The opportunity to contribute: disability and the digital entrepreneur

ABSTRACT

A range of scholarly work in communications, informatics, and media studies has identified ‘entrepreneurs’ as central to an emerging paradigm of digital labor. Drawing on data from a multi-year research project in the virtual world Second Life, I explore disability experiences of entrepreneurism, focusing on intersections of creativity, risk, and inclusion. Since its founding in 2003, Second Life has witnessed significant disability participation. Many such residents engage in forms of entrepreneurship that destabilize dominant understandings of digital labor. Most make little or no profit; some labor at a loss. Something is being articulated through languages and practices of entrepreneurship, something that challenges the ableist paradigms that still deeply structure both digital socialities and conceptions of labor.

Disability is typically assumed to be incompatible with work, an assumption often reinforced by policies that withdraw benefits from disabled persons whose income exceeds a meagre threshold. Responses to such exclusion appear when disabled persons in Second Life frame ‘entrepreneur’ as a selfhood characterized by creativity and contribution, not just initiative and risk. In navigating structural barriers with regard to income and access, including affordances of the virtual world itself, they implicitly contest reconfigurations of personhood under neoliberalism, where the laboring self becomes framed not as a worker earning an hourly wage, but as a business with the ‘ability’ to sell services. This reveals how digital technology reworks the interplay of selfhood, work, and value – but in ways that remain culturally specific and embedded in forms of inequality.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaboration
• disability
• entrepreneurship
• labor
• selfhood
• virtual worlds

Acknowledgements

I thank my Second Life interlocutors for their generosity, patience, and truly extraordinary insights. I thank my co-investigator, Donna Z. Davis, for her camaraderie and intellectual support. I thank Gerard Goggin and Haiqing Yu for their encouragement and support. A draft of this paper was discussed by the LaborTech group: for the invitation to participate I thank Winifred Poster, the group’s organizer; for their comments during the discussion I thank Opeyemi Akanbi, Sareeta Amrute, Julie Yujie Chen, Laura Forlano, Seda Guerses, and Lilly Irani. Additional comments were provided by Ilana Gershon, Alice Krueger, Silvia Lindtner, Alice Marwick, and Winifred Poster. A documentary about this project, Our Digital Selves (Bernhard Drax, director, 74mn, 2018), is freely available at https://youtu.be/GQw02-me0W4.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Tom Boellstorff is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he is the author of many articles and the books The Gay Archipelago, A Coincidence of Desires, and Coming of Age in Second Life. He is also coauthor of Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method and coeditor of Data, Now Bigger and Better! A former Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association, he currently coedits the Princeton University Press book series ‘Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology’ [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1 In this article, I employ ‘disabled persons’ rather than ‘people with disabilities’. Both are contested and imperfect, but I find person-first language less effective (see Sinclair, 2013; Titchkosky, 2001; Broderick & Ne’eman, 2008). I received Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for this research. No HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) related details of health status were obtained, and details of self-identified disabilities (along with other personally identifying details) have been altered. Physical world and screen names have been changed: quoted text chat has been altered so make it harder to find using a search engine.

2 By extension the money can then be converted to any currency, but Linden Dollars are directly exchangeable only into US dollars.

3 See, for instance, https://www.dol.gov/odep/topics/SelfEmploymentEntrepreneurship.htm (accessed March 6, 2018); https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/dvr/self-employment (accessed March 6, 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation, Cultural Anthropology and Science, Technology, and Society Programs [Grants 1459219 and 1459374].