LECTURE AND DISCUSSION:»AMAZON.COM EMPIRE«

Google, Facebook, Amazon and eBay reveal to us the current level of corporate adaptation and intelligence in the world of digital networks. They design, run and maintain some of the todays most essential communication infrastructures, they create rules governing users’ access to data and services, while appropriating counter-cultural values and identities.

By introducing the scope and scale of Amazon.com Trebor Scholz and Marcell Mars will start the discussion on the new mode of social production facilitated by new capitalist imperatives and which has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between play, consumption and production, life and work, labor and non-labor.
They will explore the violence of participation and ask how economic value is generated in the actual rather than speculative economy of the Internet. How does the intertwining of labor and play complicate our understanding of exploitation? What are the flows or discontinuities between traditional and new forms of labor: between homework and care giving or tagging, and interactivity on social networking services?.

Trebor Scholz is Associate Professor for Culture and Media at The New School in New York City. His research areas range from digital labor, and global media activism, to digital learning. His work is positioned to analyze the limitations and potentialities of emerging digital media. Scholz co-authored the book From Mobile Playgrounds to Sweatshop City (with Laura Y Liu) and his manuscript on digital labor will be published in 2014. He is the editor of two collections of essays, Digital Labor (Routledge, 2013) and Learning Through Digital Media. He co-edited nine books in the Situated Technologies series and convened seven major conferences, including The Internet as Playground and Factory (http://digitallabor.org/) and MobilityShifts (http://mobilityshifts.org). Scholz is a frequent speaker at venues worldwide.

Nenad Romic aka Marcell Mars studied psychology at the University of Zagreb and did a professional training program in psychology and psychotherapy. Furthermore, he works with Gentoo Linux and programming. After his graduation, he worked as programmer, curator, and organizer as well as in the cultural and artistic field. He organized several workshops like Programming for Non-Programmers, Zagreb (2007/2008); Wonder of Technology at the Faculty of Media and Communication, Belgrade/Croatia (2010). Nenad Romic aka Marcell Mars also worked as the organizer of numerous exhibitions and participated in collaborative artistic projects. He is one of the founders of Media Institute, a non-governmental organization that focuses on a new media culture and technology, activism, social theory and networking.