This study is an institutional ethnography of oDesk workers. The research makes use of an online questionnaire and semi-structured interviews to identify the ways in which the oDesk platform functions as the medium and expression of the activities of online workers. I analyse the marketplace along the structural dimensions of visibility, community, and economics and conclude by arguing that these structures are recursively ordered through various activities occurring as part of the contingent reproduction of the oDesk Marketplace.

The contemporary dynamics of mass communication necessitate a reassessment of the received notions of audience labor. To that end this article revisits Dallas Smythe’s seminal audience commodity theory through the lens of a two-sided class analysis. A number of his key conceptualizations are critiqued including audience power, audience measurement, media content as a free lunch, audiences as a non-durable producer’s good, the disappearance of labor power, and the revisionist history of capitalist development . At each point in the critique the contributions of various political economists who have revised and extended Smythe’s work are highlighted. The critique serves to underscore the contributions and limitations of the theory as its extension into the new media landscape is reconsidered.

This article outlines a socio-political theory appropriate for the study of the ecological repercussions of contemporary media technologies. More specifically, this approach provides a means of assessing the material impacts of media technologies and the representations of capitalist ecological crises. This approach builds on the work of ecological economists, ecosocialist scholars, and Marx’s writings on the conditions of production to argue that capitalism necessarily results in ecological destabilization. Taking Apple’s 2016 Environmental Responsibility Report as a case study, the article uses the theory to analyze Apple’s responses to ecological crises. The article asserts that Apple’s reactions are emblematic of the capitalist compulsion for increasing rates of productivity. However, unless the matter/energy savings achieved through higher rates of productivity surpass the overall increase in the flow of matter/energy in production, ecological crises will continue. Ultimately, capital accumulation ensures continued ecological destabilization.

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