Gabriella Coleman

Bio

Trained as an anthropologist, Gabriella Coleman is an assistant professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. She teaches courses on hacking and digital politics and has done the bulk of her research on the politics of free software.

Abstract

Pleasure: labor: labor: pleasure

One of the distinctive features of contemporary Internet labor is pleasure. Whether it is the pleasure of writing a review on Amazon or crafting your own clothes (and then selling them on Etsy), a sense of pleasure and pride often follows from these activities of labor common on the Internet. In this talk, I examine the politics of labor and pleasure by addressing a new class of character also common on the Internet, the griefer and troll who, as their name suggests, cause grief on the Internet for the sake of the lulz (aka pleasure). With a focus on recent battles between Anonymous (the trolls) and the Church of Scientology, I explore the importance of pleasure (that often bubbles directly from labor) for understanding not only this specific case but for critically grappling more generally with the nexus between labor and pleasure on the Internets.