Wired TV: Laboring Over an Interactive Future

4. Labor of Love: Charting the L Word

98 4 Labor of Love Charting The L Word JULIE LEVIN RUSSO The 2007 Writers Guild of America strike foregrounded the fact that labor, in both the institutional and the general sense, is an issue pivotal to current transformations in the entertainment industry. This dispute between screenwriters and executives illuminated the present-day predicament of mass media, which is hard pressed to keep up with a proliferation of content and platforms while squeezing ever greater efficiency out of its creative workers. These conditions have spurred not only the official exploitation of paid labor as expressed in the demands of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) at the bargaining table, but also the industry’s turn to a far more vast, dynamic, and affordable resource: the free labor of fans. Fan production has no doubt always held indirect economic value for corporations as a form of promotion and a stimulus to consumption, but until very recently, this phenomenon was rarely considered openly outside the science fiction niche. Now, as convergence puts pressure on television’s obsolescing profit models, hit network shows like Lost (ABC, 2004–2010) and its derivatives are adopting cult media’s tactics for attracting a loyal and engaged audience—in short, a fandom—as marketing’s next frontier. In addition to aiding the presumptive value of active and insatiable consumers, the Internet’s characteristics as a distributed, immediate, and continuous network make it practicable for the industry to mobilize fan labor directly as “user-generated content.” At Labor of Love • 99 the same time, fans are able to expropriate media commodities directly, since television and movies, along with their multiplying complement of bonus features , can be downloaded at will to serve as the raw material for unauthorized creative work. Within this mainstreaming of the subcultural traditions of fandom , managing the production of queer readings, desires, and appropriations is a nexus of particular concern in the shift from broadcast’s centralized and vertical model to the more decentralized and horizontal configuration of digital distribution. The intimate relationship I propose between queer subjectivities and postindustrial capitalism is not arbitrary: as commodities become increasingly immaterial, the affective labor of desire, identification, and meaning-making accrues greater economic value. Paraphrasing a 1999 Wired article that boldly proclaimed the death of the “Old Web,” Tiziana Terranova suggests that, with “newwaystomaketheaudiencework...televisionandthewebconvergeinthe one thing they have in common: their reliance on audience/users as providers of . . . cultural labour.”1 This labor, which is the productive force behind media convergence, exemplifies the architecture of the larger “digital economy,” characterized by “a process of economic experimentation with the creation of monetary value out of knowledge/culture/affect.”2 Such relatively autonomous and freely conducted labor schemes—fan production included—break down the distinction between waged work and leisure; but this ambiguity does not place them outside of capitalist demands. In comparison to the sunny forecast for our much-vaunted “participatory culture,” this view of convergence as incorporation may seem pessimistic: fandom is more commonly celebrated as a “gift economy” or alternative system of exchange that circumvents or even resists capitalism. Terranova argues that this outlook on free labor effaces the reality of its functional integration into the post-industrial economy. Her position does not, however, reduce fans and other digital enthusiasts to unwitting dupes of capitalism, colluding with the exploitation of their authentic practices by a monolithic machine. She emphasizes, by contrast, that “such processes are not created outside capital and then reappropriated by capital, but are the results of a complex history where the relation between labor and capital is mutually constitutive.”3 Given this interdependence, both the entertainment industry and its audiences have concrete demands and collective bargaining power in their immaterial labor negotiations. These negotiations can take the form of punitive reactions in the guise of copyright enforcement and ideologies that devalue fan labor, but increasingly they also take the form of proactive enticements toward modes of participation that enrich the brand. Outside of cult and teen genres, one of the earliest forays into this terrain among television programs came from The L Word (Showtime, 2004–2009), the first American series to make lesbian romance its primary focus. In addition to thematizing issues of lesbian identity and 100 • Julie Levin Russo representation onscreen, The L Word has innovated through online promotions that leverage its projected lesbian audience into an interactive fan community . At the intersection of lived subculture...