Digital Work - Transcription

Transcription of the Seminar 'Digital Work'

11th October 2003

Media Design Research, Piet Zwart Institute

V2_Organisation, Institute for the Unstable Media

Steven Kovats: My name is Steven Kovats, I’m a programme developer here at V2 and it’s my pleasure to welcome you all to the first collaborative seminar together with the Piet Zwart Institute on the topic of Digital Work. V2, is as most of you already know is a centre for media, art, culture and research in Rotterdam. A lot of our activities overlap with the academic community where we try to intersect our work, our research, our development, theories, publications and events together with various universities and other educational organisations, not just in Rotterdam but around Europe and other places. Last year a new Media Design Research program started-up, run by Matthew Fuller and Femke Snelting at the PZI, which follows in a lot of ways very closely to the mandate V2 has. And, so we’ve invited Matthew and Femke and the Piet Zwart team to put this discussion on today. It’s a topic that is of course central to all of us doing this work, it’s too about the future and all the problems we may be encountering in digital work as we try to educate ourselves and move into this realm of work between art, design and culture. But, I won’t get into too much of that.

I’d like now to pass the mike onto Femke Snelting, but before I do I’d just wanted to let you know that we’ve invited a number of interlopers to participate in the panel today, via the IRC chat room which is located up there on the screen.

Whether all of them are going to be in on the beginning or not I’m not sure but we’ll look at these people as external virtual visitors. I’ll be monitoring the chat and when we get into the discussion later on I hope to feed some of their questions into the discussion. With us now on-line we have for example, Zeljko Blace, he’s one of the MAMA Media Art Collective groups, in Zagreb. Later we expect to have Mauro Cavalletti and some of his students from the Parsons School of Design they may be just waking up, so hopefully we’ll get them later on. We also have Tony Brock from the North Carolina State University College of Design with some students and if were lucky we’ll have Max Bruinsma, he’s a leading Dutch media theoretic practitioner in Basel right now. Here is Femke and welcome again to V2.

Femke Snelting: Could we turn slides on? (URL?)

Welcome again, but this time from the Piet Zwart Institute. I’ll need to mention our entire name {which is quite a mouthful} the Media Design Research Programme of the Piet Zwart Institute, related to the Willem de Kooning Academy, who is part of the Hogeschool Rotterdam. As Steve said, we have collaborated with V2 in setting this event up. First off, I’d like to introduce a bit about PZI programme. We are a small research programme started just over a year ago. We’re also running a MA Media Design Programme. The Research Programme involves a series of Research Fellowships, and for that reason Alexei Shulgin is at the moment in Rotterdam and sitting in the audience. If you’ve looked though the papers you found on your chairs, you’ve found an invitation to a lecture he’s giving on the fifth November, but that’s for later.

Today we’d like to focus our attention to digital work. As you all might have noticed Digital Work has changed quite a lot over the years. Not only because of this dramatic crash which happened in our field but also the economic recession that slowly crept up behind it. In this Balkenende era, it’s almost impossible to believe that these kinds of utopian dreams, where big ideas and a lot of money came together, and that this all happened only a few years ago. I don’t know if any of you know or have read the newspapers about the Adam Curry case, where a Dutch dj sold for millions of Guilders an idea to the Ministry of Education? Well, this type of exchange is at this moment unthinkable and this is only a few years ago.

But it’s not only that, it’s also that digital work itself has matured. Working through a few cycles we see that this idea, this type of Wild West idea still exists, because basically no one really knows what kind of results are ahead or how effective digital work can or cannot be. We see that more and more rules are being applied and we see that this effectiveness, the kind of rationalisation is taking its toll. More and more we become aware that this original, more playful idea has changed to a strict and less free way of working.

At the moment, we’re looking at slides that were made during a workshop that we at the Piet Zwart Institute hosted last week working with undergraduate students where we looked at what their image of digital work is now and where they pictured themselves to be seven years from now. This by no means represents the work they did but is just a sample of the various images they photographed at different design agencies around Rotterdam. One of the photos is of a ping-pong table that remains still an icon of the free time working atmosphere. Also in the photograph you’ll notice how little it’s used. This sense of moving from fun to factory has effected the working conditions of designers, who often find themselves wedged between the worst of two worlds, on the one hand, as part of corporate structures yet, on the other hand having no more rights than freelancers or in some cases even less.

One of the questions we’d like to ask during this seminar is how designers can use their skills; because we think they have quite a lot of skills that could be effective in developing more appropriate ways to defend themselves against exploitation. Is there a place for unions or must we develop other forms? And, what does the very nature of digital work imply? To anyone working within digital work it is clear that in this profession one is learning all the time. It’s very difficult to decipher and design an educative plan. Be ready to learn at any moment, this in more positive terms is one of life-long learning which puts you in a situation where you can never be sure if what you know is enough, a situation that can lead to constant fear. How is this affecting the working conditions of digital workers? Which relates than again to how public and private converges in this type of work and how do you separate your own kind of ideas and passions about the work from the actual production you’re doing?

And, last but not least, tools and conditions; how this software we’re using actually scripts the work and how or does this leave space for creativity or developing forms of production that are outside what already is predefined through the products we’re using?

One more thing is that we’re talking about digital work in creative industries that is only a small part of the digital community working with computers. On your chair is also a reader where you’ll find links and quotes that refer to a larger idea of what digital work is. It’s mapping the lifecycle of a digital object, running from the production of computers, for example you’ll read about how we deal with waste, etc. This list can also be found on-line. (http://systems.v2.nl/ircbots/live)

Today we will have three speakers. We will start with Maurizio Lazzarato. He is a Paris-based sociologist, a member of the editorial group of the journal Multitudes and the author of the influential essay, ‘Immaterial Labour’. Maurizio will speak in French and Brian Holmes, who will later chair the discussion, is going to translate. His lecture will be followed by Steven Baldwin, who is the New York based co-founder of NetSlaves, the site that has for the last five years charted work on the internet from the beginnings of the ‘Great Tech Gold Rush’ to its present day. The third speaker will be Laurence Rassel. She is a Cyberfeminist and member of Constant, an artist-run organisation in Brussels. Constant has organised numerous digital culture events such as Copy.cult and Jonctions- Verbindingen. After the three speakers we’ll have a short break, and continue with a discussion between in house respondents, Enric Gilli Fort, an interaction designer working in the V2 lab and Eduard von Lindheim, who is a member of the Adaptor group, a network of digital designers and artists based in Rotterdam, the audience and on-line guests.

Maurizio Lazzarato

(Brian Holmes translating)

Hello everyone and thanks very much for inviting me here. My job is going to be a little difficult because what I should do is sketch out the possibility of organising, union organising this type of work. (Which is a difficult job, Brian adds.) No one has of yet succeeded in doing so, and I won’t be the one to do so today, either. I’m going to talk about two things: I will give a sort of overview of a couple basic concepts and afterwards talk about a real situation where there is an attempt to organise this kind of work.

We are in this situation where there is a gap and it’s a little difficult to bring the concepts into line with the concrete reality. Why is it difficult to organise this type of worker and why is it difficult to define the rights for this kind of worker? The main reason is that in the western countries, social rights, the rights of workers have been based on a form of work that is presently in a state of crisis. We are in a phase where we have shifted from one form of labour organisation to a quite different form of organisation. Workers rights and social rights like welfare type programs have been constituted on a former type of labour. This is why the new forms of work, the kinds of work that you all are encaged in, don’t yet have either any specific workers rights associated with them or any kind of insurance, social insurance programs that really fit.

I’m going to try to sum up in two or three very condensed points what has changed in the organisation of work. In the old form of labour organisation, which continued up into the late 1960’s, activities of reproduction were the major hegemonic ones and creative activities were the exception.

Now, we are in a situation that is in a certain way the reverse. What today is most important is the creative work; this sort of reproductive type work, or repetitive work is subordinate to creative labour. This creative work could be defined as a work of invention, inventive work. And, that is a quite broad term because there are all kinds of invention. Reproductive work is very simple; it’s factory work. It’s the kind of work that for example, Chaplin showed in ‘Modern Times’. There the invention of something, the invention of a new product wasn’t in the heart of that reproductive labour. Of course, there was a small group of people working on inventing products. But numerically it wasn’t important.

The first thing today is the importance of this reversal in production and invention.

In fact, in the theory of work and social relations, not until very recently did the idea of inventing and invention even come up. Invention existed but there was no reason to talk about it. Theorists like Marx and Schumpeter, mention invention but they never develop it into a major theme. Marx who was central to the whole social democratic understanding of labour mentions invention and science as a productive force, but it’s never said how this productive force itself is produced.

Whereas, today that is the main question. We can say the same thing looking from another viewpoint in order the try and grasp this transformation and I’ll try again to simplify it.

We can say in the old models, material production was the central thing. Today this material production is subordinate to what could be called the production of the sensible or maybe better said as aesthetic production. That means production of desire, production of lifestyles, production of different ways of living your life. This becomes the center of the organisation of labour. Here the production of material things becomes secondary or they can be completely done away with by exporting the production of material things to the third world. Aesthetic production is done via machines; via machines that work in networks and this has already been true for quite sometime. It began already at the very end of the Nineteenth Century by means of the cinema, then the radio, followed by the television and at the end of the Twentieth Century we arrive at Internet.

So, how can we configure this new way of working where aesthetic production becomes the central thing? Well, in the old model of working, we were talking about producing things, objects where the main relationship was between capital and labour. This relationship still exists but there’s now a particular relationship with society. This is the specific thing about what was called creative industries.

These creative industries are working through the relationships of or with the people working for them. They are practically involved with building up a public or clientele. This is what they produce, their major production. They address what is called an indifferent subjectivity, an average or indifferent subjectivity. This average subjectivity is the subjectivity of people in the cinema watching films, watching television, the public. In the old form of production, the one that Marxism talked about, you had the product, the product was duplicated and put in the marketplace and there it encountered the consumer. Today, the first step is constructing or better said, building up the consumer as a public. After you have built the consumer and constituted the clientele as a public, only after that is the commodity produced. Even in a classic industry like the automobile industry, first the car is sold and then it is produced. The first thing a company does today is to capture its clientele and keep it.

Here begins the interaction, the interactivity between the company and its clientele and the public. Here, I’d like to bring in a statement Duchamp made I find it appropriate, when he said, “the work is made half by the artist and the other half by the person looking at it.” When talking about Duchamp that way, it’s been changed a bit since than because capitalism has played with it and made it different. But the main thing is that the new creative worker is there to form the interface between the business and the public. That is the creative worker’s job.

You can see this at work on the television, in the cinema and also in marketing.

This is why businesses work in a networked fashion, not only within their production but also in their relationship with the public, which is essential in developing a continuous relationship.

Another basic change has to do with time. What is working time? What is productive time? In the traditional factory the important type of time was a homogeneous time, a reproductive time. This type of time, this reproductive, repetitive time that could be easily calculated. It could be measured in hours as it was done for a long, long time. Working time was clearly distinguishable from the rest of life. Now, we’re in a different time of temporality, it is no longer a homogenous time but a heterogeneous time. And, the reason why is because this type of time is the time of invention, of creating something new, an inventive time. Factory time is continuous, homogeneous time whereas this new type of time is discontinuous. This is why capturing this new kind of heterogeneous discontinuous time can no longer be done by simply enclosing people in a factory. This is why networks are used to capture, to take in this creativity, this creative time.

This has another basic consequence for the subjectivity of people who do the work. Gramsci, who was one of the people who first theorized the ‘Fordist’ type of factory work, said that workers not only had to leave in the cloakroom their normal clothes but they also had to leave their day to day subjectivity before walking onto the factory floor. Only at the end of the day, just upon leaving the building could they take back their subjectivity, their soul as it were that they had left behind while working. They’d then go home, read the newspaper, do something political, go to the cinema or wherever.

Now, it’s quite different because this subjectivity, the worker’s soul as it were has to come back into the workplace. It has to become directly productive in the business. The reason that the subjectivity has to be involved is because it has to now create something. Creating has become more important than making something again.

Another, radical change comes when you ask the question, how are you going to organise this subjectivity when you can no longer be reduced to a set of reflexes, as in Taylorist sorts of work patterns? We go from a model that was basically an authoritarian model into a new model, where new management concepts need to be brought in. Creation is possible only when there’s a certain type of confidence, of friendliness and cooperation between the people who are participating in the work. You can’t order someone to invent something. And you can’t order how that is going to be distributed. People don’t know how to command the distribution of an idea or invention. At this point what comes up are new kinds of conflicts, new kinds of struggles inside this creative work. Because on one hand business always needs to command, always needs to order various activities but can not use the authoritarian models to de so.

This radical change that I have briefly described has bought about a marginalization and people’s way of living becomes precarious. It’s brought with it a certain level of uncertainty and a level of poverty that hasn’t in the ‘west’ been seen in a number of years. Because this new form of working has expressed itself completely different than the old ‘Fordist’ way of working, the kinds of rights that we have and social insurances are out-dated and adapted only to the old ways of reproductive labour. For this new kind of labour we have to invent not only new forms of organisation but also new forms of social insurance. I don’t want to give an idealistic vision to this change in the reorganisation of work. Even in these new so-called creative industries there exists a very traditional kind of exploitation. But, now the exploitation not only has to do with the amount of time that you’re working but also with the content of the kind of work that you’re doing. Because, for instance, if this creative worker is working for a television programme, this kind of work that they’re doing has the potential to destroy their creativity and their capacity to work. If you work for a banal television program or you work making a series of commercials, it can actually kill your creativity.

One problem is these precarious working conditions; another problem is how creativity is distributed throughout society. It stands outside the business, kind of infiltrating throughout the whole of society. For instance, in the creative relationship with the public, Godard in a provocative statement, said, “If you’re talking about television you should pay the audience as well”. Watching television is a real form of work. In France statistics have come out that show that people spend more time looking at the television than they do working, which is probably true everywhere. But, if you take all the time French people spend working, divide and average that out, with how much time people spend watching television you’ll find people working a bit more than three hours per day and three and a half hours watching television. People are just beginning to calculate how the consumer or how the public forms part of the business and how the public actually forms a service for the business.

Now, by looking at a particular example, I’d like to show how different precarious working conditions have developed and how people have reacted to them. We’re talking about new forms of work in which the labour laws, union organisations, and social insurance does not cover the needs of the workers. We are in a situation where business has not adapted to the workforce. It’s quite difficult to talk about this new labour force because it extents over such a wide range.

This is an Italian website (www.chainworkers.org/chainw/who.htm/) and we will talk about this more, later but it has this wonderful saying, ‘Chain and brainworkers unite’.

Brainworkers are the creative workers and chain workers are workers working in distribution, like department stores, supermarkets, and fast food chains. It’s no longer the chain of production that is referred to in the Latin language, no longer the assembly line; it’s become a chain of distribution. Those are exactly the things that have emerged from the transformation of labour that we talked about earlier. What creative industry needs is a distribution chain in order to distribute their production.

This is one of the first attempts or maybe even the first attempt to organise the entire range from the creative workers, who are doing graphic work and things like that all the way to the precarious, uninsured people doing the simplest jobs, like, Fast Food and department stores.

Here there are things that work very well, surprisingly well, and other things that do not work at all. First, they try to work situation by situation but since there are so many fragmented situations, organising has become quite complicated. What works quite well on the other hand is, and what they have been doing the last three years is organising a big demonstration; a May Day Parade that is designed specifically to accommodate the whole society of casual workers.

In the morning, you have the tradition union demonstration and in the afternoon, you have the new form of demonstration for the socialised, casual worker. The afternoon demonstrations are much bigger than the ones in the morning. It’s a quite a surprising thing because no one knows where these people are coming from. They come first of all because this phrase defines them and their precarious working situations. But, people also come because of the way the people organising the demonstration express their subjectivity through the images they use and through the way they organise language. They’re in a perfect sort of harmony with this type of worker. Chain workers equal not just union activism but media and union activism. What they do is they take these ways of creative working and integrate them into political action.

Here, you see the three posters used for the second May Day parade in 2002. (http://www.chainworkers.org/chainw/md2002/cartoline.htm/ ) Here is a fast food worker who says, ‘My rights are not for sale, is that clear?’ The second is of two people working in a supermarket but their legal status is not the same. The poster says, ‘These two workers are not equal.’ One is a temp, an interim worker; the other is a store employee. The third is a brainworker, one who works with their brain. This one says, ‘You, too alienated by your work? Get away from it and go on strike.’ These three posters/postcards encompass the entire range of the work force.

On the other side of the postcards (http://www.chainworkers.org/chainw/md2002/retro.htm/ ) you have the sociological descriptions of the work that come very close to the truth. In the first image, the part time worker is in uniform, people working in supermarkets, grill restaurants, bars, clubs, and mall shops. Their lives are determined by the commercial chain, irregular hours, working night or weekend shifts, on the weekend, what is called flexible labour, basically. The next concerns the temps and lastly the brainworkers, who work with computers, networking, and whose brain needs always to be flashing. Their eyes are red, having spent the whole day staring into a computer screen and who, when things go well are paid for ninety days of work.

What is interesting are the graphics and the language being used to express the conditions, that is completely different from the old unionising language and imaginary. The demonstrations are also very different from those organized by the union. Last May Day there was 50 thousand people. These have nothing to do with the tradition disciplined union marches. Now you have all the contacts, all the dimensions that creative workers are working with. What you find in these demonstrations is the creativeness of these (brainworkers), which resemble more festivities, like techno or gay parades than union gatherings. (http://www.chainworkers.org/chainw/md2002/galleria/index.html/ )

These are the posters for the last May Day parade, held in 2003. (http://www.equilibrioprecario.org/ ) Here, they are still asking the same questions, ‘Is it an autonomous freelance worker or is it a casual, temporary worker?’ ‘Is it a full time or flexible worker?’ ‘Is it an employee or someone on a short-term contact?’ The surprising thing is how many people come, 50 thousand people for a union demonstration is huge. But, at the same time, it’s quite difficult to organise these people in any kind of long-term political or union way. They do engage in specific conflicts, I can give some examples of. For instance, they’ve worked with call centres; there they have been able to stop business by stopping calls. This was a very interesting strike. These are news forms of labour struggle, they asked the public to all call at a certain time. Which worked, people did, and there was an overflow of calls that in turned blocked all the in-coming lines. At the same time, in front of the union centre was a picket line to keep people from going into work. What we should keep in mind here, is that people usually work in a call centre only a few months and then they disappear which makes it very difficult to develop any kind of continuous, union relationship in this type of workplace.

This is why they put so much emphasis on the relationship between media activism and these new forms of work. Even political powers are only able to keep society together by using the media. What we’re talking about here are experiments, one time deals, except for the May Day parade there isn’t anyway to bring all these things together into a coherent campaign. The other thing they have done is open a kind of information, referral window but the problem is that unions don’t have much information to give the people. The field is too diverse, they aren’t able to supply people with much information let alone answer any questions. This window is basically an office where there are lawyers people can ask specific questions to about their work situation.

The problem is that people end up going there after they were fired or their contracts have expired. Most have short-term contracts. In this way, it’s retrospective work and not much help. The office is open to everyone from the brainworkers to the chain workers, but is used more readily by lower income workers. Please don’t think here that there’s a big difference in the intellectual levels of the brainworkers and the chain workers; most are students actually.

This is what you might find in the office, it is a manual of self-defense with attached to that a range of activities. These are categories of work; first you have temporary work that offers a specific type of contact, called a co-co-co, something you only find in Italy. Each country divides up the work differently and the last category is for people doing collaborative work.

In order now to wrap this up, the whole chain of reproduction into invention has produced an uncertain or precarious world of work. It’s a chancy type affair, an unpredictable work situation. This uncertainty of the content of the work is transformed from the social organisation into an existential lifestyle with an unpredictable idea of what your life is going to be like.

The problem is how do we struggle against this kind of uncertain, precarious way of working and living?

This is something that we’ve seen recently in France with the strike that was organised by the part-time cinema and theatre workers, and this encompassed actors, dancers, television people all kinds of creative workers. What’s interesting is that this type of creative work in the old organisation was an exception considered exceptional. In today’s creative work, the organising unit is the project, not a homogenous way of working but openings for all kinds of different projects and one ends up going from one project to the next. In the past that was specifically the way creative labour worked but, today one finds it on all levels of work, even in factories, this is just how it works. Even full-time contracted employees work this way, moving from project to project.

Here we have a strange situation, the French state wants to have rules for everything, even while the old form of labour was still current in the late sixties, the French state came up with a way of defining a special status for these kinds of workers, these part time cinema and theatre people. This type of social insurance guaranteed a continuous income despite the discontinuous way of working. Project discontinuity is for example found in theatre work, one month a play opens with a certain set of actors followed the next month with a new show and another different group of actors. Discontinuous activity is no longer just an artistic form but today covers all forms of work. In a certain way ‘employment’ has become rare, it’s divided and certainly not guaranteed.

As a concluding remark, and it comes in the form of a question, ‘Is this notion of continuous income for discontinuous forms of work one of the solutions that could be brought to the problem of organising today’s labour?’ This is basically what the chain workers group is asking for as well. The problem now, is to find the force, the organised power of workers that could impose, propose this kind of solution on the state and in the business world.

Thank-you

Brian Holmes: Later you can ask all the questions you want, after we’ve heard from all the other speakers.

Steve Baldwin

(Setting up) I think I have to switch from a to b to get to the pc? I have an antivirus ad, which is perfect for the pc.

My name is Steve Baldwin and I’m from the USA, from New York. First, I’d like to say how interested I was in hearing Maurizio about digital work and how difficult it is to organise a counter force to the various pressures that have been put upon people in USA and all over the world who are working in this media and finding as I’ve found myself in a situation that sucks to put it blankly. And, has sucked for a while in terms of one’s expectation level. I’ll talk about this in a little more detail later, but first, I’m wearing two hats today; the first is a little hat that since 1996 I’ve been interested in the idea that the Internet and the world wide web especially won’t be around for a very long time and we were talking yesterday that the web is about to celebrate it’s tenth year anniversary. We’ve been working collectively on this media medium. Remember when the first browser came along in late 93? How we all became transfixed and began to get really involved, actively producing content for it as different from just watching it. Why, I suspect this is because before I started working for the internet I was working for the music business when at that time, there was a wonderful old saying that, ‘Rock and Roll is here to stay’ and we all kind of know now that’s not so. But, when you’re young and full of energetic passion you think your discoveries and all those possibilities you’re working on are going to be around for a while, at least that’s what I thought. But in 1996-97, I started noticing and putting together what were beginning to clutter the site, abandoned sites, we penned, ‘Ghost Sites’. We were already seeing why these projects were given up. Certainly corporations wound up kind of losing heart and dropping these things that inevitably were turning into ghosts.

I’ll put up a couple screens of these, (http://disobey.com/ghostsites/ )many are not very relevant but than again many of them are, at least I think so. There is a picture of Enron that is quite interesting. (http://disobey.com/ghostsites/show_exhibit/eron3/ ) The site still exists but if you go to it today, all these pictures, you see here on screen, all these imagines have been removed. I been trying to think, ‘Why did they keep everything on the site except these images?’ And here I think there is a clue actually to what happen to all of us, how this great apocalypse happened.

The great enthusiasm rose to a theatrical pitch in just around the early part of 2000, April 16th to be exact, was when the great financial medium reached its peak and the whole thing started collapsing.

The Enron scandals came around later. I’m glad to have captured this slide above me now because I don’t think any copies of it exist anymore, which is just exactly what ghost sites is about. It is an attempt to archive, in a subjective way some of the artistic products that were made by many designers and innovators, all of whom are unsung and anonymous today. All were unsigned sites, works that were not meant to be permanent; they were communication chatter that I happened to capture from time to time.

What is probably more germane and interesting to this conference is the work I’ve written with Bill Lessard, who couldn’t be here today, these two books, the NetSlaves project, one that is no longer in print, are all that’s left of the project. We had grand goals for NetSlaves, which was a result of my co-writers and I, our excitement and hope that came from the heart. This was the beginning or an attempt to document some of the inequities and injustices, the craziness of working in this medium for reasons Maurizio has addressed; like erasing the personal and professional time barriers and the pressures and expectations that come with that, that a lot of people have not been trained for, either by their families or educational systems.

In 1998 I was spinning out of corporate life, which since then I haven’t gone back into. I’m now living as a freelance writer, in a very threadbare existence, trying to make due, paying bills by painting houses and doing construction. I have no health insurance, I have no insurance of any kind. I’m one of these people who live very much on the periphery of life, the periphery of economic life. But anyway, in 1998 we were seeing all these stories in the media about people like Jeff Bezos and Jerry Yang, a lot of very brilliant, young people and this isn’t to take away from any of their achievements but there were a lot of other people who appeared to be getting rich and I don’t want to let that role off my tongue without talking about how important that was, but it wasn’t the only thing, even among the most materialistic people, the Americans. It certainly wasn’t. What drove me and I consider myself a materialist, but there was this great myth coming into being and it was motivating people. People were imitating the behavior and dropping the buzzwords, they were redefining their wardrobes, wearing all types of technical gear. They were really thinking of themselves and playing as if they were pioneers. Or something equivalent to astronauts. People still do today think about cyberspace as a place, a space, and as The Enterprise.

One of the things I do today is that I transcribe very vertical IT industry conferences and they are always talking about the enterprise and the need integrate across the application. Of course, the Enterprise is just the business, the crummy corporation you happen to work for but the Enterprise gives a subliminal kind of meaning, that is traditionally very American because Americans take a certain technology development, we certainly took this one, the internet and we plug it into our deepest hopes, fears and desires about the future and whatever happens, happens. It’s important because it’s happening now and it’s going to happen and we’ve got to know about it because it’s going to be happening more and more.

But today, at this moment today, it’s happened; it’s over, at least in the popular imagination. No one needs longer to talk about this, like no one needs to talk about a hurricane that has already passed. Let’s do the American thing, and for this I’ll use my hands the Donald Rumsfeld way; “We’ve got to contain it and move on.” And, that is exactly what I think we have done worldwide.

This is our first book, ‘NetSlaves’, written in ‘99, sold very well because it came out in the middle of all this craziness. People were reading it like others watch television soap. Reading it to find out what happened to these people and that company. But the real reason why most people read it was because they didn’t want this to happen in their own company, no one wanted it to happen to ‘me’. So, there was a very utilitarian reason for the book and we sold about thirty- forty thousand copies. We only made about 1.400 dollars but we sold forty thousand copies, that I was quite proud about, being a first time author. But, I don’t want to talk about the book business today because it’s even worse.

After a number of years, after the crash of 2000, we wrote a second book, ‘NetSlaves 2.0.’. We changed our focus; we weren’t talking about the different classes or casts of Internet workers. We were talking about how people coped after the bottom dropped out and how they survived or if they survived? So, that is more or less what ‘NetSlaves’ is or was about.

I want to now talk more in depth about the project because it bears witness to some of the issues Maurizio was talking about. Why is it so difficult getting people together working in this heterogeneous area we call digital work? And what a broad field it is, as addressed in the Digital Work literature. These people working on all levels, as stated earlier working in call centers, or pc assembly workers, in a pc factory or in China where they take the old pc’s apart for recycling. Maybe it’s someone in a creative field, like an architect of a site designer or a much lower level coder but it all reminds me of a struggle that went on around one hundred years ago, in America. When a fellow named Eugene V. Debs was trying to organise railroad workers into the I.W.W. that stands for, Industrial Workers of the World. His idea was ‘One Big Union’, let’s use the collective power and if something bad happens or if we want a change in management, ‘We will shut this railroad down.’ Organising in this way is still going on today, especially here in Europe. In fact, the NS threaten to strike this very day and only called it off because the weekend coincided with a school holiday.

One problem Debs had was moving across craft lines. For instances, the people who sweep out the trains didn’t want to be in the same union as the engineers who were driving the locomotives or the men stoking the fires. Their attitudes were, ‘I don’t know these other people, how do I know that what’s good for me is good for them? I don’t really share too many of their interests or concerns…You mean, I have to go on strike because they’ve abused the other guy?’ Ultimately Debs work was very important and the union movement as it existed the early twentieth century in America would not have gotten where it was without him, but here he fundamentally failed. And so did we with ‘NetSlaves”, which I can’t really compare because, because our project was a home grown small scale effort where we wanted to document the lives of workers and instead when people found out about us they came to us, and it kind of snowballed with people visiting the website.

Digital workers felt a fundamental need to be solitaire. One of the most popular cartoons in America is called, Dilbert. I don’t know if it’s available over here but at that time Scott Adams was depicting very barren cube like landscapes with all these cruel managers and low levels employees as drones which resonated quite deep in peoples’ consciousness. Even today when you walk into any corporate cube farm you’ll always find personnel with clippings of Dilbert that speak directly about a personal situation. They come in different forms, a hanging calendar, post-it notes or used as a screen saver, someone else will be drinking out of a Dilbert mug and all because he’s a hero. But beyond that, what is there today? I don’t think very much. Digital workers I think, never thought of themselves and still do not as a cog in the machine but to a certain extent they considered themselves entrepreneurs, as creative people who like Maurizio said, dealt with less hierarchy and flexibility in the workplace. It felt as if they were calling their own shots. To give an example, ‘I’m working for company x and my job is creating software or banner ads, but that is just where I am today. Ultimately, I’m going to be running this company because I know more about the way work happens and how it should actually be done. I’m working hands on. ‘

This kind of attitude is very American; they are a ‘do it yourself’ group of people. A lot of the original energy that went into the Internet revolution came from California, which is in the news today for a much different reason. But it bears on the kind of craziness that typically has come from California. All these engineers many of whom did or had worked in the military and were now retired, were working in their garages, tinkering with this and that component, putting stuff together and coming up with all this wild stuff. Ultimately, Apple came about. The product of two young men slapping things together and these two guys are the real hero’s. These are the genuine hero’s and it doesn’t matter whether you voted Democrat or Republican. They are not people like Bill Gates. People on an average do not look up to Bill Gates, he’s not really an innovator, and he pays lip service to innovation. He’s not much more than a gatekeeper collecting dimes whenever someone enters or exists, pocketing money that belongs to someone else. Whereas, Jobs and Wozniak, the two behind Apple took active counter-cultural streams, which are still active today in California. These were counter-cultural rebellious spirits, eternally young, who built a user-friendly tool that capsulated this energy and put it in the public domain.

I’d like now to use the white board and draw a diagram which I consider authentic, a simple spirit that predates the web, a circle; in its’ core which animates so many people, I see it as rebellion or ‘Me’, that is important. It’s not necessarily us, but it’s ‘Me’ and it’s ‘who I really am’. It doesn’t matter what I look like, but it’s about what I can contribute. The soul of the man, what the blues folks sing about. So there’s ‘Me’, a sacred space, which is the basis of most authenticity or forms of Art.

And now, I’m just going to say it, I don’t care what anybody thinks, but when I was just a young person, I was a sound man in the Punk movement, in New York and there was this button that said, ‘something to say and a place to say it.‘ And, that’s all I really needed, I’ve got something to say and I’ve got a place. I’ve got a garage and it doesn’t matter if it has heat or anything, I have a place. Which in it own way, continued to making the internet something we did, whether or not they were being paid, should or shouldn’t have been doing it at all, it is just something to do, out of a curiosity that comes naturally.

So, here we have the core that is ‘Me’ and what I have to contribute to this force that will be around as long as mankind is?

And now I’m encircling Me, which I’ll label ‘Making it’ because the real world, the one outside your core is not going to let you say for too long whatever your doing is interesting or right. Your landlord isn’t interested in what you are doing in the garage, so you have to put a circle around what it is your doing everyday that’s called making it, protecting your rebellious spirit because if you don’t the guys in the white coats are going to come and get you and you are not going to be able to say much anymore. Here again and I was so happy to hear Maurizio defining the classical worker as having to leave your self-subjective self behind. You have to become a different person. You have to emasculate yourself. Sell your soul.

Well, hey looking at the diagram it looks like a 45-rpm record; an old medium producing an old image, that’s great.

I’d like now to talk about the crash and what we’ve been through. I think and this may be a wrong assumption but I think, that Europeans have done a better job in this area than Americans did because I don’t think you people put as many chips on this thing, chips on the new economy, but maybe I’m wrong. But, it seemed like everyone in the States was investing in the business, from the Fortune 500 gentlemen to school age teenagers dropping out and going in with start ups. Forty year olds were giving up their secure jobs and saying to their spouses, honey, ‘This is my last shot and I’m going to get there’. Everyone was thinking, ‘If you don’t take the risk how are you going to get there?’ Like who said it, Andrew Carnegie, ’No-one become a billionaire without taking risks’. Well, most of us take risks everyday and end up painting houses and filling dumpsters.

Anyway, I want to draw another circular diagram which I like because most presentations are square. I want to talk about the boom, roughly the years we’ve been through. The last ten years from 1993 until now 2003. The years, 1993 to 1996 went every quickly and was a very interesting time with most of us having seen the web, it was an amazing time, like dropping acid or hearing the electric guitar for the first time. I love this time, a new sound had appeared. No one had seen this stuff before. There were a lot of interesting things coming out of universities, individuals and some companies and no one could put it in a box. No one could figure it out, people were asking themselves, ‘How can we turn this into a business, professionalise it?’ There was experimentation in fooling around excitement. We were talking about this at breakfast, remembering the early web, the first graphic achievements, the first animated gif, the moving pictures and seeing frames for the first time when ‘Netscape 2.0’ came in. I was working at Time – Warner and they were looking at these things and they take everything seriously and even they were turned on like, wow because in their imagination it was just a short step into inventing a new way to charge for movies or music.

But, in 1996 a very important business event happened when Netscape did its public offering, its IPO. It was the biggest IPO ever and people got enormously rich. And, then people started imitating, thinking if this browser company can do this and become millionaires lots of people began thinking well my technology is better than Netscape’s, that in turn created an IPO mania that continued up and into the year 2000. And then, the pipeline began to dry up and eventually the entire market folded and with it came, at least in the first year, denial, a void, negative space where people said, ‘Come on, this is a speed bump, a temporary road block, don’t pull your money out. Who said this was going to be easy? Nothing is easy, we’ve got to tough this one out.’

And, people believed this. The people doing the talking were official types of the Wall Street journal, economists, ‘the trusted few’ that signaled calm. Which doesn’t take away from the numbers of economists that had been skeptical of the business from the very beginning. And then, you had the critics, like myself who were screaming, “What a waste, there is so much inefficiency, so much idiocy. This is crazy. Who’s driving the bus? We don’t have a road map. It’s all going to crash. The sky is going to fall.” A lot of static was created, no one listened to us and no one listened to them, and the market had a mind of its own and the market was making money. The thoughts were as long as people are making money, let’s make money. Skeptics and negativity were not allowed. People were only interested in your confidence.

And, then a spectacular implosion occurred, the dot-com implosion. It’s kind of funny but, I was watching the California debates and Arnold Schwarzenegger had nothing to say about this. One of the other candidates did though acknowledge that California’s economic problems evidentially wound up into all their political problems, which no one seems to understand. But it does though appear quite surreal to the rest of us that Arnold Schwarzenegger ends up being the governor of the state. At some point they did admit that the state might not have been in so much I trouble if it hadn’t been for this dot-com thing, the Dot-com implosion where space collapses into itself. That is what happened.

Between 2000 and now, I don’t know, not much has happened. I’m unemployed. All my clients I had, and I had big clients, working for Time-Warner as I did on a freelance basis, are gone. But, it’s strange, I’ve gradually returned to the Internet. I started making enough money a few months ago to get a connection again. A lot of other people though have just said, ‘to hell with it.’ This is what we called in the book, ‘Neo-Luddism, or Neo-Luddites.’ People who were really burned by this junk and what did it all mean? To hell with it, which is easy to do when you are downwardly mobile. Why do you need any of the net services anymore? All these things cost money and you don’t have any. So, you radically make your life tiny. And, you yourself begin to disappear, which in a funny way is quite liberating because you don’t have worry about what Microsoft is or isn’t doing, you don’t have to worry about viruses or all that comes with the package. That is what I did, and have only come back like I said about six months ago.

Back to the timeline, I want to talk about what happened back in the early days in 1993-4 and ‘95 when big media companies discovered this medium and they wanted to make a statement and they wanted to spend enormous amounts of money, which they did. I can show you pictures of these where companies like Time-Warner and Hearst or large magazine chains started to seriously invest in new media, hiring a lot of creative people. (http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/v2/v2.shtml/ ) Not the kind of people you find in California. Development took place in California; the heart of the movement is there. Where they build the software and put to search engines together, all the technical work is there. On the east coast, where I’m from there was never a technical or even a manufacturing infrastructure in the nineties. There are a couple good technical schools like MIT, in Boston and Stevens Institute, which is close to New York. But we didn’t have a Stanford, pumping out these highly qualified programmers or like the MBAs, picking up information, working up a scenario and kind of carried the ball when it came time to market all these companies to Wall Street. I’m going to end this diagram because it’s very simple. Once big media stepped in and started distributing a lot of money it gave way to a lot of people, worldwide giving the network content. And, when I’m talking about content, I’m talking about sites, your site, my site, your company’s site; they’re not generating much money but they are providing content. They were doing things that ultimately build fortunes.

When I think about all the money America Online made before it merged with Time-Warner, what was that all premised upon? There wasn’t anything that great about World on-line. AOL was the easiest and most successful way; it had 30,40 or 50 million people working for it. It was all built up on people chatting, they were not paying money to listen to music, read great works of fiction or paying to subscribe to magazines. They were just going person to person, communicating with each other via e-mail. That was an evolution circling around the periphery of the circle called independent media, Indie Media. People who are doing what it is they do but less for reasons of ‘making it’. They were not out to protect themselves. They were interested in making freaky things, making things accessible to others. The net became a bizarre mosaic of wonderful but sometimes disturbing content that has had somewhat of a cultural influence. It created the sense that being on the net isn’t just about getting rich, just being cool or having the gadgets but this was where the counter culture was alive and continues to be alive.

After the crash, the center dropped away, big media said to hell with this. They shut down all the Internet departments. Only the usual source information was left, Associated Press, UPI and CNN. The content that people then saw wasn’t very original, quite repurposed or dumped from what they were already doing. When big media dropped out, I remember feeling a moment of triumph. Thinking, ‘At last, all those idiots, all those dodgy types are gone’. Their exodus leaves an emptiness the counter culture will fill. All those wonderful voices out there that have been ignored and starved all that time will now be recognised. Maybe now all those people who have been creating content will pick their enthusiasm back up.’ But, to make a long story short, Web-logging came along about this time. I don’t think that anyone in web-logging makes money. But, with the centers collapse, the outsiders right now are starving. A survey about web-logging came out that about 80-90% of these sites are dead. People have given up on them and don’t continue.

Many of us were being paid to do this type of work for companies and it wasn’t so very different, we thought it was creative; a new way in working but actually it just was an extension of factory work.

But fundamentally, we were doing these jobs because they were great. Here I’d like to talk a bit about Andrew Ross, who’s linked here in your handout flyer, who wrote a book I think is much better than the ones I wrote; which were more documenting what was happening. Ross’s book is much more systematic and constructive. He waited a little longer than we did to write his book. In the book he attempts to write objectively about how good these jobs really were. Perhaps if all this financial stuff hadn’t happen we might have really been on the verge of a break through into what Ross calls, ‘a humane workplace’. A place where ‘Me’, doesn’t have to deaden himself when entering the working environment or split himself in half in order to be able to work in this environment.

I suppose the good news is, is that we don’t know what would have happened if these companies had spent their money a little more wisely, the crash hadn’t occurred, or 9-11 hadn’t changed the landscape. What kind of a world would it today? Where would digital work be? The best of digital work should not be put down too much. In these books I wrote, I focused maybe too much on how the utopian promise behind the Internet failed people, which I think it did.

What kind of world could we have been in if we had carried the good things and ideas from that period into the future and not necessarily connect the disaster that happened to the fact that for many of us it was the first time ever, employees were treated with a lot more respect, given a lot of freedom and were allowed to contribute more to the organisation than ever before? I think it is a mistake in America when we and the media talk about this, that the dot-com implosion is something that has wound up being the fault of the workers or the fault of the people that went into it. Which isn’t so, because and it has been admitted that there were many things wrong with these business models, but I won’t go into that because it doesn’t interest me that much. But, in retrospect you ask yourself how could they have ever gotten so many people to put so much money down on such preposterous ideas as for example, a pet shop? Think about the economics of shipping cat litter. It’s very expensive. There is no way you can drop ship cat litter to your door and make money. These are things someone should have known at the time and they didn’t. Why did they not know this? And I don’t know, but there is this myth that they were a bunch of kids, a bunch of smart-ass; arrogant kids whose parents had abandoned them. The children of the sixties with hippy, pot smoking parents who developed them into revolutionaries. These kids in turn went out there and conned everybody, they went to bed with them all, the bankers, the venture capitalists and members of all different shady established businesses. Two separate things happened, when one was destroyed the other one wasn’t, but I’m going to finish up here because I’m caught in a blue streak.

I do believe, that there still remains today an authentic sense of subversiveness, a spirit of rebellion. It may not be published, it may not be important. But, there are so many battles in the world of the Internet and not only in digital work. There are controversies over things like file sharing. Lately, corporations have been directly targeting individuals, going after kids for downloading this or that, copyrighted work and they are really going after these people and are merciless. These battles are built around open source software patents, which are related to copyright. There is a battle over form and a lot of it is in constant changed; since America became absorbed with spying on particular people for security and safety reasons.

But what I see today in America, a lot like in the sixties is the young people have a their own language, their own rituals, they behave as though they know that this world is a pretty damned, corrupt place. Marketing that’s being shoved down their throat, they don’t believe a word of it and there is skepticism about it. Of course they are profoundly influenced by what they see on television and what is present in their culture. Television who’s potential is so great but is so diffuse.

There is a lot of good news coming from America now, Howard Dean, who is running for president has raised more money in a shorter period of time than ever and through the Internet, which astounded the other candidates who were just a little too late…. Oh, you want me to finish? O.K. I’ll finish up, that’s it.

Laurence Rassel

First, I want to say thanks to Femke and Matthew who have built up this context for inviting me here, and secondly to the students who participated in the Digital Work workshop, who through their work gave us a richer context into what digital work is in Rotterdam, it’s office landscapes and people. I’d also like to thank Roger Teeuwen who helped us better understand where we are digitally standing at this time in space and also to Leslie, Stephen and Pascal because they have all taken care of the practical and technical demands that we have and of course to V2 because I am here.

As it was mentioned in the folder I am here to talk about Digitales. Digitales is an event that has bought women from various backgrounds dealing with technology to work together every year since 2001.

I was invited to talk about this event. But, what can I show of Digitales? What can be shown? The organisers of this event at one point asked me to bring some visuals related to my talk; something you, my audience can look at as well as me.

But what is an image related to my talk? Who is talking here? What can I show, which will be related to my work in Digitales?

What is the relationship between the image and the talk and the work?

So, if you agree I will follow several threads in this talk:

- Who is talking, here and now?

- The picture: what is this image? And, why was it chosen as evidence of the event I was invited to talk about?

- Digitales, the event itself.

- And, finally, I will try to draw links between the working conditions and models of women’s work, in the arts and in new technology.

[Conditions of work]

First, who is talking?

I will tell a story. My first image is a painting by Nancy Spero, an American feminist artist of the seventies and eighties.

I want to tell a story about this image, a story I heard, read somewhere or maybe invented but: in the 60’s Nancy Spero had to take care of her three sons (because, as she said of Leon Golub, her artist husband), “Leon’s consciousness needed a lot of raising in that era”. But she never stopped working and always late at night, proving if only to herself she was an artist. She said, “Perhaps motherhood was part of a political, personal choice in my changing mediums and content. I started to work rapidly on paper, angry works, often scatological.” These are not the images you see on the screen but she’s talking about her wall paintings at the time. In the story, I remember she was also saying that she was painting women small enough to be hidden with her hand, because she thought her children would be embarrassed, shocked by the images.

This time another quote by Lucy Lippard, an feminist art historian who said, in ‘The Pink Glass Swan’; “Five years after the birth of my feminist consciousness, I still have to question every assumption, every reaction I have in order to examine them for signs of preconditioning. Some changes came across fast. In the winter of 1970, I went to a great many women’s studios and my preconceptions were jolted daily. I thought serious artists had to have big, professional-looking spaces. I found women in corners of men’s studios, in bedrooms and children’s rooms, even in kitchens, working away. I thought important art was large. I found women working small, both out of inclination and necessity.”

Returning once again to Spero and I quote, “The stigma of motherhood had struck. It seemed even artist friends regarded me differently, as if there couldn’t be 2 artists in one household. My work was virtually and sometimes conspicuously ignored - particularly when the male half was honing his skills in theoretical explanations of a powerful work as a young Turk. My art was more lyrical and layered, less accessible - coming from a female sensibility”.

Several years ago I compared these stories with my own social and working conditions, I worked painting by hand or with computer in the kitchen, or living room, in small formats, self portraits and so on. I guess, you can imagine the scenario?

For me, feminism revealed among other things, the relationships at play between the conditions of work and the conditions of visibility, recognition.

I asked myself how, and where the other artists worked? Where the money came from? How do institutions and galleries work? Who is the audience, who is their public? Who is choosing the work to be viewed, on display, or commented on? How? What for, and, under which conditions? When I had a day job in factories, offices or schools, I was wandering when would there be time for my own work?

Slowly my gaze, attention and questioning moved away from painting and the issues around painting, of fine arts, and into the framework of the conditions of work and following a path.

My work from then on changed to deal with these relationships, these conditions. My means of action and creation, my tools were not colours and brushes anymore but meetings, discussions and organising activities. There were no more paintings, videos or objects. At the end there were situations where people met, talked, walked and worked together. The work was not in the galleries or in the studios, but around coffee tables, in offices and workplaces, during meetings and workshops.

[Testimony (Witnessing (giving evidence)]

Why do I begin today with the question, ‘Who is talking?’ and with a personal story?

Maybe, in order to address the ambiguity of being at the origin of this project, called Digitales which became collective, which exists and is alive only because it is collective and situated in the reality of different networks and places.

Being on the inside of a collective project I find it difficult now to speak in the name of the others who haven’t given me this role. So, today, I speak for myself, from my personal experience, only this way can I situate this experience, and this standpoint on this project.

And, also because bringing a personal experience in a public space is not neutral, if you allow me I can also say that I inscribe myself in the history of feminism going from an «I» personal to a political, public «I».

If I question ‘who is talking’, I have also to think about what is the nature, the status of the words, the discourse in relation to the pictures of Digitales that I will show you. So here I quote in French.1

“Let’s take the example of ‘testimony and proof’ that we have to distinguish, that we must always distinguish. A testimony - giving evidence - has never been taken as or will never be able to be seen as a proof. In the strict sense of the word, testimony is given in the first person, by someone who says : «I swear», who commits oneself to tell the truth, gives one’s word and asks to be believed on one’s words when proof need not - or will never - be produced for structural, essential and non-contingent reasons. (…) Technique will never provide a testimony. On the other side, inversely whoever testifies under oath commits oneself not only to tell the truth, but also to repeat, to confirm this truth later, tomorrow, and forever. The present of one’s testimony must be repeated (…) Testimony as a given testimony, as evidence, is always discourse (…)” So, this is my translation, end of quote.

Sophia

In 2001, I was working as an editor for Sophia. [In the following text I’ll be using the vocabulary and language in their brochures] Since 1990, Sophia has been a network whose objective is to promote the development of women’s studies, research and feminist teaching in Belgium. Its main aims are to build bridges between researchers working in and out of university centres, to establish links between the women's movement and the academic world, and to bring the different language-speaking communities in Belgium closer. Sophia organises conferences every two years and publishes a quarterly news bulletin that reports on research, publications, conferences, training and information on women and gender in Belgium.

Sophia's office was housed in the Women’s Centre on the same street as a training centre for women: Interface 3.

Interface3 ASBL

«This Brussels-based organisation started as an independent pilot project for vocational training in 1988. Since then, it has been training women in professions where they are under-represented, mainly in fast developing sectors where information and communication technology (ICT) play an important role. With the latest equipment, the centre and its team of specialised trainers use original teaching methods, which take account of problems affecting women’s careers, such as childcare, family obligations, the balance between professional life and domestic responsibilities, and the need to overcome the feelings of inadequacy often caused by a long period outside the labour market. A management and job creation cell (websites, computer graphics) is also located there, offering placements at the end of the training and integrating long-term unemployed and lower-qualified women into the workplace.

So, you have Sofia on the same street as Interface 3 and besides renting classrooms in the Women’s Centre and some limited technical projects, there was not much collaboration with this working place, and no contact at all between the Sofia Feminist studies network and this Training Centre, Interface 3.

Since 2001, Interface 3 has been responsible for the ADA Belgian network whose aim is to create an exchange, a thought and action network on the subject of women and ICTs. Led by Interface3asbl in partnership with women's training organisations in computer information technology, @ron, ATEL, Sofft, NFTE, this project is supported by the Belgian ministry of Labour and Employment and the European Social Funds, and involves a wider collaboration with companies, guidance centres, schools, etc.

And from 1997, I have been working on a voluntary basis for Constant vzw that is an organisation linking artistic and theoretical thinking on the Internet and digital communication. We don’t have any space, we organise events like lectures, concerts, parties, workshops, film/video screenings, meetings inside/for other places or online. Finally, the projects by Constant do not belong to a given space, but provide material that can be taken away and worked with. We can be one to 20 people working on this platform, depending on the project and on the stage of the project. We are graphic designers, painters, musicians, and film-makers. We go from pop and mainstream culture to hardcore experimental. The activities organised by Constant are marked by the idea that the most fruitful debates spring from the interstices of disciplines and genres. Whether through the place, the publication, or the choice of people present, what we are looking for is cross-pollination, reciprocal contamination. We organised in 2000, the Cyberfeminist Working Days, bringing new media tools and cyberfeminist questions to an art public.

Within this particular body of circumstances:

I was working for Sophia, an academic womens network, in the Women House which was located in the same street of that of Interface 3, a women's training organisation in computer information technology that was part of the, in 2001 ADA network, and being a cyberfeminist working inside the non profit organisation Constant.: Digitales was launched.

Pascal, can you please switch on the Digitales video? Thank-you. I will translate what you are seeing in synchronisation. It is a video made during one of our events. It begins with a simple question, “Do you have a personal computer?’” The first says, “No, no”. Another says, “Of course not.” A third says, “ Two, a mac and a pc, no discrimination.” Another woman says, “Well yes, I go on line, all the time. I use a lot of computers but none are personal computers.” And, this last woman says, “Yes, very personal because I built it myself.”

When the ‘Digitales’ project was launched. And now, I dub myself.

«We wanted to name the event. We started with words like hive, network, sheaf because we wanted people to understand that there were several organisations working together, women and/or feminist organisations. We were looking for a generic term, a word that could be used for a long time, a word that could be repeated, in different languages, because the idea was that it would be a regularly recurring event. The what? What were we? What did it all mean?

Then we stumbled on the word ‘Digitales’ and picked it up because it represented the technique we were all using. But when I make a gesture, there are also the fingers, the handprint. So at the same time, it was the fingers, the body and digital technology. And afterwards we found that it was also a poison (digitalis), a thing that will seep in and change things, transform them."

Now we can cut the sound.

This video was produced by the Interface 3 trainees using a digital camera to make the video within the event Digitales, as a product for public use. This video was made to be projected as a visual background for the round table of conclusion for the first Digitales in 2001. I proposed to have it projected while I was talking about Digitales. The event was recorded by the women trainees and trainers themselves: through interviews, recordings, taking digital pictures and videos, etc.

As you see or as I tell you the event took place inside the Training Centre and the Women House, with people moving to one room from another, from one building to another.

Here is the text we wrote about Digitales. The text I wrote in collaboration with Marie-Françoise Stewart-Ebel is one of the founders in Interface 3 and Nadine Plateau who founded Sofia, all feminists and thanks to Femke for reading this stuff.

Digitales are times of technological, feminist activity and continual exchange on work, knowledge, skills, experiences, dreams and questioning.

Our Objectives are:

Finding a common language to provoke thoughts and to work out a practice that will stimulate women's action in contemporary society and bring awareness of the concept of gender to the debates on new technologies through:

- technological and creative initiation,

- understanding of the work tool,

- the critical analysis of new technologies, - the discovery and the construction of new images and interactions,

- constructing history, means of transmitting experience.

We are bringing together those who:

- have or want to use technologies to earn their living and to provide for the needs of a family,

- have professional and technical skills on the cutting edge of information and communication technology and alternative systems,

- undertake university research in various disciplines and in various countries,

- create their artistic work by using 'traditional' or 'new' media (film, video, Internet, digital support),

- are interested by feminist thought on contemporary society.

The Partners:

I’ve talked about ADA, Sophia, Constant, and since 2002, the Centre for Equal Opportunity which is a consortium of the University of Antwerp (UA) and the University Centre of Limburg (LUC). The Centre occupies an intermediary position between a research institute, public administration and civil society. The next edition in January 2004, will be organised in another Training Centre in Antwerp (ATEL), guest organisations will be: the European network SIGIS (Strrategies of Inclusion: Gender and the Information Society), and Htmlles, Studio XX festival on women and new media art from Montréal.

As you can see, it brings together, over several days, people coming from the worlds of academia, vocational training, technique and the arts.

For example: one day we might have a conference with a researcher from the European Trade Union and an artist, and the next day comes a science philosopher talking about the techno-scientific uterus because we think, that they all try to make visible the physical body behind the technique. So, in the following weeks, electronic musicians and translators work to bring them together into one production.

Another example: women in the vocational training centre were invited to make a critique of a governmental campaign designed to bring women and girls into technology. They did their own posters, and had the opportunity to talk with the person in charge of this campaign.

You can find the archives produced, re-edited by the trainees, and the guests online, and/or are free on demand from Constant or Interface3.

http://www.digitales-online.org/

[Images of Ditigal work. Evidence]

So. I was invited to talk about Digitales, I tried to set ‘who is talking’?

Then, I tried to explain the context, and the circumstances of it. Until now, I have been reluctant to use pictures of Interface 3 trainees to present my own work in and on Digitales. But now I use it as a background image, as a proof, as a product.

Why?

I can only show what they themselves have produced within the event Digitales, as a product for public use, but these videos don’t represent the event, they are part of an event. As I told you this video was made to be projected as a visual background for the round table discussion at the conclusion of the first Digitales.

So what can I show you of Digitales?

My testimony is not the event either. I can bring it to you because I lived through it, and still am working on it.

How can I give you a feeling of what it is, of what it was?

Because, it is a shared experience, based in time and space.

But let me try to share a picture with you - give you a sense of it.

This image is already famous in a way: it is now on the homepage of the Ada network, it is praised by every participant to Digitales, and appears highly symbolic, doesn’t it? As you have seen, we have plenty of these pictures, with many different kinds of women's hands on computers.

But the fact that these women have hands on computers is not what Digitales is, I know that. Interface 3 is a training centre for women in new technology, and most women are not from European origin, so this reality and diversity exists without Digitales.

But let’s take this image and track down Digitales in it:

-The fact is, is that this picture was taken by a woman behind the digital camera, other women behind the editing software.

- The fact is, is that a woman trained to be a secretary has the opportunity, for the first time, to open and take apart a computer. The fact is, is that she meets and works with someone trained to work at a help desk.

- The fact is, is that such an image has replaced other databank images on the website of the ADA network. - The fact is, is that this image has been archived, seen (I show it here, it is in the report to the funding bodies, it is public on the net.)

This ‘interdisciplinary’ meeting (between secretary, help desk, and a webdesigner behind the camera), and such a diverse itinerary is all part of Digitales.

Also, I was able to ‘use’ this image, once I have given my relation to it, set the circumstances, and put it context. Maybe once again, I gave it back its technicality, how it was done.

[Proof]

Let's go back to testimony

Talking about technicality, let's go back to the testimony, and ‘who’s talking’, to the visibility, to the format of a ‘new media’, ‘multimedia’, and ‘nomadic work’.

As I told you to begin with: my means of action (creation), my tools were not colours, brushes anymore but meetings, talks, and organising activities. There were no more paintings, videos, objects; at the end there were situations, people meeting, talking, and walking together. The work was not in the galleries or in the studios, but around coffees (at coffee tables), in offices and workplaces, during meetings and workshops.

So, by the adjectives « new media», "multimedia», «nomadic work», I try to describe a work which is using different types of media: texts, sounds, images, relationships, meetings, web design, translations, book keeping, different types of skills: soft, hard and wet ware. This job is not developed once and repeated, it is flowing to other places, rebuilding in content, and due to be transmitted.

• • image du tableau des actions à remplir**

I am now employed by the ADA partnership, my work is acted by this table mentioning Digitales as a budget line. My work is visible: you can see it in the lines and code numbers added to this table which every employee has to fill in, on an hourly basis. It is used to account for what the employee has done, for which part of the budget line, in which action of the project it is included, and is part of reporting to the European Social Fund, which part-subsidies ADA, and as such, Digitales.

How did I get there? How did I get caught in the web I have myself woven, and became employed by my own concept, my own work?

[Paradoxes]

As a feminist, I questioned the capital value of, or underlined the capitalist value of the art product, of art.

As an artist, caught in ancient mythology:

I do this work for the beauty of it, or the hell of it, or just because I want to. But then, what do I have to sell: images, words, cultural capital, my agenda?

My work contract says, that I am a trainer.

What do I sell?

Gosh, can you imagine selling your voice, your body of circumstances?

Do I have to give a form, a contract to my work to gain visibility (and money) at the price, at the risk of being prisoner of this form?

But, why do I persist to identify myself as an artist:

Is it to preserve my freedom, my independence to work at home, to be able to work longer hours for the hell of it? Is it for the good of womankind? I am aware that these values of independence and autonomy can be used against me.

My work is to create protocols of meetings, conditions of meetings, and is not meant to be seen. It should be experienced, lived through.

I am not for sale.

I want to keep my freedom.

I want my work to be recognised.

I want my work to have collective value.

I want my work to be transmitted, non repetitive, not commoditised, and always in question.

Don’t you?

[Biographies]

Here, I would like to make a link between «artistic» practice, experience, its paradoxes, and the experience of women working in new media, between their desire to keep autonomy, and the burden of it.

For example: (These examples and quotes are from interviews taken from an investigation lead by a European project, called www-ict, Widening Women’s Work in Information and Communication Technology.)

What we can see from the interview is that women:

- like the idea of working from home,

- but are afraid of the work not being recognised because it was not produced inside the enterprise.

‘Working as a software developer is not so bad when you have small children because you can do it at home.’

Another example is from an IBM survey they did in July, 2003 done among women working in the company and the perceived difficulties for making optimal use of e-place (e- place is working from home):

Where 13,3 % of those interviewed thought that their jobs were not taken into consideration.

They like to be passionate about their work.

A freelance web-designer said : “When I need a project to be ready, I can work until 4 o’clock in the morning. And often, they see me working on my laptop when I watch my little daughter playing in the park.”

Yet, at the same time they are overwhelmed by the amount of work and hours a woman puts in.

But isn’t the basic model, someone always working and being passionate or slave to one’s work?

“… There are no part-time workers here. All women who work part-time are soon edged out. There is just no tolerance of it whatsoever. It is as if, when you get past a certain level, you start playing with the boys. They are all serious about their work, they are all making long hours and they expect you to do the same. My boss’s boss here, he works through the night. He has got a family (…) but they live in a different part of the country, and he is one of these people that only needs a few hours sleep a night. So, he works through the night and will be sending emails at midnight. You can send him an email at any time and he will respond back. It is just that culture that needs you to be available at all times. It is very difficult.”

Women know they are highly valued and searched for (in researched) in technology industries because they have soft skills (social relationships, care) but they are never very well paid for their skills, they are considered a plus, but not in financial terms, like, “when it comes to problems to solve conflicts between colleagues, I have this mediating role, since I get along with all of them.” While on the otherhand, and most women are a lot less aware of this, is that it is these so-called and praised female skills that stop them to go from a marketing position to more technical one.

“Senior managers tend to have these clichéd views that women are good at certain things, they are more sensitive, better communicators and more persuasive.”

Allow me here to draw a thread of my web to Olympe de Gouges, who in 1788 was campaigning for women’s rights during the first French Revolution and Republic, describes herself as, "A woman who has only paradoxes to offer and not problems easy to resolve."

And so to conclude I quote, Rosi Braidotti, from her book in 2002, ‘Metamorphoses’: »In praise of the principle of non-profit. »

‘In opposition to the metaphysical and the modernist vision of the machine as a harmonious assembly of parts working together to produce a socially desirable result (wealth, truth, etc), nomadic machines are relentlessly gratuitous. They promote the principle of non-profit and function as unruly, disorderly, cacophonous, non-productive or sterile machines. They aim at resisting capital accumulation, at dissipative structures of gratuitous self-_expression which therefore militate against self-destruction. Their flows of energy re-confirm the joy of wastefulness and resist the negative passion of greed. This is in direct opposition to the techno-hype that surrounds new technological developments in advanced post-industrial societies.’

I gave you here Rosi Braidotti’s proposal of non-profit and gratuitous principles, but is this sustainable? How can we think of models of contracts, social protections, of working conditions that could give a visibility of the multilayered, flexible, generous women workers without commodifying them, enclosing them in spread sheets, and in images?

Should passion, generosity, care, love, creative, mobile, freedom and multi-threading minds be sold, commoditised, under contracts and highly priced?

Or shouldn’t they be?

1 «Prenons l’exemple du témoignage et de la preuve, qu’il faut distinguer, qu’on doit toujours distinguer. Un témoignage n’a jamais été tenu ou ne pourra jamais être tenu pour une preuve. Au sens strict du terme, le témoignage est avancé à la première personne par quelqu’un qui dit : « je jure », qui s’engage à dire la vérité, donne sa parole et demande à être cru sur parole là où la preuve n’a pas à être faite – ou ne pourra jamais être faite, pour des raisons structurelles, essentielles et non contingentes. Il est possible que le témoignage soit d’autre part corroboré par une preuve mais le processus de la preuve est absolument hétérogène à celui du témoignage qui implique la foi jurée, l’engagement à dire la vérité. Par conséquent, là où il y a preuve, il n’y a pas de témoignage. L’archive technique en principe ne devrait jamais se substituer au témoignage. (…) La technique ne fournira jamais un témoignage. D’autre part (…), inversement quiconque témoigne et prête serment s’engage non seulement à dire la vérité, mais à répéter et à confirmer cette vérité tout à l’heure, demain et à l’infini. Le présent de mon témoignage doit être répété (…) Le témoignage en tant que témoignage porté, en tant qu’attestation, consiste toujours en du discours.(…)

Jacques Derrida / Bernard Stiegler, ‘Echographies de la télévision’, - Galilée - INA, 1996, pp 106 & 107. English translation, Polity Press, 2002

discussion with respondents begins:

Stephen Kovats: Ok everybody. I'd like to invite everybody back to take some seats so we can continue with the discussion. If I could get the speakers, moderator, our friendly neighbors respondents... Speakers moderators, respondents, please up to the table!...

And just while everybody is shuffling back to their seats... You'll find at your seats...There should be a short visitor's survey we'd really appreciate it if you could fill it out. You can either leave it in your seat or drop it off my table when you go out...

And I also want to draw your attention to a recent V2 publication which fits in very well to a lot of what Steve (Baldwin) was talking about. Is dealing with our post ".com" crush environment "My first recession" by Geert Lovink is available in the book store. I think it might be of interest and value to people who are interested in today's discussion.

So it's looking good back here I think we are almost ready to roll. Femke would you like to say a few words or shall we just move right in...

(Our moderator is having some trouble digitally manipulating his chair)... So the chair is yours, so to speak...

Brian Holmes,: Where are the respondents? We should have two people who should be with us... So, get ready to respond (lol)...

I want to make a little anecdote. I'm a professional translator, the work that I do is to translate. So I only do the most interesting work of all which for me is art. So I really look for the things...And after some years it became so insufferable for me, so impossible to do this work, so boring, so unbearable that I became more and more interested in the politics of this kind of work, and becoming interested in the politics of this kind of work I started to read people like Maurizio and other people and there was always this word, "precarité" in the French, or this "precariato" in the Italian which you couldn't translate into English... and becoming more totally... As the translating work became more unbearable and it become more and more into politics, then I always needed to express this concept of precarité in English and finally, here, doing something which I'm not sure if it is work or politics or art or whatever I realize that the best translation for this word would be "unstable". In fact, "the unstable worker". And is really quite amazing because you come to the Institute of Unstable Media and you find out that the word that you've been missing in the job you used to do before you quit working is really "unstable". So, that brings you from work, to politics, to media...

And I think the question is then how to get out of media and back to politics, you know, because you find yourself over and over again in this "unstable media institutes" talking about this things but I don't think we have yet made the real leap outside the "unstable media institutes" and back to the work that the whole thing started with. So I hope that as we talk we will be able to come, to really get to this central questions that came out from all the presentations: between work, creativity expressed through media and the politics that could actually have an effect on work. Because I think, that might be the circle that we were talking about if we manage to get there...

Maybe it would be good that first the people who were sort of named to respond to the talks tell us what was most important or what was most missing from what we have just heard...

Enric could you present yourself, Enric and tell us who you are before telling us what you think?.

Enric Gilli Fort: I am Enric. I am working at the v2 lab we just work with "unstable media" which is as author. Basically we are working developing any kind of software or applications

that come to us from cultural institutions... (sorry I have a black out).

Basically my role is as an interaction designer. Actually we don't produce anything, we just produce lines of code or behaviors, or actions so people can do things... So, what Maurizio was telling about that before the production was more into the goods, and now everything has shifted much more to this kind of services, or this...the immateriality of the services ... You are building more, yeah well, services...

People is putting money in something and well what we give back is something that people is using as well. And so basically we are just dealing with information structures, we create applications.

Brian Holmes: And what about this question of work?, this question of labor?... This question of labor does it mean something to you?. Because in the presentations in the end they were all nonetheless about the difficulty of actually having an influence on the way that you organise other people's behavior. Your job as an interaction designer is to organise other people's behaviors but at the same time what kind of influence do you have on your own behavior as a worker?. How could you gain?... That seems to be the point, what do you think about that point?.

Enric Gilli Fort: Well that's a difficult question...I think it is the practice, Basically, it is something that not everybody knows this discipline of interaction designer but there is really a lot of knowledge that has been built and even if it's progressing... A lot of people is working on building a stable and solid practice. I think is a mix between what you can learn from what has been done already and trying to find the new ways of doing your practice.

I think is still developing this discipline and that's what it is about ... Still also the medium is really young, in a way, this interactivity even though computers have been with us for like 20 years ... but there is still a lot to do... Specially because now is quite a limited interface with the computer, so everything will change quite a lot...

Brian Holmes: Could you imagine contributing your knowledge to something... An attempt like the chain workers which is a platform which isn't really to get any work done but rather to give people a chance to organise their relationship to work? Do you think that interaction design and your own work contribute something to an attempt like that? You know, tools for people. Like we saw on the websites, there were different places where people can get information about their work, ways that they could share their information. Do you think there is a potential in interaction design itself to create some of those tools that are missing?

Enric Gilli Fort: I think so, I think it can play a role at the moment of... Because when you are creating the tools the manner of making this tools more accessible or less accessible also make them exist. If something is hidden and people cannot use it then there has no value at all. So also one of the tasks of interaction design is just to make people do what they want to do so, the easiest the tools, the more user centered are the tasks, the more useful are for the people. So, if you make something that is completely not usable people cannot use it at all...

So it's quite powerful in a way, maybe you highlight tasks that are not that useful... You are quite powerful because you can kind of show the "bads" to people or maybe hide some other "bads", so is like making some tools available or not, just by matters of making them more predominant in the screen or...

Brian Holmes: Do you...This is going to be something for everybody... Do you have any specific questions that you would like to ask to any of the panelists?.

Enric Gilli Fort: Well more like making points, for example about the tools that Maurizio was talking about. How people were structuring them and how people were using the networks of the web just to organise themselves.

I think one phenomena now that is quite right is... and quite useful, is the fact of the weblogs. A lot of weblogs are abandoned and they are not making money. They just use the weblogs as the way to show their knowledge. Trough that, get to do lectures, conferences, books. Is not a tool in itself to make money, but is a tool that is quite powerful, for example just to ask for feedback. Is more straight contact with people or the audience, so you can ask for feedback when you are just writing a book maybe. Or there are this community weblogs, where people kind of share their knowledge, they have guest bloggers and they share...they have thematic weblogs(...)

Steve Baldwin: I'd like to make a point about weblogs. I just kind of missed them. I think they are important too.

During the first part of the Iraq war there was a great interest specially on the part of those who wanted to reach beyond the official channels of information, the kind of official propaganda channels...to watch what was really going on in that part of the world. Not just Iraq but Iran and the middle east. And being able to see this primary subjective...this primary sources, was much more valuable for many people, individuals looking for information. And that is true not just in that instance but also wherever you look. But also, I think we are talking about the importance of media activism...

In the USA, I've worked as a journalist, this is probably true everywhere... Journalists are very, very lazy. It’s just the nature of it, because they are so busy and they are not really paid very well. When a story pops, wherever it might be, the first place many of this people look is to the the weblogs. If they find a weblog that appears to have any kind of regional information that can supply them with a scoop, they will get it and they would contact the webmaster and they would inmediately use it. And that's something I kind of left out in my circular diagrams...That, just because you are on the periphery, you are not making money and you're living from hand to mouth, you can really have an enormous influence, once the official media picks up on you and links to you and incorporates your views. And it happens so very quickly that it is a very, very powerful force.

Eduard von Lindheim: Shall I just, I want also to throw out the ball... I am Eduard, my background is graphic design. I started my education at the time the computers were not there. So it was just printed media. My task was just to communicate a message by printed media, or posters or whatever.

When the computer came my area just expanded so much more, with the internet also. I met people from all different areas and this is what you talked about the group of people with "the magic and freaky things happened"...

I see that the design area for me expanded to designing almost everything, like meetings, like new tools, new software, new situations or starting processes also... by collaboration, because I can find all the people who are specialised in their area. I don't have to know anything about programming or code, or architecture or social items, I just find the people and we start designing a new thing. I think this is one of the most important changes for me in my work, what the internet brought and the computer...

My question also is, you told that the internet is maybe at its last years, what do you think will stay from the internet?. For me also, I just use it as a "super communication tool" and find information and connect with people. But the websites I never visit, I never surf actually on the web but I just search to answer my questions.

Steve Baldwin: If I said that the internet is over I misspoke. Maybe I did say it, but is wrong...

What I think I said is that the Web is over and the ".com revolution" which is the kind of way that is packaged...There are a lot of things in that package; when people said "What do you do?", well "I work for a .com" and that meant so many different things. That kind of indicated to the listener what ones values for - or could...

That one was kind of an... Andrew Ross in his book "No Collar", this funny fusion, between... he calls it "the industralization of bohemia". Where there is a style to being a web designer. There was kind of a real fashion. I think, for a couple of years, you couldn't be really any cooler than that and now we look back and we kind of think this was a cliché:

"Ah yeah those kids with the scooter...and, we call it the fussball in the U.S., this soccer tables and the toys and all that stuff"...

But that kind of package has a life span. I think that is ending again because... In the USA, there really are not any new IT jobs that are in the USA. Any new jobs that are created, are created in India where you can get people to work... You can get I think two and a half people to work on any task, that you used to have to pay an American to do. And also this kind of ties to something that I don’t think we are talking about, which is, "outsourcing" and "the global outsourcing"...

One of the labour actions that did take place during ...I think it was 1999 maybe 2000. There was an attempt to organise the workers of Amazon.com. It was an unsuccessful effort for a variety of different reasons but what ultimately happened... I think it was in Amazon.com call center and in the call centers you have the kind of the least, one of the least creative aspects of digital work. You are pretty much just doing the same repetitive task over and over "where is my book, where is my book, where is my book", you know, this is what this people do all day. They got angry, they got mad. There was a union in the west coast that took up their cause.

Amazon kind of dodged the bullet. I think they kind of layed these people off, I am not sure what happened to these people. But ultimately, they brought all this jobs back in Bangalore, where people speak English, they speak it probably better than people in the U.S.A. do. And they are very compliant and they are not uninized... So, I think well, the corporations are very smart and if you make any kind of trouble man your job just "with a press of a button" goes overseas to somewhere else...

(to Eduard) The internet has magnified and expanded your world and I think it probably has for everybody here. And there is something that really is new, this way of working collaboratively. In the software design business they call it an "iterative design process", where you can kind of work a bit, get it to kind of work a little, well enough and then change it and keep changing it, and keep changing it...

Corporate America, and the IBM sort of world, you know, these sort of big very conservative companies, they are still looking at this because they realise that this style of working is so efficient, it delivers... The end product is so much better for their customers. They cannot ignore it and I think that, one of the struggles that went on in the background over the last five or ten years has been this style of work, where the young folks that come in they know about this model, they know how to work because is the best way, I think.

But the guys who are running, and I say guys specifically, because they are guys, they are not women usually. The guys who run this don't like this because they cannot manage it in the traditional way. They don't know what everyone in that group is doing, they couldn't know...

And that is a struggle that yet to be resolved, and might well be resolved in the favor of this new model which has I think profound implications because is not top down is from the bottom up. The people who are doing the work know much more how that work should be done, I think.

Brian Holmes: (to Eduard) Would you like to respond to that?

Eduard von Lindheim: You talked all about, in a way, that you actually... It seems to me that all the areas you are talking about are in a stage that it doesn't have a form, but it is in a change, also for the models they want to put on the new labour rights and everything...

For me it seems like that there is no model, is the end of the model, because the old models are based on a time that we all thought, "Let's make models"...And the way people think, especially the young generation, it's so flexible and so different. So I wonder if this is also part of the things what will be communicated to the people who make, who try to make the new model. What is the thought about it?

Brian Holmes: And do you personally feel anything at this attempt at an industrialisation of bohemia?. Because, if I understand correctly you see yourself as an artist and at the same time you come out of a background of graphic design, so you are also someone who could fit into a working environment. Do you feel that there is a pressure on you to be a certain kind of artist-worker?. Do you have any qualms about that or any questions that arise in you when you try to negotiate between your desire to work freely as an artist or your need to make money or whatever like that?...

Eduard von Lindheim: Oh yeah I have this problem (lol). Because everybody asks me to put a label to what I'm doing and I can't, actually, and I'm also finding my way and I notice with a lot of people around me that I work with, that they have the same problem. We are building something new we don't know what, we only feel that is still exciting but, the further we go, the more people want that we give it a label but the further we go the more difficult it becomes, actually.

Brian Holmes: This is something I would like to ask to everybody ...Do you feel the need to construct something to support this experimental unstable way of working?. I mean, do you feel that at a certain point the precariousness of it and maybe what you see around you would require that the society itself change a little to adapt to a new way of working and also to a new aspiration towards living a different kind of a life?

Eduard von Lindheim: Yeah definitely, but...

Brian Holmes: We will come back while you think about your point... It will come back...

Alexei Shulgin: Ok thank you. There is one mic for the audience... Yeah I think is an interesting question, because originally there is this old model of the creative person who is kind of a-social... I am an artist myself I've chosen myself to take this unstable position not having a steady job because, I didn't want to, I mean sometimes I had to, during my life period... That was my choice, not to be into this hierarchical system or not to work for a company and yes it is a traditional kind of I don't know, kind of modernistic artistic model... The problem is that now much more many people are pushed into this model without their will and that creates these conflicts. But, I want to stress out that this situation has its history and originally people were kind of rejecting institutional affiliations and working for companies just because they wanted to be out by any means. And that was this artistic model, so this is my comment...

Brian Holmes: And what do you think about what Laurence was talking about?. Because Laurence pointed to people who...She quoted something where a woman was talking about her boss, that her boss would be ready to work all night and it seemed that she wasn't. Does this say something to you now that you are embarked in this artistic model where you are your own boss in a certain way?.

Alexei Shulgin: Yeah perhaps, but actually I don't know what to say here...

Olga Goriunova: Can I ask a question , because I don't really know what is happening, can I ask a question?. Ok! so, I have a question for Mister Lazzarato. Could you please expand the boundaries of your system a bit because, also maybe because I'm not coming from the west... Your kind of system way... You just said that the production and reproductions just happen elsewhere in the third world and then you never talked about it again. Would you say that this production that is happening in the Philipines or Vietnam is it a part of this system that you described but just a remote part? Or is it a separate system now that can be analysed in Marxist terms as it never changed, like the same as we had here in Europe in the 19th century? And, how would you describe... well, we have this globalised world and production is happening elsewhere and the supression of workers is happening elsewhere but, it is very connected to this new model that is taking place here, that you described ... Could you say a little bit on that?...

Maurizio Lazzarato, translated by Brian Holmes: If we look at the statistics, we find that there are some 200 million children working in the world and if we look at the statistics of people working in Europe we find that there are actually more people doing salaried jobs than there were before. Salaried in the old sense, in the Fordist sense where you had not an unstable job but a stable one. So, in fact even inside our countries the reproductive labor is growing in that sense. But nonetheless, so the two... there is not such a sharp divide as it might seem...

But nonetheless, the model has changed and that all this reproductive work is actually much less reproductive and much less repetitious than it was before. And is much more embued with questions of creativity, information and so on. And that's also true in the Third World to the point where the Indian economist Amartya Sen who is a Nobel prize winning economist, says that even in the so called "undeveloped countries" what you see is that people are refusing the industrial model of development. And he says, another way must be found to understand also the social relations, even in the Third World countries. And even though Amartya Sen is a neo-classical economist, he isn't necessarily a revolutionary, he says that the welfare state should not finance, as it use to do in the past, the reproduction of the labor force but it should really finance subjectivity, education and actually encourage people to become unique you know, singular. It should leave a space and actually create the space for people to become more and more different. And this would be a model of development that is needed in the third world as well and is asked for in the Third World. And so you see that there is really a kind of a unity. You couldn't divide it into a sphere that would be covered by classical Marxism and another one that would be underneath the new model...

(to Maurizio Lazzarato) Do you want to add something?

He just in fact reiterated or stressed that even in the non-western countries they are looking for these different models and here too, we would need a model of social insurance and therefore a public sector model that would actually correspond to the kinds of works that we are doing. And I would even add too, that obviously, you have a kind of poverty in the west that you didn't have before, that which also eliminates the difference perceived from one side to the other.

But does this answer your question? (...)

(To Eduard) To respond to your question about these models. He thinks that there is something really interesting in this notion of "unstable work" and it could be the precondition for something that becomes completely umpredictable and always new, which can't be planned by anyone. But, at the same time, what we need to do is to invent institutions that can help people to face the risks of this uncertain and unstable kind of adventure of creative work. And these would be institutions that...which in a certain way will insure not a predictable certain future, where you know where you will be in ten years from now, but that would insure the possibility of becoming and metamorphosis and that's ... We know that in general models for living are given to us by power, by the state, by people with concentrated power like, corporations. But we need to look... We can't be sure that they are going to give us these models, so we need to look ourselves for those kind of models to try to be able to... If we want to have them.

Femke Snelting: Brian I have two questions here...

Michael Bitterman: I would like to, not to respond to what we just heard but I'd like to connect it a bit more to the question of the person in the orange shirt to the Dutch graphic designer. Which was, is there a need to construct? It has something to do with the last statement that we just heard, which has to do with a certain need that we come up with something. And I would like to connect that, to the idea of creation and you call it construction so... I would like to first identify creativity as a combinatorial phenomena so, something which for someone who would have a higher level intelligence than a single human being and that would simply be computing certain data, information and then, coming up with a seemingly interesting solution for a problem. So, a very simple process in a way and we need to develop probably or, at least, mentally develop a good model for representing such a phenomena.

I think you can never precisely say that we have to come up with it in that sense because obviously the content will drive that form also. So, we could both look at the fact that practically working in a particular way as you are doing could drive a new idea about, for instance, more direct democracies, particular kinds of social systems which seem to adapt to such a situation... So basically, a drive from certain tensions between, for instance Arnold Schwarzenegger being a governor of a country and then asking, well, we have such a huge amount of real time intelligence always investigating a political system and we are not effectively using it in decision making. So, how can such a gap, so to say, can be filled with meaning?, etcetera. But I don't think that there is a real necessity in some way, to search for "the idea" which will resolve it, but essentially, we can trust, I think and that is a bit oppositional to the former statement of the French speaker, that we need to sort of almost artificially wait for a kind of crash or something like this. But we can have faith in that there is a natural tendency of sort of reality as such or the world we live in, in its complexity. If we have a good model to understand it, that it will also come to that level and it will go through that state we are in right now which is seemingly a bit more interested in practical solutions but is not necessarily a doomed condition like it was in the 80's, etcetera. So I just want just to give a little hope that it would come by itself, almost.

Brian Holmes: I suspect that it would be interesting to think that if it comes by itself, who it will come by itself for?. Because if you have extremely gifted people who are able to use the internet and who are able to make this synthesis you are talking about on the one hand. Is it sure that they would make them for anybody but themselves?. This would be the question I would ask...

Gerard Alberts: I would like to continue on this point and combine it with the "role model" discussion that we have just now. And it is a question I would like to have Steve Baldwin’s hopefully subversive answer too.

But first a systematic point from Maurizio and Lawrence. Maurizio, in your first discourse you ended with a hopeful note that we would find a way to institutionalise continuous employment while working on a project basis in these ICT, internet times.

We have these models, you have them in journalism, you have them in science, scientific research... Although this model is not quite valid today. The bohemia of science has been industrialized over the last 2 or 3 decades. And we have a hard time finding bohemian-like scientists today. Is that really a sort of model you were thinking of?.

And the same question I have to Laurence. Technology is heavily gender typified as male and you are working hard to give women an entrance to the ICT world. Are there hopeful signs of a different working model in what you are doing... And I have a rather negative experience to tell from history there. When in this male typified computer world women were allowed entrance they were allowed entrance to do the heavily repetitive work of data entry, computation, with a very negative rhetoric about that women would support the repetitive work better, would be more accurate etcetera, in a negative word, would be more ready to be subdued. That is the negative message from history but do you have a positive model?

Laurence: First?. Normally I should think before answering but I will try. Because there are different things and different threads. It's not so easy to say good and bad, and model, no model.

That there are not women in ICT? What I want to prove is the contrary they have always been there and they will be always there. What I try also to say is that to bring you all... To bring, as a factor, character inside this becoming model of society, is not to forget the history of feminism and that's the paradoxes, the flexibility of, "You be your own boss", for god's sake what century is this?. Not only women... I'm not thinking about people working in their own lands and in their own homes as if its also all past.

About women and technology what we try to do also with Digitales is to bring the link, to affect the link and to state the fact that a cashier in the supermarket is working with technology as well as a graphic designer or a helpdesk. I'm sorry I can only go by a web of references...

That's why we are also doing this Digitales stuff. It's because there is a problem for the moment and is not... It's that we want to bring girls and women to technology and there are a lot of European university studies to study what's the problem of it. Why we do not see women in high positions? And the model we want women to go in is imposed by the business and the enterprise. That's where we want to enter, is to maybe to virus these studies and say look at your own...

"Who is giving you the model you want to enter?". We try to tell women: "You have in your hands and in your past, in your own history the possibilities to find something else because you need to have a flexible time". And when I say “women” I'm not talking only about the female sex, but in the feminist sense, that of the "becoming women", so men too. They also should take care of the child, or go to the garden, or go bicycling. I mean, there is something more in life than work and family... So they have inside their own practice the way to make this. Maybe and not only "in model" but "in models", that you can make yourself your own... Construct what you need at that point and that moment. So I have a lot of hope that this will come by itself but, as Brian was mentioning, how can we warranty in a way and maybe because I'm getting older that I think... I love science fiction so I can imagine that in a post apocalyptic way it will be better but I think that we have to take care and to be more engaged to find waranties and not only the state... It's complicated, it's complex...

I want to keep this complexity, this paradoxicalness, flexible... The history of feminism is something to be inside all these thoughts and not only in new media. So, I don't know if I'm answering the question but I think we should be in and not outside the debate and that's the problem of most of... Also what everybody has mentioned, the Digitales, we take place, not literally but, in a call center. So who are we to go to this women, to quit their stupid job. They need this job but what we show to them is that their practice of using the computer it could be something else or someone else. So they could use this tools just to be and also what we try to make them conscious... is that what they are doing is only one moment and so in life there would be multiple jobs.

I think we... It's not because you are women you are better but it's true that the word computer comes from "women doing the computing". So women were the first computer.

Brian Holmes: He (Maurizio Lazzarato) says he will answer you later. He is still thinking...

Gerard Alberts: So what about the subversive answer?

Steve Balwin: No, no, no. I'm sorry, I think you have asked a number of questions. A subversive answer, about the gender issue? Because I do have one...(lol)

Kevin Lo: I'm actually coming from Montreal. I've been in the Netherlands a month and a half, so I have a bit more of common experience I think to what Stephen was talking about. So I think probably it hasn't been an experience, here in Europe, as badly as it was in North America. So I'd like to try and negotiate between this sort of optimism that I feel is sort of shown from a lot of the local dutch designers here. Because there is such a great tradition of design and graphic design.

I'm a graphic designer myself but I'm also a media activist. Then this sort of pessimistic look that we tend to bring from North America because we have seen "the shit hit the fan". And something like this is great!. I'm really loving this experience from hearing all these voices. When you think of the amazing interconnectivity that the internet and what that has allowed for graphic designer's practice, to sort of expand and meet all these new people. All this sort of different interactions which have really expanded the field and which is obviously a very positive sign. But then I also think in a way is very incestuous...

If you look around us now it is not really that large a group of people, if you consider the amount of people working in new media and of people that are concerned with working with new media...

We have a lot of students we have young people. We don't have people that are trying to raise families, that are getting sucked or whatever... I'm just saying, the majority seems a bit younger than the average.

For me it is very hard to judge because I had this wide-eyed optimism about the internet and still, because of the things that are going on and because, as Laurence has mentioned Studio XX in Montreal that I happen to know. And I'm sitting here in Rotterdam hearing about my old hometown and it's amazing but then it also makes me think, how small and limited this niche of networks is then, if some of the only people she could find to support her model of a non-profit attempt at re-gendering technology and attempting to be political in network media... And all she can find is this tiny little studio and I know how badly they need money and...I mean I've worked for them before, how hard it is for them. All the way to Montreal I mean we are pretty far here and that's the only thing we could find to connect, is like... There is this great connection I feel this is a great happy community but at the same time, it is tiny is very, very small.

I just wanted sort of see if there is any kind of negotiation between... Is it really as bad as Stephen is saying or is it good as we are seeing it I mean, the possibilities that we see. I think there is this very strong contradiction here that... I don't know is very hard for me to get objectively I mean, I'm very optimistic but I'm also very pessimistic.

I don't know, I guess there is no real question here (lol) is more just a comment, is just something to think about. Is this sort of optimism and the ideas of it and then when it comes to reality you know, we have five people in a chat line and 50 people here? And this is new media?. I don't know, you know.(lol)

Brian Holmes: That's what I was saying at the start. How you get out from these strict media circles? This also depends a little bit where you look of course. But it also depends on chances and we know we have a lot of chances to do this in moments of big political demonstrations like when we first met in Canada. We don't always have these chances. And if you don't look for them you will never have them...

Maurizio says he can answer now...

So, this was a certain long answer to a short question but maybe necessary...

Maurizio Lazzarato translated by Brian Holmes: He doesn't think it would be possible to base a resistance on some sort of a "new bohemia" that would be like the old artistic bohemias that we know.

If we look at the situation we are in now, there is another difference between the old style of production and the new kind of production. In the old one, what you produced was material commodities but, in the new kind of production what's really mostly produced are common goods, shared goods.

Things that are owned by everybody, like language like gestures, like emotions, all these things which are in the realm of the common. But that brings up very big problems, if you take the example of free software which is a common good, it is not necesarily owned by anybody. The problem is how to keep businesses from basically stealing it, taking it and making it private again. And these are things which are not produced by businesses and is not only free software. It's also education, culture, art, all this things you don't need business to produce them. But, you need two things, first of all you need the general conditions of health and well being in society. So you need to be able to eat, you need to have education, you need to have access to a different kinds of tools. So, you need this sort of general common goods also to make more common goods and then you have to be able to protect them.

So if we look at this maybe the prerequisite for this situation, for opposing, for using this cooperative potential to oppose neoliberalism which is basically trying to privatise it, take it and steal it.

And if you see in the case of free software how it's been done, was by inventing a law, a legal thing, which is "copyleft" which is a legal way to keep the business from stealing and making private what was, and what is, and what should be a common good. And what would be important would be to find similar "devices" in other realms of common goods to be able to continue this process of being able to produce outside of the control of businesses.

For example in the question of pharmaceuticals, right now where you see people imposing the production of pharmaceuticals cheaply and refusing the law that makes that drug, the invention of that drug, into something private. Because at first it was an invention and the invention came out of universities and so then it becomes a source of wealth for a company. But now we see movements that refuse that. And that's an example, another example in addition to free software.

Femke Snelting: I have a few questions that come up here and I think Stephen wanted to ask them.

Steve Kovats: A couple of things have been coming up and one quite closely related to what you have just been talking about... For example:

Are there observations or statistics for example, on the way industry have been using or abusing the so called "voluntary work force" like the people who are hacking or working on open source, free software models and so on. Is like a shadow or ghost workforce and the question is how does the industry work on and see it?.

And another question, a bit more abstract perhaps, asking in general the panelists, about whether they see a tactile… Or, how do they see a tactile relationship between communication and file transfer between communities and countries happening? I think this is addressing the issue of the form of communication and the mass of communication, that we are no longer typing or engaging in slower communications but how the acceleration, the speed and the mass, changes the relationship between worker and what is being worked.

Steve Baldwin: I'm gonna try to talk about the first one, maybe the second one...The idea that... I think I kind of threw this out before...

Many of these empires have been built on the free labour of the people who have subscribed to them, and I think in America, or in the USA, America Online is the single case that typifies that best. This was an online service that begun really as a kind of a joke. It wasn't a big player but what they did is, they started - this goes way back to the early 90's - they gave free accounts. You remember this, they gave free accounts to people who would moderate discussions just like you are moderating one right now. You wouldn't get a dime but you would get a free AOL account. And over the years the popularity of all these thousands of little moderated discussions kind of created a critical mass that moved America Online into a very, very sharp upward revenue path. To the point that it actually acquired the world’s largest media company... I guess they’ve divorced a little now but they wound up acquiring Time Warner which is kind of unconceivable. But then, a couple of years ago the volunteers started to organise and started to say, "Well this is really unfair" (and Ithink, it was also because the value of a free AOL account went all the way down and people started to think that it wasn't a very good service, you have to watch advertisements all the time...)

I'm ignorant of how that dispute was resolved but I don't think, and it might not have been resolved, but it's certainly not the only example of people freely giving up their time and their energy in a way that I would argue that was kind of like a big con-job making these big corporations rich. But I guess, the trouble is that they knew what was going on. They kind of knew what they were doing, all these individuals, and they were kind of like "so what?". And I kind of think of that today - that all of us with our blogs out there, and we are putting our earnest deep personal thoughts, you know, the fruit of all our academic training and what we see in life is all going out there for free because we want to share it with the world! I don't want to make money out of it - I wanna give it to mankind.

Bucause is internet art or is internet content or is related some how to the internet. This kind of relates a little to defining your role, and I was thinking that you have to kind of take any kind of internet language or IT related language away because it's going to ...it's almost like the Mark of Cain.

I think is true in the USA there were all these funny titles. I mean, there really are people who do "information architecture" but it is a very, very technical, small world and they are working, you know, deep in these corporations - architecting or building tools. But everyone around could say "I am an information architect", I guess so, I mean I can draw a flowchart I can do this and that... The terminology, the means of self-description, became valueless ultimately, and I think that people don't use them anymore. The only trace of that one might be a digital artist, is that you have an "http", you know, you have have a website on your business card and you have an e-mail address. But what's next? I cannot answer that except to say that we will all be surprised and we might be surprised because that might not be good a thing either. We have been blessed by many good things...

Femke Snelting: I have two more questions here and I was very curious whether the respondants want to have a last word...

Michael Bitterman: There was an interesting one again or a couple of which I would like to connect in a way. There was that question, how could you sort of, conceptually, approach that construction? If we, let's think it would be a construction. How could one make that or so? And I think, it is a good perspective to think out of the idea or think out of the perspective of the thing itself, because, it seems maybe very unpractical and very utopian or very science fiction oriented but helps probably a lot to find the real practical next step and probably even helps to explain, to answer what is the possible future of the internet.

Or if we, for instance, would just look at what it is itself and would almost accept it as a kind of lifeform and would really ask what is this life about, what is it feeding from, what is it sort of digesting, how would it like to survive and how would it fight for that survival?

Then we could come to an idea that maybe its character, as we heard rightfully from the Dutch graphic designer, it seems to connect and it seems to be a good way to really quickly get information etcetera but what is also an interesting aspect maybe is that, it starts to develop something almost like an autonomy. I'm not pointing up to literally like body, in the sense of human body, but it definitely has some kind of impact and a physicalness too. And it is interesting to think that we work in a very immaterial environment but essentially the stuff that we do has ways to manifest itself in a physical body all the time.

So I would like to see that, a sort of an interaction condition between that material and that mental environment. I don't know exactly if that answers a lot but I think at the end the internet will serve much less as something that answers your questions but actually more as something that ask you a question. And there, something that develops as a kind of higher degree of intelligence and helps probably in the end to not make mistakes that would lead you into poverty which could be sort of an "angel type device" something like that...

Steve Baldwin: It's interesting because when you think about it we are talking about one thing, it's not "the internets" its "the internet" but what does the internet think?...

No, but I'd say that the internet is really interested in consuming itself like a snake eating its own tail, right. And all of the impetus and all of the motivation by everybody in this technology business is to ultimately eliminate the human beings from the process. This is my dystopian, pure data right, a completely autonomous... Did you ever see that movie "The Forbin Project", where the computers take over the world? But that's again dystopia.

Femke Snelting: Last question, here.

Gerard Alberts: Is rather a comment on the question that came in from the chat about the future of the internet. The immediate future you can see is spam. And it is an answer, it is a serious answer to your question about one web or more webs.

The World Wide Web is just this one definition, this one protocol and what you see is that beyond this protocol as soon as you connect to the outside, in comes spam: through protocols we do not understand but it takes our time, takes our attention. And since through this crash that Steve was so lively in describing before us, he said one very important thing: the center dropped out and now that the center dropped out we stopped, we as consumers stopped visiting the websites by ourselves, now, the web sites are coming to us and we as consumers live it everyday. And this goes beyond this one protocol of world wide web there are more protocols such as web robots, crawlers, spy web, whatever... that do not conform to protocols we understand as consumers and it is coming into our living room.

Brian Holmes: Do the two respondents have some more responses to make on the basis of your specific experience?

Enric Gilli Fort: The beginning of the internet... It looked like it just came and it would just supplant things in real life. But I think now, when people is more realising that it’s going to be like another reality that adds to what is happening everyday so they were thinking "Oh, people would just start to consume over the internet all the video all the broadband" but you can really see how people are combining both real life and the internet so you can see yeah... Actually the blogs, people is just commenting, giving critiques over the blogs but then it is in real life where they will sell their knowledge and it is this kind of combination... And this will also be evident with the mobile technologies because now it is really that you have to stick to the desktop. But when everything will come to mobile technologies and PDA's or anything it would just really become a tool and a tool that will give you basically, information. So for everyday life it's gonna be even more useful.

Brian Holmes: I still have the impression that we are proving the fact that is impossible to talk about digital work and is something that will be interesting to think about as the result of this conference.

Eduard von Lindheim: I'd like to also tell my thoughts about what the internet brings for me. The ".com" hype it came out of it because everybody felt something immensely new with it. They try to make money out of it. But they made a mistake. That is new, so you don't know it yet and at the moment people are coming back from the illusion that it is something what they thought it was, because they thought about their past and now everybody is slowly getting aware that something really new is coming.

For example the music industry is dealing with it and thinking that we can go back. We can slow down maybe but the slowing down process is more to prevent that they will collapse also. So, I think maybe it will take another 10 years or 20 years that the whole industry and society starts moving on to a new form. So there is still a long way to go...

Stephen Kovats: All eyes are pointing this way. I guess that means that we have come to the end of our session. Thank you very, very much Brian and our guest panelists and the respondents, for coming and having this excellent discussion today.

Transcription by Leslie Robbins and Alejandra Nunez Perez