Corporate profits have never been higher, at a time when the real unemployment has soared. Have bosses learned how to get by without workers? Not really, but the evidence suggests a growing reliance on new kinds of free labor to boost the balance sheet of companies that are canny enough to harvest it. Free, or token-wage, labor is increasingly available though a variety of channels: crowdsourcing, data-mining, prosumerism, or other sophisticated digital techniques for extracting rents from user/participants; expanded prison labor programs; the explosion of unpaid near-obligatory internships in every white-collar sector; and the whole gamut of contestant volunteering that has transformed so much of our commerce in culture into an amateur talent show, with jackpot stakes for a few winners and hard-luck schwag for everyone else.