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Hi list,<br>
<br>
I've really enjoyed a lot of the recent discussion, and especially the
comments Ned makes below; I feel I should mention that my
recently-published book, <i>The Cultural Logic of Computation</i>
(Harvard, 2009) discusses ERP, CRM and other logistics software in just
this context--and also continues to insist, as several have done here,
that there is a deeply problematic mismatch between "labor" as it is
conceptualized in the world of computing, and the other sorts of labor
that will and must continue to make the everyday world operate. In no
small part due to the decade I spent as a software architect and
programmer in the financial information industry, I am deeply skeptical
of claims that the computerization of society will lead to a freer,
more democratic world. I am first skeptical that there is any kind of
automatic trend in that direction, despite the huge amounts of rhetoric
to that effect (much of it effectively critiqued on this list, and a
major target of my book); but I feel it is just as critical to raise
the question even at more pedestrian levels. I continue to think that
despite its benefits, there are significant and underacknowledged
conflicts between "the computerization of society" and, to quote the
philospopher Hilary Putnam, "total human flourishing." <br>
<br>
David G.<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
David Golumbia
Assistant Professor
Media Studies, English, and Linguistics
University of Virginia</pre>
<br>
Ned Rossiter wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:1F0E0420-DA81-4E90-9A9D-2579585508FD@nedrossiter.org"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">hello idc-list. I've been a happy lurker since the early days of idc,
and I feel like I'm outing myself or something, which I guess is
about time. I've been following the fascinating postings on the
question of digital labour with great interest, and hope to make more
direct engagements with those shortly. By way of introduction, I
work in China at the University of Nottingham, Ningbo (a 2nd tier
city south of Shanghai, which I commute from, across the longest
bridge - for the time being - in the world). Over the past five to
seven years I've been writing on the relationship between creative
labour, network cultures, state transformation and the invention of
new institutional forms (what Nick Knouf referred to as organized
networks). Along with my book on organized networks, related edited
volumes and essays have been published with Geert Lovink, Brett
Neilson and Soenke Zehle. Two relevant earlier texts are here:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/lovink_rossiter.html">http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/lovink_rossiter.html</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/neilson_rossiter.html">http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/neilson_rossiter.html</a>
Trebor asked me to say something about the relationship between
unions and organized networks. Perhaps the first thing to say is that
their conditions of emergence, and thus their social-technical
dynamics, are vastly different. The former is an institutional form
coemergent with the industrial age of Fordism and the masculine
culture of organized labour. The latter is an emergent institutional
form, whose contours of labour organisation share something with the
precarity movements (largely a European phenomenon, at least in terms
of organization and identification) and the broad condition of post-
Fordist labour (flexible, just-in-time, insecure, informational, etc).
Having said that, there are also some affinities beginning to
develop. One of the key issues of the 2007-2008 writer's strike in
the US was the issue of payment for content distributed over the
internet. Here, we see one of the central conflicts between creative
labour and the rise of new media -- how to earn a buck when the world
downloads content for free? Plenty has been written on the politics
of this topic (Ken Wark's A Hacker Manifesto lays it out neatly), but
less has been researched on the question of financial remuneration
for free labour. This is where unions, with their traditional
concerns with decent working conditions and fair pay, have got
something up on organized networks, which are better at engaging
practices of self-organization via new media of communication (see
the recent student protests across the world, and the work of <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://">http://</a>
edu-factory.org ), but are less able to deal with the social-
technical condition of ephemerality, info-overload, increasingly
diminishing attention spans, geocultural translation and the issue of
sustainability.
I wasn't following much of the writer's strike, however, and I'm sure
there are people on this list who can say a lot more about how
digital media were enlisted in the strategies of the union
organizers. Closer to home, for me, were the strikes in Melbourne by
taxi drivers in April 2008. Many of the drivers were Indian, and
residing in the country on international student visas. Not organized
through the traditional labour form of the union, but rather through
the circulation of sms texts (a now widely adopted technique of self-
organization, but still surprisingly unsettling for authorities), the
strike proved highly effective at the time. As Brett Neilson and I
wrote in recent text (published in theory, culture & society, and
kindly available through <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://aaaarg.org">http://aaaarg.org</a> ):
"It is precisely because the drivers did not organize along
hierarchical or representative lines that their protest proved so
baffling and threatening to the authorities. Clearly, the event was
something other than a spontaneous uprising. It was not without
‘structure or organizers’. Rather, the potency of the strike rested
on its multiplicity and internal divisions, which remained illegible
to the state but instituted a network of relations that, while
precarious, brought the city to a halt.
The second thing that interests us about this taxi blockade is the
fact that many of the drivers are also international university
students. Because most of these students are present in the country
on visas that allow them to work only 20 hours a week, they are
forced to survive by accepting illegal, dangerous and highly
exploitative working conditions. The question thus arises as to
whether the blockade should be read as taxi driver politics, migrant
politics or student politics. We would suggest that one reason for
the effectiveness of the strike (the government, which had only
recently refused to negotiate with unions of teachers and health
workers, acceded to the drivers’ demands) is the fact that it is all
three of these at the same time."
In Europe, labour organizer Valery Alzaga has been working closely
with migrant workers in the cleaning industry. This follows on from
the work she did with the Justice for Janitors campaign in the US. In
both these cases, I can see a connection between union politics and
organized networks in so far as the new political constituencies of
self-organized migrant labour are reinventing the organizational form
and culture of unions.
Since last September, when I moved from the polluted soup bowl of
Beijing to the relatively clean air cities of Shanghai and Ningbo,
I've been reacquainting myself with the matters related to the sea,
and this includes a growing interest in what the maritime industries
and logistics software have to tell us about new biopolitical regimes
of labour. It's also struck me that the emergent field of software
studies, embodied most recently in Matt Fuller's collection -
Software Studies\a lexicon - seems to have nothing to say about
labour. And this is pretty surprising, considering the amount of free
labour invested in developing open source software. Here, Julian's
concept of playbour as a double-edged sword captures the moving
ground of labour/life nicely.
Pasted below are some excerpts from a forthcoming paper for a
biopolitics conference in Taiwan. Fieldwork notes associated with
that paper can be found here: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://orgnets.cn/?cat=5">http://orgnets.cn/?cat=5</a>
As Geert noted in comments on a draft version of the paper, We the
global intelligentsia use Word. The global working class uses SAP/ERP.
These are also matters for software studies/media theory. And they
are also issues for labour politics and organized networks. The
prospect of labour and life governed through the biopolitical regimes
of logistics software is not some cooked up dystopian fear, but a
concrete reality on the horizon of the future-present. The sooner
software studies gets out of its bourgeois-anarchist ghetto of open
source celebration and starts to engage the banality of labour and
logistics software, then the sooner we will see the question of
software politics find a place in the field of informational
economies and digital media .
Ned
----
excerpts from a forthcoming paper - The Logistics of Labour, Life and
Things: Maritime Industries in China as a Biopolitical Index of
Sovereign Futures
[...] If Foucault’s interest in biopolitics moved around the
indistinction within a neoliberal paradigm between labour and life,
production and reproduction, then it follows that the labour of
research might share something with the life of labour. Both subsist
within what Foucault identified as the ‘milieu’ or environment within
which the life of species-beings is addressed and constituted by
power.[1] Perhaps even more forcefully, does the analytic rubric turn
to the ‘biopolitics of experience’ when labour and life are
constitutively indistinct?[2] No doubt one could say that experience
has always been subject to regimes of governance that manage labour
and life – the church, for instance, exercised its power over life
through the ritual of prayer and worship and the social practice of
congregation for mass. But the real subsumption of labour by capital
in a post-Fordist era renders the organization of experience in novel
ways. Within information societies and knowledge economies,
experience presents itself as one of those last frontiers of capture
in the economisation of life. Think, for instance, of search engines
such as Google and the way economies of data-mining derive profit
from the aggregation of the seemingly inane activity of users
clicking from one site to the next, or from the accumulation of the
trivial taste on social networking sites.
Across his lectures on biopolitics, Foucault returns to a core
definition of biopolitics, only to then take further ‘detours’ in his
elaboration of the relationship between territoriality,
governmentality, security, populations, economy and so forth.
‘Biopolitics deals with the population, with the population as a
political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and
political, as a biological problem and as power’s problem’.[3] What,
for instance, is the population or species-being operating or
constituted as a ‘problem’ in the maritime industries? For logistics,
the problem emerges in the interruption of global supply chains –
what RAND Corporation term ‘fault tolerance’ (a technocratic term
suitably emptied of political substance and subjectivity).[4] The
biopolitical problem, or population, for maritime logistics includes:
the pirate, the stowaway, the sex worker, the so-called ‘illegal
migrant’, the disobedient worker, the disruption of organized labour,
etc. But what of the production of knowledge on such populations? How
is the population of academics, NGO researchers, health
professionals, policy-makers, think-tank consultants, etc. managed
and organized? What are the techniques of calculus by which these
diverse populations, subsumed into the category of ‘fault tolerance’,
are identified and managed in the interests of securitization? Such
questions concern the human as the species-being of bio-power. But
what of the population of software applications and technological
devices that, to varying degrees, are a species-being of artificial
life increasingly able to self-manage, auto-correct and internally
propagate as they process the informatized status of people and
things? Technologies such as these would also belong to an analysis
of the biopolitics of contemporary labour and life.
[...]
The rise of what I would term ‘informatized sovereignty’ takes on
particular hues in the logistical techniques associated with the
maritime industries.[5] Code is King. To find out more about the role
of software in logistics, I got in touch with two logistics workers
in China – one employed by a U.S. automotive company based in
Shanghai and the other studying at Shanghai Maritime University,
having previously worked in container stowage at the Shanghai Port.
Both placed an emphasis on the importance of efficiencies in
logistics, with one noting that ‘Well organized and highly-efficient
workers can eliminate the risk and cost of logistics activities and
provide added value service to customer’. This text-book response is
embodied in software standards for logistics.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) databases are standard platforms
used within logistics in combination with customised software
applications to manage global supply chains, organizational
conditions and labour efficiencies. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
are software interfaces built into ERP databases to measure worker
and organizational efficiencies, meeting of target quotas, financial
performance, real-time status of global supply chains, and the
capacity of the organization to adapt to changing circumstances.
These are all quantitative indicators that register performance with
a numerical value, however, and are not able to accommodate more
immaterial factors such as a worker’s feelings and level of
motivation and enthusiasm. It would seem logistics software is still
to address the biological spectrum special to the species-being of
human life. Yet it in another sense, such immaterialities of labour
and life are coded into the quantitative parametres of KPIs through
the brute force of instrumentality or calculation: no matter how a
worker might feel, quotas have to be met and global supply chains
must not be adversely affected.
The coded materiality of fulfilling performance quotas and ensuring
the smooth operation of supply chains subsists within its own
universe of auto-affirmation. The relationship between logistics
software and self-regulation by workers assumes closure in the
circuit of governance. One of my logistics informants put it this
way: ‘As per our broker’s management experience, every staff is
trained to use their internal ERP software to reflect every movement
of their work. Moreover, the data from ERP software is also used as a
tool or KPI to evaluate staff’s performance, thus making them work
more efficiently’.
This ready inculcation of both disciplinary practices and the logic
of control within the organizational culture of the company and its
workers is quite confronting. Certainly, the managerial culture of
universities has more than its share of whacky acronyms that
constitute a new planetary grammar coextensive with the governance of
labour. And the bizarre interpellation of academics into the psuedo-
corporate audit regimes predicated on performance outcomes and
accountability measures presents some novel terrain for theories of
subjectivity and desire. The industry of logistics further amplifies
such biopolitical technologies, where the labour control regime is
programmed into the logistics chain at the level of code. A ‘Standard
Operation Procedure’ (SOP) is incorporated into the KPI of workers.
[6] The SOP describes the status of specific job, dividing it ‘into
measurable control points’. My informant provided this example: ‘For
instance, we would set SOP to our broker, which may require them to
finish custom clearance of a normal shipment within 3 working days,
if they fail to hit it, their KPI will be influenced and thus
influence their payment’.
There is a sense here of how logistics software ‘reflects’ the
‘movement’ of labour as the fulfillment of assigned tasks over a set
period of time. This sort of labour performance measure is reproduced
across many workplace settings. What makes it noteworthy here is the
way in which the governance of labour is informatized in such a way
that the border between undertaking a task and reporting its
completion has become closed or indistinct. Labour and performativity
are captured in the real-time algorithms of code. There is little
scope for the worker to ‘fudge’ their reporting of tasks some days or
even months after the event, as in the case of academia and its
increasing adoption of annual performance reviews, where a simple cut
and paste of the previous year’s forecast of anticipated outputs with
a shift to the retrospective tense is usually sufficient. The Zizek
factory tuned in early to the genre of labour performance indicators,
with this account of lessons learnt while working at the Institute of
Sociology in Ljubljana: ‘Every three years I write a research
proposal. Then I subdivide it into three one-sentence paragraphs,
which I call my yearly projects. At the end of each year I change the
research proposal's future-tense verbs into the past tense and then
call it my final report’.[7] Any academic who hasn’t been totally
subsumed into the drone-like persona found in audit-land learns this
technique of sanity management early in their career. But with the
rise of informatized sovereignty, biopolitical control is immanent to
the time of living labour and labour-power.[8] There is no longer a
temporal delay between the execution of duties and their statistical
measure. One logistics interviewee described how their broker uses
ERP software to evaluate the KPI of workers:
'Each employee is asked to mark it in the ERP system when they finish
their required work. There are two advantages for it: 1) If they fail
to finish the logistics activity within SOP time, they check in the
ERP system to find which employee did not complete his/her time
according to SOP, which help measure employee's performance. 2) Every
employee could track in the ERP system to know about the current
status/movement of the logistics activities. In short, ERP software
visualizes the movement of logistics activities by efforts of every
link in the logistics chain'.
But as noted earlier, ERP software is a quantitative system, and as a
cybernetic model it refuses the feedback or noise of more immaterial
forces such as worker’s attitudes, feelings and levels of motivation
that would have disruptive effects. Although a more sophisticated
software environment would calculate in such variables precisely
because their modulating power operates in a replenishing way, such
is the parasitical logic of capital and the organic modus operandi of
life. As it stands, the metaphor of global supply chains signals a
totalising vision in which everything can be accounted for, measured
and given an economic value. As Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson
note, ‘the notion of the chain, while it carries a sense of ligature
or bondage we wish to maintain, suggests the linkage or articulation
of multiple units into a single linear system’.[9]
In the case of logistics, there is an institutional, discursive and
political-economic investment in securitization and risk assessment
that underscores the need for such linear systems of control. And
such linearity and closure is always going to be the condition of
undoing for a system that rests on stasis, consistency and control
without incorporating contingency and complexity that define the ‘far-
from-equilibrium’ conditions of life-worlds as understood in more
advanced cybernetics.[10] The dismal ‘failure’ of the U.S. led
consortia in the war in Iraq embodies the limits of military
logistics and the theatre of war. But as we have been reminded in
recent news media reports on the so-called financial crisis, all
limits or failures of capital present new opportunities for its
ongoing reproduction.
[...]
If this diverse array of conditions, practices and social-technical
systems are any indication of the future-present of sovereign states
and biopolitical technologies of population control, then it would
seem that labour which is able to operate outside of the software
devices special to logistics and its global supply chains might
correspond with a life that is at once free, and economically
impoverished.
[1] Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, Lectures at the
Collège de France, 1975-76, trans. David Macey, London: Allen Lane,
2003, p. 245.
[2] For an examination of the biopolitics of experience, see Jon
Solomon’s paper in this conference – ‘Beyond Foucault’s Culturalism:
Translation between Biopolitics and the Archaeology of the Human
Sciences’, Biopolitics, Ethics, and Subjectivation: Questions on
Modernity, International Conference at National Chiao-Tung
University, Hsin Chu, Taiwan, 24-28 June, 2009.
[3] Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p. 245.
[4] See Henry H. Willis and David S. Ortiz, Evaluating the Security
of the Global Containerized Supply Chain, Santa Monica, Cal.: RAND
Corporation, 2004, <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/2004/">http://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/2004/</a>
RAND_TR214.pdf
[5] A study of logistics in the aviation industries would, I suspect,
produce similar findings. However, with its considerably longer
history and thus conflict with shifting epochs, the maritime
industries hold greater interest precisely because they were not born
in a time of modern logistics, as the aviation industries arguably were.
[6] Standard Operation Procedure also refers, of course, to the
routine practices of torture adopted by the U.S. military, supposedly
as a technique of interrogation. The shared terminology here should
come as no surprise, given the origins of logistics within the
military-industrial complex.
[7] See Robert S. Boyton, ‘Enjoy Your Zizek! An Excitable Slovenian
Philosopher Examines The Obscene Practices Of Everyday Life,
Including His Own', Lingua Franca 8.7 (October, 1998). Available at:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.lacan.com/zizek-enjoy.htm">http://www.lacan.com/zizek-enjoy.htm</a>
[8] See also Tiziana Terranova: ‘What we seem to have then is
definition of a new biopolitical plane that can be organized through
the deployment of immanent control, which operates directly within
the productive power of the multitude and the clinamen’. Network
Cultures: Politics for the Information Age, London: Pluto, 2004, p. 122.
[9] Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, ‘Care Workers, Traders, and
Body Shoppers’, unpublished paper, 2009.
[10] See Terranova, Network Cultures, p. 122. See also Ned Rossiter,
Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions,
Amsterdam: NAi Publishers / Institute of Network Cultures, 2006, pp.
166-195.
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</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
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