User:Lidia.Pereira/PoC

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Blurb:
The Immaterial Labor Union is an attempt to unite the scattered multitude of cultural agents within participatory culture.

"Now, surely you can see that under these circumstances all the work that we do is an exercise of the mind and body more or less pleasant to be done: so that instead of avoiding work everybody seeks it: and, since people have got defter in doing the work generation after generation, it has become so easy to do, that it seems as if there were less done, though probably more is produced." "News from Nowere", William Morris
This quote perfectly illustrates how the idea of enjoyable and pleasant work has been co-opted to generate a system that, by overshadowing the labor aspect of it, manages to exploit and monetize new domains of the subject.

The Immaterial Labor Union

The Immaterial Labor Union was born out of a desire to shunt from the atomization of the individual into the collective, to think about alternatives to the neoliberal grey area of the multitude and its permanent state of insulation. It refuses the technocratic graphing out of social relationships, the abstraction of the community to a network of edges and vertices carefully mined to more profitably design the subject. The union holds that a true knowledge economy is only worthy of such title when not dependent on power assymetries, and so demands transparency and control over the means of production - our own subjectivation.
Making use of deception and other ubiquitous strategies such as the instrumentalization of communities and factorization/machinization of social activity, the neoliberal apparatus has found ways to coopt yet another one of its critiques, labelling our current mode of exploitation under the "social" tag. To put it simply, the immaterial labor union intends to be a space of community reflection around the question: "How not to be seen, yet still be represented?"
Influences can be traced back to authors such as Maurizio Lazzarato and his conception of immaterial labor, Mirko Tobias Schäfer and his writings about participatory culture, more precisely, implicit user participation, William Morris and Henry Flynt.

MANIFESTO

We, the multitude, oppose against our likes buying your political power.

We, the multitude, demand our leisure time not to be commodified.

We, the multitude, will not click into your hierarchy of influencers and influenced.

We, the multitude, refuse to operate under your terms of service.

We, the multitude, demand the means of control over our subjectivation.

We, the multitude, oppose against our comments being the trendsetters of your revenue.

We, the multitude, will not comply to your cyberstalking ways of monetizing our relationships.

We, the multitude, refuse to be seen as the multitude but aknowledge the political, social and cultural assymmetries within our midst.

We, the multitude, will engage critically in thinking representation as opposed to surveillance.

We, the multitude, demand transparency and control over the production of social relations.

We, the multitude, refuse to smile away our political demands and positively accept your control discourse feed.

- News from Nowhere - Facebook Users go on Strike

Hundreds of Facebook users have gone on strike last week, deleting their accounts and refusing to come back until some major changes occur in the way the well-known social platform operates. Behind this outbreak was a mass mobilization organized by the Immaterial Labor Union, a platform for cultural producers from all around the world who demand for the recognition of their labor.
Talking to one of the Union's representatives, we've learned that these concerns are "higher the more implicit the user's participation", and this is indeed the reasoning behind the strike.
Facebook revenues depend heavily on targeted advertising - by graphing users' interactions on the platform, Facebook is able to provide more specialized information about consumer habits to whom it may concern (in this case, ad agencies). The lack of transparency of these methods is a major issue, which needs to be tackled and dealt with. The user's leisure time is becoming a commodity, and, as the digital labor adagio goes:"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."
According to the official manifesto of the Immaterial Labor Union, with which many of the strikers identify, there's a clear demand for transparency and dialogue, a desire to unite the scattered multitude of digital producers all around the world to work on the question of political representation without surveillance.
In the meanwhile, this§ strike is causing some panic in Sillicon Valley as it might spread, menacing its system of capital accumulation and hence the whole stability of their business model.