PasqualeQuantif ying Love
Frank Pasquale
the most successful Internet companies, it seems, all learned
the lesson of Tom Sawyer. By outsourcing labor to their users, it
is as if they have cordially invited friends and neighbors to delight
in painting their fence. Instagram does not need to hire photogra-
phers; users snap, post, and comment on photos, and their hashtags
are a filing system, a taxonomy as meticulously curated as a filing
cabinet. Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, relies on all of us
to keep each other amused, as does the Chinese platform Weibo.
Even Google, Amazon, and Alibaba, operating far afield from social
media, rely on combined consumers and producers (“prosumers”) to
let them know when their algorithms are helpful. They also allow
customers to police the quality of products and websites so that
they don’t have to pay someone to do that work. Airbnb, Uber, and
eBay apply similar methods, shifting the burden of quality control
by having both sides in commercial transactions rate one another.
We all give up small treasures—our data—to paint the fence of
platform capitalists.