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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Thanks for this vigorous start to what
I know will be a rich discussion.<br>
<br>
I'll be somewhat briefer. Greetings from Quito, Ecuador, where
I've just finished a round of reporting on the FLOK Society
project, which held a summit to design open-knowledge policies for
the country. I'm a journalist currently in the midst of a series
of magazine stories (for The Nation, Vice, Chronicle of Higher Ed,
Hemispheres, etc.) about struggles over digital and material
commonses. Before that, I wrote a book each about <a
href="http://www.therowboat.com/books/god-in-proof/">God</a> and
<a href="http://www.therowboat.com/books/thank-you-anarchy/">Occupy
Wall Street</a>. I am also working with the Social Science
Research Council on a project about digital culture and religion,
which will result in several meetings and a book.<br>
<br>
I'll be speaking at the conference about the commons of time, and
the ways in which digital capitalism continues to roll back what
historian Benjamin Hunnicut calls "the lost American dream" of
leisure time. <br>
<br>
I'm really looking forward to the conference, and to meeting you.
In the meantime, please feel free to let me know about any tips
related to:<br>
<br>
* organizing digital labor<br>
* the politics of scholarly publishing<br>
* communities that digital culture leaves out<br>
* discourses of the commons<br>
* overlaps between online and offline political struggle<br>
* innovations in cooperative financing<br>
<br>
Nathan<br>
<div class="moz-signature"><br>
∴<br>
Nathan Schneider / therowboat.com<br>
<em><a href="http://www.therowboat.com/books/god-in-proof/">God
in Proof</a></em> / <em><a
href="http://www.therowboat.com/books/thank-you-anarchy">Thank
You, Anarchy</a></em>
<br>
<br>
</div>
On 06/03/2014 02:19 PM, Samuel Tannert wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CA+Ww5QCErrmAoOVe0iHbOwX-eT_SeDUxLSrRN2LtU1HkE-JJkQ@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">
<div>Cross-pollination is the key to life. In the abstract, I
mean. Communication, the process of producing difference, et
cetera.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I took on the Instagram feed for #DL14, but I am yet to
figure out how exactly to take photos of digital labor. I have
never been a photo archivist in any meaningful way. The whole
act seems too much effort -- take out the camera, lens-cap off
/ camera-app on, frame-focus-shoot -- and so none of my
Facebook photos are my own. And I have never been good with
aesthetics in any meaningful way. Possibly a fear of taste? I
desired white jeans one winter, but mostly a top-of-the-pile
heuristic has helped me through the daily fashion requirement.
Despite my own inadequacies, however, the Instagram must go
on/line!</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Initially I wanted it stylish/-ized with a particular form,
e.g. always the hands or just handwritten words. Repetition is
advantageously reductionist in that the pattern has certain
intertextual demands which can substitute for nuanced
critique, passing the buck from artist to audience; a cabinet
of curiosities speaks in a way a baseball-card collection
cannot.. "I think." Digital labor seems to me more than a
series of instances to be cataloged. Digital technologies are
so pervasively immanent, "at once everywhere and soon to come
everywhere else," and the more I think about what to photogram
the more it seems I would have to capture the world itself.
Labor_Digital14 sits empty. Much/All of my time has been spent
thinking about what is possible:</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>A photo of hands typing on a keyboard is a necessity. &
texting. If you crunch the numbers we spend something like 60%
of our waking day doing this and I think omission would be
deceit, here. The salient bit is that digital labor can be
captured at the point of human action on the interface -- a
kind of straightforward realist framing which blurs the
difference between perception by the tool & that of the
human. This conflation demands a search for all sorts of
interesting interactions with different digital technologies,
looking with the eye and capturing with the camera: e.g.
programming the VCR #throwbackthursday, gaming keyboards
#MoreButtonsThanGod, or an 11-hour time-lapse of a keyboard in
use #2real.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Then there's the tension between the screen and the camera
-- that strange distance provoked by a photo of a monitor or
someone videotaping the TV. It doesn't really work, right? The
extra agential layer puts the user at such a level of
abstraction from the object that the role the representing
apparatus plays becomes frustratingly apparent -- 'learn to
take a screenshot, buddy!' And that's it: the screenshot
understands the digital environment without the additional
abstraction in a kind of Bogost/alien-phenomenology, 'what
does the object see?' I keep wanting to use the word
'hyperreal' for semantic integrity, but the baggage would
suggest that the objects captured are somehow merely symbolic
which I don't mean at all.. Either way, the capturing of the
digital environment still demands a searching, but within
hyperspace and with hyperspatial vision.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>And that all is just the first-order stuff! Then you've got
the innumerable material and ideal abstractions of digital
labor, reductively defined: industry and theory & art. On
one hand I could seek out that activity which our digital
activities are predicated upon, e.g. the ConEd guy out front
of the apartment with a jackhammer at 2 AM or, taken far more
seriously, the now infamous 'FoxConn girl' selfie. On the
other hand I could go PostSecret and photograph the symbolic
abstraction, e.g. whiteboard sketch-ups, highlighted
quotations in worn books, art & more art in its broadest
sense. If you allow some kind of abstraction everything
becomes associated with digital labor, ~'no outside to
capitalism.'</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Digital Labor: DIGITAL LABOR. BIG. To really understand it
you have to come from all these different angles.. and that's
been Hollywood's problem all along, no? You can capture the
person using the interface, but it's someone just someone
tak-a-taking away; or you can capture the on-screen image, but
it's just a bunch of boring input boxes. The synthetic
experience of using a computer is really difficult to capture
from outside, and also in our real lives -- watching someone
use a computer is painfully alienating.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>So the film industry's first instinct was to only engage
with digital technologies through science fiction and I think
this worked pretty well. Either interfaces were made
gesture/voice controlled so that action & intent were
apparent, or hyperspace was made material through
Hackers-esque VR goggles and graphical user interfaces (e.g.,
[HACK MAINFRAME] [CANCEL]). Then for a while they settled on a
3-quarters over-the-shoulder shot in a kind of defeatist
realism, but now that's changing! Shows are using overlays
with the screen display stuck on top of the picture, a kind of
hyper-/material collage: House of Cards, Sherlock, used often
with texting. It's all very stylish and I can only imagine
that there was extensive audience testing done -- kidding..
maybe? It really is a significant advance in capturing our
experience of digital technologies, affect of a higher
fidelity. We have realized that one part of the act simply
won't do.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>So why Instagram at all? Is it necessary? Useful? I think
it has to be, because we live in a world of digital labor. The
'experience' of digital technologies extends beyond the
productive sphere and has wormed its way into life itself. It
is grafted to our collective being. & Instagram is set up
for this capturing of instances, not in the sense of a Google
Image Search ontology, but a Web-2.0 stream epistemology.
Instagram is useful in that it allows the crowd-sourcing of a
particular aspect of the whole which is most descriptive in
combination with other methods of knowing.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Turn left and I'm sure you could see this move coming, but
I mean to be very sincere: I really think that #DL14 will
succeed in this way, in the sense of a more complete picture
than we have ever had before. The Instagram aside, I have had
the pleasure of reading innumerable abstracts for projects of
all kinds coming at the problem of digital labor from so many
angles (3 x BIG) -- a proper attempt at mapping the kosmos.
More subdued: we are all in for a treat.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>A number of presentations tackle the problem of digital
labor with a very realist edge, from the panel of Amazon
Mechanical Turk workers which will provide a first-hand
account of the emerging crowd-sourcing industry to Henry
Warwick's solo-performance of Terry Riley's "In C," written
for 11 to 35 performers, which will make visible the
'redundancies' in the labor market caused by digital
technologies. Others will engage with the hypermaterial, from
Karin Hansson's social-networking platform AffectMachine which
attempts to commodify human interaction to Carl DiSalvo and
his team's reconfiguration of civil society as something which
can be 'hacked' through the development of grassroots digital
infrastructure. Others will be slightly abstracted: Miriam
Cherry will be giving an account of the legal framework
through which minimum wage could be extended to crowd-workers,
Gavin Mueller will be giving a history of the piracy/'warez'
scene, Frank Pasquale will work through the question of
whether we might someday "automate the automators" by
replacing the managerial class with algorithmic processes.
There will even be a stand-up comedy routine by Benj Gerdes,
which I hope will let us laugh despite the often overwhelming
confrontation which is the conference's focus. There are so
many fantastic projects that I do not have the space to list
here, and I am awestruck, really, at just how unique each
submission was.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I have incredibly high hopes for #DL14 as an opportunity
for a meaningful advance of the whole field of digital labor
studies. Youthful idealism included, I feel like we live in a
period of particular import as both departure and genesis,
situated as we are at the turn of the millennium. There could
not be an assembly more capable of shouldering that
responsibility than all of you.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Please introduce yourselves.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>H M Theinert</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>tl;dr</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Instagram is hard</div>
<div>Digital Labor is everywhere</div>
<div>
Hollywood is OK, sometimes, I guess</div>
<div>#DL14</div>
<div><br>
</div>
</div>
<br>
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