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Title:
NetSlaves
Review:
Netslaves are the exploited, badly paid, ill treated and sometimes
deceived workers on the Internet. Presumably there are equivalent
slaves in many other industries, and always have been, but the rosy
picture of the Internet painted by the media may have led one to
think that there were only winners on the Web.
At least that was the picture of the Internet a few months ago.
Now, members of the same media are falling over themselves to tell
us that everything has changed, that the dotcom millionaire, who
reigned for an even shorter time than the Yuppie, is dead. Events
that have occurred since the publication of the book allow one to
ask who was doing the deceiving.
But the writers of the book do point out that the victims of the
exploitation are often guilty of naivete and of not doing enough
research. The investors who ploughed money into lemons are similarly
guilty. In the two page afterword, the most sustained piece of
analysis in the whole book, they also point out that the book itself
is an alpha release of a story which is still in its early chapters.
There is even a half paragraph about how well some people can do
working on the Net, if they do their research first. And throughout
the book the Internet is shown to be the hub of one segment of human
activity. But it is human nature that is the problem. Far from
being the enemy, the Internet itself is seen as part of the solution
by a number of the slaves who decide to fight back.
In fact, given that the writers started their research several years
ago, their project shows great prescience. While many were trying to
get on the bandwagon, they were already standing back and asking if
the Internet was really a universal panacea, a place where there were
none of the traditional hierarchies, where anyone could be the boss
and everyone would make money.
Far from there being no hierarchy, Lessard and Baldwin set out the
structure of a caste system which they find on the Internet, where
people have a set place in a hierarchy and little or no chance of
rising unless prepared to resort to unscrupulous means. Ironic.
We are given a case study of a representative of each of the ten
castes they identify and the subject of almost every one of these
case studies comes a cropper. But another irony is that almost all
of them return to the Internet. Perhaps it's as hard to get out of
the cast system altogether as it is to move to a different caste.
I look forward to reading an update to Netslaves in the near future.
Free Pint Reviewer:
Simon Collery has been involved in editorial and research work for
the electronic media for a number of years, working for AND Data
Solutions, Oxford, and the Oxford English Dictionary Project. One of
his primary interests is the use of the Internet as a serious
research tool and a source of free, reliable information and software.
He enjoys pursuing this interest, and others, working full-time on
content development as a member of the Free Pint team.
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