Coursera, the fast-growing, for-profit online education company, has become, as the Wall Street Journal put it, “an investor’s pet.” It has pulled in $85 million in venture funding over the last two years, attracting big-name investors like Kleiner Perkins and the World Bank’s VC arm, LearnCapital.

Those millions aren’t enough, apparently, to pay translators to help the company extend its online courses, or MOOCs, into foreign markets. Instead, Coursera is taking the digital sharecropping route. It announced this week that it is recruiting skilled translators and asking them to donate their work to the company for free. What the volunteers receive, in lieu of income, is the satisfaction of being a member of Coursera’s “community.” Translation, says the company, is “much more than a means to an end. By joining the GTC [Global Translator Community], you’ll become a member of a tight-knit community of committed individuals and organizations.”

You’ll also sign a contract stating that

YOU EXPRESSLY AGREE THAT ANY TRANSLATION SERVICES YOU PROVIDE WILL BE  DEEMED A “WORK FOR HIRE,” UNDER SECTION 101 OF THE U.S. COPYRIGHT ACT, IN EXCHANGE FOR GOOD AND VALUABLE CONSIDERATION, THE SUFFICIENCY OF WHICH IS ACKNOWLEDGED.

 The work-for-hire provision of the copyright act transfers copyright ownership immediately and irrevocably from the author of a work to the company contracting for the work. Just in case there’s any gray area about the translator’s work-for-hire status, there’s also this clause: 

IF, AND TO THE EXTENT UNDER APPLICABLE LAW, YOU MAY BE  ENTITLED TO CLAIM OWNERSHIP OVER ANY PART OF THE TRANSLATIONS, THEN YOU HEREBY TRANSFER, GRANT, CONVEY, ASSIGN, AND RELINQUISH EXCLUSIVITY TO COURSERA ALL OF YOUR RIGHT, TITLE, AND INTEREST IN AND TO THE TRANSLATIONS PURSUANT TO COPYRIGHT OR ANY OTHER APPLICABLE LAW IN PERPETUITY OR FOR THE LONGEST PERIOD OTHERWISE PERMITTED BY LAW.

Of course, the translator will receive “good and value consideration” — i.e., membership in the GTC. It’s charity without the charity.

Geoff Shullenberger puts the program into perspective:

We should not be surprised, but should be troubled, that Coursera is now recruiting “volunteers” to “translate top courses into their native languages.”  Yes, that’s right, a for-profit company, instead of hiring and paying professional translators, is using the rhetoric of volunteerism (“community,” “partner organizations,” “contributions”) to obtain that labor for free.  ”Why translate” for Coursera?  Because “you are helping millions of learners who may otherwise struggle to understand courses taught outside their native language.” After all, “video subtitle translations can increase course enrollments among speakers of the translated language by up to 200-300%.”  Oh yes, and that increased enrollment increases the value of our company, and we get to pocket 100% of the additional revenue brought in.

Actually, “digital sharecropping” probably isn’t the best term to describe this particular arrangement. It’s one thing for social networks like Facebook and Twitter to build their businesses on the unpaid contributions of their members. The members are simply socializing, after all, and they’re deriving social benefits from their “playbor.” In social networks, as I noted in a 2006 post, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. Translation is not play; it’s work — and skilled work at that. What Coursera is doing seems more like plain old chicanery.

UPDATE: Shullenberger thinks we need a new term: “the voluntariat.” It’s the proletariat but without the wages.

Image: San Jose Library.

“With social media, the compelling opportunities for self-expression outstrip the supply of things we have to confidently say about ourselves,” writes Rob Horning. “The demand for self-expression overwhelms what we might dredge up from ‘inside.'”

My trigger finger is itching to give that a +1.

The struggle with the limits of what’s “inside” — the struggle with the limits of personality — has long been the source of the best art. We tend to characterize art as “self-expression,” but that’s really more a description of bad art. The immature artist, as Eliot wrote, is constantly giving in to the urge to vent what’s inside, whereas the mature artist seeks to escape that urge.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. … The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him “personal.” Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

Social media turns us all into bad poets.

Implicit in Eliot’s argument is, I think, the idea that the self is forever overreaching. Personality wants to expand to fill all available space. Resisting the self’s inclination to artificially inflate what’s inside, and thereby overwhelm what’s inside, has always been hard, but it becomes much harder when the available space for the self is made both explicit and infinite, as happens with social media and other documentary systems of self-expression.

The Dolls, prophetic as always:

Forget information overload. Ours is a time of identity overload. From personality there is no escape. Or, if there is an escape, it lies in deliberately treating the social network as a canvas or a blank page. Eliot again:

The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.

But is it possible to treat Facebook as “only a medium and not a personality”? And if you managed to do so, would you have any friends?

Image: Ted Silveira.

From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables:

“Yes, my dear sir,” said Clifford, “it is my firm belief and hope that these terms of roof and hearth-stone, which have so long been held to embody something sacred, are soon to pass out of men’s daily use, and be forgotten. Just imagine, for a moment, how much of human evil will crumble away, with this one change! What we call real estate — the solid ground to build a house on — is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests. Within the lifetime of the child already born, all this will be done away. The world is growing too ethereal and spiritual to bear these enormities a great while longer. The harbingers of a better era are unmistakable.”

“All a humbug!” growled the old gentleman.

“Then there is electricity, — the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence!” exclaimed Clifford. “Is that a humbug, too? Is it a fact — or have I dreamt it — that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!”

“If you mean the telegraph,” said the old gentleman, glancing his eye toward its wire, alongside the rail-track, “it is an excellent thing, — that is, of course, if the speculators in cotton and politics don’t get possession of it. A great thing, indeed, sir, particularly as regards the detection of bank-robbers and murderers.”

“I don’t quite like it, in that point of view,” replied Clifford. “A bank-robber, and what you call a murderer, likewise, has his rights, which men of enlightened humanity and conscience should regard in so much the more liberal spirit, because the bulk of society is prone to controvert their existence. An almost spiritual medium, like the electric telegraph, should be consecrated to high, deep, joyful, and holy missions. Lovers, day by day — hour by hour, if so often moved to do it, — might send their heart-throbs from Maine to Florida, with some such words as these ‘I love you forever!’ — ‘My heart runs over with love!’ — ‘I love you more than I can!’ and, again, at the next message ‘I have lived an hour longer, and love you twice as much!’ Or, when a good man has departed, his distant friend should be conscious of an electric thrill, as from the world of happy spirits, telling him ‘Your dear friend is in bliss!’ Or, to an absent husband, should come tidings thus ‘An immortal being, of whom you are the father, has this moment come from God!’ and immediately its little voice would seem to have reached so far, and to be echoing in his heart. But for these poor rogues, the bank-robbers, — who, after all, are about as honest as nine people in ten, except that they disregard certain formalities, and prefer to transact business at midnight rather than ‘Change-hours, — and for these murderers, as you phrase it, who are often excusable in the motives of their deed, and deserve to be ranked among public benefactors, if we consider only its result, — for unfortunate individuals like these, I really cannot applaud the enlistment of an immaterial and miraculous power in the universal world-hunt at their heels!”

“You can’t, hey?” cried the old gentleman, with a hard look.

h/t: Lapham’s Quarterly.

From Lance Strate’s trenchant 2008 article “Studying Media as Media“:

McLuhan’s emphasis on media effects has led some of his critics to label his approach as technological determinism. Technological determinism is a straw man used to caricature McLuhan as some sort of media Calvinist, and to dismiss his arguments without serious consideration. After all, most people get upset at the denial of free will, in theory as well as in practice. …

Free will does not mean freedom from limits, constraints, and outside influences. As [technology] diffusion researcher Everett Rogers puts it, innovations have consequences, and while some of the consequences may be desirable, others may be undesirable. And while some consequences may be direct effects of the introduction of a new technology, these in turn may lead to further indirect effects. And while some consequences may be anticipated, there will always be others that are unanticipated. Along the same lines, it may be true that a good part of what we call reality is a social construction, but the construction we end up with is not necessarily one that we intended to build. Moreover, only an intellectual divorced from everyday life could forget that construction begins with raw materials and the tools that shape them. Media are the stuff with which we build our social realities.

Other critics complain that media ecology scholars like McLuhan, Havelock, and Ong put forth a “Great Divide” theory, exaggerating the difference between orality and literacy, for example. And it is true that they see a great divide between orality and literacy. And a great divide between word and image. And a great divide between the alphabet, on the one hand, and pictographic and ideographic writing, on the other. And a great divide between clay tablets as a medium for writing and papyrus. And a great divide between parchment and paper. And a great divide between scribal copying and the printing press. And a great divide between typography and the electronic media. And now a great divide between virtuality and reality. I could continue to add to this list, but the point is that there are many divides, which suggests that no single one of them is all that great after all. The critics miss the point that media ecology scholars often work dialectically, using contrasts to understand media.

Without the drawing of distinctions, everything blurs.

Image: Fabian Mohr.

In his book Social Physics, MIT’s Sandy Pentland argues that the collection of “big data” on people’s associations and behavior offers a way not only to gain a better understanding of society but to engineer society to be more productive, creative, and harmonious. I review the book in the new issue of MIT Technology Review. Here’s a bit from the review:

Even if we assume that the privacy issues can be resolved, the idea of what Pentland calls a “data-driven society” remains problematic. Social physics is a variation on the theory of behavioralism that found favor [in the sixties], and it suffers from the same limitations that doomed its predecessor. Defining social relations as a pattern of stimulus and response makes the math easier, but it ignores the deep, structural sources of social ills. Pentland may be right that our behavior is determined largely by social norms and the influences of our peers, but what he fails to see is that those norms and influences are themselves shaped by history, politics, and economics, not to mention power and prejudice. People don’t have complete freedom in choosing their peer groups. Their choices are constrained by where they live, where they come from, how much money they have, and what they look like. A statistical model of society that ignores issues of class, that takes patterns of influence as givens rather than as historical contingencies, will tend to perpetuate existing social structures and dynamics. It will encourage us to optimize the status quo rather than challenge it.

Read on.

Image: SimCity screenshot.

“Neither helplessness nor unbounded enthusiasm and indifference to consequences would have allowed humans to inhabit the earth for very long,” observed Bruno Latour in a lecture in Copenhagen in February. “Rather a solid pragmatism, a limited confidence in human cunning, a sane respect for the powers of nature, a great care invested to protect the fragility of human enterprise — these appear to be the virtues for dealing with first nature. Care and caution: a totally mundane grasp of the dangers and of the possibilities of this world of below.”

We live in two worlds, Latour says. There’s first nature, the earthly “world of below,” and there’s second nature, the transcendent “world of beyond.” Second nature reflects our yearning for a world “more solid, less transitory, less perishable” than that of the earth. Through most of history, second nature manifested itself in myth and religion. Now, argues Latour, it manifests itself in the “laws” of economics:

The transcendent world of beyond has always been more durable than the poor world of below. But what is new is that this world of beyond is not that of salvation and eternity, but that of economic matters. […] The world of economy, far from representing a sturdy down-to-earth materialism, a sound appetite for worldly goods and solid matters of fact, is now final and absolute.

Purging an economic system of its contingencies and investing it with inexorability tends “to generate for most people who don’t benefit from its wealth a feeling of helplessness and for a few people who benefit from it an immense enthusiasm together with a dumbness of the senses.” You get either fatalism or hubris.

It strikes me that what Latour says about our current conception of economics goes equally well for our current conception of technology. Consider the following passage from his speech in which, in three instances, I’ve replaced the word “capitalism” with the word “technology”:

We begin to see how difficult it is to disentangle the contradictory affects created by an appeal to the concept of technology: it generates a prodigious enthusiam for seizing unbounded opportunities; a dystopian feeling of total helplessness for those who are submitted to its decrees; a complete disinhibition as to the long-term consequences of its action for those who profit from it; a perverse wound of smug superiority in those who have failed to fight its progression; a fascination for its iron laws in the eyes of those who claim to study its development, to the point that it appears to run more smoothly than nature itself; a total indifference to how the soil on which it is rooted is occupied; a complete confusion about who should be treated as a total stranger and who as a close neighbor. And above all, it marks a movement towards modernization that delegitimates those who stay behind as so many losers. Actually now that technology is thought to have no enemy, it has become a mere synonym for the implacable thrust forward of modernization. From this tangle of effects, I get no other feeling than an increased sense of helplessness. The mere invocation of technology renders me speechless.

“Resistance is futile”: Depending on who’s speaking, it’s a statement of triumphalism or of defeatism.

Latour finds, in thinking about our shifting sense of economics, a great irony in the “inversion of what is transitory and what is eternal.” The irony becomes even stronger when we consider the similar inversion that has taken place in our view of technology. The glory of technology stems from the possibilities it opens to people in the material world of first nature. The glory hinges on technology’s contingency, on the way it yields not only to circumstance but to human desire and planning. When technological progress comes to be seen as a transcendent, implacable force, a force beyond human fashioning, it begins to foreclose opportunities at least as often as it opens them. It starts to hem us in.

“A solid pragmatism, a limited confidence in human cunning, a sane respect for the powers of nature, a great care invested to protect the fragility of human enterprise”: Would not these earthly virtues serve us equally well in dealing with technology?

Image: detail of Botticelli’s “St. Augustine in His Studio.”

“Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned! —to the earth art thou not for ever dead?”

Returning to the Smashing Facebook meme — a meme of my own imagining, I acknowledge — it struck me that Edgar Alan Poe might shed light on the matter. Poe understood the psychology of social media when Mark Zuckerberg’s great-great-great-grandfather was still in short pants.

Just yesterday, an acquaintance of mine let it be known that he was, as he put it, “off the Book.” Translation: he had cancelled his Facebook account. This was not, I immediately recalled, the first time he had made such an announcement. He had gone off the Book, and then back on the Book, at least a couple of times previously. That’s not unusual these days. I’ve met a lot of people who, exhausted with the work of maintaining appearances on Facebook, try to break the habit, only to find, a few days or a few weeks later, that they’ve reactivated the account.

At the start of Poe’s story “William Wilson,” the title character recalls how, in his youth, he met a schoolmate who shared not only his name but his aspect, his tone of voice, his manner of dress, his personality. The very image of himself, this double, this doppelganger, becomes, after a brief period of friendship, William Wilson’s rival and then his nemesis. As the years pass, wherever Wilson goes the other Wilson is there. His presence becomes ever more oppressive.

“From his inscrutable tyranny did I at length flee, panic-stricken, as from a pestilence; and to the very ends of the earth I fled in vain.”

Finally, Wilson can take no more. In a moment of hopelessness and rage, he attacks his double.

“The contest was brief indeed. I was frantic with every species of wild excitement, and felt within my single arm the energy and the power of a multitude. In a few seconds I forced him by sheer strength against the wainscotting, and thus, getting him at mercy, plunged my sword, with brute ferocity, repeatedly through and through his bosom.”

The doppelganger is mortally wounded. And yet William Wilson is anything but liberated. He discovers, after the violent deed is done, that there is no other man in the room with him. He is alone. He looks into a mirror and, aghast, discovers that it is he himself who has been stabbed.

“But what human language can adequately portray that astonishment, that horror which possessed me at the spectacle then presented to view? The brief moment in which I averted my eyes had been sufficient to produce, apparently, a material change in the arrangements at the upper or farther end of the room. A large mirror, — so at first it appeared to me in my confusion — now stood where none had been perceptible before; and as I stepped up to it in extremity of terror, mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood, advanced to meet me with a feeble and tottering gait.”

I know you see the moral of the tale, dear reader, but indulge me while, like Aesop, I belabor it: One terminates one’s Facebook account only to discover that one has terminated one’s self.

“You have conquered, and I yield. Yet henceforward art thou also dead — dead to the world and its hopes. In me didst thou exist — and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”

Image: still from Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.