Workshop: The Politics of Disconnection and Disruptive Media
The workshop explores the possibilities of disconnection in digital culture and is the second event in a series dedicated to questions of disconnection. Current discourses on digital culture often link media technologies to immediate delivery and constant availability that result in the experience of hurried lives and a culture of speed (Davis, 2013; Rosa, 2013; Sharma, 2014; Tomlinson, 2007). However, in this context practices and technologies of disconnection emerge as well. We are interested in exploring how disconnection, i.e. the non-usage of digital media technologies is constructed as being of economic, cultural, social and political value in contemporary, information affluent societies. As the abundance of media technologies contributes to the necessity to make choices for connection or disconnection, use or non-use, participation or abstention, these choices are becoming of interest to the digital economy.
Date: 12 December
Location: Södertörn University, Sweden, PA238
The workshop explores
- Disconnection and non-usage as resistance
- The politics of non-participation and disconnection
- Disruptive media
Programme
Alessandro Delfanti (University of Toronto)
You’re disconnected! Getting fired in platform capitalism
Sophie Toupin (McGill University)
Maxigas (Central European University)
Emergent features of old new media: The case of IRC backlogs
Johan Söderberg (Gothenburg University)
The Cloud Factory – Distributed Deskilling
Mel Hogan (University of Calgary)
Infrastructural Activism: Water and the NSA’s Data Center in Utah
Discussants
Carina Guyard (Södertörn University)
Christian Schwarzenegger (Augsburg University)
Anne Kaun (Södertörn University)
Registration (free)
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-politics-of-disconnection-and-disruptive-media-tickets-28943817738
Abstracts
Alessandro Delfanti
You’re disconnected! Getting fired in platform capitalism
In platform-based digital labour, worker dismissal can materialize in the form of disconnection from the company’s app or website. This represents the most brutal side of the disciplinary power of digital labour technologies. Disconnection can be the result of a negative algorithmic evaluation of a worker’s productivity or reliability, for example through aggregated customer ratings. It can also represent a political decision, for example in the case of dismissal of workers on strike. Indeed, the technical ability to disconnect a worker is the result of deeper political and legal transformations which enable platform capitalism to tap into an increasingly precarious workforce. In this paper I will present case studies from ongoing mobilizations in the food delivery sector in Italy. To this end, I will also analyze how, by institutionalizing casual work, recent labour laws have normalized disconnection. Yet the role of these disciplinary technologies in subduing labour may lay the ground for new forms of resistance to emerge.
Sophie Toupin
Maxigas
Emergent features of old new media: The case of IRC backlogs
The affordances of media may change over time even if their technical architecture remains intact, affecting their use and non-use. Shifting affordances of a media may motivate its adoption and non-adoption by different social groups. The social history and contemporary use of Internet Relay Chat is a case in point.
Internet Relay Chat is a very basic but very flexible protocol for real time written conversations. It has been first implemented in 1988, one year before the World Wide Web. IRC reached the height of its popularity as a general purpose social media during the first Gulf War and the siege of Sarajevo (1992-1996). At this time it performed various functions that were later fulfilled by specialised programs and platforms, such as dating, following friends or file sharing. As the population of the Internet grew and market consolidation set it, IRC faded from the public view.
However, it is known from seminal studies of contemporary peer production communities that free software developers [@Coleman2012a], hackerspace members [@Maxigas2015a], Wikipedia editors [@Broughton2008a] and Anonymous hacktivists [@Dagdelen2012a] use primarily IRC for everyday backstage communication. While the first group has always been on IRC, the latter three adopted it after the apparent demise of the medium. I propose to find out “Why these contemporary user groups – widely considered as disruptive innovators and early adopters – stick to a museological chat technology despite its obvious limitations within the current technological landscape?” Currently popular social networking platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, offer similar features and appear to be a more obvious choice. My hypothesis is that while IRC use can seem retrograde, it is actually the articulation of a powerful critique of mainstream social media monopolies.
Johan Söderberg
The Cloud Factory – Distributed Deskilling
Taking foothold in a case study of a group of hobbyists developing an open source 3D printer, this presentation re-examines the deskilling-thesis in Harry Braverman’s classic Labor and Monopoly Capital. The deskilling-thesis lays down that, given capitalist relations of production, i.e. wage labour relations, there is a general trend towards deskilling. The relevance of my case study for revisiting this question is suggested by the fact, that the 3D printer derives from computer numerical control (CNC) machinery. The principle behind both the CNC machines and the 3D printers is that a machinery tool is guided by software (as opposed to being guided by a human worker). The deployment of this technology in the heavy manufacturing industry in the second half of twentieth century served as a touchstone in debates for and against the deskilling-thesis. The open source 3D printer provides me with a novel entry point to an old debate that was framed by the contractual employment relation. The relevance of my case study to LPT rests on recent studies showing that users, fans and audiences are being put-to-work by firms (Gill & Pratt, 2008; Burston, Dyer-Witheford & Hearn, 2010; Scholz, 2012). Subsequently, calls have been made for synthesising LPT with theories about the exploitation of free/volunteer labour in the cultural sector (Böhm & Land, 2012), and Marx’s theory of value is being re-examined in the light of this trend (Fuchs, 2012). This body of empirical and theoretical work provides the background for situating the 3D printing community in a larger, historical transformation of the labour process and occupational structures. The machine tools and the control software used by the hobbyists in the 3D printing community are ‘material traces’ pointing back to (contractual, waged) machine operators in the industry. The two are internally related, in the sense that the former is the product of the desolation of the latter. This much can be extrapolated from Labour and Monopoly Capital. Braverman predicted that the degradation of worklife (i.e. deskilling) would push people to seek refuge in hobbys and subcultural identities, and, still more intriguing, that those activities would soon be valorized by capital again. In a prophetic line, he laid down the terms for the current discussions about exploitation of free labour in the cultural sector: “So enterprising is capital that even where the effort is made by one or another section of the population to find a way to nature, sport, or art through personal activity and amateur or “underground” innovation, these activities are rapidly incorporated into the market so far as is possible.” (Braverman, 1999 [1974], p.193)
Mél Hogan
Infrastructural Activism: Water and the NSA’s Data Center in Utah
My talk explores how the Snowden revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have reignited media scholars to engage with the infrastructures that enable intercepting, hosting, and processing immeasurable amounts of data. Focusing on the expansive architecture, location, and resource dependence of the NSA’s Utah Data Center, I demonstrate how surveillance and privacy can never be disconnected from the material infrastructures that allow and render natural the epistemological state of mass surveillance. Specifically, I explore the NSA’s infrastructure and the million of gallons of water it requires daily to cool its servers, while located in one of the driest states in the US. I look at how water is an intriguing and politically relevant part of the surveillance infrastructure and how it has been constructed as the main tool for counter-surveillance activism in this case, and how it may eventually help further the public’s conceptualization of Big Data, and privacy, as deeply material.
See: http://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2015/01/23/utah-bill-would-turn-off-water-to-nsa-data-center/
The workshop series is funded by the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT).