User:Lidia.Pereira/PoC

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 (1st Draft)

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.