In contributing to the discussion on Second Life and the politics of virtual labor I’d like to report on a hybrid reality, social networking project I recently exhibited / performed at the Sundance Film Festival with Jeff Crouse, Senior Research Fellow at Eyebeam in NYC. The project titled “Invisible Threads” explores the growing intersection between labor, emerging virtual economies and real life commodities through the creation of a designer jeans “sweatshop” in Second Life (SL). The factory virtually manufactures designer jeans that are “teleported” into the real world upon completion and worn by real live people. Simulating an actual textile facility, machines include Jaquard weaving looms, dye vats, laser fabric cutters, industrial sewing machines and quality control. SL citizens hired through job recruitment ads placed in the SL classifieds operate the various machines as well as serve as floor managers and security.

I’ll first give an overview of how the project works and then I’ll divulge into the nitty-gritty of being a menacing, virtual factory manager.

For Sundance, we set up a temporary store at the New Frontier on Main Street – Double Happiness Jeans. Designer jean styles include “No Pants Left Behind”, “MyPants”, “LowRider” and “Casual Friday” in either boot cut, skinny leg, relaxed or classic. Customers place their jean orders via streaming audio and video into the virtual factory. SL workers watch the stream projected on a wall of the factory Orwellian style. In an assembly line fashion, the first worker starts the production process that involves loading cotton bales into the Jaquard loom. Once the fabric is made it moves down the assembly line through each machine. Each worker stationed at a machine is responsible for selecting the correct option based on the customer’s order, men’s or women’s size for example. The worker also has a limited time to press the correct button otherwise the assembly line stops and the order has to start over. At the end of the production process, the jeans go through the SL to real life (RL) “portal” resulting in an output from a large format printer.

Customers at Sundance were able to watch the entire production process on a large flat screen installed in the physical space. Once in the real world, the jeans require simple assembly before being worn. Using what we call the pizza roller cutter, the jeans printed on a cotton canvas are quickly cut out and glue gunned together with stitched reinforcement on the crotch. (After many adhesive tests and many noxious fumes we found the glue gun to be the best and safest adhesive. Yet after sitting around in the jeans the glue became heated in the crotch area – need I elaborate further!)

So what was it like to run a designer jeans sweatshop amongst the stars? Well aside from the cheap thrill of having Robert Redford join my social network by signing my “MyPants”, the project raises some serious questions about the current cultural production of play and its relationship to outsourced, virtual labor. The project is based on research in motion economics, Taylorism and current goldfarming / virtual sweatshops.

In case you aren’t familiar with goldfarming, for over the past five years, virtual sweatshops have been springing up all over the developing world. These makeshift sweatshops, usually a small shop or apartment with dormitory-style housing, employ predominantly migrant workers and single mothers to work 12-16 hour shifts or more “playing” games. The job involves either digging/farming for virtual gold and other assets or leveling-up characters (power leveling). The virtual assets and avatars are then sold online for real world currency with the sweatshop entrepreneurs raking in the cash (a good resource on the topic and model of distributed filmmaking http://www.chinesegoldfarmers.com and of course Julian Dibbell).

The role of play and use of game-based models in the workforce has become incredibly pervasive as exemplified in corporate culture (www.seriosity.com, www.thegogame.com), education (www.instituteofplay.org) and advertising (Chevron’s “Energyville” - http://www.willyoujoinus.com/energyville). As Deleuze states in “Society of Control”, society has evolved into a “school of perpetual training” where the educational system feeds the corporation and what better way than through the use of play and games.

We chose Second Life as our medium to explore the conflation of leisure / entertainment and labor within the context of play and game- based models. Second Life obviously does not follow a traditional game model. Although educational institutions are starting to populate the world for online training and archiving purposes (which I am not dismissing), SL is ultimately about consumption and simulating upward mobility. You can have your dream mansion, look like Anna Nicole in her good days and drive a slick hovercraft.

Throughout the project we learned a lot about our workers. In the early job interview phase, we asked workers why they wanted to work in our factory and what expectations they had. Common jobs in SL are either camping where you sit in one spot for a period of time to gain Lindens (SL money) or escort services that are very similar to real world adult entertainment. (If one has building or scripting skills, more money can be made but for now I’ll just focused on unskilled labor.) Almost all of the workers had tried the other jobs and wanted a “decent” job in their second life. Most treat their second life with the respect and dignity of their first life – they want a good job in order to live a good life with nice things in SL. Several had previous factory experience! Over several days of training sessions and throughout the work days at Sundance workers developed camaraderie, similar to what happens at RL jobs where you interact with the same people on a day-to-day basis. A similar camaraderie and the experience of fun on the job have also been noted in the world of the goldfarmers.

So how is our factory a sweatshop and furthermore, how do you create the embodied, visceral conditions of a sweatshop in a synthetic world? For the goldfarmers, the general worker demographic, the amount of hours worked, the dormitory-style living conditions and the pay (slightly more than agricultural work) closely resembles the scenario of many real world sweatshops. Plus we must consider the actual job tasks involved. Digging for gold and slaying virtual tigers for up to 16 hours a day is a very repetitive task that does not involve a steep learning curve. And I’m sure most people on this list are familiar with repetitive stress injuries such as Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and other neck and back strain incurred from prolonged computer use. Goldfarmers receive no health benefits either. At least not to my knowledge.

In our “sweatshop”, workers received 200 Lindens an hour, about $.80 USD depending on the daily exchange rate, for basically pushing a button. Workers also received a 500 m2 parcel of virtual land in front of the factory on Eyebeam Island that they can use for up to six months (TBD). This is about enough land for a medium size house and small yard. We set up the parcels with small shack-like housing to see how the factory village would evolve over the next few months. Some workers have chosen to keep the shacks while others have modified them to resemble more upscale dwellings or completely fantastical habitats. If we view this within the economy of SL, their lifestyle and salary could be considered blue collar to middle class. The worker could afford clothes (a pair of designer-like jeans in SL averages about 150 Lindens) and could work towards owning a small home but could not afford to own virtual property, the ultimate commodity in SL. Yet if we extend the virtual workers economics into the real world, they obviously couldn’t afford to live in the first world.

I realize our project is highly symbolic. Workers did not work full- time or overtime and worked from the comfort of their own homes. For the visitors/customers at Sundance, most not at all familiar with art and technology work or Second Life, the project got them thinking about how our products get made and about new models of production – telematic labor and a global, virtual workforce. Since the project resembled a retail store / kiosk, visitors were initially drawn to the crazy jeans hanging on our clothing racks. Everything you find on a real pair of jeans (pockets, belt loops, zippers) is printed onto the fabric but in exaggerated form becoming a characterization of the latest jeans styles – rips with knees sticking out, overly acid rinses (complete environmental hazard btw), the MyPants social networking jeans, the LowRider with boxers hanging out and a Double Happiness/Tommy Hilfiger logo (don’t worry Trebor we saved a pair for you). The jean prices were in both Linden dollars and US currency to show the relationship between the price of jeans and the workers’ wages. It was also interesting to hear feedback from visitors who had seen Alex Rivera’s film debuting at Sundance called “Sleep Dealers” that is also focused on telematic labor (and won 2 awards, yeah!).

What at first was the role of a retail sales person during the holiday season answering questions about size and fit evolved into a platform for discussing these critical issues with the general public (and many super smart kids!).

Although I could probably continue talking about the project for another 10 pages of email because it resonates on so many levels I’ll stop here. Our future plans include a potential showing at Fashion Week which I feel would be the ultimate success of our mission (if you have any contacts in the industry please send them our way) and an iteration that functions similar to mechanical turk is also on the table. Being good guys playing the role of bad guys has also made us think about ways to advocate for virtual workers rights, an issue Edward Castronova has been blogging about (http://terranova.blogs.com). I would also like to post / publish more about the project, specifically conversations with our virtual workers – job recruitment interviews, worker expectations, feedback on working in the factory. Maybe a virtual Studs Turkel’s “Working”.

And last but not least, I welcome your feedback on the project and thoughts/comments on any of the issues I’ve attempted to tackle. I’d be happy to share my resources/delicious links. More info about the project including press links is available on the project site along with SLurl: www.doublehappinessjeans.com

Visit the factory in SL: Eyebeam Island 204/43/27

My own site is www.pan-o-matic.com and my not-so-updated blog with related projects is at www.pan-o-matic.com/blog

Jeff Crouse’s work located at http://www.jeffcrouse.info (aka Supreme Hoodoo)

Look forward to continuing the discussion…

Cheers,

Stephanie Rothenberg
(aka Doctor Rodenberger)

Scott Kildall wrote:

Hi Stephanie,

Thanks for sharing the details of the project. This certainly articulates many of the odd aspects of the Second Life economy.

One thing that is particularly compelling about your virtual sweatshop is the co-operative element. Most of the other jobs in SL are solo operations: camping, dancing platforms or else services with a client: building objects, escorts, etc.

I was just on a panel called “Real World Implications of Virtual Economies” at the Floating Points symposium through Emerson College and Turbulence. This was following the Mixed Realities exhibition.

At the symposium, we discussed many facets of the economies of both Second Life and World of Warcraft. Some key differences arise.

In the practice of Goldfarming, the workers are often in countries in parts of Asia. Usually young men around 18 or 19 years old who are living onsite in dorm rooms with bunk beds and by day working 14+ hours to generate profits for their company and generating goods in the form of virtual characters for westerners. It mirrors the sweatshop labor practices in many ways — though diverges from them in a few.

For the Mixed Realities exhibition, Victoria Scott and myself showed a new work called No Matter which transforms imaginary objects (e.g. the Holy Grail, Time Machine, Schrodinger’s Cat) through Second Life and into the real world as paper replicas (thanks to OGLE by Eyebeam).

The critical component of this project is a study of the economy of Second Life: we paid builders and artists to make these objects for them and tracked the wages we paid them. What resulted are things such as a unique object of the Trojan Horse that cost us $12.00 to have built (over 25 hours of labor). In the process of working with people in SL, we gained a deep understanding of the economy.

One divergent factor is that virtual labor in SL (we also talked to campers, dancers, etc.) operates from developed countries. The sweatshop practices can mimic RL practices but without the real economic need, they are gesture rather than impact.

In reality, the wages garnered in SL are less than minimum wage for the people using it. In many cases, users probably spend more on their power bill than the wages earned.

The question then is why?

A certain psychology of desire is often at operation. Many users don’t want to transfer money in from their credit card — even though this would be the sensible decision. So they try to earn Lindens. Probably all of us in Second Life are irrational consumers but it still baffles me to see irrational producers.

The other thing that we discovered when working with the builders is while some of them were building objects for us to earn Linden dollars to buy goods for their avatars, many felt a connection with the No Matter project. They wanted to contribute to the final artwork. The amount they made served as a token of their time.

I also recall a conversation I had with someone in SL about a year ago. She wanted to do escorting in SL because of the novelty of it: the fact that you could try something like this without any consequences since there is no physical act and no social stigma (since most people on SL keep their identity private). From your description, it seems as if the desire to work in a virtual sweatshop as a project is part of it — and the fact that at the end of it, you can just quit Second Life and the virtual factory disappears.

Best,

Scott Kildall

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