Immaterial Labour Union: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 13:22, 11 June 2015

Immaterial Labour Union
Creator	Lídia Pereira
Year	2015
Bio	After completion of her bachelor studies in Graphic Design, Lídia Pereira [PT] became intrigued by the friction between digital utopias and material realities. Her current work is concerned with the political organization of labour within digital economy, presenting a focus on the power structures governing online behaviour.
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Website	http://www.immateriallaborunion.net/

The Immaterial Labor Union was born out of a desire to negotiate terms of service and push for the protection of personal data on a transnational scope, against avid, corporate social networking companies profiting from user-generated content. The Union aims, in the short-term, to readdress abuses concerning the unfair working conditions perpetrated through the processing of our online data, and in a long-term to conceive and shape alternative social networking solutions.

Every two weeks, The Immaterial Labour Union issues a new number of its zine. Each number touches on a different aspect of corporate social media labor, such as terms of service, advertisement, the social graph, tracking cookies, etc. Through satire, poetry, creative experimentation with image and text, academic theory and practical tools for self-empowerment on social networks, the zine intends to be a portal to broader audience engagement, an active campaigning tool to activate participation and conception of alternatives.

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 |Thumbnail=Lidiacatalogthumbnail.png
 |Website=http://www.immateriallaborunion.net/
+|Catalog-Text1=[[File:Catalogpg1.png|300px]]
+|Catalog-Text2=[[File:Lidiacapazine1.png|100px]][[File:Lidiacapazine2.png|100px]][[File:Lidiacapazine3.png|100px]]
+organized in pecuniary disposition <br>
+architectures of desire organizing data flows<br>
+node to node, linking love<br>
+links of interest, nodding quiet acquiescence<br>
+how vastly superior is to profit from conscience
+poet of algorithms,<br>
+engineer of souls,<br>
+a soul for sale,<br>
+my desire composed in graphics pale.
+|Catalog-Text3= Corporate Social Networking Plaftforms as Cognitive Factories: Labour Organisation in the Digital Space (An Excerpt)
+The expansion of the sociogram to non-human nodes opens up the question about
+the human subject - if social engineering explains the management of social relationships, how does one explain the management of the subject’s notion of self? In Governing the Soul: the Shaping of the Private Self, one of the general problems that Nicholas Rose proposes to address concerns the social shaping of the human subject. Social thinkers such as Karl Marx and Adam Smith reflected on the relationship between social context and its inhabitant subject; sociology and psychology were not separated entities; where these thinkers asked how human subjectivity was socially determined by the surrounding apparatus, Rose asks: “how have persons been shaped by prevailing ways of thinking about human beings and acting upon them?” (Rose, xvii). With the “birth of a new area of expertise” in the area of the psy sciences, Rose argues that it has become evident the tendency towards the engineering of the soul - never before was human subjectivity so carefully managed, so instrumental to the general economical efficiency of society.<br>
+Rose argues that psychological sciences are that which allows for the inscription
+of the human soul into categorized, calculable structures. Such inscription enables power to affect change upon human subjectivity through “human technologies”, which quantitatively arrange the human subject in networks of power (Rose,.8) In this sense the social graph, as well as its predecessor, the sociogram, might be placed under the concept of “human technology”, insofar as they inscribe the subject’s psy in view of a certain outcome - efficiency. Nicholas Rose underlines the consequences of these networks for the human atom in terms of infiltration of power in the human soul, actively redefining the self and its ways of thinking about itself.
+It is my understanding that the choice of the word “graph” in Social Graph
+is everything but innocent, as it entails ideological assumptions of rational mathematical analysis - thus representing one step further towards positivist ideals of fixed, simplified, predictable and rigid social structures. The concept of the social graph eerily echoes Rose’s notion of psychological examination as that which allows subjectivity to become calculable. <br>
+With its arrogant project of turning all human subjects into rational, productive components of itself, the social graph might have come closer to accomplishing that which Gastev’s social engineering machine ultimately failed to do. Is it possible that the social graph, then, is serving also the process of taking the governance of our soul a step further, to use Nicolas Rose’s words? In the digital space, the management of the multitude of immaterial produsers calls for more efficient methods of classifying, analysing and engineering the psy. The social graph, despite and thanks to its blatant bi-dimensionality, is successfully transforming the digital space into the realm of the quantified subject, the privileged structure for power infiltration within the human soul. By feeding the algorithms that control the content of what we see in corporate social networking platforms, it becomes the central model through which our“soul” is engineered.
 |Description=The Immaterial Labor Union was born out of a desire to negotiate terms of service and push for the protection of personal data on a transnational scope, against avid, corporate social networking companies profiting from user-generated content. The Union aims, in the short-term, to readdress abuses concerning the unfair working conditions perpetrated through the processing of our online data, and in a long-term to conceive and shape alternative social networking solutions.