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@ -97,7 +97,12 @@ During the pandemic, this exclusion defined at least two different models of car
# The machinic feminine, the machinic neutral
**Terms of service**
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.
**Social Reproduction and Hyperemployment**
@ -123,12 +128,7 @@ from: Helen Hester, [Technically Female: Women, Machines, and Hyperemployment](h
# Conclusions
The paradigm of “service” ubiquitously shapes production and consumption today, operationalizing a blend of mundane cultural qualities, such as convenience, speed, comfort, usability and politeness, in favor of a smooth circulation of capital flows. In other words, service can be seen as a socio-economic expression of the desire to lead a carefree existence, that in capitalist societies translates in the value of carelessness as a dominant ideology to contend with.
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.