User:Bohye Woo/4th Thesis outline

Topic

Free labour in the context of data colonialism

Question

What has been inherited in Korean working culture from Japanese colonialism, and how has this been transformed to a digital space? Through unpacking the inherited digital colonialism, free labour is produced — how can we make it palpable?

Introduction

Background + Thesis statement

According to The Korea Herald, S. Koreans are known to be among the World's worst workaholics, ranking second in the OECD in terms of working hours in 2014. Many people work over-hours in the evening or even till early in the morning without getting properly considered to be paid. This is happening because of S. Korea's age hierarchy, work productivity, and forceful culture that is inherited from the early 20th century where S. Korea was colonized by Japan.(The Korean Herald, 2015)

As a Millennial, who was born and raised with digital technology in S. Korea, I see the culture of working hard is happening in the digital platform too. Since my parents bought a big bulky computer with a Window 98 installed, I started having a basic but hardcore computer course where I learned how to type keyboard and search on the web at school. As time goes by, the Internet has become an easiest platform to join, search, play and became a place of comfort. Eventually, Internet experiences such as scrolling down the Internet, joining a community by creating an account, uploading photos on online community, cilcking 'accept' button on privacy policy settings, facing with Internet advertisements come as naturally to me as breathing.

However it seems that as the possibilities of technology increase, so does our digital workability on it. The Internet become our 24/7 workplace, and we became a digital worker from what we carried out because the above-mentioned activities with the help of human labour creates new products that generate different range of values. It become sellable sources in which we voluntarily worked by providing data in the form of labour. Eventually, those activities are considered to be a work that is invisible, appropriated, copied, uncared, influenced, piggybacked, borrowed, leaked, silenced, reproduced and exploited.

What is considered to be a free work? Did we agree on this work? Where has our contract been made? Are we a digital volunteer, a worker, a proletariat or a slave? As a Millennial generation, how should we look at free digital labour in the specific context of colonial era in S. Korea? What has been inherited in Korean working culture from Japanese colonialism, and how has this been transformed to a digital space? Through unpacking, inherited digital colonialism arises and digital free labour is produced — how can we create a sense of urgency?

I also want to mention a general labour exploitation in digital and saying I'm focusing on only hidden labour in data colonialism on this thesis.

Body

Chapter 1: How did free labour arise in its cultural context?

1. Point A: South Korean labour — they work a lot

Koreans work a lot: According to The Korea Herald, S. Koreans are known to be among the World's worst workaholics, ranking second in the OECD in terms of working hours in 2014. (The Korean Herald, 2015) Male workers in manufacturing industry are allowed 24.10 overtime work hours while non-manufacturing workers get 10.90 hours. Public sector can work 11.06 hours overtime, while private sector workers are allowed 16.06 hours. (Bae, 2014)

1st reference for working overtime in S. Korea: A Korean concept of human affection, in Korean '정(jeong)' in Korea where people share product/work for free.

2. Point B: Korean work ethics is all about age hierarchy, work productivity, and forceful culture.

Age hierarchy: In general, Korean society is based on age hierarchy that older people get more respect, money and pretty much get their way. The same is true when it comes to the work environment. Age matters more than skill (however this is slowly changing). If you are younger, you are considered the lowest in the pecking order. Everyone follows the oldest person, who is usually the top dog. Hence it hinders productivity.(Hogan, 2017)

Forceful working culture: South Korea’s work culture is notorious for its rigid hierarchy, forceful, demand for obedience and loyalty, and work hours which sometimes lead employees to gwarosa — death by overworking.(Park, 2017)

Work productivity': Respecting a strict hierarchy is seen as a way to complete tasks more quickly, but critics say it leads to inefficiency at work by hindering younger employees from directly contributing to the achievements of a business.(Shin, 2018) (a) A Korean concept of '노동요(work song)': a piece of music/song work sing while conducting a task to make work effective. (b) Free labour as a model of volunteerism — A Korean concept of free labour called '품앗이(Pumasi)', a traditional form of communal labor in Korean agricultural society.

3. Point C: Over-working hour culture came from the Japanese colonial times as well as military regime period.
To understand why there is S. Korean free labours culture, we need to go back to the history of S. Korea in the early 20th century.

Relation to the Japanese colonial times: A culture of hierarchy and high pressure to work long hours is coming from the uniquely hierarchy-driven work culture that was influenced by the Japanese work values during the colonial period in the early 20th century. (a)There is a concept of 'Myeol-Sa-Bong-Gong(멸사봉공)' as a vestige of Japanese imperialism which means "destroy your personal life and devote yourself for the betterment of your community". The concept encouraged people to safrifice their personal life for the companies they worked for, and such a life was viewed as ideal and even honorable. Today's work culture in S. Korea certainly has traits that were influenced by this concept. (The Korean Herald, 2015) (There are more references such as forceful labour during the colonial era, how their labour was being used, how much they actually worked per day.) (b) During the occupation, Japan took over Korea’s labor and land. Nearly 100,000 Japanese families settled in Korea with land they had been given; they chopped down trees by the millions and planted non-native species, transforming a familiar landscape into something many Koreans didn’t recognize.

Relation to the military regime period: It also came from the military-driven culture that dominated S. Korea under the authoritarian governments of the 60s and 70s. (The Korean Herald, 2015) Since the establishment of the South Korean state in 1948, twelve people have served nineteen terms as president of South Korea. Especially the second president of S. Korea named Park Chung-hee, who followed dictatorship for 16 years (1963 ~ 1979). He was a Japanese collaborator and one-time communist who cynically engineered a path to the top. He was a sinister general who seized power via coup. He suppressed democratic institutions, wielded security services to suppress human rights and altered the constitution to maintain power. (There will be more references such as, how he performed his dictatorship when it comes to using labours.)

4. Chapter 1 Conclusion:
Korean working culture is a toxic legacy of colonialism and militarism from the early 20th century which brought the concept of free labour. This is a remnant of Japanese colonialism and military dictatorship that permeated in our skin, and it persisted for a long time.

Chapter 2: The extend of the history, what has Korean colonialism been inherited into digital? (Coloniality of data extraction)

In chapter 1, I explained what is over-hour working(free labour) culture in S. Korea, where does it originate from by refering Japanese colonial times and Korean military regime in the early 20th century. In this chapter, I will analyze how the specific S. Korean working culture has translated into free digital labour culture by comparing and diverging into some examples. Through the analysis, I will conduct how the dispossession inherent in data relations is resonated through a meticulous analysis on how extraction happened in Korean historical colonialism.

1. Point A: Divergence

Tangibility of labour: The aforementioned concept of free labour in S. Korean culture is a traditional form of labour. This traditional sense of working would be clearly tangible and visible as you may noticed from the chapter 1. If you are working in a shoe factory, the factory is a physical place. You can see the factory, workers, machines, and products. And, there is also agreements on who owns the production which would be a company. In this way, the labour is distinctly explicit on who owns what's produced. However, in digital form of labour, any interaction you have on the Internet tend to be very implicit and invisible. There are no consents on who own the means of production although it can be easily quantified which becomes a data. The data is intangible, and it doesn't belong to you even though it is what you produced. The involvement of this production is very complex, From a digital worker who produces data, to the means of production, to a third party who owns the production without consent, to an advertisment agency who paid for the product to the third party. Therefore eco-system of the Internet is somehow contradictory. The way how labour is being used, a product, and a work itself has different ways and means between traditional and digital sense. How colonialism shapes the way the colonized think of themselves: ruling subjects, claims to power, inlcuding time and space. (Couldry's chapter 3)

'Geographically bounded' to 'technopolitically bounded'/u>: The social structure keeps changing, but idea of colonialism that is being inherited is showing to the digital world in a different form and structure. It's happening not only in Korean online culture, but everywhere in a slightly different form. If historical colonialism expanded by appropriating for exploitation geographical territory and the resources that territorial conquest could bring, data colonialism expands by appropriating for exploitation ever more layers of human life itself.(Couldry, 2019) In the past, colonialism was geographically bounded, like the specific case of the Korean colonial times. However, Digital Colonialism is beyond the geograchical bound. Now it is human bounded, in a bigger scale, it's technopolitically bounded.

2. Point B: Comparison — how the legacy of Korean historical colonialism embodies in the present

(1)Appropriation of human life: Korean historical colonialism appropriated territories and bodies through extreme physical violence = Digital coloniallism appropriated the web(social medias) and human through our information, data, labour, time and life. Raw material = our data.

Historically

Colonisation happened little by little: Before the official Japanese forced occupation, there had been small and big colonial governances many times.
Japan's coercive threat: The Japanese–Korea Treaty of Amity(강화도조약), in 1876, where Korea opened up to Japanese trade, was a inequality treaty made by Japan's coercive threat. However, the treaty ended Korea's status as forced open three Korean ports to Japanese trade, granted extraterritorial rights to Japanese citizens, and was an unequal treaty signed under duress (gunboat diplomacy) of the Ganghwa Island incident(운요호사건) of 1875. As a result of the treaty, Japanese merchants came to Busan, which became the center for foreign trade and commerce. (https://web.archive.org/web/20071031070532/http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200707220222.html)

Chapter 3: How we make free labour visible?

In the chapter 2, I delved into analyzation on how specific Korean working cultue has translated into free labour in digital platform, took a closer look at its pervasiveness in our daily lives, observed what values are produced. We notice that the Internet has a colonialistic exploitation. There are small number of enormous companies control or at least mediate much of the Internet in practice. (Richard Hendricks, 2019) Like Naver(A Korean Google), Melon(The biggiest Korean music streaming site, like Spotify), they control the market for internet access have the technical capability to control us, let us working. Although it’s no secret internet giants like Google collect your data when you visit their sites, everyone is indifferent on hard working and being a netslaves. We're aware of this, but we are still in this platform 24/7. Nobody is forcing us to work, but we're still voluntarily producing our own products. Therefore how can we, as a self-aware digital worker, behave or involve on our own autonomy, labour, work we do, product we produce? Can we make the labour explicitly visible that everyone can regulate themselves? To fight with these platform, what can we do within the system? This chapter will sketch out examples and suggestions on what we can do.

1. Point A: We don't need our autonomy, it's bullshit. We'll try to change from inside.

Using a decentralized platform or not using ceontralized system wouldn't be an optimal solution: it would not be a surprise to see social media users move towards more decentralized alternatives.(Lielacher, 2019) "If we could do it, we could build a completely decentralized version of our current internet," Hendricks says. "With no firewalls, no tolls, no government regulation, no spying. Information would be totally free in every sense of the word." In theory it's ideal, however, it's difficult where a small number of enormous companies control or at least mediate much of the Internet in practice. (Richard Hendricks, 2019) In addition, convincing people to use decentralized alternatives to Facebook and Twitter has proven to be a notoriously difficult problem. Getting people to use what amounts to a whole new version of the web could be even harder.

Post Maxist idea: The benefits of decentralized platforms include censorship-resistance, personal data, ownership, improved content curation, less/no ads, and new content monetization models.(Lielacher, 2019). However, desipte these obvious benefits, there are some difficulties on being in this network — hardship on building a community(social network). Majority of people join centralized network because it holds already many users and informations to share. Then, how can we still stay in the centralized network as it seems we do care more a social community building than autonomy?

Transparency and accountability: There are many internet browser extension on keeping our privacy and transparency. (1)Time tracker for facebook by Tim Coy: This extension tracks how much time you have wasted on facebook. (2) Ghostery – Privacy Ad Blocker, offered by: https://www.ghostery.com to block ads, stop trackers. (3)privacy-protecting feature: theTracking Blocker by Disconnect.me. The Tracking Blocker is a built-in extension which prevents invisible trackers from monitoring your online activity. (+ Quantified self, We should have data dignity: How to have data dignity?)

2. Point B: Forensicating the place of origin to find out the cause of the problem

However, will those given semi-utopian solution helps our labour visible? We should realize its provenance and where it starts from. Maybe also talk about the privacy settings and agreements as a starting point where our free labour is contracted. Making a new account on social media, searching platform, creating email accounts, signing up Youtube etc...

Cookie privacy policy terms: When did we consent to the free labour? When did we make a contract on my job and working hours? Anytime we're on a site using one its hidden services, those companies give itself permission to collect our data. Even if we've never agreed to their terms and conditions, their polities allow it to collect and store our data. It’s virtually impossible to avoid using company's services if we want to use the web—something the company deliberately obscures to hire people to join the forcefully produced labour farm. The agreements are made in a very sneaky way. Therefore we shouldn't deny the fact that we're bilnd on the way your contract is signed.

Google Surveillance Detector: It is a browser extention that shows you whenever Google is monitoring you online. Unlike Google’s services, this extension doesn’t save, collect, or report any data. In fact, 80% of all the sites you visit on the internet have Google services running in the background, collecting your data and sending it back to Google. However, it's not a secret anymore that those giant companies indirectly push you working, gathering the products we produced. What if we don't want to sit and just watch it happening? Those big companies claim that we can choose to stop working whenever we want. Google always said "Google is free". Contradictorily, Google is NOT free. The company took in almost $30 billion in revenue and kept nearly $18.9 billion in profits last year, almost all of it from advertising. (Fair search, 2011)

Conclusion

Clear conclusion needs to be made!