selling it on Craig’s List when you get a new one. When my computer is replaced, it will return from whence it came–to the warm bosom of the University of Illinois.

Apple gives out stickers but I have never seen them on an actual computer. Weirdly, I have seen them on cars–one Saab and a few VW’s. I threw mine away, but not without a pang, because like everything that Apple does they are nice (again, thrift). Portland Oregon is the best place for bumperstickers I have ever seen: my favorite is “my other car is a broom,” which was often found on a weathered Subaru wagon or an elderly Toyota Tercel wagon with the long-throw manual transmission shifter and a Mexican blanket covering the back seat.

It would be good if I could get some stickers from Sarai: that’s a cause that I’d like to advertise a lot. But I don’t think that they make them.

Lilly’s intervention into the Digital Turk has gotten me thinking about this kind of labor as the same type of digital piecework that women of color have done since the early days of digital culture.  My grandmother worked in electronics assembly right after the war because she saw an ad recruiting Japanese American women as workers–this was right after the war in Santa Clara, when many of them had returned from internment camps.  Thus, they were a fairly emiserated and jobless group of workers who had an excellent reputation for manual dexterity.  As Donna Haraway wrote years ago, women of color, especially transnational ones, have always done the piecework of the digital age.

The Mechnical Turk makes digital piecework seem game-like, done on one’s own time, but it is also a mockery of the “creative industries” form of labor, done for love/interest/personal development rather than for the (meager) pay.  Amazon is a platform for consumption, and hosting the Turk there makes working that way look like play.  Lots of types of sweated/semi-sweated labor like this seem like play rather than work, and are also a mockery of the creative industries–like gold farming.

Lilly knows that I am obsessed with gold farming, because it is sweated labor done by Asian men in actual sweatshop conditions, but also because it is so overtly about play as work.  These jobless and unemployable Chinese men play World of Warcraft and other MMO’s and sell their avatars and virtual money through third party virtual goods resellers like IGE.  If we look at what they do, it’s also a mockery of the creative industries that the digital revolution was supposed to make available to so many.

In film and television studies, there’s new interest in studying “below the line” workers, like secretaries, script girls, craft workers, and personal assistants.  So many of them are women, and they are so seldom talked about–they’re not auteurs or stars.  If we look at digital games like other media, can we talk about gold farmers as “below the line” workers in the digital entertainment industry?  They make the “play” of other more privileged people more easy and fun, they do the boring stuff that needs to get done to make the game accessible to busy Americans and even busy Asians who want to play at a high level but don’t have time to earn all this gold, and they are despised as a workforce for these very reasons.  Are they Mechanical Turks?  To free associate a bit, the Turk was an Oriental–exotic, inscrutable, and tricky.  Chinese gold farmers are so marginalized, they are pallet-sharing, bleary eyed information workers a world away whose work is always viewed as harmful and antisocial in world of warcraft, yet their labor is essential; 20% of players have bought gold, and they are tolerated because Blizzard knows that without them many players would drop out in frustration (Mia Consalvo’s book _Cheating_, MIT Press, discusses this strategy–game manufacturers often leak cheat codes and tolerate farmers because otherwise new players would get too frustrated and stop being good customers.)

I wrote a paper about this which will appear in a communication studies journal.  I’m posting it here because the journal is a paper journal and isn’t out yet. I wrote this article almost exactly a year ago, and I thank Difference Engine’s editors for letting me post it here so that people can read it. Any feedback welcome, as always.

WordPress doesn’t like my attachment, so I’m having to link it: click Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft to get the pdf.