Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries (Acting with Technology)

243 Pages·2012·3.08 MB·English

by  Gina Neff

Venture Labor
Acting with Technology
Bonnie A. Nardi, Victor Kaptelinin, Kirsten A. Foot, editors
Tracing Genres through Organizations: A Sociocultural Approach to
Information Design,
Clay Spinuzzi, 2003
Activity-Centered Design: An Ecological Approach to Designing
Smart Tools and Usable Systems,
Geri Gay and Helene Hembrooke, 2004
The Semiotic Engineering of Human Computer Interaction,
Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza, 2005
Group Cognition: Computer Support for Building Collaborative
Knowledge,
Gerry Stahl, 2006
Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design,
Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie A. Nardi, 2006
Web Campaigning,
Kirsten A. Foot and Steven M. Schneider, 2006
Scientific Collaboration on the Internet,
Gary M. Olson, Ann Zimmerman, and Nathan Bos, editors, 2008
Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design,
Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie A. Nardi, 2009
Digitally Enabled Social Change: Activism in the Internet Age,
Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport, 2011
Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafés of Urban Ghana,
Jenna Burrell, 2012
Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries,
Gina Neff, 2012
Venture Labor
Work and the Burden of Risk in
Innovative Industries
Gina Neff
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic
or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and
retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information about special quantity discounts, please email
[email protected].
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Neff, Gina, 1971–
Venture labor : work and the burden of risk in innovative industries / Gina Neff.
p. cm.—(Acting with technology)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-01748-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-262-30052-0 (retail e-book)
1. High technology industries—United States—Employees. 2. High technology industries
—United States—Management. 3. Technological innovations—Economic aspects—
United States. I. Title.
HD8039.H542U654 2012
331.700973—dc23
2011039214
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
d_r1
For Philip Howard, eleven times more
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 The Social Risks of the Dot-Com Era
2 The Origins and Rise of Venture Labor
3 Being Venture Labor: Strategies for Managing Risk
4 Why Networks Failed
5 The Crash of Venture Labor
6 Conclusion: Lessons from a New Economy for a New Medium?
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
One of my mentors, Herbert Gans, warned me that I should get this
book out quickly before people forget that the Internet boom ever
happened. Yet optimism about our digital future is back in vogue,
years after the first dot-com bust. Indeed, if people have forgotten
that the Internet boom happened, it is because new Web 2.0, cloud
computing, social media, and crowdsourcing have become the
exciting new digital tools and social trends. But in an important way,
the backstory for the industries behind these innovations has not
changed since the Internet boom. While the start-up companies on
this current wave of investment are not creating webpages or “B2B”
e-commerce sites, they are relying on many of the same phenomena
as the companies that were started in the lofts and apartments of
New York’s Silicon Alley in the 1990s. Innovation, then and now,
relies on the phenomena I call venture labor, the investment of
“everyday entrepreneurs” in the companies where they work.
With the present euphoria around social media and Web 2.0, we
can see how easily we can forget, though. Many of the lessons from
the beginnings of the Internet, especially how small companies
created news, information, and entertainment for digital media, are
relevant for understanding the directions that today’s companies will
take and how our media will look in the future. The Internet may no
longer be in its infancy, but it is still far from maturation and many
innovations and ideas will continue to be developed.
Although venture labor as everyday entrepreneurship gained
visibility and became manifest during the dot-com boom of the late
1990s, the phenomena both predates and extends the Web 1.0 era.
As a new wave of social media and new media companies hold
initial public offerings of stock, we see yet another cycle of people
investing in the companies where they work, getting in “on the
ground floor” of creative and technical opportunities in a sector that
appears to be expanding.
This book lays out the motivations for why and how people work
for these types of ventures. Start-up companies and emerging media
will always depend on people who work to turn innovative ideas into
reality. Rescuing the historical lessons of the first wave of Internet
companies can help the next wave understand how to better support
the everyday entrepreneurs that these companies rely on. The
media legacy of Silicon Alley lives on, and the process of venture
labor is very much alive.