Introduction to

Contextual
Information

Submitted by
Sayani Majumder

MA (New Media
Content Design)

1st Semester

Roll No.
Oculus Rift: Case Study
Case Study: Oculus Rift, Facebook and Affective Labour
As many of you may have heard, Oculus Rift, a virtual reality platform, announced its
sale to Facebook over the weekend. The $2 billion deal, the developers argue in
their statement, will allow them to make VR ubiquitous, affordable, and
transformative.

This endpoint might be unremarkable, except for where Oculus Rift began: as a
crowdfunding effort on Kickstarter. The campaign was nothing short of a massive
success, raising its $250,000 goal in less than 24 hours, and going on to generate
nearly two and a half million dollars.

Joel Johnsons piece does some excellent work discussing what this means about the
relationship between crowdfunding and venture capital:

The fact that everyone involved made a rational choice to sell out isn't what I find
frustrating, I don't think. (I don't even particularly care that Oculus sold to Facebook
and not, say, Microsoft. Ultimately a sale is a sale, even if Facebook is the worst
possible partner for Oculus of any of the large technology companies.) It's that I, as a
consumer, bought into the narrative that underpins almost every Kickstarter project:
that without my contribution, something novel would not exist. And while that
remains trueand is a reason that Kickstarter's owners continue to underline that
their goal is to fund "creators" and not "products"Oculus' sale to Facebook also
highlights the disparity inherent in the current capitalist and investment structure,
where small investors are excluded from returns by regulation, but investors with
more capital can quickly extract more capital by pushing a quick expansion into
untapped markets, even without proving that those markets actually, truly exist.

An article by Leigh Alexander posted on Gamstura summarizes critiques of the sale in

similar terms:

When a Kickstarter fails to deliver, annoyed consumers are told, "you did not make
a pre-order, you invested in an idea." Now this happens, and we hear the reverse:
"You were basically pre-ordering a product, and it's going to get made, so what's the
matter?" Which is it?

So part of what is at stake here has little to do with Oculus Rift at all, and everything
to do with crowdfundings self-definition. Is it possible to invest in an idea, or a
creator, without unintentionally acting as an unpaid test market for larger companies?
Or does the successful generation of a large enough crowd automatically place the
affective bonds of that crowd in the service of capital, rendering it little more than a
digital instance of cognitive capitalism, or an online iteration of the exploitation of
affective labour? Is the best we might hope for, as Johnsons piece suggests, revisions
to legal structures that will entitle backers to a stake in a company, regardless of the
size of their investment? Or does whatever it was some people thought they were
purchasing when they invested in ideas and creators represent an important
opportunity to imagine and create alternative economies?

Importantly, too, neither of these takes are particularly concerned with the fact that
its Facebook specifically involved in the purchase of Oculus. And while these
critiques would be true regardless of the purchaser, but Facebooks involvement does
add another dimension to the conversation. And that dimension is affective labour.

While we labour online for far more companies than just Facebook, its ubiquity and
control over the terms that constitute the online social should, and does, give many
of us pause. Wages for Facebook (a reference to the feminist campaign Wages for
Housework) builds on and mobilizes around these concerns, and invokes the
importance of affect at several turns, including a memorable moment when they
describe how our fingertips have become distorted from so much liking, and our
feelings have gotten lost from so many friendships.

By no means somehow outside of capital prior to the sale, the draw of Oculus Rift,
and the excitement about virtual reality more generally, might resemble what Love
calls failed sociality, or a politics of refusal to engage with the world as-is. That
is, by previously remaining separate from the move toward socially networked
gaming, Oculus Rift seemed to present an opportunity for users to participate in a
gaming that resists the need for users to be always already social and incessantly
connected. Again, this doesnt make the pre-Facebook Oculus (or any VR)
disembodied or asocial, but rather something as refusing some of the terms on which
the social is currently constituted. Prior to the sale, the moment of connection and
monetized affective labour was the crowdfunding campaign and discussions
surrounding it; the platform itself did not require users to generate data in the form
of sharing. The reaction against Oculuss sale seems not just a response to the
exploitation of backers in the service of large-scale venture capitalism, but a fear
that connecting virtual reality with Facebooks brand of social might mean a
perpetual exploitation which will make the gaming reality decidedly less virtual and
more invested in maintaining normative economic and social structures.