User:Lidia.Pereira/GPS/TOu

Main question -> How can we argue in favor of the organization of digital labor?

Abstract
The paradigm shift of the Foucauldian disciplinary society to the Deleuzian control society allowed for the birth of the multitude, which does away with the collective identity of the laborer and mutes the political voice of the masses of the industrial era. It is necessary then to forge links between individuals, adapting their demands to the changes in the landscape of economical production. However, the political, social and cultural assymmetries to be found within the digital multitude midst present an obstacle nearly impossible to transpose. For example, because digital networks often mimic the uneven development of the capitalist landscape, this affects laborers differently according to their geographical condition. Is it possible to justify the organization of digital labor in terms of necessity against (im)possibility?

1. From the Sociogram to the Social Graph
The sociogram as a graphical representation of social relationships in the terms of nodes and links, where every node represents a person and every link represents a relationship, was first used by the psychologist Jacob Levy Moreno, in the late 1930's. By the year of 2007, during the Facebook F8 conference, the term Social Graph - an hybrid between a relational database and a sociogram - was introduced.
Studying the genealogy of the sociogram it is possible to begin to fathom the patterns which pervade contemporary modes of production. From the concepts of cybernetics/governance, abstraction of complex social subjects into sterile graphic representations and an ideological attempt to enforce positivist paradigms in normative structures, the history of the sociogram guides us through the concepts of social engineering, sociometry, relational databases and other tools for governance.
Using this genealogy as pretext, the chapter will lay the historical, economical and political grounds in which the network society emerges, radically restructuring the working class and its struggles, thus giving birth to the digital multitude.

2. Immaterial Digital Labor within the context of Social Media
In the second chapter I will proceed to a deeper analysis of the aforementioned working class restructuring, specifically within the context of immaterial digital labor and social media. In doing so, I intend to better grasp and delineate its demands within the current information economy.
A vast amount of our daily lives, both personal and professional, is embedded within computational network logic. The boundaries between work and leisure become blurry, which oftentimes means the commodification and monetization of the latter. The business model of large social media monopolies reduces us to a graph, easily mined, craftily designed. Making clever use of the 'network effect' (where the number of users determines the value of a service) for marketing purposes, social media monopolies are extracting great profit from user activity. The capitalist apparatus has found ways to coopt yet another one of its critiques, labeling our current mode of exploitation under the "social" tag.
If 'sharing is caring', one can draw a parallel between social media and affective labor. Socialist feminism has framed the latter in the context of capitalist exploitation - the domestic was perceived by some as a site of social reproduction, whose unwaged status only allowed for more profit. In social media economy this unwaged labor corresponds with the social production of data subjects. According to Maurizio Lazzarato, the control over this production of subjects and social relations coincides, then, with economical power.

3. Why an union? Strategies, case studies and difficulties in organizing the multitude
The space of the multitude does away with the collective identity of the laborer and mutes the political voice of the industrial era masses. The ideological focus of social media on the individual rather than on the collective presents difficulties to the formation of a political conscience. Not only that, but the political, social and cultural assymmetries to be found within the digital multitude midst present an obstacle nearly impossible to transpose. Can I justify the existence of the immaterial labor union in terms of necessity against (im)possibility? And how?
First of all, how can we argue in favor of an union? Is the union the more appropriate form to mobilize the digital multitude? In order to answer these questions I will trace a brief history of the union, using case studies in an attempt to understand whether instrumentalization risks derive from its ontology or structural decisions. I will then proceed with an analysis of the problematics of translating traditional union forms to the digital space through the studying of similar projects. Arguing for the expansion of the union to go beyond the alleviation of labor conditions I hope to further justify my decision, striving to find balance between piecemeal and utopian action to effect change beyond traditional 'workplace' boundaries.

Bibliography:
Lovink, Geert and Rasch, Miriam (editors) "Unlike Us Reader: Social media monopolies and their alternatives"
Castells, Manuel "The Rise of the Network Society"
Rose, Nikolas "Governing the Soul"
Schäfer, Mirko Tobias "Bastard Culture"
Schöltz, Trebor (editor) "Digital Labor - The Internet as Playground and Factory"
Virno, Paolo "A Grammar of the Multitude"