had a bit of a revelation on the whole “free” economy. it can work in specific cases but the reality is that here/now, things aren’t set up to be able to handle free. energetically or otherwise. so the very idea of “free” here… if it’s expected and ends up draining people in the process is a type of vampirism of sorts. thats a strong word… but we need fair exchange, not people greedy sucking at an all you can eat menu. if we where balanced, then its a different story. it should be free. we know deep down that it should be. but we’re here, and things aren’t balance. and that’s where we’re at, so free a lot of the times can be feeding the greed economy, the suck them dry economy. when it comes to protecting the integrity of important knowledge, copyright is super important. [vynny]

Indeed, though copyright is super important only if it’s collectively enforceable, claimable by content creators, and modifiable. Getting paid is key, I’d say, not necessarily the archaic apparatus of copyright. What we need is protection from theft by megacorps. Copyright shouldn’t be about hoarding. Squatter’s laws in effect. If you don’t use it, it’s up for grabs—but not for corporate use. Though I’ve heard plenty of critiques of Creative Commons, I think it’s “share-alike” license is the best thing going.

Compared to Turin, and even Beijing, the Vancouver 2010 Olympicon is perhaps the first major sporting spectacle to bear witness to the rise in social media. Compared to the ’90s advent of Indymedia, social media is a very different beast. Indymedia came about as the convergence of traditional alternative media (such as college & campus radio, ‘zines, underground newspapers and pamphlets) with emerging internet technologies of self-publishing. When Indymedia saw its first introduction at APEC in 1997, going on to become a full-fledged, independently developed technical web platform for contributors with a centralized media hub at the Seattle ’99 WTO convergence, it provided effective coverage not only because it aired the footage of, and granted time to, perspectives that mainstream network-based television was either unable or unwilling to provide, but because it did so from a concentration of independent, alternative journalists who, though they may have differed as to the precise orientation of their political convictions, all agreed upon the common need for an alternative media network to represent the unheard side of the story.

cameras out as the spectacle slides by. photo: tobias c. van Veen

In so far as social media has engaged the earlier, more politicized forms of alternative media, it has done so almost by default of its omnipresence, as it provides street-level coverage from the now ubiquitious photo (and video) capable mobile handheld, with content directly uploaded to Flickr, Twitter or Facebook. While media hubs such as W2 in Vancouver have provided physical space to nonaccredited journalists of various stripes, such centres proclaim neutrality, and do not aim to provide the same collective media convergence of the Indymedia centres (the centre that did aim to do so, VIVO, had its low power FM radio station shut down). Indeed, closest to Indymedia’s heritage at the Olympicon is the Vancouver Media Coop for its critical reportage. But the social media hub of the Vancouver 2010 Olympicon has been True North Media House, which offers a self-accreditation process, print-out media badge, and a few online hubs for agglomerated content (Flickr photo pool; RSS firehouse of agglomerated content, and #tnmh hashtag search on Twitter). Unlike Indymedia, there is no agenda to “take on” the mainstream media as an alternative perspective. In this sense, TNMH is form without content, and purposely so. It seeks to provide only aggregation, and not a platform for publication. In this sense, it is your Twitter account, blog or Flickr page that becomes the venue; unlike Indymedia, it is a decentralized rather than centralized attempt at news gathering.

But is it even news gathering? Is it documentation or journalism? What is social media, precisely? This question came up at the Freshmedia conference on social media hosted at W2 during the Olympicon. The conference sought to explore the question “How has social media transformed the Olympic story?” From my own observations, I am not sure social media has transformed the Olympic story in any significant way. The Twitter channel #tnmh primarily reflects a mix of cheerleading approaches, with most tweets echoing what the mainstream media is already reporting in realtime – who scored a goal, who won a race, pictures of crowds on Robson, protests in the Downtown Eastside. Besides coverage of primarily W2 events and a few smaller happenings, TNMH has not broken a story nor exposed a perspective not already covered in the larger mediasphere.

sponsored media has the only elevated perspective? photo: tobias c. van veen

As a TNMH self-accredited “social reporter” myself, I have used the TNMH channel to try and disseminate articles from the alternative press about the Olympics, or even to juxtapose conflicting articles from different sources. For the most part, these tweets have not been retweeted, which means few Twitter users see them as worthy of disseminating to their followers. The tweets that are retweeted the most usually focus upon content from social media journalist and photographer Kris Krug as well as convivial though contentless (for a journalist) social observations on Olympic events. In short, the channel reflects a hierarchy of content and not a horizontal distribution of alternative viewpoints. Its contributors also do not appear to work toward a collective process; they retweet popular content, thus clogging the channel with more of the same, but do not interrogate each other’s content in an attempt to produce more work, verify it or question it. To address the questions raised at the Freshmedia conference, social media on this level is not journalism, insofar as it does not perform the most basic task of asking questions and verifying reports. That said, the #tnmh channel also features links to blog posts from about a dozen contributors, each of whom provide different viewpoints on the Olympic spectacle. In this sense, the TNMH RSS firehose feed, rebroadcasted at @tnmh, provides a better insight into the diverse content being produced. That said again, is it documentation or journalism? And once a blog article (as this one), is it “social media” or does it not revert to a fragmented form of indie journalism?

These questions are complex, though they reflect, to a degree, the technical structure of the software itself — social media is not a filter nor a concentrated platform; it is an agglomerate of channels, and with Twitter especially, content is limited to 140 characters. Beyond Twitter, digital photographs are the preferred medium (written blogs are a now distant third; and long analysis, such as this, dead last – thus guaranteeing this post’s stillborn obsolescence). While I am not out to critique any kind of apparent “lack” of politics given the open door format of TNMH, and the constraints of the underlying technology (though it leads to all kinds of questions concerning the sociopolitical limitations of these embedded technological constraints)  it does appear that in this particular scenario, right here & right now at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, social media does not seem to possess the same degree of self-consciousness as to its potential power as previous alternative media networks. Instead, it appears more concerned with reporting what we already know by way of a kind of convivial online chit-chat, and is perhaps more interested in reporting about itself, as Kris Krug’s article for PBS Mediashift demonstrates. There is a narcissism to social media reflected in the drive toward quantity over quality: more tweets, more followers, more people retweeting you, all adds up to more social prestige, more online cultural capital. Is that all there is to social media?

we watch the media watching us. live. and then tweeted. photo: tobias c. van Veen

While social media already exists, we don’t know why it exists for us — or for what it could be used for beyond its drive toward the virtualization (and quantification) of social relations (“facebook friends” / “followers”) and perhaps in the final assessment, corporate datamining. This is the reverse of Indymedia, which knew why it wanted to exist, and sought out the web tools to see it realised, and then went on an unpredictable journey to see how these tools could be put to use. But unlike 1997-2004 or so, Indymedia is no longer the mainstream media’s “media story.” And how convenient this is: that apparently democratizing social media has now taken up the mantle as the “voice of the people” only to reveal it has little, if anything, to say. Was Indymedia overcome by social media only to see its alternative collectivization of journalistic activity fragmented into conveniently apolitical soundbytes? Has alternative media culminated, then, in a lack of critical and self-reflective thought as it becomes social media?

It’s worth picking out a few examples of what I mean. The first is an obvious tag spam from @texturasalon. By including #tnmh in this message, it shows up in the #tnmh feed. When a corporate interest does this to a reportage hashtag, it is known as tag spam.

For the record, Textura Salon apologized for doing so when called out on their advertising tactics. But in some ways, this kind of tag spamming is so overt that it is like traditional advertising: it is very easy to identify, and any kind of complaint over the tag spam produces undesirable backlash.

Perhaps more complex, and thus all the more telling, is the following exchange surrounding @adhack, which began when a number of #tnmh Twitter accounts retweeted the following: “Still time to enter your Olympic ad photos to win a cool prize from Adhack: http://olympicadawards.com #tnmh.” A glance at Adhack’s website revealed a contest, taglined “People Powered Advertising,” where contestants could win “a cool prize” of “original artwork from a Vancouver artist” for “Best Ad Photographer” and “Best Brand at the Olympics.” The accompanying video was entitled “Celebrating the Best Ads at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.” Evidently the Adhack website and campaign uses the (free) resources of photographers and social media to, at the surface, gather documentation of various ad campaigns ongoing during the Olympics. In this sense, it perpetuates relations of precarious labour by dressing-up unpaid labour with a lure of glamour (the contest). [see k-punk's further meditations on precarious labour here]. Below the surface, the campaign collects data on who is participating, with the bonus of aggregated metrics on social media participation in ad campaigns (who is willing to volunteer unpaid labour for a prize). So as well as gauging the success or failure of diverse campaigns in various kinds of ways (which campaigns received the most exposure, from whom, at what time, for what reasons, etc), Adhack’s use of TNMH to advertise its campaign also blurs the line between “social reporting” and public relations.

Given the embedded technological constraints within Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and so on, it is perhaps worth asking if there was any such line between PR and social media to begin with. Unlike Indymedia, which sought to construct its own web software for collective and unmediated journalism, social media uses widely-available (and of course popular) corporate social networks whose entire existence is designed to gather and aggregate mass amounts of data, from metrics to network relations, which is then sold to all manner of entities, both private and public. So to assume that PR and social media isn’t already downstream from a privately-controlled datamining operation is to, perhaps, maintain something of a false hope, if not an incorrect assumption. Indeed, a resulting discussion with @jordanbehan, who tweeted me to let me know it was him who put the #tnmh hashtag into the Adhack tweets, revealed something of the perspective in which social media users view social media as a platform. [UPDATE: see our thoughtful discussion below in the Comments – and for the record Behan has no owned interests in Adhack]. Behan responded to my tweeted question “so in socialmedia, x-over with PR interests OK? because in journalism, it’s not” with the (public) tweet:

As Behan writes below in the comments, these 140 characters are not enough space to get into his comment on journalism, which is well taken (and this alone – the technological constraints on expression – could nearly summarize a large aspect of this post – which does not imply a technological determinism, but a determination of limited technologies). Besides that it is difficult to ascertain what “disclosure” means in this context, it begs the question. If newspapers and other media have vested interests, this does not mean that journalism itself has lost the ethical high ground (and if it has, should not alternative media struggle to regain it?). Moreover, should the compromised sponsorship of corporate media mean that social media must cross the same line? If social media follows from the acceptance of sponsored media interests, then it becomes a pale imitation of corporate media conglomerates; certainly it cannot live up to its hype as the “democratization” of media.

Fundamental differences arise between a privately owned newspaper, with its command & control hierarchy, and a social media hashtag associated with a self-accredited media disorganisation and its website (which ultimately has no control whatsoever). Which is why the concept of “community” – or rather the question of who owns this concept, who brands it & wield its signifier – is central to defining, and thus exerting control over, social media (and this control, at this level, takes place through symbolic networks and peer influences in channels like Twitter). Thus the larger question to address is one of “community,” as Behan notes. Is there such a thing as a “community” around an ad campaign? To claim that there is community when there are only contest participants seems to devalue the concept of community; the same goes for consumers and business associates. [See below comments: as Adhack is a "marketplace made up of independent ad creatives" – and not a traditional company – does this make it a community? The medieaval world for a delimited marketplace of producers was a guild, which is perhaps more accurate here than community. Or have the conditions of contemporary capital completely collapsed these distinctions?]

A community tears down the walls at APEC '97, broadcast in real time over cellphones on CiTR 101.9FM & streamed worldwide to the Net. Before the Prime Minister's handlers knew what had happened, Nardwuar was asking Chrétien about the incident. Result? "Pepper, I put it on my plate." photo: the Ubyssey (I was standing to the left – cell phone in hand.)

Is TNMH a community? To a degree, yes, insofar as the communal, or what is held in the commons, without ownership, is the shared output of (mostly unpaid) social reportage, and to the degree that many of its participants know each other and are engaged in collective labour toward perspectives and even ends that although different, are the product of social reportage and not advertising. What is common, and thus communal to TNMH is that it is reportage, and not advertising. What all of these questions reflect is the battle over – and ultimately the appropriation of – the meaning of the signifier “community,” and consequently, what is appropriate to and for that community, as well as what can appropriately represent that community. Following this line of thought, I tweeted surprise at the retweeting of the Adhack campaign, questioning the relation between social media and PR. Let me lead you on this tale, for it revealed a set of distinctions between different kinds of corporate involvement that became murky indeed.

Indeed, my tweet invoked a critical response of its own. Apparently the use of the word “spam” provoked some wrath as Adhack is a “community member” in the local Vancouver tech/arts scene. Kris Krug, author of the PBS Mediashift report on social media at the 2010 Olympicon, responded with:

Not to pick on Kris Krug (whom I respect immensely), but his (public) response led me to further questions: why is asking a question concerning the popular retweet of corporate public relations campaigns a “fail”? Who is this “we” who support Adhack? Should I be supporting Adhack if I support TNMH? And why is a tweet considered an “analysis” (aka a judgement) when it asked a question (as journalists are wont to do)? As a journalist, it was time to begin asking questions. If Adhack isn’t spam, given its placement of tag spam in a Twitter channel for social reportage – and doing so by enlisting, conscious or not, members of the TNMH “community” to retweet their tag spam – then I’m not sure what is — or isn’t. In any case, I thought if social reportage was to be self-reflective, perhaps this was the time for it to be so. (Note: I do hope to continue the conversation with Kris Krug at a later date — this by no means is meant to reflect the totality of his thought on the matter.)

At this point, the discussion went private with Kris Krug, and so I won’t reveal the tweets here, as “direct messages” are not readable by public members and so retain at least something of the apparent ethics of a private letter. That said, I can probably summarize the content (which was thoughtful & amicable). Unlike the dynamics of many an email list, the exchange did not lead to a flame war. Indeed we both commented on how inadequate 140 characters is to have a meaningful discussion (or even a dispute). But what Kris told me was that Adhack is a “community partner” – they support grassroots geek events like Barcamps, TNMH, Northern Voice and W2 by contributing skills and knowledge. In short, they aren’t “spammers” (which I was taken to task for in my use of “Adhack spam”). But what I wanted to know was: is Adhack use of TNMH feeds an acceptable use of social reportage? Indeed, Coke sponsors community events too – such as the Olympics. So where is the line drawn? As Krug responded, if Coke tagged #tnmh they’d be “tag spamming” as they have never contributed anything to the channel or local tech/arts community; but also explicit was a fundamental rejection of a corporation such as Coke (“fuck Coke”), which leads us to fine distinctions between corporate entities. So while large-scale corporations such as Coke are unacceptable if they use a Twitter channel such as #tnmh to promote a campaign (tag spamming), local use by a local advertising firm is acceptable, provided they have contributed in other ways to the tech/arts community.

And this, it appears, is the heart of it. What are the aspirations of social media? As Jordan Behan noted, is social media already compromised by the reportage of mainstream media (given corporate ownership and biased support of various agendas), thus offering no alternative? Or, perhaps more disturbingly, is the grassroots deployment of social media by advertising firms the only available model for building “community”?

Jaggi Singh taken down at APEC 97, as captured by the Ubyssey, some 9 years before Twitter, 7 years before Flickr, but on CiTR radio within minutes and online that night.

What alternative Indymedia sought to do was build community by building technologies and platforms, by giving voice to a multitude because issues and questions were not being represented in corporate media. Social media, by contrast, has not emerged from a social necessity to break down the wall of corporate and mainstream media. By contrast, social media has emerged from the corporate necessity to turn a profit from the increasingly fragmented mediasphere. Though “social reporting” has taken up residence in the house of social media, it does not own the building. It’s a tenant without a lease.

That said, it was Indymedia that sunk the foundations.

Indymedia at a Climate Change Camp in the UK. source: interwebz.

Marx once wrote that history repeats itself twice: first as tragedy, second as farce. I’m not sure which is which here, but what Indymedia started has been largely forgotten in contemporary social media. Distribution of ubiquitous mobile technology and easy-to-use corporate platforms of distribution has not produced the same level of citizen journalism and self-consciousness of reportage evident over a decade ago. Indeed, the second time around appears to have limited the impact of alternative media, not enhanced it. Quite simply, we have not witnessed the serious undermining of corporately-held media, whether traditional or in the social/new media spheres.

There are speculations to be had — that the corporate interests behind social media capitalize upon spectacles such as the Olympicon to generate the image of community involvement while delimiting its actuality. While I expected this everywhere at the Olympicon, I did not expect this kind of corporate entanglement to underlie the apparently independent conglomerate of interests that is TNMH, nor did I expect a general acceptance of vested corporate interests. Is the “new normal” of reportage reflective of entangled corporate interests? Are corporate interests OK if the corporation does enough to integrate itself within apparently independent “community” activities? What does this say about social media? Only that it is no better than or worse than mainstream corporate media — sans the fact-checking processes of journalism.

However, it reveals quite clearly that alternative media platforms, such as the Vancouver Media Coop, and larger media outlets such as the Huffington Post or in BC, the Tyee, though less hyped and less glamourous, are nonetheless better signs of media “democratization.” Social media hasn’t sold out; it never had anything to sell, as it was produced, packaged & sold by corporate interests to begin with. Does this leave vantages from which to undermine its embedded interests and turn its channels to other purposes? Yes indeed – but only as long as they allow you to keep contributing. Otherwise, and ultimately, it’s account deleted.

==./ transmission out

the pyramid of corporate cognitive labour

I recently came across a rather awesome analysis on Ribbonfarm that adds some much-needed complexity to the basic dichotomy between vertical and horizontal models of corporate control. These fantastic and well-writ posts (The Gervais Principle I and II) have been hit up on Slashdot and have circulated far & wide for good reason. Like Christian Marazzi’s work that deftly summarizes the significance of language to capital – the way language informs the fluctuations of the stock market and global economy (see Capital and Language) – Venkat analyses the way in which language is ab/used by particular players in corporate organisations. He deploys his deft analysis to unravel bureaucratic power principles as well as propose a theory of microclass. And he accomplishes this all by taking as his primary example the hit TV series The Office — Ricky Gervais’ brilliant satire of water cooler politics and management mediocrity. Venkat’s analysis, informed by his research into theories of corporate management, complements Marazzi’s observation that

In the post-Fordist context, in which language has become in every respect an instrument of the production of commodities and, therefore, the material condition of our very lives, the loss of the ability to speak, of the “language capacity,” means the loss of belonging in the world as such, the loss of what “communifies” the many who constitute the community. (Marazzi, Capital and Language: 131).

In his first post, Venkat complexifies the horizontal/vertical models with a theory of microclass. The Sociopaths (senior mgmt), Clueless (middle mgmt) & Losers (bottomfeeders) are constituted by their ability (or lack thereof) to learn, engage with, and ultimately ab/use corporate language for their own ends. In short, Venkat’s analysis jives with Marazzi, Virno and Berardi’s claims concerning not only the significance of language to contemporary labour conditions – insofar as linguistic affect structures fluctations of the stock market – but its operational effacity, insofar as linguistic competence structures the very field of labour. In short, one’s subjectivity under cognitive labour is structured by one’s ability to process the linguistic matrix of capital (which of course says much about education and class composition, among other things, but also about the linguistic seduction of capital – the great mass of all those who, to rephrase Spinoza, fight to remain slaves).

In Autonomist theory, this centrality of linguistic operations, interlaced and communicated by way of mobile and networked technologies, has been called the general intellect, insofar as the intellectualization of labour via technics constitutes the overall condition of cognitive labour. In this increasing technicization of labour, linguistic competence becomes the measure of labour itself: it is the brain that becomes the machine or engine of (cognitive) labour. As I think I’ll comment on in an upcoming post, mind you, I think the significance of a functioning brain is overrated in cognitive labour and it is a living-dead brain or zombie labour that still constitutes the scenario for the majority of the workforce (one is required to think, but not think too much). I think Venkat captures something of the zombie labour hyperthesis in his breakdown of the Loser class into two subclasses (becoming-Sociopath and Clueless Losers) and by analysing the seemingly lost Clueless as the middle manageriat, i.e., as those who believe the most in the conditions of their own enslavement.

In his second post, Venkat breaks down language into Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk & Gametalk, and details how it is ab/used by each class. Powertalk is the language of control and conquer used by Sociopaths; it works on multiple levels at once, communicating several meanings in discrete semantic utterances. Such communication is a poker game of words, where what is left unsaid determines the value of what is said, where parameters of the language game itself are relayed in the delivery of each utterance, and where ambiguity destabilizes erstwhile assurances. While the Clueless attempt to imitate Powertalk, they only fail to grasp the most superficial level of its meaning, and though they might deploy all the buzzwords, the Clueless can only speak Posturetalk – all copy and no depth, all bark and no bite. For Powertalk is only Powertalk if the speaker has table stakes — some actual informational capital to wager. In a similar way, Gametalk is what Losers like to talk to each other, which is basically showroom-style hot air; but as this is a language for Losers only, it holds no value, unlike the way in which Posturetalk signals that one is dealing with a Clueless class member. And in a truly brilliant move, Venkat outlines how Babytalk is not only what Sociopaths use to communicate with the Clueless – for the Clueless can’t grasp Powertalk – but Babytalk is also the language that Losers use to address their middle management superiors, which is why Losers are the breeding ground of Sociopaths as well as containing an exodus-class of what I will call “Carefrees” who know perfectly well the game but have no real interest in playing it. And in those rare instances where upper management Sociopaths talk directly to Loser minions, a variant form of Powertalk is used called Straight Talk — a direct and one-way command utterance with threatening overtones. Mind you it is also in such instances that a becoming-Sociopath Loser can demonstrate their knowledge of Powertalk and forge a path to senior management.

Venkat's Gervais Principle Language Model

Like all great fiction, The Office models only what is more real than reality, the world in its representation, in its vicious deployments of language and power. One moment I particular dig in this worthy read (which I cannot do justice to here – do go and devour it) is when Venkat contrasts The Gervais Principle with the Dilbert Principle:

Scott Adams, seeing a different flaw in the Peter Principle, proposed the Dilbert Principle: that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to middle management to limit the damage they can do. This again is untrue. The Gervais principle predicts the exact opposite: that the most competent ones will be promoted to middle management. Michael Scott was a star salesman before he become a clueless middle manager. The least competent employees (but not all of them — only certain enlightened incompetents) will be promoted not to middle management, but fast-tracked through to senior management. To the sociopath level. (Venkat, Gervais Principle)

Venkat adds a subtle flavour here, though he isn’t quite acknowledging that both principles appear to be operational and correct. The Dilbert Principle applies in general: middle management is composed of the Clueless. That said, the truly incompetent remain as Losers – those forever loyal to the company but who will never achieve middle management as quite simply they do their menial jobs too well (though it’s hard to say who is more incompetent: the Losers who never get anywhere or the Clueless who believe they have gotten somewhere by becoming middle management but are just being played by the Sociopaths as a buffer between the upper management and the lumpenLosers). Indeed, it is the deployment of the Clueless as the buffer between the harsh and vicious world of the Sociopaths and the lumpenLosers that marks Venkat’s insight – for it also opens the door to possible action. Remove middle management, and a classic class antagonism reveals itself in all its possible violence. As Venkat puts it, the Clueless mediate between an otherwise untenable master/slave dialectic.

What I also dig about Venkat is that the Losers aren’t just “losers” in the usual, derogatory sense but are often composed of the completely Careless who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about this powergame – those coasting by who watch it unfold all around them and say to hell with it. The Careless Losers – the carefree, perhaps – have something else going on in their lives and see work for what it is: a distraction from what counts. In this sense, the Losers, as the biggest group that constitutes most of us, are composed of that “silent majority” that upholds a good deal of old fashioned anarchist sensibility: act as if the State/Corp doesn’t exist. In the indication of a blindspot within an organisation’s powergame environment, Venkat’s analysis suggests that other systems of power might lie elsewhere. This elsewhere keeps those with an ear to the outside constantly seeking an alternative means to living without working, and as Virno suggests, means that exodus (or the politics of disappearance) constitutes the general strategy of the (Loser) workforce.

The other strategy is, of course, to try and manipulate the system from the inside. And those with some sense of how to manipulate language (the Sociopaths) forge a path directly from Loserdom to senior management. Becoming-Sociopath Losers aren’t headhunted because they do their menial job well, but because they demonstrate (by subtle language signs) that they know that their job is worthless by the standards of other Sociopaths. By slacking in their work (getting others to do it for them or just plain deferring it) and putting the extra energy into getting ahead (manoeuvring and conniving), and taking advantage of risk-taking scenarios (playing the game), Sociopaths advance directly from Loser status to senior management — which does not necessarily imply that a Sociopath is bad. For if one is playing the powergame for different ends, such strategies are also the purview of the good. For this general assessment of power applies as much to NPOs and artist-run centres as it does to oil corporations and PR firms.

Check out how the way language plays into this sacking story recently sent to me (the author requested anonymity):

The most telling thing, in my 15-year design career, is I’ve never worked anywhere longer than two years. I’ve been made redundant once and been sacked one and a half times.

The first sacking came on a Friday evening completely out of the blue. It was at the end of the month, so it was nice and tidy for them. The boss had been out of the office all afternoon, walked in the office and asked to have a word with me outside the door. He simply said: “we’re going to let you go”— that was it. I walked away there and then. He did my colleague, the same way, 3 minutes later. Needless to say, it was ruthless and illegal. There was no dismissal process followed.

However, at the time, the job market was buoyant and I got a way better job (oxymoron) shortly afterwards. Needless to say, that company has been erased from my CV. It’s a futile act but it feels the most dignified response to how I was treated— walk away, shake the dust from your shoes and take back control.

The ‘point 5’ sacking was more gentle and evolved over the course of a month. It came to a head and can be summarised in one sentence. They said: “I think you need to move on”. I agreed and left at the end of the week.

*.*.*

- the way in which anthronomics circulates -

As part of my recent research into the mechanics of dismissal – the ways in which dismissals operate as the modus operandi of precarious labour – I asked around the Facebook network for stories of gettin’ fired. And I was surprised by the response; a good number of friends & colleagues had at one time been ‘dismissed’ from their jobs. Their stories are self-explanatory. It would appear that in most cases, the managerial class deploys dismissal as a means to cover-up structural incompetence. In quite a few cases, employees were misled into short-term hirings; dismissal is an easy way to ignore labour law that protects employee rights.

coffee shop (in 2003?), got hired pre-xmas, promised full-time work by the end of the first week… only got 20-28 hours for the first three weeks… and then as soon as the xmas rush was over, i got told it ‘wasn’t working out’ – but the boss wouldn’t be more specific than that.

slightly different – when working in the convenience store in the UBC SUB, i had an awful, nasty boss, who’d angrily blame her stupid mistakes on the employees, multiple times a day. in the end, i turned up to work ten minutes late, and walked to the front of the line (i think it was new bus pass time, crazy busy) with my letter of resignation, and handed it to her (she was clearly pissed that i was late, and was about to say something rude to me). it read “i can’t stand working for you any longer, you are incompetent and your personality makes working hell. i quit as of now” (words to that effect). i cc’d it to the AMS office, and she was fired a few hours after i resigned – apparently, there’d been complaints about her before. so there’s someone else’s getting fired story, heh…

_Anomie Nous

==

Not an aggressive enough salesperson (basically not being the type of salesperson I hate). This happened at a lingerie/sex shop & at a hippy clothes and knickknack store.
_ Alexis O’Hara

I call the incompetence of supposed managerial superiors ‘structural’ because any corporate structure which does not listen to its employees, and refuses to participate in a two-way dialogue between employees and managers, has already resigned itself to a vertical business model. Management models can be contrasted into two types, both of which are to be found under precarious labour.

The first, the vertical model, communicates from the top-down only. This model can be summarized as command & control. The vertical model uses the psychodynamics of paternalistic authority, manifesting itself in the language of guilt and loyalty, disappointment and approval, and works by way of coercive and usually hypocritical strategies (insofar as the employer, as the ‘good but stern father’, wishes you well – but only insofar as you are ‘seen and not heard’). Usually the failure of the vertical model is self-evident. Without any kind of dialogue, managerial power is absolute. Employee scheduling is usually a mess; staff are kept 24/7 on call for shift changes. Fear operates as a motivator due to constant demands on regular scheduling. In this respect, the vertical model has changed since the 20th century; one’s ‘hours’ are not set in stone and can change at any time. Examples are made, of course, out of those who raise questions or attempt to engage in dialogue. For the most part, the vertical model is still the most prominent, and to be found in retail, etc.

i got “let go” from a residency recently for playing house..
_ Deejay Tripwire

==

new tattoo
_ Maria Herrero

The second, the deceptive horizontal model, is a supposedly more open, and relatively newer model of employee–managerial relations, and follows a consult & direct procedure. Open discussions are held with staff; employee ideas are explored. In a company like Google, (paid) time is even set aside to follow employee initiatives. In this model, there is a semblance, if not an actual amount of respect, inclusivity, negotiation, and ultimately, some degree of understanding between managerial and employee subject-positions. However, the advantage and the disadvantage of this model are the same, which is why it is deceptive: ideas percolate up. Whatever the employee initiative, it is property of the company, and not the employee, and the employee can easily be dismissed/shuffled out once their initiative has been overtaken by the corporation’s interests. This model is often found in ‘progressive’ hi-tech industries, the film industry, arts, music, academia and other creative industries, and in many respects is the model of precarious labour itself in its alliance with cognitive labour. In this sense, the deceptive-horizontal model is precisely what workers of the ’60s onward fought for: the mobilization and relaxation of labour time, more collective involvement in decision-making, and increased involvement in and responsibility for corporate operations. But this has had the downside of mobilizing all time into company time. All employee ideas are pre-owned by the company, and at its worst, this horizontal model is that of a cognitive sweatshop, as seen predominantly in the gaming and programming industries. Expect long hours without credit for brilliance; the managers steal the latter from their team, using what percolates up from below to advance their own careers/interests.

accusations of abusive language
_ Michelle Fearless

==

In clubland, I once had my wages raised (without asking for it – I was told I was worth it) and was told a month or so later that it was too expensive to keep me, so they “let” me “go”.
_ Hillegonda Rietveld

Google gives me this image when searching for 'wage slavery' //

A few days ago I was throwing down some conversation in a noisy bar with a colleague (and friend) whom I hadn’t seen in awhile. Besides being able to only interpret every fourth word or so due to a completely distracting mashup mix blaring on the system whilst downing a good number of beers, the question came up as to what I was reading, and I showed TH a copy of Precarious Rhapsody by Franco “Bifo” Berardi — a work of autonomist theory from the Italian camp. The reason I was reading this, I explained, was because it engaged me, enraptured me, and for good reason — every line appeared as a reflection of my own fractured experience, not only in the past year working the shop floor, but in my life of working within realms aptly described under the banner of cognitive labour. I had gone from being a wordsmith and arts worker to a member of the shop floor precariat, in short from one precarious realm to another, from a realm where 110% of the brain is owned (insofar as one’s future cognitive production is pre-owned) to a position in which the brain is not only disowned, but actively discouraged in its use, with the menial task of one’s labour, however useless or counterproductive, the only toil to be done. While working the shop floor, I also observed the incredible ineptitude of business management, as it sweated the small stuff, missed the bigger picture, accepted mediocrity from itself while demanding 24/7 availability from the minimum wagers. In short, working the floor demonstrated quite precisely the management-induced toxic atmosphere of insecurity, resulting in seasonal turnover, inexperienced decision-making, and overall bad biz.

So there’s two angles here, as to why autonomist work grabs me by the nards. The first is its accuracy, insofar as it grasps the complex of conditions within precarious and cognitive labour. It is not imperative to discuss the theorizations and data of political economy, however. One does not need to directly tackle political theory to authenticate one’s work, or justify it, in view of some perceived greater political good or political cabal that would only see work of political theory as worthy of contemplation. But the second point I had to make digs much deeper than that, as it concerns the overall technicization of work, in short, the production of one’s labour and technico-ontology — one could say the labour required within the day-to-day technical way of being. This deep media infestation of being with technical production, of the cognitive sphere within the realm of cognitive labour, and of the apparatus of labour itself within precarity, situates the production of oneself as a labourer – which today is to say, as the possible totality of one’s being – within the multitude in relation to the vectors of cognitariat / precariat.

These coordinates of technical subjectivity in relation to labour affects the production of knowledge itself. In short, one cannot pretend to produce knowledge independently of these control mechanisms, of this technico-ontology, of the technicization of labour, and of the 24/7 mobilization of the brain that is cognitive labour. Nor can one claim to exist and work independently of the distraction mechanisms of mobile technologies and the tethering acts they perform to the superego of capital (you are always ‘on call’).

In short, there is an ironic yet devastating demand being placed on the labourer: while work never ends (as one is never out of touch, and always expected to be available, with no claims to a private life or other demands), you as a worker are nonetheless completely expendable (and thus a member of the precariat: and so one must sacrifice all autonomy from work so as to keep one’s job). And for what it’s worth, I know; I was finally “permanently removed from the schedule” (and thus ending my self-induced experiment in anthronomics) for (a) asking for a raise and (b) taking time off work (duly notified, in writing) over Xmas to visit my (ailing) family. The scenario is near Dickensian.

This contemporary condition of on-call ontology or on-demand da-sein produces an emotional economy of stress. To live under such instant-demand duress is stress-inducing indeed. Life becomes a series of panic attacks in the face of never being able to live up to such workplace demands without completely dismantling ‘life’ itself as distinct from ‘work’. The managerial class uses techniques of guilt/loyalty to enforce workers to labour at a moment’s notice, scheduling with less than a few hours or days time, without hope of a raise, without benefits or reward, and all for a minimum wage. And so when I read work that theorizes this condition and links it to the technical production of knowledge, the precarity of the labour class, the non-stop nature of labour, and so on, I feel that not only is it correct in many respects, but that such insightful and damning analysis, in its accurate summary and resistant energy, gives hope to the many.

has much if anything changed? indeed: the nature of the chains.

As Mark Fisher elaborates, we live in a “business ontology,” where “everything is folded inside a business reality system, that the only goals and purposes which count are those that are translatable into business terms” (Questioning Capitalist Realism @ MUTE). And Fisher makes a good point that it is not academia today (if it ever was) that acts as if it lived in an ivory tower, a supposed utopia where professors slack off and don’t have to ‘deal with the real world’ as has oft been portrayed (this assessment is so far off base — all academes I know work ridiculous hours, shoulder pounds of paperwork, wallow in committees, and pay their dues many times over; more than that the entire academic endeavour is  heading down the dark path of sessionalization, underemployment and underpay, sinking without delay to that junk-strewn bottom of degree zero precarity). So the myth that academia is apparently bereft of ‘competence appraisals’ is just that — a diversionary tactic from that other dark tower on the horizon. For that other (which is to say only) ivory tower is not ivory but built with the sweat of labour, and it houses business executives, not academics. It is the business world today that is the ‘ivory tower’. As the 08/10 financial crisis demonstrated, it is the business world that is lost in the clouds. How else can we describe or account for such a lofty place so seemingly out of touch with the conditions of existence of most of the labouring world, a place where overpaid executives get paid bonuses for not only sinking the company, but pillaging the entire system? It is business, the corporate environment, and the manageriat that are ensconced within a tower of their own, believing that their (generally poisonous, for the rest of us) actions are untouchable, unaccountable, and unchangeable. (And what will it take to pull this tower down?) As Mark Fisher puts it:

Neoliberal ideology likes us to believe that bureaucracy has decreased under it, but the reality is that it has simply changed form, and the average teacher or lecturer is doing much more bureaucracy than ever before – and this is not ‘necessary’ bureaucracy, or bureaucracy that ‘improves performance’; on the contrary, as we all know, it is a purely empty activity, a dead ritual that is at best useless, at worst actually counter-productive. What I mean by ‘capitalist realism’ is partly the imposition of these mechanisms – whose real significance might be to ensure ideological compliance at this ritualized level – and also the acceptance of those mechanisms by workers (and managers), who go along with them because ‘that’s just how things are now.’ (Mark Fisher / Questioning Capitalist Realism @ MUTE)

If one takes Fisher’s claims seriously – as I do – then the production of knowledge, which is to say, self-knowledge, and thus the production of subjectivity itself, is deeply affected by rituals of technical control. I wouldn’t say that, as an academic worker, that one needs to belabour the point well wrought by 1980s postmodern-style subject positioning (what are the coordinate of the authorial body?). [1] However, any kind of quasi-analytic intellectual labour today needs to address the ways in which work as-such is being conducted. For this is a question of general ontology, of the production of knowledge itself, in relation to the technics of labour. In this sense I think it is astute to observe the intersection between computing ontology and classical ontology. While interviewing Mark Fisher, Mathew Fuller interprets business ontology as “something that combines both the classical understanding of an ontology and the more technical description of the ordering of relations in a computing ontology, [wherein] one is flattened into the other” (Mathew Fuller / Questioning).

From what I can extrapolate of Fuller’s brief interpretation of business ontology (of which I would like to hear more), the hierarchy of computing ontology (the hierarchy of languages and feedback controls demonstrated by second level cybernetics) has been flattened into being, or the ontology of the world as-such. The hierarchical language ladders of computerization, wherein various master languages control others, and at base, all elements are programmed in a binary, numerical code, has since become the frame through which the flow of the world is perceived. This has worked very well for business up until recently (and even then, is still working) insofar as the technico-computerization of ontology affects the conditions of perception. Like science, such a framing demonstrates its efficacy; it is not as if it is autonomous from all that comes to pass (though I would place science on a less mutable level than this particular business ontology; but then we need to ask what is science, today, apart from business ontology and technico-production?). It is because of this relative efficacy — as Marx among others demonstrated, an effectiveness that is only at the expense of others — that the business class has thus perceived itself as meshing with the world as-such, when, in starkest reality of the night, the business class has done nothing but glimpse its image in a mirror, preening and congratulating itself for seeing itself reflected in all it sees, finding itself in all it touches, and finally coming to believe that its own bloated image is the totality of the world, and that the world works in the way it does.

This is classic hubris indeed, and the business ontology, successfully disseminated by an oversaturation of media networks, has become such a dominant framing of the world that its crash was unforeseen by almost all within its grasp (save for a few).

What to do about it then? Is this question even possible? What coffee needs to be drunk? What kool-aid? Well, why not read work that grabs the bull by the horns, and gets you wired on its energy, its no-holds-barred take on this world we live in:

The concept of competition has replaced that of competence. [...] Any intellectual competence that is not related to speculation is made precarious, devalued and low waged. [...] Ignorance rises up to power and economic decisions are made purely on the basis of the gain of the maximum and most immediate profit. All that matters is the reduction of labour costs, because this is what competition is about, nothing to do with the production of quality. As a result, the last word on decisions about production does not come from chemists, urbanists or doctors, but from people with managerial competence, that is, with the ability to reduce labour costs and accelerate realization of profit. (Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody 51-52).

At some point you have to ask yourself: do I want my life to be controlled by a manager? How long can I take this? This question certainly occurred to me; I was surprised to learn I could take it longer than my manager could. And everyone must do what they have to do to make do under the circumstances. But burying one’s head in the sand is the saddest of all responses. Life – or what is left of it – appears less solitary when seeking out work that dissects the situation — and challenges it. And to take up that challenge in one’s own way, in whatever way one sees fit, in one’s work, conversation, writing, this will be the only way to disseminate cognitive alternatives to the diminishing returns of precarious labour.

And for the record, I question the authority of not only managers, but chemists, doctors and certainly urbanists, point being that it will only be through a persistent culture of inquisitive souls that any kind of shift toward an engaged democracy can take place, a place with a market less defined by its methamphetamine binges, cocaine culture and capitalism-on-steroids, growth-at-all-costs ideology, and infused instead with the sustainable relation of all beings and things on this small and rather minor planet of ours.

[1] Edit — to add –  Perhaps the more apt questions still remain: what is doing the coordinating? What systems are in play? Who programs in the coordinates? Where do these coordinates come from? Whom do they serve? What is a coordinate? What map is being used? What does it attempt to map? In short, not ‘what or where is my body and how does that authenticate (or not) what I have to say’, but, what is controlling my body and how is that affecting what I CAN say? In short: whatever is muzzling you, you know it, it is right in front of you, every single time you bite your tongue. There, right there, is the blockage that must be removed, avoided, deconstructed, destroyed.

truth in irony – whether beat down or beaten entirely / g20 protests, london

Since there are no remaining visible alternatives to universal pan-capitalism there seems to be no need for payoffs for the disenchanted, no necessity to bribe dissenting segments of the population and no incentives to grant extensions of freedoms. Instead of peddling hope and the vision of a mutually shared commonwealth, authority is maintained by synthetic fear and the need to secure property against some other. (“Synthetic Fear,” Konrad Becker, in Strategic Reality Dictionary: 144).

What is an anthronomics? Anthronomics would come to consist of embedded analysis. But literally: sleep with the enemy. Living the precarious wage as anthropology of the precariat. And plumbing the depths of the employer (or lack thereof). As a -nomics, a study of laws, it is yet a side-step from an economics which sees laws as relations of production, trade, and money, or in general of eco- principalities that become increasingly removed from affective conditions of collective bodies. An anthronomics puts the body back into the equation of economics, as well as the embedded status of its investigator, and like cultural ethnography, seeks to think through by thinking among.

What is the precariat from the perspective of an anthronomics? Beyond what has already been said, the precariat is that class that lives within the repression/expression of trauma brought on by perpetual motion. While mobility is touted as the vector of freedom, mobility belies not a life of change, but a stasis in which security is suddenly fraught and yet central to existence. Any anthronomics of the precariat must learn to decipher the signs of collective trauma, to unwrap the politics of fear (as Brian Massumi collected long ago), and to pinpoint – and disintegrate – the control strategies in which the semantics of security reside.

Claiming precarity presupposes a state in which life was good, stable, grounded. Stability and the heartland – the volk – is a myth, which is to say, an effective distribution which found its place for a time. Longing for one is the prison of the other. The stable job that is now a dream was once the cage (and the time clock) to the worker of the 20th century. What does this mean? That though the poles of de/stabilization are contained within a politics of fear, the semantics of security are a new development within the perpetuation of fear under mobility.

Fear has been around as long as anything, and operates in different forms (…and is this not Foucault’s study, Discipline & Punish). Over the past centuries in which capital has intensified, fear has been operative at multiple levels, from the revolutionary fear of the proletariat and their organisation into unions that wield fear as power, to the perpetuation of fear under militarism during apparently stable economic formations, and always in complex ways (fears of union-busting; fear of violence, organised strikes, communism; fear of the corrupt union itself, etc: in this case, fear is fear of becoming-mobile, of losing one’s collective support, fraternity, job, home, family). Likewise, security was a concern under conditions of apparent stability when the world was organised in a bipolar fashion (the twin militarizations of capitalism/communism). In the 21C, attempts at bipolarization have not been entirely successful (“with us or with the terrorists”). In any case, it is more effective to retain fear of the other within — within borders, within homes, within ourselves, and precisely at the ontological level.

(For who in your office might go postal? Fear them. Carry a gun. You will never really know (them). But you will be ready when the time comes. — As will they. Amen.)

state sanctioned expression of localized fear as sadism (aka "going postal") / g20 protests, london

Losing one’s job, family and home is still a fear, but now, a fear executed upon the solitary. To lose a job now is to be disconnected from a network; to lose the potential of one avenue of mobility. Fear in this case is fear of losing a series of connections, on the one channel, and fear of losing oneself among the overwhelming sea of connectivity, on the other.

When Becker writes of the utter lack of need to address the demands of the precariat, he is defining necessity from the side of what is also a precarious system of control. Precarity is not merely the precarious class, as the class of the cognitive labour, the mobility waged, and so on. Precarity is also the state of stability in its most general form, which can take system-wide effect, as the 2008 credit crunch demonstrated. Precarity is the state of the ecological worldsystems in which humans survive. Precarity is thus a general fear of total collapse, and it is the defining ontological condition of humanity as it emerges out of the first 10 years of the 21C.

As a totality-fear, it is a collective trauma meted out by a thousand cuts. For the very few, one fear eclipses all – and this is a phobia – but for most (in the overdeveloped West), fear expresses itself in a general panic about nothing at all, as nothing so large, and totalizing, has yet to be localized. The fear has not (yet) manifested — and this is precisely the fear. The West has not yet seen: mass terrorist attacks; collapse of food stocks, contaminated water; mass impoverishment; civil collapse. The precariat at all levels thus lives in a state of fear over what yet may be. A general trauma sets in, a fear of the future, and its futurity (will there be a future?). This is a nuclear fear without the content that the nuclear threat posed. For fear is now everywhere. This is fear at all levels.

One consequence of this generalized fear is asserting that the precariat is not the newly renamed proletariat. The precariat is a cross-section of the multitude, and the multitude, under Paolo Virno’s formulation, is a form, not a content. (If this form/content grouping is too simplistic, then think it like this: the multitude is evacuated of content; it is a framing, a process, without a point of reference in a revolutionary class. The multitude is a condition and it changes. What groups the multitude is the connectivity of the globe, as a network, and the development of communicative technics, as redefining the conditions of labour and production. The multitude is nonetheless locatable by grouping the collective bodies wrought within cognitive labour, communicative technologies, and generalized fear. This does not mean that the multitude, however, by virtue of its content, being or technico-economic status follows any particular entelechy or unfolding of history, dialectical or otherwise.)

In this sense, the great fear of all the trad-leftist theorists is thus realised, insofar as the multitude is not necessarily leftist, proletarian, etc — it is only expressed, perhaps, by this shared condition of collective trauma, which is a fear of the futurity of the future, a fear of what is yet to come but also that there might not be a to-come to come, and that what might come along might just put off what comes again once and for all. The conditions of this fear demand their embedded analysis, for they are constructed and wrought by the politics of fear, the semantics of security, and the economics of precarity / mobility.

In this shared moment, the precariat redefines necessity. It is not necessary to improve the living conditions of others not only because there is no alternative, but because there is no future. (Or there is no futurity-belief: even as the future arrives, without question. Not even Star Wars mythology — there is no only Hope, not even another Hope, just a lack of futurity in which Hope can be situated as a concrete imaginary, Force or No Force.)

Is there not something nihilist, then, in this formulation (and in the way Kroker thought technological nihilism)? The world’s underemployed and impoverished receive nothing because the perception of necessity is such – amongst those who distribute and steal from the collective wealth of the world – that there is no need to address necessity itself. A necessity only takes hold when it is imperative to address something in order to rectify (perhaps we understand this as the application of justice), or in which a scenario offers no alternative but to, under fear of a penalty (such as death). For example, the latter fear of the overthrowing of power, the revolution, personified in the fear that you might be the first up against the wall, generates the necessity to address the demands of the underemployed. Here, in this case where necessity has seemingly failed, the true necessity is one in which there is no alternative but not to, as there is no alternative (in general), because there is simply no need to.

In short: there is no fear of revolution, no fear of the uprising of the multitude, as those benefiting from current conditions are as part of this politics of fear as anyone else, and as part of the flux of the multitude as anyone else. What they fear is what we fear, and this fear is within us all, as the fear of what is hidden within, the incorporated, and that which is so totalizing – the Earth’s rejection of its human inhabitants – that it levels this fear against us all, amongst us all. There is no outside to this problematic, so to speak. And without fear of uprising, there is no necessity at the level of the locale, the level in which fear affects the body. At this level, there is fear not of a collective uprising of the underemployed and impoverished, but a fear of everyone and everything. For we know not who is agent and who is patriot. And this situation, of course, justifies everything.

a body registers fear in a localized impact of "necessary force" / g20 protests, london

"Precarious" issue of MUTE (Vol.2 #0)

What are the characteristics of the precariat? When one outlines the precarious class it is often by way of emphasizing the importance of cognitive labour. But sometimes discussions of cognitive labour (or what is known, somewhat incorrectly, as “immaterial labour”) glance over what Brian Holmes calls “the flexible personality.” As Holmes writes of his essay (originally published in 2001), the world has now commenced the

full implementation of the flexible employment system, that is, of a labor regime in which worker mobility and variable hours are accompanied by continuous electronic surveillance and the managerial analysis of performance. (Holmes, Flexible Personality)

Holmes’ observation on the flexitarian personality reveal the double-edge of precarity. Precarity results from, in part, the demands of the ’60s to a less-rigid workplace. Precarity in this sense is the outgrowth of Fordism; it is post-Fordist, post-assembly-line, post-one-job-for-life labour. However, the exploitation of precisely this development announces the precarious class. As employers no longer have to commit to their employees, no longer have to think of employees as long-term partners in the functioning of a business, employees are like stock: they become replaceable on a seasonal basis. The affective state of precarity underlies the instability of mobility. As the Frassanito Network writes, precarity means “unsure, uncertain, difficult, delicate.” The problem of labour under precarity is outlined by Neilson and Rossiter in Fibreculture (5):

The mobile capacity of information corresponds, in many instances, with the flexible nature of work across many sectors of the media and cultural industries. And it is precisely the informatisation of social relations that makes political organisation such a difficult – even undesireable – undertaking for many. Without recourse to traditional institutions such as the union, new technics of organisation are required if the common conditions of exploitation are to be addressed and transformed. (Neilson and Rossiter, “Multitudes, Creative Organisation and the Precarious Condition of New Media Labour“)

Information, in this sense, does not necessarily have to tie into the precariat of the new media and culture industries. Information is also a strain of hierarchical knowledge used to discipline, surveil and control employees. By granting employees access to information on production stock, delivery times and production dates, employees are handed the additional responsibility of communicating to customers the availability (present and future) of products. Thus the employee also becomes the face of a third-party company and answers to critiques of that company’s production schedule from irate customers. This kind of information is downloaded into employees, however without the power to do much about it. There is no upload of information (“feedback”) to the company or the employer concerning the consequences of the downloaded information. In short, information is one-way, from top to bottom. Changes that might arise from bottom-to-top remain inacceptable, which points to the general structure of hierarchy which still prevails among precariat business. (There are exceptions to this rule in the hi-tech industries, notably Google, which grants a percentage of labour as creative time to pursue whatever project(s) one wishes – given that it too becomes corporate property and a measure of one’s job performance; thus the second level of precarious knowledge is to grant employees the power of “feedback,” but only insofar as it improves the power of the managing hierarchy.)

In my unscientific but deeply subjective experience of returning to the retail sales floor over the past year – what Adorno would call, with some damn fine sense, an objective point of view in this scenario – I can attest to the now deeply ingrained fears and managerial strategies of the flexible workforce.

The first rule, which has been in place since mean wages peaked in 1973, is to pay as little as possible for the work performed. As all businesses in a given locale follow this rule, a blanket excuse that ‘one pays as much as the others’ stifles demands for a living wage. By keeping wages low, it ensures that workers have no real alternative to (yet another) business-as-usual. Yet, everyone well realises that they are quickly replaceable; in short, the job is flexitarian, as there is no upward mobility, no increase in benefits, to be had in staying at any one job. This very system of low wages means that the majority of the population is unable to purchase their own products (thus risking the stability of the entire economy, as without consumers/buyers, there is no production). Without credit cards, we’d all be doomed. The rise of credit in the face of low wages plays an essential part of the current economy of consumer markets as well as the “credit crunch” and collapse of 2008. With the lowering of the living wage from the ’70s on, a solution had to be found to the reduced spending power of consumers. By opening the credit market to workers of all stripes, genders and colours in the ’80s, consumers could once again purchase without consequence (or rather: a delayed consequence that hit the world in 2008). This new lending market  led to “financialization” as speculation upon debt – and  to the subsequent collapse of the credit market. The delayed circularity of this collapse is nonetheless lost on the localized decision of the flexitarian system to keep wages low (see Midnight Notes Collective – Promissory Notes: From Crisis to Commons).

The second rule is not to offer raises to returning staff. This reinforces the flexibility of one’s position, or, in other words, that the business has little stake in your labour, and that you a replaceable entity. The fear of losing one’s job for the most part ensures that few if any demands are raised by workers. That few workers stay on for longer than a year means that they never achieve an organisational capacity to pursue demands. The strategy of not increasing pay for increased responsibility, tasks or labour is even to the detriment of the business, insofar as training a new staff member (in the face of a staff member who quits) demands more of managerial labour, time and expense than offering a raise. However, the reinforcement of a below-living-wage, even at the expense of the business – so as to maintain the flexibility of the system itself – is perhaps the strongest index of the flexitarian system. Labour is cheap and plentiful in this system, easily replaceable. Rather than meet (and negotiate) demands, employees are rejected in their demands and/or reprimanded for requesting them (and pursuing their negotiation).

Third is to increase the demands upon a worker without offering corresponding benefits (in pay or otherwise). The longer one stays at a position, the more responsibility must be assumed, tasks and labour, yet there is no benefit to the employee. By increasing the demands of a job without an increase in pay, the implicit message is to move on to an easier job at the same pay. Thus the flexitarian system maintains mobility in the workforce. At the same time, this means that no employee ever forms a caring attachment to the labour they are performing. If they do, it is out of a misplaced sense of servitude that is often set at odds to the demands of the employer (the employee often cares more about customer relations or product quality than the owner, in this sense). In this convoluted sense of loyalty, the delay of decisive action to leave a job sustains all kinds of conflicting emotions. Fear of losing one’s job, guilt over not meeting the increasing demands of an employer, frustration at not being able to address the situation, nor at being able to assume the true responsibility it would require to actually address the inequalities and evident problems of the business — this is the politics of affect that takes its toil on the shop floor, in the kitchen and grey-paneled office.

So that’s the way we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that’s stolen from us – that’s snatched right out of our hands – even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness. (Murukami, Sputnik Sweeheart 207)

…and in the Norwegian night sky, a spiral, lighting the heavens for over two minutes, what is this strange sight…

"the mysterious lysfenomen"

What gains greater notice — this spiral or the infelicities of Tiger Woods? The media attention is resolutely focused on the AfroAmerican groin as usual; the strangeness of the night sky passes us unnoticed. Perhaps because it gestures not toward what we already know – that Tiger, like 99% of us, thinks the confines of marriage a sham, and that human life be too short to not divest it among many – but toward what we don’t know. This light, the sky, these are unassimilable objects. Though reported and noticed as they do not escape all perception (that which does passes us by without a trace — perhaps), such events constitute a counter-event. A slip within symbolic systems. Such slips make possible all kinds of escapes and exit strategies.

Sputnik Sweetheart, the novel by Japanese writer Murakami, depicts an exit strategy. A novel not unlike Antonioni’s L’Avventura, it revolves around a missing character and an island. A missing loved one, but one loved without the return of affection. A nonreciprocal relationship. And then a search: the would-be lover missing. A third character involved, another woman, and the island itself. Unlike Antonioni, who traces the disintegration of empathy as the protagonist loses interest in his lost lover, quickly shifting his affections to another (the best friend of the missing woman), Murukami leaves us only with a disintegration of contact with the world itself. A Japanese man in Greece; the uncontact with the world is complete.

Contemporary labour has a touch of unreality about it. Its production incomplete, uncontact with a world that misses that which is most significant. When questions are replied with reprimands. Precarious labour has an existential taste of the immaterial to it; that one’s actions benefit an unseen master, with effects ultimately satisfying to no one, least of all to oneself. Missing is the substantial content of the work. Thought applied to work, to the possibilities of its overall transformation, is emptied of itself by way of negation from above. The workforce is kept impermanent by way of permanent threat of underemployment. And yet employment is all there is for the most of the many, in the strictest ontological sense.

find someone to hold hands with: remember this

Not posting here registers a kind of disappearance. Where have I gone? Am I working? What constitutes labour when it is non-present? Is a life unrecorded in the 21C a life lived? Does not the precariat, the precarious immaterial class, take as much time archiving as doing? What precisely is the measure of this distance between doing and recording, acting and archiving? A desire to be done with it, enough with it, competes against the same urge to document. We are all tourists now: tourists, becoming a tourist, was the first manifestation of pathological levels of documentation. All must be photographed, recorded; the lived experience is better — oh, but isn’t it — in the re-telling than the actuality. The banality of “postmodern” readings (and this remains the ugly legacy of postmodernism) celebrated the retelling over the actuality. What is the actuality? So easy to diss this concept of lived experience – but in the critical deconstruction of presence, what the imitators forgot was the actuality or lived experience of thinking without a master. Actuality is living without a master. Writing is living too — but without a master. The only master being the master to take apart within the self (yes: this be alterity, otherness). Postmodernism found the easy-way out by generating endless critique of the lived plenitude instead of seeking its own experience thereof. Lived experience as the repetition of plenitude and suffering is the basis of anarchic living: organisation without mastery. And this concept has much more to do with the deconstruction of presence than the mere dialectical reversal of retelling over doing.

A strange kind of permanence is the new pathology. All actions recorded: one’s loves, hates, connections, events, photos, videos, sounds, names. The Net is the new fear of lived presence in its final, accountable record. Peter at the Gates has been replaced by Google in the Search Bar. Your Life: in 50 odd pages of depth. The transient occurs over time as links die, websites condemned to oblivion (but even then, Archive.org and the Wayback Machine attempt to sustain posterity; Google copies the entire Internet). The initial objections to the Net’s transience are now inverted, reversed, as instead objection grows over data-harvesting, the impossibility of severance, of making a damn relation end, when the evidence is scattered everywhere. Permanence threatens us: it is there when we don’t want it, and when we want it, it is gone.

Don’t we dream of an electron bomb, knocking out all electrical systems, wiping all hard-drives. This collective wiping of memory that would liberate forgetfulness by not forgetting liberation. The greatest act conceived was put to film in Fight Club: destroy the records of the banks, the credit card companies, the insurers. Disappear the financial, put to death what Marazzi calls the “financialization” of the world. Down, down, down.

cognitive labour, the human machine.

While I am often taken by the Italian Autonomist readings of general intellect in Marx (from the Grundrisse) the concept of locating ‘fixed capital’ not in machines but in the body of living labour can be challenging to pinpoint on a concrete level. The concept of general intellect, as it becomes what is called “cognitive labour,” is precisely that of the commodification, consumption and conscription of the living concrete today: the subject, in her body, and her cognitive power.

With a machine,  the investment of capital in an object can be readily grasped. Capital is invested in a machine that generates, through its production, more capital. Voila, this be fixed capital. And to invent a machine, one needs ‘general intellect’, which is to say, science (in the general sense: the knowledge of making X). A machine comes about through the production of a technical knowledge and science. Fixed capital relies upon the production of such knowledge (its invention & dissemination; which leads to an inherent argument for the freedom of information while at the same time providing the condition for information to become a commodity under copyright – but I digress). Thus general intellect is fixed, as in materialized by way of capital, in the machine.

But what does it mean to say that general intellect has now transitioned from the machine to the worker herself? It is easy enough to explain that a well-cared for workforce produces better work. But this is the wrong tack, and misses the point. To grasp fixed capital in the workforce itself means something else, for it means that the general intellect produces the subject herself as its product (commodity), its follower (capital consumer) and its agent (creator conscript). The worker is now the machine; the worker is the place where capital and science collide, information and investment, money and meat. You get the idea.

Moreover the argument continues: (1) that cognitive labour is a significantly different dimension of capital that defines ‘post-fordist’ production’ as a historical transition and new economic epoch; and (2) according to Negri, Virno, Marazzi and others, has come about as a reactionary response to resistance against the breakdown of Fordism (such as that of the workerist movements of the ’60s and ’70s). Thus living labour, or cognitive labour, or general intellect, as the concept is known in its various stages and places, is not only central to post-fordism, it is also different from its use in Marx, where “general intellect” specifically refers to the knowledge now fixed, by way of capital, in a machine.

Now this machine is the human herself. Or rather, the boundary between human & machine has become indistinguishable. Not in a vague way, as if what we consider machines are implanted circuits in the flesh, as if humans had mechanically become cyborg. Rather, human/machine is economically the same category (as well as ontologically – though what ontos means here is yet another digression). This rather unremarkable thesis is nonetheless an economic milestone, something different than the peasant hooked up to the plow, this typewriter fighter at the keys which is the economico–ontological state of cognitive labour.

This is also the precise moment where theories of the technicity of the human comes into play, such as that of the technical a priori of perception (Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media) and the technical a priori of différance (Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time). Here technicity is meant in its broadest sense of tekhne in general. Yet another digression here, with this constellation including Derrida (on the status of tekhne in the timing & spacing of différance; see Echographies of Television) and Kittler (concerning the priority and structural force of the technical substrate).

In Autonomist theory, cognitive labour, the new fixed capital, resides in the worker herself, is, ontologically speaking, the worker herself: her reproductive capabilities (of producing more workers, but also more cognitive labour), her consumption (of the products of cognitive labour), her investment in financial markets (financialization of savings as the markets become cognitively modified), and in the work she performs, as cognitive labour, which is to say, as Marazzi points out (in Capital and Language) a linguistic labour, a labour of speech acts and symbol manipulations.

What does this mean? Primarily, the computerization of work. Second, the required level of discourse and education to perform work in a workplace: the negotiation of work by way of complex codes and languages, not only with computers, but with each other. Third, the socialization of work, so that work exceeds the time performed “at work.” Fourth, the interiorization of work in the cognitive, so that the brainpower of the worker is harnessed to not just work, but create new work. Cognitive labour is also the scientification of work-in-general (labour). Fifth: on a general level of language. Even if the cognitive labourer still ‘works at’ machines (the computer), the work undertaken is a labour entwined with the symbolic and the linguistic (in the structural sense). Negri’s explanation of living labour reads quite literally ‘in the brain of’ the labourer (see Porcelain Workshop, 66). Marazzi discusses the linguistic capacity and capability of the worker that is now necessary for computerized labour (to be discussed here: the way in which language structures the financialization of the economy).

Perhaps we can read: cognitive labour means to labour under the demand of several languages and codes (the ability to write, speak, interact with technologies, know their codes, their performing acts, and to speak these different languages, to code these codes, to decode these symbols, to manipulate new ones: this is the structure of working a laptop in the 21C, of editing images, sound, video, blogs, words, designs, software in general, whether one designs socks or makes widgets, edits a newspaper or trades stocks, troubleshoots car engines with a laptop or delivers pizza with an onboard GPS). Is all contemporary labour cognitive labour? No. Is most labour intertwined with cognitive labour as the basic economic principle? Yes.

In short, humans are no longer tied to fixed machines as the machine has been interiorized ‘in the brain’ – which is to say, in the flesh of the brawn.