Goldfarmer Goldfarmer: Time and the Deadbeat Escapements of Writing

1. Goldfarmer Goldfarmer: Time and the Deadbeat Escapements of Writing • Mike Edwards • @preterite • mike.edwards@wsu.edu

2. worker • time • labor • capital • worker

3. worker • time • labor • capital • worker

4. goldfarming: • the exchanges of virtual goods and services in multiplayer online role-playing games

5. 2003: $1.5 billion • 2007: $8.5 billion • 2009: $12.6 billion • 2012: $21.2 billion • (Lehdonvirta & Ernkvist, World Bank)

7. 60+ hours per week$2.70 per hour

8. 60+ hours per week$2.70 per hour

10. 1865–1867 • Irish railroad laborers:$30/month, board included • Chinese railroad laborers:$31/month, board not included

11. Leland Stanford on Chinese railroad workers: “More prudent and economical,they are contented with less wages.”

12. August 1853: 13 passengers are killedin the first major train collision in the United States.

13. worker • time • labor • capital • worker

14. Time as discrete commodity and measure Time as continuous analog experience

16. Lewis Mumford: “The clock, not the steam engine, is the key-machineof the modern industrial age.”

17. The digital exists in discontinuous quanta of information.

18. 1873: The Seth Thomas Company built the railroad clockthat still sits at the heart of Grand Central Terminal.

19. 12 noon, November 18, 1883: Standard Railway Timewas adopted across the United States.

20. Today: The processes in every computer chipare driven by an oscillator clock putting out 1s and 0s.

21. Dowling, Carolyn. “Word Processing and the Ongoing Difficulty of Writing.” Computers and Composition 11.3 (1994), 227–235.

22. Section 20 of United States Code Part 600.2concerning Institutional Eligibility of the Higher Education Act of 1965: “a credit hour is an amount of work... that reasonably represents not less than... one hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours of out-of-class student work each week for approximately fifteen weeks for one semester... of credit.”

23. Marx: “Moments are the elements of profit.”

24. Machinery both (1) raises productivity of labor and (2) as a repository of capital operates as ameans of lengthening the working day.

25. worker • time • labor • capital • worker

26. Labor power as contracted, time-metered commodity Labor input as experiential activity of work

27. Marx: “In the labour process..., man’s activity, via the instruments of labour, effects an alteration in the object of labour... The process is extinguished in the product. Labour has become bound up in its object.”

28. In capitalist production,labor power as the digitized commodity is fused to machines and sobecomes an aspect of the circuits of capital.

29. land, labor, capital digital devices, digital labor, immaterial capital

30. production, distribution, use, re-production

31. worker • time • labor • capital • worker

32. capital as technological object in which labor is frozen capital as process of increasing surplus value

33. fusing labor to capital

34. worker • time • labor • capital • worker

35. Marx: how colonialism and its effects work tospread Western capitalism’s frontiers of domination

36. We are the goldfarmers.

37. in digitizing our time,we are self-exploiting

38. http://bit.ly/cw2014edwards @preterite mike.edwards@wsu.edu