War, Free Labor, MySpace, and AT&T

This is really an extended comment for J's post "Immaterial Labor = I'm Material Labor?"

This is a great, well-thought out post that truly is an addition to our collective work of trying to understand what these "new" conceptions of labor truly mean (and why people would do all this "free labor" in the first place).

I'd like to extend your argument out a bit. What happens as we (members of society) get more and more used to "free labor"-type activities?

First, I admit that my train of thought is along the lines of the old adage - "You give someone an inch and they will take a mile..." I think it is useful to realize that once certain ideas become common sense (it is ok for Google to scan my email to sell my information to advertisers, because my e-mail is "free" from Google), this same mode of thought can be translated to other possibilities as well (it is ok for my government to install surveillance cameras on every street corner, because they are trying to save me from terrorists).

Take for example a recent (7/30/07) poll done by the Washington Post and ABC News. When asked the question, "Some people support the use of surveillance cameras in public places as a way to help solve crimes. Others say these cameras go too far as a government intrusion on personal privacy. What's your opinion - do you support or oppose the increased use of surveillance cameras in public places?" 71% of respondents supported the use of surveillance cameras to "help solve crimes" while 25% were opposed to the "increased use of surveillance cameras".

Of course, any of you that study agenda setting or survey design realize there are serious problems with this question in the first place. The 71% of respondents in support of surveillance cameras are not stating that they support increased government control, but rather that they value social well-being "help solve crimes" over personal concerns "intrusion on personal privacy". That aside...

I am making a "slippery slope" argument in a way. But I am making this argument because of the real consequences I see happening as a result of the culture of terror, what has been fabricated by particular interests (government and private) to excuse further control over the population in order to keep us "safe from terrorists". I see creepy things going on and I am trying to understand them.

For example, the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative in NYC is a $15 million capital expenditures plan to "help safeguard bridges, tunnels, and infrastructure as well as everyone who lives, works, and does business downtown." What they forget to mention in this press release is that authorities will install around 3,000 "security" cameras in the Manhattan financial district (The Week "Someone's watching you" 09/28/2007). These new surveillance cameras are digital and will be able to create profiles (Oh Cool!!! Do you mean like a MySpace profile???) of potential deviants (Oh, I guess it isn't like MySpace....well?). According to The Week, "If a camera detects someone leaving a bag or package, it will sound an alarm. This elaborate system will also have the capability to transmit images to the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. When fully implemented by 2010, cameras will be recording millions of ordinary New Yorkers going about their lives."

I am not sure what comes first - increased corporate surveillance for profit or increased military/government surveillance for control - but I suspect they are interrelated. As the Wire Tapping scandal showed us, the two social structures often work hand in hand.

I-Lunch (an homage)

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1665119,00.html

Naomi Klein Interviews

Naomi Klein seems to be everywhere in the media nowadays as her new book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Captialism" is coming out.

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1666221,00.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-cusack/huffpost-exclusive-my-in_b_65990.html

Articles on Kid Nation

Two interesting articles on Kid Nation. The first article (Newsweek) is saying that the blur between kid pop culture and adult pop culture is to blame for the conception of the show, whereas the second article (Time) is saying that maybe the controversy surrounding the show is based on anxiety and fear of overbearing parents/adults. We talked about how kids were able to understand the class formation in society and adopted the concept easily in the show. However, we haven't talked about the gender role aspect of the show. See who (or which group) becomes in charge of the kitchen (before the contrivance of class in the show) in the first episode. I thought that was interesting.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20430958/site/newsweek/page/0/

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1661705,00.html

Class in Session at Kid Nation

Here are highlights from the first episode...the wisest words are spoken by Jimmy in the first 30 seconds.

Then skip to 3:08 (7:00 on countdown timer) when they introduce the class system.

Embedding was disabled for this clip, but follow the link to see what happens once they've been assigned to classes/jobs. Apparently kid beauty queens don't do dishes any more than their adult counterparts, and don't miss the action at 5:58, when a laborer takes to dancing in the street to supplement her wages...and then teaches others to do the same.

Free labor "from below"?

Earmark Watch is putting the public to work to sort through legislative earmarks to ferret out corruption, waste, etc.

The Beginning of the End of History

If you haven't heard Naomi Klein and Alan Greenspan go head to head on Democracy Now, it's worth a listen. According to Al, we're stuck with both capitalism and human "nature" (corrupt, selfish, power-hungry), indeed, the two seem to have much in common. The result may not be pretty, but it's better than any other possible imagined alternative. Don't even bother. We live in a world of very narrow horizons.

Material constraints on the production of affect?

Turns out building informational communities over cell phones might actually have some material constraints, because, oddly enough, someone owns and therefore controls the networks (means of affective labor?). Verizon decided that it wasn't going to allow Naral Pro-Choice America to use its wireless service for an informational text-message program. Then it promptly reversed the decision. But still, it gets to decide. Or does it?

Immaterial Labor = I'm material Labor?

I wanted to post this before coming to class but I ended up running out of time. Apologises first.
I'm not sure if my understanding of immaterial labor is correct (I'm still working on it) but I just wanted to throw this out and get your reactions. Please correct, revise, or add to my humble opinion (gently please).

In postfordism, there is a de-differentiation between producers and consumers and thus, the knowledge of the consumers becomes an integral part in the production of commodities. This has created the emergence of mass intellectuals/knowledge workers and their role in today’s economic force has become ever more significant. What intrigues me the most is the notion of immaterial labor in the form of knowledge labor and its role in the production of commodities. I feel like (and especially after reading Virno) that in order to engage in this type of immaterial labor, a person’s material needs, desires, and wants need to be fulfilled first. People without economic, social, and political power (people without sufficient financial power to feed, clothe, and house themselves) don’t seem to have time nor energy to really engage in knowledge/intellectual labor (although they would be more likely to be engaged in immaterial labor through affective labor such as prostitution, domestic labor, fast food service, etc.) although there seems to be a myth that anybody and everybody can be an intellectual laborer. For instance, people who post reviews, opinions, and comments on commodities and services on the website such as Amazon.com or their personal blogs seem to fit what Everett Rogers would call “innovators.” They are the first to get the products, test them and comment on them so others (early adopters, late adopters, laggards) can read them and follow their advices. Innovators are the trendsetters and they take pride in that social role. These are the people who bought ipods before it became a cultural phenomenon, or rather people who made it possible for ipods to become a cultural phenomenon. And being a trendsetter comes with a high price tag. When the innovators purchase a new product, the price of the product is still high and there’s also a risk of the product having all kinds of errors and bugs (Xbox 360 anybody?). However, these innovators take that risk and they can do so because first, their materialistic desires are fulfilled (how many people who are starving would do this?) and second, their desire to set the trend is enormously high. This is what I mean by immaterial labor (knowledge labor/intellectual labor) as a representation of materialistic power.

So why do innovators engage in this kind of immaterial labor? Some people might do it for a shallow reason such as showing off their knowledge of the product (or even to show off their possession of the product). Others might do it because they believe they are contributing to society by helping others to purchase better products. However, the bigger reason seems to lie in the human desire of “ownership” in the form of customization (and here, Chad’s comment in class on the reflection of self in commodities really helped). Many more companies are using the intellectual laborer’s comments and feedbacks when they are revamping their product line (Nikon was an example I gave in class for using (expert) consumers’ comments as test beds). Every intellectual laborer has different opinions about the product and desires different things from the product and companies will take them into consideration when they are revamping their product lines (Sorry if this idea sounds Jenksian). Once the intellectual laborer's comments are incorporated the new product is distributed to the general population in the form of a customized product for the privileged intellectual laborers. When the intellectual laborers see that their opinions have been incorporated into a product, they can feel a “false sense of ownership” (I’ve done something for this product, I have helped create this product, etc.), a natural desire that only people with fulfilled materialistic desires can have. For people who try to get by day by day, this desire is a luxury, a dream, a pure imagination.

Who do we shoot?

This post is a little crazy and in need of revision, but I wanted to get it in before class.

The Bowring essay makes some pretty incisive criticisms of Hardt and Negri's theoretical apparatus. I'd like to reserve my right to disagree with these criticisms until I've read some more Hardt and Negri, but as for now they seem pretty on the mark. There were several sections of the Hardt essay that were so vague as to be almost nonsensical. For instance, he says: "On the one hand, affective labor, the production and reproduction of life, has become firmly embedded as a necessary foundation for capitalist accumulation and patriarchal order. On the other hand, however, the production of affects, subjectivities, and forms of life present an enormous potential for autonomous circuits of valorization, and perhaps for liberation" (100). This is one of those statements which asserts so little one that cannot even disagree with it. He defines "biopolitical power" on p.99 as "labor involved in the creation of life...in the production and reproduction of affects." The only thing he excludes from these processes is procreation. On 96: "What affective labor produces are social networks, forms of community, biopower." So, what we can gather from this is that affective labor consists of anything that produces something we might recognize as a social relation.

I'm trying to think of a way to make this concept useful. One thing that might work is to think of affective labor in terms of a shift in the ways that power is deployed. If the aim of the era of industrial labor was to deploy disciplinary apparatuses that control the worker's time and space, then the aim of the era of affective labor is to deploy mechanisms that control the non-material aspects of being (without giving up the material ones). Bowring writes that Hardt and Negri characterize Empire "in Foucauldian terms as the replacement of the 'disciplinary society' with the 'society of control.' This distinction conveys the way power is no longer exercised via the prescriptive, normalizing and compartmentalizing efforts of the modern state and its disciplinary institutions, but instead seeks to mobilize and direct, from the inside, and without institutional obstruction, the vitality and productive energies of the population" (125). Hardt and Negri say "Biopower is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior" (Bowring 125). What does it mean to work "from the inside" or "interior"? Maybe the answer to this question is obvious, but I do not think it is clearly articulated in any of the materials we read for today. I think Gilles Deleuze gives a pretty succinct description of this idea in his "Postscript on the Societies of Control" (1990): http://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/netzkritik/societyofcontrol.html

Deleuze writes: "We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure--prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an "interior," in crisis like all other interiors--scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons." The important distinction here is between "enclosures" and "controls." Enclosures are the apparatuses of the state and controls are the affective mobilizations of "productive energies." As Deleuze writes, "Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point." While his analogies are perhaps not the clearest, he does, unlike Hardt and Negri, give some lucid examples:

"This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it's because they express the corporate situation with great precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of "salary according to merit" has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation....In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything--the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation."

I believe that these remarks may go some way in addressing what Mark describes as "an implicit denigration of material labor" in Hardt and Negri: if the apparatuses of domination no longer operate at the level of material labor, then can it still be feasible to formulate a program of resistance in this realm? Are the streets dead capital? When I say "no longer operate" I don't mean that they don't exist, but rather that they have been fully automatitized, off-loaded into a system that operates independently of any individual actors. A simpler formula: the man with the stopwatch is no longer behind you, he is inside you--you are your own stopwatch. The move is from material submission to immaterial cathexis. This is the effect of increased efforts to harness the affective energies of the worker--libidinal investment in the production process. Let's take the example of "sabotage": who is being addressed in an act of sabotage today? Only yourself, your affective investment in the corporate body. It would seem that the basic prerequisites of material resistance (like sabotage) are some degree of worker solidarity and a definable target (someone to shoot).

How can a system like this sustain itself? Only very precariously. Zizek's reformulation of Marx's famous quip "for they know not what they do" is instructive: "they know fully what they do, but they do it anyway." Part of biopolitical power is to allow the worker to retain a cynical distance from his or her own exploitation. This may not be too far from Deleuze's concept of metastability--instead of cynical distance, he would say that the worker is able to move, or surf, between different (apparently antagonistic) nodes in a network. We are "undulatory," as he says. It is also why things like The Office and Office Space are so funny. In the corporation today there is an absurd tension between fostering agonism (see Deleuze above) and a drive to inclusiveness, cooperation, teamwork, etc. This tension is evidence that the production of human affect has become a much larger part of the production process. The agonistic spirit dismantles collective action on behalf of the workers which is compensated for by collective action on behalf of the corporation: this is why any act at the level of material resistance is self-addressed. In summation: The production of affect (libidinal cathexis in the production cycle) militates against material action against the system in its dual production of agonism (aggression) and the corporate ethos (love). Affective labor allows the antagonistic systems of industrial labor to be apparently dissolved.

Also:
If you missed the first episode, you must watch Kid Nation, CBS' new show about 40 kids who get dropped off in an old west-style town .
Best part: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4GEbi7EtD4
Full episode: http://www.cbs.com/primetime/kid_nation/video.php?mode=episodes&episode=1&autostart=1
The narrative is so great--watch as they move through the stage of primitive accumulation in which they prospect for petroleum! Watch as they are divided into social classes based on how well they succeeded of extracting value from their property! Watch as a female member of the labor class reinvents prostitution! Hopefully some monopolists will emerge in the next episode.

Picking up on Perry's comments about cell phones -- it's hard not to detect a certain marketing imperative to capture non-commercially mediated interaction in privatized communication networks. As a recovering reality TV viewer, I think of shows like Newport Harbor ("the real OC"), in which the cell phone is perhaps an even more important cast member than the car. Some of the most important social interactions take place via cell phone, which has interesting consequences for dramatic encounters: rather than a close-up two shot, we see cross-cutting from one person talking into their cell phone to an interlocutor, also on a cell phone somewhere else, perhaps even in the same house or at the same club. Which is a roundabout way to get at the notion that the valorization of "affective" or "immaterial" labor relies upon a material infrastructure (if we're going to make this distinction). More concretely, there are "means of production" for affective labor just as their are means of production for material labor. When Rupert Murdoch paid a half-billion dollars for MySpace he was buying the means of production for the valorization of the affective labor of social networking. When we move our e-mail correspondence onto Google's servers, or our phone conversations onto the service mentioned by Perry, we are being provided access to the means of production for affective or immaterial labor (Hardt argues that the former is a subset of the latter). This is what seems to be missing in Virno's claim that "thoughts and discourses function IN THEMSELVES as productive 'machines' in contemporary labor". Whether or not this is even conceivable (can we imagine what a thought that is productive in itself might be), the valorization of socialized immaterial labor relies upon privatized and commercialized material infrastructures: cell phone networks, internet providers, Googleplex (its server complexes). So the question then becomes is immaterial labor really that different from material labor. Both are social, both rely upon a material infrastructure (the means of production) that can be captured and privatized. There is an implicit denigration of material labor in these formulations -- as if physical labor is somehow less social and less of a resource for political struggle and "autonomy" than affective or symbolic labor -- which seems to recapitulate the very separation of mental and material that marxist accounts are supposed to challenge.

So that's the direction I was going in at the end of class -- but it is a tentative formulation, open to qualification and rethinking. I'd be interested in your thoughts/responses.

Lazz puts the social back in the factory

Where Virno's version of immaterial labor reinforced how I was already thinking of the term (social factory-ing outside the factory walls), Lazz's bit about the restructured worker stopped me in my tracks.

Of course, I thought to myself, why wouldn't this team paradigm business be another mediatizing ploy? Okay, that was where I ended up, but the idea that one aspect of immaterial labor being the work of making people feel like people again caught me by surprise and sent me spiralling into a doubt-ridden, soul-searching weekend.

Illusions of empowerment...

I spent the last five years teaching at a community college and the two years before that teaching at the research university across the street. The courses I taught were the standard Gen Ed "you need this to get and keep a job" comm courses. The community college's mission included the phrase "workforce development" and they held annual workforce development "summits" with New Mexico's business leaders who spent the whole day complaining about the incoming workforce's dearth of communication skills.

Thus, the community college was split in two, organizationally and politically: a myriad of vocational tracks on one side, and the track I worked in on the other which would lead students across the street to the university. Since we were a "Hispanic-Serving Institution," (quotes intended) there was a great deal of effort (clearly misdirected) to corral hundreds of Hispanic women into the secretarial track (where they would be grammar-abused) so our campus could claim their numbers for our retention and completion rates. Those who went through the track I taught in and across the street were counted in the university's numbers. Regardless, it was not uncommon for many of these women to be attending school in secret -- as soon as they finished their degrees, they'd leave their abusive husbands (this was true of women in both tracks). This puts a domestic spin on the idea about the "choice" between the sweatshop or death, eh?

Anyway, I'd always "sell" the course on the first day in the terms Lazz lays out -- one HAS to communicate, etc., though I knew we'd do more. But I now have this nagging feeling that many of my students (particularly those who were not at-risk) may have only walked away with passing grades in Worker Bee 101.

While there was much that was corrupt and dysfunctional in my school (a long and separate story), I clung to the idea that I might be doing some good inside my classroom. At the end of the day, I thought I was teaching people about being humane. We had major service-learning projects. Students wrote me letters about how their relationships with estranged spouses/children/family were reconciled, they'd finally left abusive relationships, they'd reached out to a bullied kid, they stayed on as volunteers after the service project was over, they sought out the services of the organization from their project...

So I guess my question is: Is this really a zero-sum game? If I buy Lazz and Virno's arguments, which I am inclined to, do I have to let go of of the good work that I know I did? Is life-enriching communication in the workplace (or anywhere else) an illusion or somehow worthless if it is also productive?

False Autonomy

It was not long into my reading of Lazzarato that I began to see him outlining the similarities between immaterial labor and Fordist/Taylorian methods of productive management. The reason this is even worth noting for me is because up until the point I approached Lazzarato, and even up until, say, the second section of his piece, I was either naïve or optimistic enough to think that immaterial/mental labor might embody “true” autonomy, as opposed to corrupted, co-opted, enveloped, or managed autonomy, which I see Lazzarato talking about.

Lazzarato, I think, takes a moment to create this false sense of optimism about true autonomy in immaterial labor, writing, “In today’s large restructured company, a worker’s work increasingly involves, at various levels, an ability to choose among different alternatives and thus a degree of responsibility regarding decision making.” He is here instantiating the idea that because we can now partake in immaterial labor, the days of management, or at least “mere execution,” are over. But they aren’t!

He then goes on to say, “The worker’s personality and subjectivity have to be made susceptible to organization and command,” and later, “Today’s management thinking takes workers’ subjectivity into consideration only in order to codify it in line with the requirements of production.”

It then becomes apparent that the “self-valorization that the struggle against work has produced” has been re-enveloped by capital. Immaterial labor is not a site for resistance, or, it turns out, even autonomy within capital. While it is communication and subjectivity that get incorporated into the cycle of reproduction, there are still at work Taylorian, and more specifically, panoptical, principles that are needed for the management, codification, and extraction of the immaterial labor-value from this intellectual proletariat.

Because immaterial labor must project itself as necessarily and inherently autonomous, it "manages" management, through panotpicism, that is, self-management. Lazzarato writes that “the quality of this kind of [immaterial] labor power is thus defined not only by its professional capacities, but also by its ability to ‘manage’ its own activity . . . “ He also writes that “Capital wants a situation where command resides within the subject him- or herself, and within the communicative process. The worker is to be responsible for his or her own control and motivation within the work group . . .” Thus, there is no manager standing over the immaterial laborer, perfecting his shovel technique and capacity. Rather, and much more insidiously, the immaterial laborer manages him- or herself.

I feel like I’ve said my share for this post, but I do want to point out how we can relate “pellets” and the blurring between leisure/labor times to this notion of false autonomy and self-management. Before, for me at least, pellets, like immaterial labor in general, still contained the possibility for genuine flexibility and autonomy, but after reading Lazzarato, pellets of time now seem more like a self-management strategy that aspires to the creation of the constant laborer.

MySpace is watching

Interesting NYTimes piece on target marketing via MySpace. Money quote: “We are blessed with a phenomenal amount of information about the likes, dislikes and life’s passions of our users,” said Peter Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive Media, who will talk about the program at an address to investors and analysts at a Merrill Lynch conference in Los Angeles on Tuesday. “We have an opportunity to provide advertisers with a completely new paradigm.”

And, please, if anyone has a link to the story Perry mentioned about the internet phone service that monitors you while you talk, could you post it here? Thanks!

current developments support Lazzarato

I agree with Choonghee’s comments that Lazzarato seems central to our discussions of immaterial labor. Lazzarato identifies two aspects of immaterial labor that seem important to understanding it—the central role of communication (as both a constituent of immaterial labor and as its target or commodity-product) and the ways that immaterial labor makes social relations into capital relations. Lazzarato seems to be saying that immaterial labor is not just capital’s taking advantage of the human need/desire for communication, but that it actively infiltrates and transforms human communicative activity into a process from which surplus value can be extracted. I thought this was going too far until I thought about yesterday’s news about the small internet phone start up which will be offering free phone service in exchange for the consumer allowing the phone conversations to be monitored to produce advertising targeted to that consumer’s conversations.

Direct Labor and Social Taylorism

I recall in a previous class we posited a distinction between direct (material) and indirect (immaterial) labor. Bearing that distinction in mind, I was struck by Marx’s use of “direct” throughout his treatment on machines in the Grundisse: “It is the tendency of capital to give production a scientific character; direct labor is reduced to a mere moment of this process.” Marx uses “direct” to describe a process of manual labor that decreases with the tendency for increased surplus value and the use of social and scientific knowledge. Marx ends with this idea of free time as “transforming its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject.” This reminded me of the subjectivity referenced by Lazzarato as the means of immaterial labor that capital tries to rationalize and appropriate.

This leads to my main first impression of Lazzarato and Virno. After reading Robins & Webster and their “Taylorism lives!” argument, I was struck by how they believe that advanced capitalism represents a departure from Fordism and Taylorism.

For Robins & Webster, “Fordism entails the progressive intrusion into the sphere of reproduction (free time) by capitalist social relations...the growth of consumerism as a way of life...the reproduction of social life is fueled by the products of capitalist factories.” Despite Lazzarato’s claims that immaterial labor represents “the furthest point from the Taylorist model,” their descriptions of advanced capitalist labor aren’t very different.

I also want to echo Robin and the idea of the Panopticon. Again, Robins & Webster really espoused this idea of social Taylorism through the concept of the Panopticon: “A central figure for understanding the modalities of power in the information society. In the Panoptic machine, mobilization is achieved by means of the isolation of individuals, combined with the development of surveillance and intelligence by centralized agencies” (122). When Lazzarato explains that immaterial labor is defined by its ability to manage its own activity and that capital seeks to command and organize subjectivity through normative communicative forms (which he claims is “quite far from the Taylorist model of organization”) it really doesn’t seem too different from the panoptic model set up by social Taylorism.

Subjectivity vs agency

To be honest, I found Lazzarato's article a bit difficult to follow: the language tends to be rather abstruse and the text sometimes lacks in coherence (some ideas are repeated again and again, sometimes he contradicts himself, and even the paragraph structure is a mess). However, what I found interesting in both Virno and Lazzarato's articles was the ambivalent way in which they describe power/class relations in the context of "immaterial labour" and post-Fordist economics. On the one hand, they assert the autonomous potential of immaterial labour. For instance, Lazzarato argues that an "analysis of immaterial labour" can "lead us to define [...] a space for radical autonomy of the productive synergies of immaterial labour". He adds that "a polymorphous self-employed autonomous work has emerged as the dominant form, a kind of 'intellectual worker' who is him or herself an entrepreneur". On the other hand, he also suggests that the new labour relations also stifle agency: "the fact that immaterial labor produces subjectivity and economic value at the same time demonstrates how capitalist production has invaded our lives and has broken down all the oppositions among economy, power and knowledge". Virno makes a similar point on capitalist appropriation of subjectivity: "the subversion of capitalist relations of production can only manifest itself through the institution of a public sphere outside the state and of a political community that hinges on the general intellect".

So, in simple terms, does that mean that capitalism in crisis mutates and appropriates forms of resistance?

after reading Lazzarato

Back in my days working in a TV station, nobody among my colleagues said “we are producers of culture.” Rather, we all said that we were just workers in a manufacturing company. This self-disparaging statement actually does not sound refreshing due to the redundant use of it by so many people in so many different occupations. Anyway, what the statement meant was two fold in my configuration.

First, we realized that there was not much room for creativity and real individuality to work in our work process. Thinking of TV programs in general, you can’t say there is lots of creativity and independency going on in TV programs unless you watch only public access channels. As a TV producer, you are supposed to make shows in certain ways you already know, you are supposed to know, and you are taught to know. Your boss does not tell you what to do because you are a member of union and you claim that you have right to be independent. Nonetheless, you have to feel humiliation while you work in cultural industry, because what you do is just following an existing order. So you can say you are working on a conveyer belt.

Second, we were put in an environment where high competition of advertising market forced TV people to try hard to hold more eyes of audiences on TV while your program was aired. Rating, although I worked in a public company, seemed to dominate all other rationales and logics. In this setting, you are supposed to lose individuality. It is not difficult to realize that you are constantly working when you watch commercials, buy candy bars, talk with your guests, and spend free time for leisure activities. What you need to know and learn is everywhere and ubiquitous. Therefore we were constructed by the postindustrial order as a “consumer / communicator.” We “satisfy a demand by the consumer and at the same time establish that demand.”

When I read Lazzarato saying that “the post-Taylorist mode of production is defined precisely by putting subjectivity to work both in the activation of productive cooperation and in the production of the cultural contents of commodities,” I thought what he says resonates a lot with my experience. I would say I was working in the cycle of “author, reproduction, and reception.” In my understating, technoculture allows laypersons to participate in this cycle while they are mesmerized by “valorization.” Laypersons put a lot of immaterial labour, no matter whether they realize what they are doing, and get drowned in the cycle.

a pox on your techno-house

My flights home from Pittsburgh were made of the stuff that gets an average comedian by these days. The first flight came fully equipped with a screaming newbie in my aisle. Damn all you breeders, I thought. The second flight has much more to do with this class and Mark's question than a screaming child. I sat next to a chatty Cathy -- the kind of person who continues to talk to you even when you have your Times of the Technoculture book as close to your nose as possible. Since he made it perfectly clear that I would not be reading gently into that good flight, I decided to talk to him about what I was reading and our class. Here is what technology and immaterial labor meant to this guy (a financial panther, er, I mean financial planner) from Ohio:

The planner guy told me that he built a house that is technologically smart. The first smart thing he told me about was the surveillance system (cameras and motion detectors) that watches over the perimeter and the interior. If the motion detector detects something moving, then an alert is sent to the house (or to his mobile phone if he is away). At his house, he can turn any one of his many TVs to a certain channel to watch the camera. He told me his wife (who was sitting a row up from him for some reason, perhaps so she could get a break from his constant chattering) was very skeptical of the need for all this technology at his home until she was at home one night alone and the alarm went off. She was relieved when she checked the surveillance feed, or something. I don't know if this is a true story or just one of those justifications men make about the need for all this techno-security. Anyway, his house calls him at work for the most inane reasons...to adjust the temperature, to let him know if the pilot light goes out in the furnace, etc. He in turn can "talk back" to the house, via his phone or computer, to tell it what to do. He related his smart house to his business' software system that keeps track of client information so that he can seem more personally connected each time he gets a call.

Although I am tempted to make a rather crude analogy that his house has taken up some of the tasks of a 1950s housewife and a better-than-average guard dog, I think that would be straying a bit too far from the task at hand. And besides, I think he likes it when his house calls (I wonder if he pines for those calls...)

Which brings me to my reading of Lazzarato, who offers a rich theoretical development of immaterial labor, an interesting critique of same, but a poor model for its potential application.

"The management mandate to 'become subjects of communication' threatens to be even more totalitarian than the earlier rigid division between mental and manual labor... because capitalism seeks to involve even the worker's personality and subjectivity within the production of value. Capital wants a situation where command resides within the subject him- or herself, and within the communicative process. The worker is to be responsible for his or her own control and motivation..."

Thinking of this quote reminds me of chatty Cathy's "productive" house, and Foucault's treatment of Bentham and the ultimate objective of the panopticon. I think this notion of the subsumption of subjectivity is central to D-W and Lazzarato, but I keep getting stuck at this point. It might be that I don't trust political economists to be good theorists of subjectivity.

"I have defined working-class labor as an abstract activity that nowadays involves the application of subjectivity." What are we to make of this definition, which relies on a view of subjectivity that seems to me to be unproblematized? That is, if we are to agree with Lazzarato's critique of the increased self-regulation that immaterial labor brings to the production of value, should we get our story straight about how subjectivity is structured?

That might be a minor point, but Lazzarato's model of immaterial labor presents me with the most difficulties. "Immaterial labor continually creates and modifies the forms and conditions of communication, which in turn acts as the interface that negotiates the relationship between production and consumption." I have tried to draw this up as a model, but I find that it is either too vague or abstract. Perhaps if we are able to draw a model, we can see how "immaterial labor" becomes (or is used in the service of) material labor through creation and modification. We could also see where the cultural and informational content works as aspects of immaterial labor and how.

The Algorithm

The NYTimes had a short piece on the algorithm that I thought might be of some interest. I think one of the terms that's going to be in play in our reading of autonomism is that of "general intellect" -- might we think of an algorithm as an example of "general intellect"? To do so would certainly go against the grain of the reading that Virno is running. OK, so what kind of distinction might we draw to separate algorithmic "knowledge" from general intellect? It certainly seems to fit more on the side of "fixed capital," and yet, of course, there retains a sense of immateriality. A tidbit for the article that gets to the notion of language and its relation to "general intellect":


"But the concept is not so different from what happens routinely during a Google search. The network of computers answering your query pays attention to which results you choose to read. You’re gathering data from the network while the network is gathering data about you. The result is a statistical accretion of what people — those beings who clack away at the keys — are looking for, a rough sense of what their language means."

The Pretender and Deflecting Strategies of Resistance

Virno and Lazarrato do quite a bit to further our understanding of immaterial labor. Simultaneously they describe strategies for insuring wide scale libidinal investment in capitalism. Two swaths of the argument here: Lazarrato’s use of Benjamin and acquisition of previously aura saturated items is a good way to explain systematic false consciousness and Virno’s reading of cynicism is a defense mechanism par excellence for simply rationalizing not fighting capitalism. These strategies for resolving challengers against capitalism are contingent on Immaterial Labor both through the development of cognitive skills in the work force and the particular psychic economy of upward social mobility.

Lazarrato argues that it is breaking barriers that creates the prospect for creating new barriers. This is a criticism of most purely material political strategies. If the dominant regime of your day is designed to allow you to succeed, then your struggle to break down those barriers feeds into the psychic economy of your oppression. This has come up twice before in class, as the dejection of fans of the first Matrix movie when encountering the later installments and in a very early argument about the nature of the super ego demands of the symbolic father figure. In both cases the answer to the answer is not to resist or fully assume the mantle of fighting the system but to fight the system of enjoyment that has created those chances for domination to exist in the first place. Neo transcends the metaphysical rules of the universe writ large, expanding his resistance well beyond the constellation of the existing order. The passage is useful in defining what immaterial labor is and in showing how an apparent resistance strategy is dime store slight of hand, quite literally in the case of ugly fashions. Is this analysis somewhat trite, yes, but that does not make the argument go away, it might say that the nuances of public reception of aesthetic objects is slightly more complex then this presentation of false consciousness would let on, but this false consciousness argument is played out so successfully in so many places that to dismiss it would be equally dull. Regardless of your take on my conflations, you can always “have it your way.”

Virno frames the strategy of cynicism quite accurately. Truly deskilled workers would need to be really smart, to shift jobs regularly is a task of immense proportions. NBC had a show in the mid/late 90’s titled “the Pretender.” For being a non-core show (fri/sat at 7) the show was reasonably interesting and not nearly as bland as Walker Texas Ranger. The protagonist would inhabit the social spaces of others, surgeons, astronauts, lawyers and all comers with some symbolic mandate to special knowledge. A brief section of the theme song described how our hero was in fact one of the smartest people alive and was highly vaunted as a part of a government program to harness the power of these truly post-skilled laborers. Why does a moderately hackneyed sci-fi show have to do with cynicism? Virno argues that cynicism is a product of subaltern knowledge where the sure veracity of impersonality has stripped affective relationships bare. The individual then can be educated to the extreme, they in fact should be highly educated because the question for these individuals is not so much IF they know that they are oppressed but WHY they choose not to care about taking action. Highly educated workers then are deterratorialized and utilized in a variety of settings, and they know that they are too smart to even bother resisting or demanding equality.

--dan

I burn, I pine, I perish: Deskilling as the autoerotic asphyxiation of capital

I will speak to Mark's question about the immateriality of labor in class and in subsequent posts. For now, a few provocative questions in the attempt to generate themes in the readings so far:

Some have asked quite pointedly as per the simultaneous desire capital has to expunge yet exploit work; this is indeed a mystery... one we can perhaps attempt to investigate by turning to a discussion of generating consumptive modes of "work" (fun surveys, surfing the internet for your data mining job which I did at ACT this summer, playing at the "millsbury," day trading, etc...) which more and more becomes "really" subsumed into a logic of work. Yet, in another line of thought, I remain mystified by capital having a desire at all. What does this mean? How does it make sense to talk and read of the system of capitalism 'responding to crisis' (a la Beniger)? What model of self-propagation is advanced here beyond an assumed autochthonous engine of exchange that drives culture in a one dimensional fashion? How do we make sense of Dyer-Witheford's claim that profit is an "a-priori" dimension of capital (page 15 I think) under which all other oppressions are subsumed? How is desire prior to that which which constructs our desire? {Notice how in the readings authors vacillate on their claims of desire... capitalism is everywhere; but on this account, arguably nowhere then. Capital "tracks" desire (information), capital "stimulates" desire (wages/money) and capital "constructs" desire (advertising).} The desire to construct desire in a certain mode of being/relating cannot be said to cohere analytically; this is to confuse rationality with tautology.

I know nothing about psychoanalysis and so cannot offer a reading of what these authors truly fetishize about the "machine" of capital. But were I to ask them the pop culture question of the day, I'm sure that capital would be their daddy. In broaching the question of the fetish, however, I do wish to at least begin to raise the notion of complicating desire. And this, I believe, is echoed in Robins and Webster as they try to untangle the logic of social taylorism... especially when they get to the $64,000 issue at the end of our readings and speculate upon "the irrationality that underpins [the cybernetic imaginatists'] compulsion to order" (p. 130; see also terry Eagleton's "Holy Terror" as a deconstructive reading of the war on terrorism as the chaotic, Dionysian will to order which underwrites the compulsion for "civilization"). Whereas the logic of something like a supersubject could be postulated then (an imagined superego of the social order, the big brain of capital organizing it all and thwarting crises with its dictatorial demands), an erroneous, heterogeneous order could be said to obtain (an imagined id at the level of the system, the big brain of capital as a multi-armed shiva with its hands in all the economic cookie jars).

Hinted at in the readings are speculations on this other facet of order-generation in the discourses of "autonomism." Not having read Negri and others yet, I find myself unable to comment or speak significantly on the themes therein. However, through DW's reading, it appears as though a question deserving discussion is the difference between the monolithic, universal antagonism of common groups articulated in their opposition to capital (students, engineers, janitors, etc...) and the careful attention to the localized, unique, particular brands of antagonism in any one group. Here, finally then, is my discount idea and but one cent - antagonism to capital is not a "value" in and of itself and should not be read as the organizing value, or its desire. Groups generate desire and values in and through antagonism - and to perform this inquiry seems the real value for a project of autonomist writing. What do people want? Why do they struggle? Simply to thwart, together? There must be a better way to read value and desire (and this is why I keep coming back to Nietzsche since this is perhaps the strangeness that organized his entire philosophy, namely, where does value come from if not the gods (or capital/culture)? In this light, we can begin to read capital's perverse fantasies to subsume us all as perhaps a farce we have fetishized through our very opposition of it. Perhaps there are other perverse fantasies out there that begin to unravel and defetishize capital...

WARNING: some of these links are sexually explicit, provocative and borderline offensive as they contain very adult and sexual language. Though most are innocuous, lame and quite short, I am compelled to state that it is not my intention to offend; please read at your own risk:







http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/nyc/308349637.html (epic mount)

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/ith/359545185.html (vag for sale)

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/det/367342914.html (f$%k chores)

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sac/396375017.html (tarp)

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/110504612.html (pennies)

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/den/306580551.html (tic tac boxes)

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/den/287000204.html (couch)

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/stl/257305465.html (booze for ring)

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/bos/119559400.html (guess the item)

Not too relevant, just pretty much the funniest thing I've ever read. http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/wdc/116720705.html (Cock pic art)

Posting prompt: Immaterial Labor

What does "immaterial" mean in this context? What is the relationship of immaterial labor to re-skilling (re-programming?) and the empowerment/autonomy of workers? What are the implications for our discussion of labor in the digital "social factory"? Does going back to Marx clarify or complicate the notion of immaterial labor?

Google in Iowa

I promise to come back to contributing to the stimulating conversations on this blog, but for right now I want to dump another link. This is Google's page about it's server farm that's going up in Council Bluffs, IA: http://www.google.com/datacenter/councilbluffs/

Room for Countermobilization?

Robins & Webster sure have me feeling frustrated and defeated about Social Taylorism and the power relations we're subject to. In thinking about examples of resistance, I remembered this amusing South Part episode, "Something Wall-Mart [sic] This Way Comes" where the boys learn that the heart of the superstore is the consumer.

It may not solve capitalism's problems, but perhaps it can make us less glum?

The Labor of Consumption

I brought up in class last week a question I was hoping to get resolved. Mark did address it but I think the consensus we came to was that the problem is, perhaps, or at least for now, irresolvable. The question was how we can we resolve the tension between capital’s possible fantasy of wanting to entirely expunge the worker from the process of production and at the same time capital’s reliance upon the worker.

Something that, to me, pointed in the direction of at least a start to this resolution was Robins’ & Webster’s mention of the “labor of consumption” (116). I personally would like to talk more about this concept and see what meanings we can bring out of it. I think it might speak to re-skilling. Maybe.

Considering the (dialectical?) relationship between production and consumption, I envisage capital’s ultimate fantasy as one in which the laboring workforce has been done away with but there is still the maintenance of a “consumptive workforce.” And it is here that I am feebly attempting to use this concept of the labor of consumption.

Is 're-skilling' the word?

The distinction drawn in class between reskilling and re-empowerment makes me wonder if there is another term we should be using. To me, reskilling connotes re-empowerment, but it seems that what we are calling re-skilling is really reprogramming in social Taylorism. Individuals are being reprogrammed as efficient consumer/producers. *shudder*

Can we also think of reskilling in the information age as another name for mediatization? At the bottom of p. 115, R&W say that "...work can actually be organized to allow greater autonomy and independence for workers -- apparent autonomy and independence" (emphasis added). Is this not akin to the adding of eggs to cake mix, Person of the Year 2006, TPS reports, etc.?

Another Link

Here's a link to a Slate article about what kids are up to online. It's particularly interesting in light of our conversation about the breakdown of the boundaries between labor, recreation, and consumerism.

http://www.slate.com/id/2173912/

century of the self

One of my all time favorite documentaries. Available in its 4-hour entirety on Google Video:
Link
The cake mix segment is in Part 2. It's part of a really fascinating section about Ernest Dichter's "Institute for Motivational Research," which, based on Freudian principles of unconscious motivations, invented the "focus group." Fast forward to 18:30 and prepare to be creeped out.

Link Dumping

Some interesting references from today's class:

1. The Times "You" article http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html

2. The MicroRevolt website - http://microrevolt.org/

I am working on the story of seizure of IndyMedia Center hard drives...
-Eve

Is De-Skilling Necessary?

I've been thinking about the idea that re-skilling ultimately might not have a great deal of impact on the relationship between labor and capital. Originally, in the Marxist conception, de-skilling was one way for the factory master to enhance control over his work force. As Robins and Webster outline, with the development of technology, the factory master's arsenal of tools of control has expanded exponentially. In an environment where the corporation has so many novel ways of establishing control, maybe de-skilling is no longer necessary.

The methods of control at the corporation's disposal have become more like a continuous network of control, and I think that this plays well into the concept of the social factory. R&W talk about the "potential combination of work, leisure, and consumption functions in the domestic information terminal," leading to an erosion of the distinction between production and reproduction. Therefore, under the guise of "flexibility," the corporation manages to extend control over every aspect of the worker's life. When you're able to convince your employees that they should be open to the possibility of thinking about work anytime/all the time, and have an unlimited capacity of surveillance over that work, who needs de-skilling?

The Informatized Worker

I think it is helpful to compare the different histories of capitalism outlined by D-W and Robins and Webster. The cycles of struggle (professional worker - mass worker - socialized worker) tend to roughly correspond to the periodic mobilizations referenced by Robins and Webster. I think it's valuable to note how D-W's distinctions are framed by his narrative of working class struggle against monolithic capital whereas Robins and Webster seem to regard changes in capitalism in terms of changing power relations. Whereas D-W portrays a Fordist/post-Fordist narrative, Robins and Webster seem to believe that late capitalism is a continuation of processes of administration and control articulated by Taylorism.

This distinction may seem irrelevant, but it helps me when thinking about the socialized worker’s reskilling. At first I thought D-W and Robins and Webster were at odds. Robins and Webster maintain, “Technological domination becomes extensively and systematically used in spheres far beyond the workplace. This transformation represents an intensification and reconfiguration of Fordism as a way of life...this shift represents a restructuring and reorganization of relations of power” (114). On the other hand, D-W explains that “technological envelopment does not necessarily result in a subjugation of social labor...Although initiated by capital for purposes of control and command, as the system grows it becomes for the socialized worker something else entirely, an ecology of machines” (163).

However, upon reading a bit closer, it seems that the two are much more aligned; D-W just seems more optimistic about the possibility for reappropriation of power and countemobilization (fitting given his narrative of cycles of struggle).

It seems that when drawing a distinction between information and communication, D-W coincides with Robins and Webster. “By informating production, capital seems to augment its powers of control. But it simultaneously stimulates capacities that threaten to escape its command and overspill into rivulets irrelevant to, or even subversive of, profit” (166).

After all that, I guess all I want to say is that I think the socialized worker is not reskilled, but rather informatized, with the centralized, vertical, hierarchic connotations described by D-W (166). Apologies - it's 3 A.M.

On resistance...

Recent posts by classmates have led me to that "glum chum" feeling. Here are a few of my favorites -

1. "Instead of reading the emergence of new social movements coordinated through the internet as revolutionary, we should see them as a vestigial tail, if anything they are the stale remains of old social movements." - Dan

2. "what are the hopes of developing the potential of the working classes in the information age?" - Robin

3. "What we seem to be left with in D-W’s account is a number of relatively isolated instances of emergent forms of worker resistance. There is no clear way, however, that these instances will become articulated together into a large-scale program of resistance that will lead to things like the reform of labor laws."

How about another read on D-W's accounts? The "isolated instances" of resistance are indicative that consent for capitalist hegemony is broad, but "paper thin". I find it interesting that the sublime world of gamer fantasy is built upon the mouse-clicks of exploited "gold farmers" in China. While we are razzled and dazzled by the buzzes and whirs of the Mechanical Turk, some human is at the heart of the "machine" - pushing and clicking the levers or the mouse that makes the "magic" possible, that makes the virtual gold flow.

As Braverman notes, "scientific management" develops in the need to control a "refractory work force in a setting of antagonistic social relations." These controls have gotten more sophisticated as time has marched on, but there still remains some loose ends to tie up if one would want complete control.

1. Somebody's got to do the work.

I think this is something D-W is trying to understand through the evidence he presents. Capitalism simply does not work without labor. And yet, discussion posts seem to be pretty annoyed with the fact that D-W relies so heavily on labor to save the day - "Should we rely only on labor (categorically in the first and last instance for D-W) to strategically deal with techno-capitalism?" Robin - 9/10/07

Let's look at "labor" and "social movements" in a less two-dimensional way. Labor is not only comprised of those folks that join the union. Those folks that don't join the union or are "not interested in being in unions" are still a part of the labor force, though not mobilized, as Chad says, "due to a number of causes..."

R & W provide interesting glimmers of hope in their section on the "Dark Side" p. 94 - "Populations are never simply and absolutely fixed and compartmentalised; they remain obdurately fluid and mobile." Before we dismiss these instances D-W speaks of as "isolated", we should think of the other current "isolated" instances of resistance not mentioned in D-W -
1. development of the IndyMedia Centers (IMC's) in response to corporate media handling of the "Battle in Seattle" of '99 (anti-globalization protests)...
2. Recent elections in Latin America reflecting a trend by the citizens of those countries to support candidates and policies that are anti-"free" trade and promote regionalization
3. Recent 9/15/07 anti-war protest of about 100,000 in DC led at the front of the march by "Iraq Vets Against the War" and "Veterans Against the War"...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/washington/16protest.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Resistance is alive and active. I argue that these instances are not "isolated" but are linked to a broader concept - consent is thin for the dominant order. True, the "groundswell" myth has not played out for a popular revolution started by labor unions. But, social change is a process. It took many years for Anti-Vietnam War protesters to gain widespread, popular support to end the war. It took many, many years in the U.S. to abolish slavery. It took many more years and struggles to fight for an end to legalized segregation.

So, let's not be so glum. Let's just understand that true social change takes time and struggle. Admittedly, Big Labor may not be the first to sound the call, but Big Labor still has the power to shut down the machinery of capitalism...

What is it about Taylorism...

...that makes little pieces of my soul die whenever I read it?

Oh wait, I know:

Taylorism Vs. Kettleism

D-W forgot his vesitgial tail

D-W focuses on the realm of business over other important realms of exchange. Robins and Webster expand this vision of where deskilling takes place to include the realm of politics. The critique of Habermas takes a different line then most, instead of mounting challenges to the possibility of the ideal speech situation or to the coherence of the rational subject, argue that rationality has overcoded political deliberation as unnecessary. The discourse of the rational bureaucrat and technical politico has supplanted the need for individuals to have political opinions or skills. Politics proper including the new DFL resurgence in the Minnesota State House are entirely predicated on a Taylorist model of organization. More troubling even is the argument against Jurgen in chapter 5, where R/W argue that the older symbols of social intercourse are no longer distinct from floating cultural commodities. Not only are individuals politically interchangeable but the concepts used to engage in politics are essentially crafted by the capitalist machine.

If somebody wanted to have some hope for the future they could D-W's interest in new social movements as an emergent challenge to the expert discourse that has deskilled the population. In terms of politics, D-W wants to reinvent the wheel. There was mass organizing and grass roots action for quite sometime before there was the internet, these "new" growths would seem not to be a radical new phenomena but instead a last bit of the old politics of deliberation. Instead of reading the emergence of new social movements coordinated through the internet as revolutionary, we should see them as a vestigial tail, if anything they are the stale remains of old social movements.

I am not sure what a political reskilling would look like, but it would not look like the long boring public meetings that would constitute rational civil society. The political micro cultures of the blogosphere or narrow casting are devoted to information collection, crisis politics and acceleration. I am interested in reading to the conclusion in R/W to see what the alternative is, because they could really get me pretty down. If these guys don't have some hope toward toward the end of the book, I will start to get a little freaked out. I would still be more afraid of the heat death of the universe, but not by much.

--dan

out damned spot

After reading Braverman's account of Taylorism and the two chapters by Robins & Webster, I think there may be a significant problem with this notion of re-skilling. If I have been reading this all correctly, the process of re-skilling for the new epoch of capital is perhaps too tied up to a particular method of skill, which has been applied top down in the form of scientific management (or human resources management, etc.). If for a moment we consider that re-skilling comes not from the organic knowledge of workers but from the perspective of capital, then what are the hopes of developing the potential of the working classes in the information age? D-W might say that the imposition of this type of re-skilling will always lead to a contradictory response by labor. I am not sure that this would then lead (back?) to a moment when knowledge is possessed by the worker and not capital.

Facebook and Free Labor

I've been reading about the role of commercial surveillance in the "war on terror" for a review essay I'm working on, and one of the recurring themes includes government attempts to piggyback on "non-obvious-relationship-awareness" patterns pioneered by marketers and the casino industry. In any case, I stumbled across a piece a while back about government funding for research into the possibility of trolling MySpace for the purposes of identifying potential terrorist suspects. Of course Murdoch bought the site at least in part because of its potential as a target marketing site (it was founded by some folks who worked in e-mail direct marketing, as I recall). Now, back on the marketing side, Facebook is using the info it generates from users for target marketing.

Readings for Tuesday (Sept. 18): Re-skilling?

One of the areas of overlap between D-W's account and that of the Third Wave futurologists he critiques might be the claim that one of the significant developments in the current phase of informated capitalism (at least in the US and similar economies) is a form of re-skilling. What are the implications of narratives of re-skilling from the type of critical perspective that D-W and Robins and Webster are developing (how do their accounts differ? Does the notion of "social Taylorism" come across as less open to oppositional potential than that of the "social factory"?). Which account seems more convincing to you and why? What are the differences between re-skilling in the context of an information economy and re-skilling (if we could imagine the possibility) in a Fordist or industrial context?

Also, I'm going to try something out this week, because I'm interested in hearing from more folks in class: it's a big class for a seminar, and I'd like to make sure everyone gets a chance to participate in the discussion, so I'm asking all of you to come prepared with a point, question, or quote, from the readings that you'd like to have us take up, or at least note, in class. This can be anything from a question about what "immaterial labor" or the "social factory" means to pointing out the relation between meatpacking and car building. Please tie your point to a specific passage in the reading that we can all take a look at and discuss.

I'm going to suggest that you post your reading response not as a "comment" to this post, but as a separate post unto itself. I think everyone can navigate the blog well enough to see one another's posts. Please avail yourself of the linking options if you want to reference one another's posts (or include links to articles, web pages, etc.).

Actual Free Labor?

Perhaps I misunderstood in class, but the tasks through Mechanical Turk (with the exception of the volunteer search effort referenced by Chad) are NOT free labor and don't pretend to be...it's stated clearly on their site that people request and pay for HITs (human intelligence tasks) while others complete the requested work and get paid for it (unless this example was part of a discussion on deskilling?)

I've been sitting on this clip for about a week (click to enlarge and read) that seems to be an example of Terranova's notion of "free labor that is not exploited," or what we've come to classify as free work. I followed the links in the article and this site is offered through Carnegie Mellon University and partially funded by the National Science Foundation.

This is good old (new?) fashioned volunteer work -- people freely giving work that is valued and without anyone profiting monetarily. Curiously, the "greater good" aspect of this work is not immediately clear when you get to the site.

Nevertheless, this is clearly different from the kind of "free labor" exploited by Netscape and Cygnus, but I wonder if there is still an exploitation blind spot lingering here somewhere. (Whoops, my cynical undies are showing.)

Does this seem legit to anyone else?

D-W's examples

One of the things that is missing for me from D-W’s account of how workers locate sites of struggle and mobilize around them is a developed theory of ideology. It is undeniable that the examples he finds of groups that appropriate new technologies into particular struggles represent the fact that many technological objects, especially new media, are multivalent with respect to their subjective meanings. He argues that what is “particularly notable” about the autonomists’ perspective is that it “grasps the new forms of knowledge and communication not only as instruments of capitalist domination, but also as potential resources of anti-capitalist struggle” (130). I would agree that this is particularly notable—but I am not sure to what extent it offers us a useful or unique perspective for thinking about how anti-capitalist struggle might materialize outside of the minute instances D-W documents. While the appropriations of new media he discusses represent a glimmer of hope, it would seem that in the context of labor struggles as a whole this glimmer is quickly being extinguished.

One of the examples D-W returns to over and over is the labor union. He documents the ways in which some labor unions have reassigned meanings to technological devices to make them serve purposes contrary to those of domination and control (which in some cases may have been the express intention behind the design of the device). However, it is worth noting that labor union membership as a whole has been declining steadily since the 1950s (especially in the US). So, regardless of small tactical losses, the overall strategy of capital that seeks to eliminate worker agency in the market seems to be working quite well. After some quick research on the web, it appears that the consensus for why this is so is in some part due to the fact that workers are not interested in being in unions. In other words, a large portion of workers have become convinced that unions cannot provide enough benefits to outweigh the cost of union dues. This is no doubt due to a number of causes, including increased employer resistance, however structural changes in the labor market have been proven not to be responsible for the decline (i.e., the number of potential union jobs has not declined at the rate union membership has dropped). We can say then that ideology, or the imaginary relationship to the real conditions of existence of workers, is a force that undercuts the emergence of resistances, and thus needs to be the primary target of critique. I don’t see D-W drawing much attention to the ideological restraints that by and large articulate new technologies to consumption much more effectively and consistently than to resistance or autonomy.

What we seem to be left with in D-W’s account is a number of relatively isolated instances of emergent forms of worker resistance. There is no clear way, however, that these instances will become articulated together into a large-scale program of resistance that will lead to things like the reform of labor laws. D-W appears to rely on the “groundswell” argument, where after enough of these instances accumulate workers will realize that they have at their disposal the tools required to organize effectively and make demands. Perhaps I am misreading his argument, but as far as I can tell, there is no explicit connection made between the micro-resistances he documents and a macro-resistance that will at some point emerge to reverse the macro-trends like declining union membership and a widespread skepticism of “union instrumentality.”

Immaterial Labor

We're going to be reading a piece on MySpace and immaterial labor. As a preview, there's an ongoing discussion thread devoted to the topic on the iDC list. I think this is the piece that set it off (which was a response to this essay). See what you think of the discussion of labor -- based on a quick look through some of the early posts, I noticed a preoccupation with coming up with what might be described as "subjective" or substantive definitions: if it doesn't feel like "work" then it's not labor, or if it's not physical work, it's not labor. This has very little to do with the relational definition that we discussed in class. What always fascinates me in this type of discussion is that marx, vulgar marxism, and marxists get tagged with imposing the term "labor" on a situation, finding it everywhere they look. I've read enough of the business literature on the topic to know that it's not (just) the marxists who are thinking of value generating interactivity as labor, it's the businesses who see this activity as consumer participation in the production process. Now this itself isn't dispositive from the point of view of the relational definition we've been working with, but it does tend to be overlooked by those who target those crusty marxists. Maybe they're trying to highlight the complicity of such marxists with the business world: both of them "don't get" that what they think of as labor (whether unwaged, directly waged or compensated in the form of convenience or free onlinge storage space etc.) is "really" something more. In other words, as D-W puts it, it's not (just) the marxists but contemporary capitalism which is vulgar and reductionist. Those businesses just don't get that what they think of as labor and invest in as such -- the contributions to the creation of information commodities that they buy, sell and profit from -- really isn't. We've already surpassed capitalism, but the problem is that capitalism just hasn't realized it yet.

NetSlavery

Terranova mentions "netslaves" at the beginning of the third chapter. I decided to perouse the web for this term and found it here:

NetSlaves - Horror Stories of the Working Web

http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/netslaves/

What do you think of these posted stories and how they relate to the concepts of labor we are currently discussing in class?
-Eve

Free Labor and Open Source

I asked several people but no one was sure who is making money out of this freeware, Firefox. I was actually impressed to see the message saying "over 10,000 people test..." when I happended to see it after updating the web browser. Terranova does not mention in her book about Firefox and Linux which currently pick up lots of pupularity while they remain as open-source software. It will be interesting to see whether Firefox will be another example of "digital capital hijacking" or a rare case of the Internet "gift economy."

Surveillance Futures

An interesting article on US investment in the Chinese surveillance industry: incubating high tech surveillance (for eventual export?). The next step in the control revolution?

Your Virtual Self in the Sunday Times

I am not sure if anyone has seen this article in the Sunday (09/09) New York Times Business section.

Even in a Virtual World, ‘Stuff’ Matters

The article describes the online world of Second Life where people work in the online world's economy and buy objects for their digital selves. People are earning by doing work and selling land in the online world.

The article ends on the rising need for bureaucracy and regulation. Apparently there was a run on the bank that housed people's digital monies and panic spread as these virtual A.T.M.’s stopped giving depositors their money back. Talk about discourses of dematerialization...

Read other articles about Second Life here.

Mechanical Turk not a Mechanical Jerk

Click image for bigger size.
I just got this email from Mechanical Turk. They're asking people to volunteer to scan satellite imagery to help find missing ballooner Steve Fossett.

Link Dump

http://www.tv-links.co.uk/ - Streaming all your favorite TV shows, links user-maintained.

http://gigapedia.org/ - Free books on every subject (need to register). Posted by bibliophiles. Unlike p2p filesharing, there is no expectation of getting anything in return.

http://www.zophar.net/hacks/nes.html - In case you didn't get enough Metroid or Zelda first time around, here are some Nintendo hacks. Brand new games built on the original game architecture. Done for love, not for profit.

Technoculture Blog

Hi folks, since we've been talking about free labor, we might as well do some. No compulsion here -- only on the Discussion Board. Also no payment. I thought this might be a good place to list links that relate to class themes. I mentioned the AOL data dump in class: here's a USA Today piece on it. Once the data was released online some free laborers put it into a searchable, sortable database [warning: many of the pre-fab searches here yield explicit results] which lead to some disturbing findings -- a portrait of the type of things people wonder about when they think no one is watching. If you Google AOL and Splunk, you'll find more examples of searches conducted on the data [same warning applies].