diff --git a/content/factor/stillnotrobots.md b/content/factor/stillnotrobots.md index df55de3..19a5337 100644 --- a/content/factor/stillnotrobots.md +++ b/content/factor/stillnotrobots.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ has_items=["cervelloelettronico.md", "piupostomacchine.md", "maggioranzadev.md", +++ -This final section collects documents, fragments and insights that connect the past stories gathered in these pages with the present time. The last two decades have been marked by a new cycle of automation and other technological changes in the ways people work, heal, live and protest. Without pretenses of being exaustive, materials are organized following the four red threads introduced in the previous sections: techniques of exploitation; health and environmental conditions; gendered discrimination; and forms of rebellion. +This final section collects documents, fragments and insights that connect the past stories gathered in these pages with the present time. The last two decades have been marked by a new cycle of automation and other technological changes in the ways people work, heal, live and protest. Without pretense of being exaustive, we gathered materials that resonate with the four red threads introduced in the previous sections: techniques of exploitation; health and environmental conditions; gendered discrimination; and forms of resistance. ![](static/images/no_robot.png) @@ -114,7 +114,7 @@ During the pandemic, this exclusion defined at least two different models of car The terms of service, and the term service itself, while perfectly acceptable and of current use today in job descriptions of all kinds, shares a long history with the power asymmetry and structural violence of ‘servitude’. The epochal passage from having household servants to hiring domestic helpers did not fully dissipate the contradictions at play in this kind of work. Servile and service work share at the core of their organizational praxis a logic of concealment of their actors and operations. They share techniques of hiding the unpleasantness of work (resentment, fatigue, boredom, humiliation, and so forth) under a thick layer of expected emotional and attentive labour. This creates an social environment which is conducive to unidirectional care relations, a problem that feminist scholars, such as Genevieve Fraisse still see as unresolved: “from ‘serving a person’ to ‘providing services to a person’” – she writes – “ the noteworthy difference lies in the change from the transitive to the intransitive formulation.” Yet, the introduction of a salary to mediate these kinds of relations “does not solve the problem inherent in asymmetry, in dependency, and in what takes place in a closed space with extremely fuzzy limits.” As power asymmetry and one-way flows of knowledge or attention remain intrinsic to dominant models of service transactions, we need to consider such feminist critique of the continuities between servitude, service and patriarchal expectations of comfort and convenience. These cultural assumptions have been providing the basis for developing a plethora of new digital tools and platform-mediated services: it is at this juncture that the logic of invisibilization of labour proper of servitude becomes potentiated by technology’s tendency to recede away from consciousness. -Exploring this nexus, media historian Markus Krajewski offers that service is best understood as “cultural technique” that has been used to justify a great number of historical configurations of power asymmetries. In The Server. A Media History from the Present to the Baroque , Krajewski exposes that the term "server" applied both to subaltern humans and to digital technologies is more than simply a linguistic quirk, or a coincidence. Echoing Fraisse, he too points out that the metaphor finds its roots in a “far-reaching, cultural-historical tradition of servitude” that is harvested within electronic communicational systems in order to recreate specific conditions of possibility for specialized knowledge. With the spread of AI systems across most production processes, the service paradigm seems to have sutured into a full circle of exploitation, where the very human labor needed for upkeeping the technological digital infrastructure is hidden by a pretense of full automation. With chilling efficacy, Jeff Bezos has called the hidden figures of these workers “artificial artificial intelligence”; but more aptly this brutal vanishing trick demands our attention as the “ghost work” of a new global underclass. +Exploring this nexus, media historian Markus Krajewski offers that service is best understood as “cultural technique” that has been used to justify a great number of historical configurations of power asymmetries. *In The Server. A Media History from the Present to the Baroque*, Krajewski exposes that the term "server" applied both to subaltern humans and to digital technologies is more than simply a linguistic quirk, or a coincidence. Echoing Fraisse, he too points out that the metaphor finds its roots in a “far-reaching, cultural-historical tradition of servitude” that is harvested within electronic communicational systems in order to recreate specific conditions of possibility for specialized knowledge. With the spread of AI systems across most production processes, the service paradigm seems to have sutured into a full circle of exploitation, where the very human labor needed for upkeeping the technological digital infrastructure is hidden by a pretense of full automation. With chilling efficacy, Jeff Bezos has called the hidden figures of these workers “artificial artificial intelligence”; but more aptly this brutal vanishing trick demands our attention as the “ghost work” of a new global underclass. **Social Reproduction and Hyperemployment** @@ -138,7 +138,29 @@ from: Helen Hester, [Technically Female: Women, Machines, and Hyperemployment](h - from: Wilfred Chan, [The AI startup erasing call center worker accents: is it fighting bias – or perpetuating it?](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/23/voice-accent-technology-call-center-white-american), *The Guardian*, 24th August 2022 -# Conclusions +# In way of conclusions + +Through the pages and the documents gathered in Maddening Rhythms we have unpacking the story of Lebole workers to disentangle some of the aspects that characterised their conditions of life, work and struggles. Our time spent in the archive we traced some of the debates , key terms and inventive organizational techniques that characterised the decades 1960s and 1970s, which as we saw marked the epochal passage to a new level of technologization of work. Our meandering through the many newspaper clips and typed manuscripts was simultaneously a quest to find tools for reading the present. + +A present that we then begun to map through a number of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with fifteen workers employed in different occupational sectors, but who all share a significant relation with digital technologies as part of their job experience. We are extremely grateful to all of those who took the time to talk to us, sharing sometimes difficult stories about their work life and their relationships with co-workers, clients and (often alghoritmic) bosses. These conversations were points of entry in the simmering landscape of platform work and gig economy. + +In Italy (INAP) there are over 570,000 platform workers, 1.3% of the national population. They are riders, delivery workers, AI trainers, data compilers, content creators, sex workers and many more. +50.7% of them ended up in this kind of work because they have no other alternatives. For 48% of them, platform work is their main source of income. + + +What emerges from the juxtaposition between past and present stories describing the work environment and its impact on health? + +First of all, we found many, at times surprising, lines of continuity. Not only the obsessive rhythms of work, but also a weariness of the effects of technology on psychic and physical health; an ever increasingly "scripted" job description, where not only tasks, but behaviours and movements are meticulously monitored; the quest for ways to expand workers struggles beyond the places of work, to include demands around environmental care and reorganization of social reproduction; a call to politicize the role of experts, perceived as distant and unaware of the actual experiences of workers. But we also found some fissures, marking stark lines of discontinuity. For example, the separation between bodies at work, and its consequences that the contemporary spatial and temporal organization of labour is having on a ever-weaker social solidarity. Isolation and solitude increased a lot in contemproary accounts (as one of our interviees, Cadmioboro, put it: "we are all alone"). + +Like the Leboline, the workers we interviewed are situated in a very 'young' technological landscape. +For instance, Angelo Junior Avelli reminded us that the introduction of food delivery platforms in Italy dates back only to 2015, and one year later we already witness the first strike action in the sector by Foodora workers, followed in 2017 by many others mobilizations, including the one at Deliveroo, which leads to the passing of the law n. 128 in 2019, a law instituting some measures of protection for riders and other platofrom workers, including compulsory insurance coverage against accidents at work and occupational diseases and the introduction of a basic salary. This resonates with the stories that Luigi Firrao heard by the Lebole worker he interviewed in 1967 and 1969, who also needed a bit of time to organize their efforts to organize and formulate demands against the new organization of their work through the MTM method. + +However, a precise understanding (and, consequentially, a political awareness) of the mechanisms organizing digital work is very uneavenly spread among contemproary gig workers, who struggle to find common places (virtual or in real life) where to share their knowledges. It is not a coincidence that the most visible group, that of the rider, also shares a starker visibility in public spaces and opportunity for in-person meetings, compared to many other kinds of platform work. + +Currently there are a number of fighting and resistance practices emerging within and beyond platforms, from strike actions to individual tricks adopted to slow down. Forms of self-management / ownership of the algorithm - as experimented with by the cooperative platforms movement - are also taking hold. There are those who, in continuity with the early days of industrial production, invoke forms of Luddite sabotage. Others identify in an universal unconditional basic income the only measure capable of restoring the power of the working class of rejecting working conditions that are dangerous and humiliating. Still others are engaged in new forms of unionization, such as recent attempts at Amazon, Apple and Deliveroo. Finally, there are those who see a need to deal with a more radical transformation of the digital infrastructure that regulates not only work, but ever more ubiquitously, most aspects of life. A need for a sustainable redesign of the tech sector, one that would include a consideration of its environmental impact as well as its psychological one. There all all kinds of experimentalisms agitating in the background of the platform sector, not simply reduceable to a clear antagonism, but embracing more oblique strategies of resistance and survival. +Rather than speculating on the future directions these and other protests will contribute to shape here, we wish to conclude this work in progress sharing our conviction, which grew during these months of research, around the paramount importance to conitue keeping track, in this political conjuncture, of the mutual implications and reconfigurations of welfare and technology. + +