Are you part of the "free labor pool"?

[Madeliefste Oh]

A few days ago I received a message from the SL Business Mailing list. The message is not written by LL, but by a third party (Sitearm). Basicly the mail is a lobby to get more RL business interested to participate in SL. It sums up the advantages of SL for RL business. Among them are some expressed in the following paragraph:

"Another factor is that Linden Lab seems to have gotten Second Life technology done right. That is, with the appropriate balance of performance versus resource demand necessary to run the product on a normal computer and be connected in a 24.7 “cloud” world. Competitors have yet to develop a working alternative that comes close to the Second Life server engine and thin client technology combination. And, lord knows, competitors are trying. Linden Lab also has developer tools built into the public Second Life package for free use by all. This means that, while LL provides the platform, residents provide the content. And there are a lot of residents; skilled, savvy, and creative. No 3D Web competitor with a proprietary developer kit can compete – the cost to try to privately clone SL’s “free labor pool” is out of reach."

(for the whole message see: Sitearm blog)

So that is how we are promoted to RL businesses, as a free labor pool. How do you as a content creator of SL look upon this?

 

[Kolby Nissondorf]

Yeah, im not part of any free labor pool for anyone. If thats really how they want to market companies into coming to second life, then I would go anywhere near those companies coming in, expecting 'free' labor from us, who are hard working SL citizens

[Wilhiam Hydraconis]

Er zit een fout in je link, Madeliefste.

[Josh Susanto]

It's free labor if you don't find a way to make it pay, but that's not really LL's problem.

As a person with a university education, I was able to take RL jobs that required a degree, but none of them paid enough to allow me to get ahead of my student loans, so I was basically subsidizing my RL employers by providing them with a skill level for which they were not willing to pay the production costs.

That's the current labor model for most US companies in RL, so to have them looking for something similar in SL is hardly a surprise. The SL user pool is complex, so there's bound to be a lot of people needlessly opting into an inevitable net loss scenario, as also occurs with Amway and other companies with similar structures.

But the quasi-pyramidal analogy ends there, really. LL doesn't aggressively tell users that SL is essentially an easy way for them to get rich. LL merely claims that SL is entertaining and also provides possible opportunities to make some money for those who choose to give it a try.

LL isn't forcing users to create anything, and, in fact provides a huge entertainment value at potentially zero direct profit to LL for any number of new users.

It's an emergent philosophical problem for modern program developers to make things more personal, customizable, and more conducive to direct user-user interaction without being perceived as leaving users to do all the important work. I don't think LL is doing all that badly. It costs nothing to export textures and sculpt maps, for example (yet,anyway), or to distribute them to others in-world, who may then export them. Consider the philosophical implications of that, alone, and it should be clear that LL is doing at least a little more for users than sucking up their time, money and skills.

Exporting snapshots is still free, too. Ask an architecture or interior design student whether that has any value, and maybre we'll be more on track in making sense of the "free" labor question.

The pejorative "free labor" interpretation of what happens in SL is less a reflection of the real labor dynamic in SL than of the prevailing parasitic mentality of US companies who are naturally also hungry to suck a little blood out of any possible corner of cyberspace, and who will have to be made to focus on that as a possibility in SL before they will take any interest in SL.

Again, not really LL's problem...

... unless they want to protect the quality of their product from the corrupting influence of RL American business culture.

Do they?

[Eloise Baily]

Personally, I read this differently.

I read it as LL providing the "free labour pool" for creators to dip into. I think they're saying that in order for a competitor to provide that platform, they would have to spend gazillions.

Also, it's a "free labour pool" in that you have all your designers and creators and graphic artists sitting there waiting to be poached by companies who want that kinda thing. Nice to have them all in one "pool" donchya think?

 

[WADE1 Jya]

Many people do jump at the chance to work for free, it is a scary part of human condition. Just look at Amazon Turk for a good example of how people get very excited to do menial labor for token amounts (pennies).... essentially working for free!

In SL, nobody buys or sells crowdsourced stuff that I know of?

I imagine for content creation the quality would be horribly sub-par....

Creations stemming from such exploitation would have no heart, no soul.

However, I think it is misunderstood to think this is the type of free labor Sitearm is speaking of... Skilled content creators in SL are generally smarter than to fall for hollow crowdsourcing tactics. In SL, "free labor" works different than you might expect.

What Sitearm is saying (I think) is that if a company was to try to employ all of us content creators (or an equivelent team) it is unaffordable, so not having to pay us as employees.... this is an enormous advantage to Linden Lab and a strength to Second Life as a platform -- the wealth of "free" content & developers working "for free" can't be beat... basically Linden Lab doesn't have to pay us to get content onto their platform, the market decides who among us gets paid. For the best merchants it's a mutally beneficial synergy, a true win-win.

[Eloise Baily]

Yep Wade. That's kinda what I was trying to say only you said it so much better.

[Rolig Loon]

Exactly.  As a content creator in SL, I am self-employed but I could just as easily be a contract employee for some RL business who wants to set up in SL but not hire a full-time workforce. I get to choose who I work for, if anyone. 

The only real inequity is that if I wanted to do the same work in RL that I do in SL, I'd expect to get paid a LOT more. I'm doing well if I get paid $L3,000 for an hour's worth of scripting in SL, but a scripter in RL is going to be paid at least three times that.  A RL business that hires scripters at typical SL rates is like Wal-Mart buying clothing manufactured in Bangladesh.

I could get upset about that, but I'm basically here to enjoy myself, not to earn a living.  Besides, as I said, I get to choose who I work for, if anyone. :smileyhappy:

[Sitearm Madonna]

Madeliefste; Hi! You make a good point. I should add to my post, "And the cost to try to privately clone SL's paid labor pool is also out of reach."

In my paragraph that you quote, "free labor pool" refers to the people who, over the last 7 years and counting, have built the many beautiful sims, operated the many entertainment venues, and provided the many generous freebies to residents for no charge. These people contribute their work pro bono, for their own reasons, and it makes Second Life a better and more attractive place for all.

Merchants are obviously a paid labor pool. Their skills are another advantage of Second Life for anyone considering using 3D Web. Their products are aesthetic and sophisticated and worth their price.

Many residents are members of both labor pools - charging for some of the work they do and donating other work for free.

Cheers!
Site

PS mailing lists for all residents, to subscribe and post to, are listed at https://lists.secondlife.com/

[Knowl Paine]

I think it's good news. The possibilities are endless. The desire to participate is inherent, the so titled "free labor" is never entirely free and this pool is open to all, anyone can swim.

Lead, follow or get out of the way.

 

 

[Suella Ember]

Yeah - I think Wade has pretty much got it right.

It's no biggie and I don't take offence to it. For a start they put "free labor pool" in quotes making it a "for want of a better phrase" statement rather than a statement of fact. In the absence of a better phrase to describe content creators, it's pretty much spot on and it's not actually a bad thing.

They are saying that the relative ease of content creation in SL and the fact the users basically create the world "for free" is what has always given SL the edge over it's major competitors. Which is pretty much true. Users create the world rather than LL having to spend money creating the world or it being restricted in some way, for which we should all be grateful!

I think actually, their closing comment is very important too - "the cost to privately clone SL's "free labor pool" is out of reach". This has been the main problem competitors face and will continue to face. They can clone the functionality of SL but to clone it's "free labor pool" (i.e. it's large amount of content creators) is a lot more difficult. Other worlds do get some content creators but they are going to really have to offer some major advantage over SL to entice the same numbers as SL has. In other words, they'd have to spend some serious amount of money to create that advantage.

ETA: Doh! Just realised Sitearm has responded to this effect! lol

[Josh Susanto]

I used to rent RL apartments and put my own furniture into them.

But thanks to what has been pointed out to me in the article, I now realize that spending my own time shopping for furniture I'm just going to put into a rented apartment made me part of a "free labor pool" utilized by rental property owners everywhere.

Damn!

[Sassy Dirval]

That is perhaps the most poorly written B2B recruitment letter I have ever read.   While LL does not pay for development of the GRID, the ability to profit in world is driven by an entrepreneurial sprit and sweat equity.  Painting those individuals as a mindless free-labor pool spits in the face of the case they are trying to build.

 

Maybe they used "free labor" to write their direct marketing.

 

 

[Josh Susanto]

>Maybe the used "free labor" to write their direct marketing.

Maybe they used someone they wouldn't hire without a degree, and paid them not enough to justify the cost of getting the degree?

Close enough.

It's always better to hang a man with his own rope, but it's even better if you can make him think it was his own idea.

[Rolig Loon]

Yes, the wording could have been polished a bit more.  The writer of the piece admitted as much when she posted a reply earlier in this thread.  Most of us who responded to the OP, however, have not been overly upset by it.  It's fairly clear that the intent was not to say that we're slave labor ready to work for free, but that we have created this world as independent artisans, not employees of LL. I trust that the writer will take the comments in this thread to heart and make that even more obvious in her revisions.