User:Bohye Woo/Second Project Proposal

SECOND PROJECT PROPOSAL

What do you want to make? What do I start with?

I propose to make a series of labour-publishing tools in which examines the modes of making labour recognizable in a different forms and methods. These labour publication will focus on bringing out how contemporary form of labour on the web is made with an unconcerned air, and what social, cultural and political implication led us to work all the time though its platform. It will show what interaction in the form of labour are made while working, and how our labours are made.

From the Special Issue 9, I got interested in lost labour/invisible labour in a digital platform where human work is taken advantage of. What kinds of labour is it that it's invisible, how does this labour made, is it unintendedly made? Invisible labour as a starting point, I would like to explore human social activities in digital platform that provides different form of labour. What contemporary form of labour in digital has been made, How is the infrastructue of digital labour has changed throughout the time and space? Through that, what responses are possible as a digital worker? To unpack this, I would like to being in a detective mode of investigation, crawing the web, finding evidences, writing a forensic report to reveal the infrastructure of digital labour.

How do you plan to make it?

I would like to investigate on how we experience the web, how human interaction through the Internet impacts on who, what is being created through human interaction, what is considered to be a work, how much did we work for who, how do we earn our value and dignity, and how can we measure this value through what medium. In order to do this, I will conduct different prototying sessions in which I can publish the labour.

First of all, I will organise a small prototyping with my personal data created from Facebook and Instagram. I will call this experiment as a 'crime scene case' in which I will make an investigation report, it might lead me to start on a new study case. By downloading my personal datas I produced, I would like to delve into investigate what kinds of data I have produced, To create this data what labour is being used, how many time I worked to create them. I will visualize them to see the possibilities of materializing the labour. With this materialised labour, a next step is to find the way to transfer into a method to calculate the value of it. Through this experiment, I can direct my way to visualise labour to a variety of different publishing tools.

Together with this prototyping, I will challenge myself on creating different types of decentralized labour publishing platform.

What is your timetable?

October:
November:
December:
January:
Febuary:

Why do you want to make it? Why should I give a shit? And relation to a larger context

My personal experience on Internet has become a huge motivation on this project. When I was young, the Internet was a simple platform to join a cyber club, search for a term, upload photos and videos, and share personal lifestyle. Since then, I have acknowledged that I'm relying much more to technology than before. That means I share personal life much more than I did before. From sharing daily life on social media, checking how my friends are up to via Instagram, reading e-books, to even writing a diary on my private account on social media. Doing this activity, for me, came down as natural as breathing. As a result, I tend to be oblivious on what consequences my Internet acivity will bring in the form of labour which generates new product with range of different values.

I use Internet 24/7 hours from waking up, during lunch break, to before going to bed. As a oblivious Millennial, I would like to change my views on experiencing the Web, criticize how much we are unintentionally work for creating our digital-self a.k.a datas. I work by creating personal datas based on my Internet experience, then what do I, as a user, get in return for my creation? How does traditional form of labour have transformed into a digital where it creates a new form of value? How does the ease of Internet to gain access made us work for free? I am giving away all data for free in exchange for nothing.

Who can help you and how?

Aymeric, who can help me with some technical issues as well as theoricital part of the subject 'free labour'.
Micheal, who introduced me D3 to explore the possibility of visualizing datas, will help me to materialize this topic in order to publish labour.
Lidia Pereira, who is working on the project 'pervasive labour union'.
Steve and Marloes, who has many experiences on writing.
...more and more

Relation to previous practice

My interest has been slowly built since the last Special Issue 8 where I explored the subject of dependency in a network, infrastructure, and decentralized network. The idea of dependency on a web brought me to think of what does human activity means on social media, how much independency we would get as an Internet user when it comes to creating our own data, how does that become a free labour that creates sellable sources, how is data being used/exploited from a third party, and what value does it produced.

In relation to the Special Issue 9, I delved into hidden labour in a pirate library where the labour tend to be invisible when medium is transformed into digital or vice versa. With this interest, I with my fellow students organised the workshop called 'Blurry Boundaries', examining the relation between digital and physical books and highlighted the amount of labour involved. It revealed the invisible processes, the politics of digital librarianship. By doing so, we created simple scripts that facilitated revealing hidden labours that is being produced without noticing it.

Through my previous practice, I concluded that the topic of dependency/independency in the context of using Internet and thinking about labour used in the digital platform became an interesting topic to continue researching on and create a graduation project. Therefore my graduation project will be an extension of above mentioned.

References

Scholz, T. (2013) The Internet as Playground and Factory. chapter 2: Free Labor by Tiziana Terranova.

In this chapter, it explains the development of post-industrial society on the Internet, and how internet is an advanced capitalist platform where cultural and technical work are simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited with the examples of building websites, modifying software packages and so on. It attempts to talk about 24-7 electronic sweatshops, over-working culture, being burned by digital media, and the form of netslaves. It also tells that the labour is a pervasive feature of the society where the knowledge is valued through the economy. In this manner, she talks about the legitimacy of a fixed distinction between production and consumption, labor and culture. Building on those story, the chapter ended with explanation of how production and consumption can be restructured within the category of free labor in the information industry.

Scholz, T. (2013) The Internet as Playground and Factory. chapter 1: In Search of the lost Paycheck by Andrew Ross

In this article, Andrew Ross starts sharing the story of fighting against exploiters of free online content provision, and considers this as normal phonomenon that this digital online tools offers even clever ways to sneaking out from the web.

Graham, M. (2016) Digital Labour and Development: New Knowledge Economies or Digital Sweatshops.

In this video, Mark Graham briefly explains the theory of digital labour, changing connectivity through the Internet, and what are the different digital labours performing in the web that might gives a range of risks and costs impacted on them. Here I found it's interesting to connect with over-working culture and 24-7 electronic sweatshops from Scholz's text. One interesting example from this presentation is the reason of why there is a labour surplus and struggles on employment in the local labour market. All as a way to undermine how digital employment could be in an improved conditions for digital workers.

Couldry, Nick (2019). The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. 3-7.

In this chapter, Couldry unpacks how the concept of data colonialism is involved and outline its relation to capitalism, recaling what made historical colonialism distinctive, and the idea of colonizing resources. He explains that today's technological infrastructures of connection makes data colonialism to be more elusive than historical colonialism.

— platform+capitalism+nick+srnicek
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=platform+capitalism+nick+srnicek
— Data colonialism by Nick Couldry
— The Internet as Playground and Factory Edited By Trebor Scholz
Data worker: https://monoskop.org/log/?p=21038
https://www.algolit.net/index.php/Data_Workers
https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/algolit/mundaneum
— adam smith's the division of labor
— karl marx's transformation of human labor into its own enslavement
— http://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/flying-money-2018-investigating-illicit-financial-flows-in-the-city/
— Karl Marx: From the Grundrisse (pp. 690 - 712) (automatic system of machinery): http://thenewobjectivity.com/pdf/marx.pdf
— http://matteopasquinelli.com/texts/
— cognitive labor
—Karl Marx: Fragment on machines: http://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/User:Tancre/readings/Fragment_on_Machines?fbclid=IwAR3zfuQD8ZJWvXeujLEH-eeUtyCnsGe5r_KbLgnfWcSYkTkgI4vduxQ2E2Q