PP

Traditionally, the game industry leveraged its appeal and playful aura to exploit its workers. Young “passionate” developers were hired, worked until they burned out, regularly laid off, and replaced with younger, less-demanding ones.

But in the early 2000s, these unfortunate working conditions, along with the lack of individual agency for developers on increasingly large teams, collided with the wider availability of game-making tools. This gave rise to a lively independent games movement.

Like their counterparts in other culture industries, indie developers pursued more experimental and personal projects, rejecting dull and hierarchical corporate structures. They strived to build more inclusive communities of players and developers. (I talked about this in a 2012 lecture at Indiecade called “Toward Independence.”)

Alas, it turns out that the crucial component of informational capitalism is distribution. Conglomerates like Apple, Sony, and Microsoft quickly adapted to this peaceful seizure of the means of production. They opened their markets to indies and even supported some of them, while consolidating control over the vectors along which content — previously known as culture — spreads in order to get a cut at every transaction. The result is a saturated market in which small producers take all the financial risk and rarely succeed financially, while platform capitalists make handsome profits while producing basically nothing.

McKenzie Wark detected this trend more than a decade ago in A Hacker Manifesto. In it, he describes what he calls a “vectoralist class,” which doesn’t control the means of production but instead mediates connections and access to information.

This model, which was generalized by Google and is now increasingly applied by non-informational services like Uber and Airbnb, presents daunting new challenges for socialists. Traditional responses like unionization may become less effective given the interchangeability of the productive units. Workers may see this new, precarious autonomy as a satisfying alternative to underpaid nine-to-five jobs.

And if not the factory or the office, where exactly is the primary site of class conflict? Can these platforms constitute the first primitive infrastructure for a democratic, non-centralized socialist economy in which I can be a driver one day and a game designer the next?