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Immaterial Labour Union

INTRODUCTION The Immaterial Labor Union is an attempt to unite the scattered multitude of cultural agents within participatory culture. It aims to reflect upon the representational issues within the space of the digital multitude, the economics of immaterial labor and participatory culture as well as the extreme difficulties in dealing with distributed power when social, political and cultural differences are so easily obscured.

WHAT IS IT? What I propose is to bring to life a movement that would attempt to create a platform for the encounter of the atomized voices of the digital age, researching the economics of this type of union further and gathering communities, a reivindicating force of dialogue amongst the different subjectivities involved, capable of clearly stating their demands within the economics of immaterial labor. The Immaterial Labor Union intends to be a space of community reflection around the question: “How not to be seen, yet still be represented?”

RESEARCH FIELD / CONTEXTUALIZATION The paradigm shift of control society to disciplinary 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 industrial era masses. Because implicit participation doesn’t necessarily require collaboration and communication between users, there’s no need for interaction, shared values or common goals. 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 assymetries to be found within the digital multitude midst are an obstacle nearly impossible to transpose.
Social media, particularly, benefits from user generated content contributing to information management systems, which can be exploited for improving information retrieval or gathering user information for market research. According to Maurizio Lazzarato, the production of subjects and social relations coincides, then, with economical power.

In order to realize my aims it will be necessary for me to study further the articulation of unions throughout history, carefully design a disruptive enough campaign that will gather a few interested people with whom I can then develop the toolkit for the liberation of the multitude, capable of critically disrupting social networking paradigms and of bringing new media campaigning methodologies to the traditional activist discourse.

RELATION TO PREVIOUS PRACTICE

The Immaterial Labor Union was exhibited as the headquarters for a social movement. On a big table there were pamphlets, flyers, stickers and a Metro newspaper with news about the union, as well as a computer where one could visit the movement website. There was also an agenda, a cup with pens and a coffee-maker. On the wall, posters, post-it notes and photos of campaigns can be seen. There was an interest on my part to explore the possibilities of situationist détournement.
Researching deeper into the genealogy of the sociogram, that is, the graphical representation of social relantionships in the terms of nodes and links, where every node represents a person and every link represents a relationship, it was 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. The works of Jacob L. Moreno, the father of sociometry, and Nicolas Rose's "Governing the Soul" were key in tracing this history.

LARGER CONTEXT

In my approach to the Immaterial Labor Union I am very much influenced by the Telekommunisten idea which states that only by uniting can the immaterial workers fight against exploitation. But how does this work happen?
On the second chapter of "Bastard Culture" - "Claiming Participation", Mirkos Tobias Schäfer differentiates between cultural participation and participatory culture. Whilst the former is characterized by an intelectual elite deconstruction of cultural artifacts, the latter is imbued with concepts of DIY, prosumerism and action, construction and modification of cultural artifacts, there where software development becomes the "means of production of the digital age".
This participation can be, however, explicit and/or implicit. Explicit participation is driven by motivation, varying according to different users' skils. This motivation is not always altruistic or politically charged and users' context varies greatly, such as paid labor, leisure or unpaid voluntary work. Design implemented participation, otherwise known as implicit participation, allows for our leisure time to be commodified in big chunks of metadata extracted from our interactions and habits online.
"Networks Without a Cause", by Geert Lovink, is an attempt to bring back critique and social theory to the highly networked landscape of digital media. It aims to go beyond privacy, usability, access and etc. and study the tensions between the internet's enforcement of existing structures and the distribuition of control.
To further answer my questions about network economics, I'm reading Manuel Castells' "The Rise of the Network Society", which concerns the characterization of the global economy in the terms of information, communication and capital flow and how that affects society at large by giving those in power magnificent tools for control.
For the practical side of the project, the one concerning the tactical toolkit, I've been looking into the principles of "by any media necessary". Rita Raley, the author of "Tactical Media", defends that the efficacy of street demonstration has changed, subjective view which demands for negotiation in politically engaged new media projects. She argues that activism and creative dissent must, too, enter the network. Kluitenberg, on the contrary, states the ressurgence of street protest, a collective re-approriation of the public space, in contrast to the "electronic isolation". He defends that "the political" must always coincide with the urban public space, it requires physical embodiement. In this sense, Kluitenberg couldn't be further away from Rita Raley's perspective.

PRACTICAL STEPS

The initial efforts of the project, taking place between October and December, will be directed towards research and small prototypes. This will allow for some consistency and flexibility of arguments, as well as gathering as many practical experiments with tactical media as possible, so to understand my possibilities better.
The second part concerns the gathering of a community. This process, to happen between January and March, is one that requires a good handle over the distribution of compelling campaigning material. Being thus, media formats to be explored must be carefully designed under a cohesive visual language, whose strength allows for translation and adaptation to their different specificities (pamphlets, booklets, social media pages, video/animation, website, etc.).
The third part of the plan refers to the conception and development of the toolkit, which will be the outcome presented as my graduation project. Workshops, debates and regular meetings would serve, among other things, the purpose of its conception and development.