New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Facebook and the Dispossession of Preferences

By Gordon Hull

A little more than a year ago, I floated a version of the thesis that Big Data functions as a form of capitalist accumulation by dispossession.  “Accumulation by Dispossession” is David Harvey’s term for what Marx called “primitive accumulation,” and the basic idea is that capital has to extract value from individuals in a way that pushes them into its system of value extraction.  It does that by depriving them of other sources of value.  For example, the enclosure laws in 16^th-Century England served to dispossess commoners and small-scale farmers of the ability to subsist off the land, and so thrust them, “free” into the urban labor pool.  Absent this initial dispossession, the formation of the urban market in “free labor” would have been impossible.  My argument focused on the dispossession of preferences, and was that data analytics function to deprive us of the capacity to form and express preferences outside of the logic of capitalist markets.  That is significant because the more our “preferences” are restricted to those things that we can buy, the more our lives are determined by market logic – and the more things that exceed market logic become invisible.  We are dispossessed of the ability to imagine life differently.

So.  Back to Facebook.  A recent piece by Sam Biddle in the Intercept, based on a leaked internal FB document, suggests that Facebook is deeply engaged in exactly this process.  According to Biddle:

Foucault and Marx: on Subjectification and Exhaustion

By Gordon Hull

I have been circling around the relation between Marx and Foucault for a while, and thinking in  particular about the ways that they can be viewed as productively engaged, particularly at the intersection of primitive accumulation and subjectification (e.g., here, here and here)  This of course flies in the face of Foucault’s acerbic dismissals of Marxism, as when in the early parts of Society must be Defended, he dismisses it as “totalitarian,” or in the Trombadori interviews more generally.  But there is a renaissance of interest in the topic, and there are a number of Foucault texts only now being studied in the English-speaking world that can be brought to bear on it.  Most prominent perhaps is the recently translated “Mesh of Power” lecture, where Foucault specifically credits chapters 13-15 of Capital for moving toward a non-juridical understanding of power.  As Foucault says, what Marx shows there is that “one power does not exist, but many powers” and that power is productive, not repressive:

“These specific regional powers [delineated by Marx – GH] have absolutely no ancient [primordial] function of prohibiting, preventing, saying ‘you must not.’ The original, essential and permanent function of these local and regional powers is, in reality, being producers of the efficiency and skill of the producers of a product.  Marx, for example, has superb analyses of the problem of discipline in the army and workshops.”

What I want to do here is extend some of the credit to the “Fragment on Machines” section of the Grundrisse. 

Today in Creepy Privacy Invasions: Burger King

Apparently Burger King ran an ad that attempted to trigger Google Home by having a Burger King employee say “OK, Google: What is the Whopper burger?”  First the ad was up, then it was down, now BK says that it might come back.  The ad was supposed to trigger Google Home to read the first line of the Wikipedia definition of the Whopper. Annoyed Google customers promptly changed the line to say the burger contained cyanide.  A handle that looked suspiciously like a BK executive then changed it back into effusive praise.  As of this moment, the Wikipedia front page reads much more neutrally.  So apparently it’s been reverted, or the BK sock puppet isn’t at work yet.

We don’t have a good regulatory strategy for this one.  The only one that comes immediately to mind is some sort of creative deployment of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which essentially criminalizes accessing a computer beyond authorization.  But there are reasons to be very concerned with this strategy.  The CFAA was used in an ill-conceived federal cyberbullying case, where the problem was not that the bullying, which resulted in a teenager committing suicide, was not bad (cyberbullying is epidemic, usually misogynistic and generally awful), but that the CFAA interpretation advocated in the case would have legitimated the idea that using a fake name or email address online was a federal crime.  That said, the CFAA might put a stop to this sort of saturation of all of life with advertising.  You probably did not authorize Burger King to access your home system, although I wouldn’t be surprised if terms of service didn’t start taking that sort of complaint off the table very soon.  In any case, don’t expect the current government to help: while the Republicans were involved in their circular firing squad trying to destroy the ACA, they did pass legislation blocking impending regulations protecting the privacy of ISP-collected data.

Do Brands Produce Value? Thoughts on de-fetishizing use value

Brands are of increasing importance to capitalism.  As an insightful book by Franck Cochoy argues, this is part of the logic of commodification, which generates a perpetual demand for product differentiation.  At the point that a product becomes a commodity – i.e., at the point that it leaves the bazaar, where individual vendors measure out products like food in bulk to individual customers, and enters the process of circulation in a capitalist market – it becomes necessary to distinguish commodities from one another.  This is because the initial process of commodification first produces a necessary standardization (where weights, notions of what a given product name signifies, etc. become more uniform – in Marxian terms, where exchange value becomes measurable and money becomes the primary way by which one measures equivalence between commodities whose use value is presumed equivalent), from which producers then have to distinguish their commodities.  This demand for differentiation generates packaging, brands, trademark, and the final detachment of commodities from brands, such that brands have value that can be applied to other commodities.  A good literature from anthropology and cultural studies illustrates this process with such products as “quality” salmon, canola oil, and teak.

There is currently a lively debate in the context of the internet about whether brands actually produce (surplus) value in the Marxian sense.  The pro side is represented in a recent piece by Adam Arvidsson and Elanor Colleoni, who argue that standard Marxian notions of labor apply poorly to the generation of value in places like social media, because the Marxian notion of labor is too tightly connected to time spent laboring.  Instead, and following Negri specifically and autonomist Marxism more generally, they claim that “in effect, social media platforms like Facebook function as channels by means of which affective investments on the part of the multitude can be translated into objectified forms of abstract affect that support financial valuations” (146).  That is, prosumers produce surplus value by means of affective investment in brands (it is perhaps worth pointing out that this argument is not confined to theories about information; for a similar argument from the anthropology literature, see this piece), and this unremunerated attachment is harvested by social media companies as surplus value.

In a critique of Arvidsson and Colleoni’s claim that brands produce value, Jakob Rigi and Robert Prey argue that affect “does not produce new value but instead helps the owner of the brand to appropriate a larger portion of the surplus value produced by workers in the realm of production” (400).  They identify three primary ways this happens: (1) by allowing brand owners to increase demand for their commodity at the expense of other commodities, enabling them to sell their commodities at prices above their value; (2) by allowing brand owners to extract monopoly rents in the form of intellectual property licensing; and (3) by allowing speculative value and what Marx calls “fictitious capital” to attach to the brand via the stock market.  I want to take a closer look at the first claim here, because it comes across to me as mistaken.  At the very least, it seems to me to require more argument than Rigi and Prey supply to defeat the supposition that brands create value, even if Arvidsson and Colleoni aren’t quite right to speak in terms of affective labor (though I’m going to defend at least a version of that claim below; part of my goal here is to be able to define it more precisely.  As I’ve suggested in the context of big data (see also here), I think that the surplus value discussion here is incomplete without reference to primitive accumulation).

Squaring the Circle on Big Data, Class, Value and Primitive Accumulation

A recent paper by Hamid Ekbia presents an interesting Marxian theory of the relation between exploitation and computer networks.   The paper is intended as an intervention in to discussions of the accumulation of value in what is now called cognitive capitalism (I’ve attempted to synthesize some of that literature here).  The most interesting part of the Ekbia’s paper seems to me that he’s able to construct a coherent notion of class (or close to class – he acknowledges that it’s not quite a class in the strict Marxian sense) within those who are part of the networked economy.  In particular, he is able to locate those who are exploited and to roughly define them as a group: the “condensers.”  The problem of locating a specific exploited class is important and salient partly because there is no way for a Marxian theory of value to work unless somebody is exploited, but also because the behavior of prosumers in particular has been the subject of intense controversy, particularly on the subject of whether they produce value.  Ekbia’s contribution, it seems to me, is to show how and why some prosumers manage to be exploited.

Notes on Big Data, Marx, Time, and the Production of Value

There is a running debate in critical theory circles about the applicability of Marxian analysis to big data specifically, and to an economy dominated by immaterial goods, more generally (I have blogged about this periodically, circling primarily around the concept of primitive accumulation: see here and here).  As part of working through that literature, here I want to lay out some of the broad outlines of the pro- side as I see it, and then offer some preliminary thoughts from Marx’s own work that address one specific objection.

Advocates of the applicability of Marx almost invariably (as far as I can tell so far; I don’t claim to have read anywhere near all of this literature yet) base their case on Italian autonomism.  Autonomism is best known in the work of Antonio Negri (with or without Michael Hardt); important in this context are also Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarto and Franco Berardi.  Autonomism breaks with classical Marxism both insofar as it breaks with any sort of economic determinism (by shifting the base to class struggle, and not means of production), as well by advancing two more immediately applicable ideas.  First, autonomism adopts Marx’s “Fragment on Machines,” an unpublished (by Marx) and fragmentary set of notes to the effect that capital will be relying increasingly on accumulated science and knowledge (Virno has what is probably the best synopsis of this account of the “general intellect”).  Second, autonomist theory argues that capitalist relations have extended beyond the boundaries of the workplace to encompass all social relations.  In Negri’s terms, we now face the complete subsumption of society by capital. 

Self-Tracking, Big Data, and the questions of Subjectification and Primitive Accumulation

One question surrounding big data – in addition to well-established worries about privacy and discrimination – that is starting to get attention is how it functions as a mode of capitalist accumulation.  There is an emerging literature on capitalist value creation and big data, but a lot of that is about the creation of surplus value, and so generates debate about whether the value that individuals freely contribute to the Internet can be described in Marxian terms as surplus labor.  In view of that discussion, I’ve suggested that we need to also think about the level of primitive accumulation, or what David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession.”  In the case of big data, I argued, one such method is by depriving individuals of their preferences, though accumulation practices are diverse.  A recent paper by Deborah Lupton suggests another mechanism by which this process might occur: coercive self-tracking.

Why the Politics of Internet Flags Matters

By Gordon Hull

We don’t access the internet directly – it’s always through some sort of intermediary software.  For that reason, it matters – a lot – what the intermediary does, and what kind of interactivity it promotes.  Concern about this dates at least to a 1996 (published finally in 2000) paper by Lucas Introna and Helen Nissenbaum called “Why the Politics of Search Engines Matters.”  More recently, Tarleton Gillespie has emerged as a major voice in these debates: his book, Wired Shut, makes a strong case against Digital Rights Management techniques, and his more recent “Politics of Platforms” makes an argument analogous to Introna and Nissenbaum’s for programs like Facebook.  Indeed, internal FB studies seem to bear these concerns out: Facebook discovered that it could influence voter participation with simple “get out the vote” reminders sent to some users but not others. The results could easily swing a tight election.  Gillespie and Kate Crawford have a new paper out that makes the argument in the context of “flagging” content.

Big Data and the Hyper-Reserve Army

By Gordon Hull

At the end of my time in high school, I worked part-time bagging groceries.  There was some modest union influence on the job, and its scheduling was pretty predictable: the longer you’d been there, the better schedule you’d get.  Your first few weeks, you knew you’d be working late into the evening, especially on Friday and Saturday.  After a while, the late shifts would taper off as somebody newer than you would get slotted into them.  You could depend on a pretty predictable schedule week-in and week-out.  It was a service sector job with a factory-like scheduling.

I mention this because one of the more nefarious uses of big data got emphasized last week in the context of discussion Black Friday’s steady march backwards into Thanksgiving day.  Last week’s news highlighted one way that data analytics can be used to introduce further precarity into the lives of low-wage workers.  The transfer of risk and precarity to employees more generally is of course something neoliberalism does pretty well, but the process is even more intense for low-wage workers due to the introduction of scheduling software that produces unsteady, uneven, just-in-time scheduling, so that employers don’t have to pay for employees who aren’t absolutely necessary.  Since a disproportionate number of those affected by these programs have children to care for, and since many of them are minorities, it’s also a case of disparate impact on poor, minority women.  As stores open earlier and earlier for Black Friday, more and more workers – again, mostly women – are being put into the position of not knowing whether they’ll have Thanksgiving off until a day or two before. It’s a good example of the general problem.

Taylor Swift's Platonism

By Gordon Hull

Over on Cyborgology, my colleague Robin James has a post up about Taylor Swift’s promotion of her new album.  James focuses on two moments in that promotion: on the one hand, Swift has removed her music from the free streaming part of Spotify, on the grounds that it insufficiently compensates her (and others’) labor in producing it.  On the other hand, she released a video, “Blank,” that watches more like an interactive video game.  On James’ argument, both of these strategies amount to an effort on Swift’s part to control and otherwise dictate the terms of her affective labor.  On the surface of it, that’s laudable enough, and certainly the Internet can readily be seen as an enormously complex vehicle for extracting surplus value from its users by getting them to work for free.  As Terry Hart tirelessly points out on Copyhype, Silicon Valley makes a lot of money off of other people’s work, and shockingly little of that money finds its way back to the content industries: Silicon Valley obscures (and does not compensate) the enormous amount of affective labor on which it depends.

Cloud Computing and the Extension of the Price Mechanism

by Gordon Hull

Cloud computing – where users keep their data (and often their applications) online - poses significant theoretical and regulatory problems.  Many of these concern jurisdiction: it’s very hard to even know at a given moment where data is kept, and it’s often unclear (in the case of privacy, for example), which jurisdiction’s privacy and data protection rules should apply (the one for the data subject? the company that collected the data? the companies processing it? etc.).  Not only that, U.S. and EU law are wildly inconsistent on the point, even though any large big data company has to serve multiple jurisdictions.

A recent piece by Paul M. Schwartz does some valuable work disentangling these issues; here, I want to focus on one moment.  Schwartz notes that cloud computing will likely induce significant changes in how firms are structured, and how they structure their data handling.  Back in 1937, Ronald Coase proposed that companies will decide between doing something in house and outsourcing it based on a comparison of the costs of each.  If it’s more efficient to do something in-house, using the hierarchical control structure of the firm and avoiding the complexities of dealing with markets, that’s what we can expect.  If, on the other hand, it turns out that it’s more efficient to hire somebody else to do the job, we can expect companies to do that.  Companies have to balance the difficulties of managing a project in-house versus the costs of negotiating contracts with independent vendors.

RFID Tags and Commodification

by Gordon Hull

In a recent post, and by way of an important paper by Katherine Hayles, I suggested that “insofar as RFID chips negotiate the boundary between informatics and objects, and transitions between those, they should be studied as sites for the primitive accumulation of capital.  That is, they are places where objects can become subsumed into capitalist market structures, while being dispossessed (following David Harvey's terminology) of whatever value they might have had before.”  In the comments, Ed Kazarian suggested that the analysis also needs to think about the role of circulation and the ways that the wide diffusion of RFID tags facilitate the smooth circulation of commodities with the sorts of supply chain management techniques that characterize “just in time” capitalism. Here, I want to try to further that analysis a step or two, in part by complicating the sense in which I was using subsumption.

Normalizing Civility, Policing Critique, Enforcing Silence and Misunderstanding Collegiality

By Leigh M. Johnson

How we ought to understand the terms "civility" and "collegiality" and to what extent they can be enforced as professional norms are dominating discussions in academic journalism and the academic blogosphere right now.  (So much so, in fact, that it's practically impossible for me to select among the literally hundreds of recent articles/posts and provide for you links to the most representative here.)  Of course, the efficient cause of civility/collegiality debates' meteoric rise to prominence is the controversy surrounding Dr. Steven Salaita's firing (or de-hiring, depending on your read of the situation) by the University of Illinois only a month ago, but there are a host of longstanding, deeply contentious and previously seething-just-below-the-surface agendas that have been given just enough air now by the Salaita case to fan their smoldering duff into a blazing fire.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll just note here at the start that I articulated my concerns about (and opposition to) policing norms of civility/collegiality or otherwise instituting "codes" to enforce such norms some months ago (March 2014) in a piece I co-authored with Edward Kazarian on this blog here (and reproduced on the NewAPPS site) entitled "Please do NOT revise your tone."  My concern was then, as it remains still today, that instituting or policing norms of civility/collegiality is far more likely to protect objectionable behavior/speech by those who already possess the power to avoid sanction and, more importantly, is likely to further disempower those in vulnerable professional positions by effectively providing a back-door manner of sanctioning what may be their otherwise legitimately critical behaviors/speech.  I'm particularly sympathetic to the recent piece "Civility is for Suckers" in Salon by David Palumbo-Liu (Stanford) who retraces the case-history of civility and free speech and concludes, rightly in my view, that "civility is in the eye of the powerful."

The Ferguson Lesson: Another Way to "Take Up Arms"

As someone who has spent the better part of her career researching, analyzing and teaching not only about the structure and nature of oppressive power regimes, but also better and worse ways to resist or transform such regimes, I've nevertheless been unable to settle in my own mind, to my own satisfaction, my position with regard to the moral or political value of revolutionary violence.  I can say that my core moral intuitions (for whatever those are worth) definitely incline me toward favoring nonviolence as a principled ethical commitment... though, over the years, I have found those intuitive inclinations fading in both intensity and persuasiveness.  As a philosopher, a citizen and a moral agent, I continue to be deeply unsettled by my own ambivalence on this matter.

First, a preliminary autobiographical anecdote: I spent a year between undergraduate and gradate school in the nonprofit sector, as the Director of the M.K.Gandhi Institute for the Study of Nonviolence.  (That was back in 2000, when the Gandhi Institute was still housed at Christian Brothers University in Memphis, which is now my academic home, evidencing the kind of bizarro turn-of-fate that can only be credited to some particularly clever-- or ironically humorous-- supernatural bureaucrat.)  I went to the Gandhi Institute initially because nonviolence was an all-but-unquestioned moral virtue for me at the time.  But, after a few years in graduate school and consistently since, the many and varied until-then-unposed questions about the moral or political legitimacy of violence pressed their way to the fore of my mind.  In roughly chronological order, I'd say that the combination of (1) my first real engagement with Frantz Fanon's argument in "Concerning Violence" (from his Wretched of the Earth), the arguments by Marx (and Marxists) in various texts advocating more or less violent revolution, and Noam Chomsky's considerations of the same, (2) my extensive research into human rights violations, transitional justice and transitional democracies, postcolonial theory, feminist theory and critical race theory, which collectively constituted the subject of my dissertation, (3) the radically dramatic shift in what counts as properly-speaking "political" and/or "revolutionary" violence in the post-9/11 world and (4) my own experiences, from near and afar, with the increasing number of (threatened, proto-, aborted, defeated and/or more-or-less successful) revolutions taking place in my adult lifetime (e.g., OWS, the Arab Spring and, much closer to home and far less violent, the current and ongoing academic revolution surrounding the Salaita case), all worked together to contribute to my rethinking the merits and demerits of violence as a way of resisting/combatting/correcting oppressive, exclusionary or otherwise unjust power regimes.

Join, or Die: Neoliberalism, Epistemontology, Social Harmony and the (Invisible) Invisible Hand

There's been a good bit conversation recently about the merits and demerits of "public philosophy" and, as someone who considers herself committed to public philosophy (whatever that is). I'm always happy to stumble across a piece of remarkably insightful philosophical work in the public realm.  Case in point:  Robin James (Philosophy, UNC-Charlotte) posted a really fascinating and original short-essay on the Cyborgology blog a couple of days ago entitled "An attempt at a precise & substantive definition of 'neoliberalism,' plus some thoughts on algorithms." There, she primarily aims to distinguish the sense in which we use the term "neoliberalism" to indicate an ideology from its use as a historical indicator, and she does so by employing some extremely helpful insights about algorithms, data analysis, the mathematics of music, harmony, and how we understand consonance and dissonance.  I'm deeply sympathetic with James' underlying motivation for this piece, namely, her concern that our use of the term "neoliberalism" (or its corresponding descriptor "neoliberal") has become so ubiquitous that it is in danger of being evacuated of "precise and substantive" meaning altogether.  I'm sympathetic, first, as a philosopher, for whom precise and substantive definitions are as essential as hammers and nails are to a carpenter. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I'm sympathetic with James' effort because as Jacques Derrida once said "the more confused the concept, the more it lends itself to opportunistic appropriation."  Especially in the last decade or so, "neoliberalism" is perhaps the sine qua non term that has been, by both the Left and the Right, opportunistically appropriated.

James' definition of neoliberalism's ideological position ("everything in the universe works like a deregulated, competitive, financialized, capitalist market") ends up relying heavily on her distinction of neoliberalism as a particular type of ideology, i.e., one "in which epistemology and ontology collapse into one another, an epistemontology." In sum, James conjectures that neoliberal epistemontology purports to know what it knows (objects, beings, states of affairs, persons, the world) vis-a-vis "the general field of reference of economic anaylsis."

Facebook's Social Factory

I’m currently teaching a summer gen-ed class on the topic of “Ethical Issues: Technology,” and when I teach this class, I always make a point to discuss Facebook early-on. Specifically, this time we’re talking about the “is Facebook making us lonely” question, using a piece from the Atlantic and a critique of it that appeared a few days later on Slate.  But I always try to include time for talking about Facebook in general.  And my students say more or less what the research says: almost all of them are on it, and they use it mainly to keep up with and enhance offline social networks.  They gain considerable social capital from their use of it.  But they also don’t like it all that much.  They resent the constantly changing settings, and they’re getting fairly cynical about FB as a business.  They don’t much like having to untag themselves from photos all the time.  They tend to think FB either takes them for granted, or even takes advantage of them.  More than one said they’d leave if they could figure out how.  And they do worry about privacy.  All of that is anecdotal, of course, but it’s been a pretty consistent response for a few years now.

A great deal of the value of a company like FB is network: like telephones, the more people who use them, the more valuable yours is.  This is part of why students don’t have much of an exit option, as leaving FB would basically give them the SNS equivalent of a one-phone system.  FB then rubs it in: there’s no way to export all of your material from it to another system, so a decision to leave is a decision to leave however many hours of socializing and networking behind.  This sort of state of affairs led Tiziana Terranova to note – before FB – that websites extract a lot of surplus value from the users who produce them simply because of this network effect. 

From Discipline to Control to “Please Hold while I transfer your call”

 

In a famous essay, Deleuze suggests that our society has moved beyond Foucauldian disciplinary power to a more fluid “control society,” where the various sites of disciplinary control merge into a modulated network of interlocking sites of power, the primary technique of which is access control.  As Deleuze notes, the move is “dispersive,” and “the factory has given way to the corporation.” Hence, “the family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner – state or private power – but coded figures – deformable and transformable – of a single corporation that now has only stockholders.” (6)  The most vivid image of such a society he attributes to Guattari, who:

“has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighborhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position – licit or illicit – and effects a universal modulation” (7)

This thesis has been most widely applied to surveillance and security and is easily evidenced by things like NSA “don’t fly” lists and the number of passwords one has to generate online.  That said, I would like to suggest here that, at least in one respect, we’re moving past the control society.  Or, perhaps, we’re seeing the truth of the control society in an unexpected way.  One feature of the move from the dungeon to the panopticon is regulatory efficiency: it costs a lot less to get people to police themselves than to coerce them with brute force.  The move to control is similarly efficient in that multiple, closed panoptic systems are much less efficient than a more modular arrangement where panoptic technologies are (as Foucault said they would be) completely diffused into society and work together, rather than separately. 

Even Foucault couldn't make this up (hat-tip Rod Dreher)

Why do things like "professional development," "continuing education," "team-building," and (yes, this too) "assessment" always have to tend towards infantalizing the poor people subjected to them?

It's one thing to bureaucratically humiliate people by making them waste huge gobs of time. But this business of making them engage in ritualistic idiotic performances (which always involve to some extent enthusiastically presupposing that everyone is not in fact wasting time) is a much higher echelon of evil. How can the adult human beings in this video (courtesy Washington Post) have any self-respect?*

Mark my words. First they came for the high school teachers. . .**

[*To be fair, everyone involved in making the video and smuggling it to the Washington Post gained back their self-respect fourfold.

**If I was doing my normal thing and putting a rock video in the upper right hand corner, it would probably have been Jane's Addiction's "Idiots Rule." But I realized that it didn't scan because even if team-builder/professional development/assessment types are self-deluded enough to believe in the rightness of what they make the rest of us do, it takes quite a bit of intelligence to get people so complicit in their own immiseration.]

Biopolitical Employment Screening

 If anyone still doubted that Agamben’s thesis - according to which biopolitics today is about the reduction of politics to biological existence (zoe), shorn of anything to do with the form (bios) of life – needs revision, this arrives about big-data employee screening that operates with an amalgam of questionnaires and biometrics.  Salon’s Andrew Leonard relates:

Hyperemployment and gender (guest post)

Gordon Hull sends us this guest post:

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Writing at the Atlantic, Ian Bogost develops the concept of “hyperwork” to describe the constantly-on conditions of work in contemporary society.  The gist of the argument is that we (technology users, anyway) are overworked because we are doing a lot of jobs.  As he puts it, “No matter what job you have, you probably have countless other jobs as well. Marketing and public communications were once centralized, now every division needs a social media presence, and maybe even a website to develop and manage. Thanks to Oracle and SAP, everyone is a part-time accountant and procurement specialist. Thanks to Oracle and Google Analytics, everyone is a part-time analyst.”  And that’s before we get to try to manage email.  Most of these extra jobs aren’t paid, but the loss of money is not nearly alarming as the loss of time.

At Cyborgology, my colleague Robin James takes up one point that Bogost does not make: that the new jobs we are all working are, by and large, traditionally jobs held by women or other minorities, for which traditionally “feminine” attributes of caring and nurturing are useful.  She wonders aloud whether the phenomena of hyperwork will thus alter our notions of femininity.

Another point to which Bogost gestures but that needs more emphasis relates to what Tiziana Terranova, Paolo Virno, Franco Berardi, Antonio Negri and others of the Italian “autonomist” school of thought call “cognitive capitalism,” which is basically a Marxist interpretation and critique of the “net economy.” 

Social media, mood graphs, and immaterial labor

Evan Selinger has an important piece up at Wired on the way social media are constructing mood graphs based on our use of emoticons.

We already know that with a social graph at its disposal, a mood graph would give Facebook an incredible edge over its competitors for customizing ads and recommendations, as well as predicting users’ future feelings. But consider this: Even if you’re someone who doesn’t share anything, Facebook could potentially reverse-engineer your emotional persona by filling in the blanks from your like-minded friends’ emotional states. In other words, the more your friends emote and translate their soulful moments into basic data points, the more Facebook can determine what makes you tick, too.

In short, thanks to persuasive interface design and non-transparent algorithms, we may be providing emotional labor without even knowing it.

Couple the social media framing and exploitation of self-offered emotional labor with the construction of "soft skills" profiles from MOOCs and we see some of what the Autonomia people are after when they talk about the social factory.