Anne Helmond‘s new article “The Algorithmization of the Hyperlink”  later this evening, particularly as we keep talking about who or what may be (or not, following Andy’s last post) “laboring” in the data economy.

This study looks at the history of the hyperlink from a medium-specific perspective by analyzing the technical reconfiguration of the hyperlink by engines and platforms over time. Hyperlinks may be seen as having different roles belonging to specific periods, including the role of the hyperlink as a unit of navigation, a relationship marker, a reputation indicator and a currency of the web. The question here is how web devices have contributed to constituting these roles and how social media platforms have advanced the hyperlink from a navigational device into a data-rich analytical device. By following how hyperlinks have been handled by search engines and social media platforms, and in their turn have adapted to this treatment, this study traces the emergence of new link types and related linking practices. The focus is on the relations between hyperlinks, users, engines and platforms as mediated through software and in particular the process of the algorithmization of the hyperlink through short URLs by social media platforms. The important role these platforms play in the automation of hyperlinks through platform features and in the reconfiguration of the link as database call is illustrated in a case study on link sharing on Twitter.

http://computationalculture.net/article/the-algorithmization-of-the-hyperlink

Hi all, I am participating in a conversation through the iDC listserv organized by Trebor Scholz at the New School. If you are interested in digital labor (or the future of labor in general) and the New School’s upcoming conference (November 2014), which promises to be excellent and will bring together scholars, researchers, labor organizers, activists, and artists (and more!), please consider subscribing: http://collectivate.net/idc/

Here is my latest post to the list, which is a response to Ian Bogost’s piece in The Atlantic, “Hyperemployment, or the Exhausting Work of the Technology User.”

I am assuming that, regardless of how you are employed, the notion of hyperemployment struck a nerve with you. Bogost’s point that most jobs contain a multitude of invisible forms of labor is well understood; perhaps it is even becoming a form of muscle memory for many of us. E-mail is one of the most obvious instantiations of the often-unacknowledged demand that workers be continually “available” and ready for work, and as such it is a powerful social, subjectifying agent. A friend recently told me that, despite being hired and submitting paperwork for the position, he lost a well-paying, temporary teaching assignment because he was a day late in responding to the director’s e-mail request for supplemental materials. When you live paycheck to paycheck, it’s cold comfort to suggest, “Well, hey, you probably didn’t want to work for that madman anyway.” In many ways, the overattachment to digital devices that Bogost charts can be seen as learned behavior emerging from a poorly controlled Milgram experiment in which we are both the ones shocked by the persistent buzzing of our devices (“opportunity” calling) and the ones doing the shocking, giving in to invisible structures of authority that mark the evolving, ever increasingly digitally mediated labor landscape. In addition to that implicit demand for attention and the assumption of “epic” levels of connectivity to digital and mobile technologies, there is also, as Bogost suggests, an accompanying “administration” of one’s life that takes the form of an endless to-do list.  As he writes,

the ballet school’s schedule updates (always received too late, but, “didn’t you get the email?”); the Scout troop announcements; the daily deals website notices; the PR distribution list you somehow got on after attending that conference; the insurance notification, informing you that your new coverage cards are available for self-service printing (you went paperless, yes?); and the email password reset notice that finally trickles in 12 hours later, since you forgot your insurance website password…

It is undeniable that as life and work blur into each other, levels of exhaustion mount. The persistent “doing of things” or the “getting of things done” comes to stand in for other activities. Microsoft even recently declared November 7 to be “Get It Done Day,” as though to suggest that even holidays are workdays (and they are quite literally for part-time workers this Thanksgiving at Walmart and Best-Buy). As Microsoft rather grossly suggests in its new Office 365 campaign, there is no physical escape from work, and “whether you are in an office park or a national park, you can still participate in meetings.”

And, as we e-mail in the morning, text in the afternoon, and hop on Twitter to criticize after dinner, a substrate of meta-data-labor goes to work in ways that we can barely conceptualize, let alone make claims about its surplus value. Bogost writes, “For those of us lucky enough to be employed, we’re really hyperemployed,” and he is well aware that such hyperemployment is rarely acknowledged, begets little to no wage, and may even be a form of labor common to both the formally employed and the under- and unemployed. If you need a stark reminder of how exhausting unemployment is, try playing “Iain Duncan Smith’s Realistic Unemployment Simulator”: http://toys.usvsth3m.com/iain-duncan-smiths-realistic-unemployment-simulator/.

What I am curious about, however, is the use of the term “hyperemployment.” As Trebor suggested, the term is contradictory for workers who are refused the designation of “employee.” Trebor mentioned crowd-sourced labor, but the fight simply to be recognized as an employee has been a long and well-documented struggle for workers who were excised from the National Labor Relations Act, namely agricultural and domestic workers. While there is agency in simply offering the term “employment” to certain activities (waged or unwaged), I am wondering if what Bogost is drawing attention to has less to do with “employment” than with the uneven redistribution and privatization of the labor of social reproduction, an antagonism that feminist theorists have been writing about for more than thirty years. Bogost writes, “hyperemployment offers a subtly different way to characterize all the tiny effort we contribute to Facebook and Instagram and the like. It’s not just that we’ve been duped into contributing free value to technology companies (although that’s also true), but that we’ve tacitly agreed to work unpaid jobs for all these companies.” This tacit agreement, however, extends beyond social media and e-mail and is really a form of housework and maintenance for our daily lives. In that regard, I wonder if calling the cozy arrangement between digital technologies, data economies, and invisible labor “employment” runs the danger of side-stepping the deeper (gendered and racialized) antagonisms inherent in the distinction between what is considered labor and what is considered “care.”

While I am very supportive of drawing lines of solidarities between waged workers, the underemployed, and the unemployed (and I think Bogost’s article can help us with that project by drawing attention to unspoken common platforms and practices across these groups), I’m also curious if we can approach the very notion of digital labor with a different vocabulary— one that might reject the implicit tendencies toward individual competition and entrepreneurial success. I mean, are you just employed or are you “hyperemployed”? Either way, there is a culture of “what’s your excuse?” sadism ready to answer you and a large market of “management systems” and life-coach support systems geared at helping individuals live and thrive in the “hyperness” of the market. As Mimi Thi Nguyen has suggested in her piece “Against Efficiency Machines,” “‘Solidarity’ may seem an old-fashioned concept, but it is one we need if we are to refuse to concede to what neoliberalism would make of us (entrepreneurial, exceptional, exploitable).” To that end, I am curious about language that can shift focus from the individually employed individual and perhaps even help us reconsider what a “share the work” program might look like today. I am curious about language that looks not to flatten the condition of employment but rather can ask questions like “why am I so overworked, when others are going hungry?” While we can draw attention to the ways in which our lives are coming to exhaust us, I am wondering what solidarities can be drawn among bodies, selves, and data (and other nonhuman actors)—solidarities that might really take care of all of us.

A few weeks ago, this video went viral:

In the video, we see a young woman—Marina Shifrin—happily, seemingly joyfully dancing to Kayne West’s song “Gone.” We read the words “It’s 4:30am and I am at work. I work for an awesome news company that produces news videos. For almost two years, I sacrificed my relationships, time, and energy for this job. And my boss only cares… about quantity and how many views each video gets. So, I figured I’d make ONE video of my own, to focus on the content instead of the views. Oh, and to let my boss know…. (dance break) I quit.” If you’ve ever wanted to tell your boss to shove it, by this point in the video, you are dancing along with her.

When I first saw the video, I thought to myself, “Ah, interesting. You can quit your job, but you can’t quit the Internet.” Indeed, the video’s virality (it received over 15 million views within a little over a week), its quick circulation—either through “you go girl, admiration” or “omg, I can’t believe she did this” (or any number of affective reactions.  To some degree the content of the reaction doesn’t matter, rather that you simply react and click and “share”)– is the very stuff of the Internet economy. As it turns out, this moment of “micro-celebrity” garnered Marina a job offer on the Queen Latifah Show where Latifah herself offered to create the position of “Digital Content Producer” expressly for Marina. Referring to herself as “a boss”, Latifah told Marina “I’m a boss and bosses can HIRE.” According to Mashable, Marina had until Oct 14^th to decide to take the job and has now embarked on a comedy career.

Honestly, when I first saw this video, I thought “ooh, that will be a great entry into a discussion about digital labor” and intended to file it away for a class or a lecture. And, because I am in the midst of job searching at the moment, writing up notes was put on hold. The thought of “quitting as the impossible condition” wasn’t exactly conducive to the “buck up, camper” moment the academic job market seems to require. As I have written before, I’m deeply committed to sticking it out in the public university and to reclaiming accessible, affordable quality education as a public right and good. And, although I am decidedly not interested in telling people not to go to graduate school (as was my response when Rebecca Schuman wrote her now well-known Thesis Hatement in Slate) mostly because I have fears about the demographic, long-term effects of such an abandonment, it was with some pleasure that I saw that Rebecca Schuman was writing about quitting the academy. As with Marina, a part of me deeply embraces the agency found in a declaration of “I quit,” especially when such agency seems to facilitate transformation or change.

As most of us know, academic work is exhausting, exploitative, and precarious—not to mention often occurring in what amounts to a hostile work environment of administrative budget cuts, pepper spray for students, and policies on “Expressive Activity,” such as the one CUNY has authored . It seems finally to be dawning on many academics that they are not autonomous agents, but workers who are employed at the irrational pleasure of a system doing its best to put them out of work. For any number of reasons, the University is ripe for its “Take This Job and Shove It” moment.

Yet, and this is where the Internet is truly fascinating to me as a deeper terrain of exploitation; where do we go if and when we leave? As @reclaimUC suggested yesterday on Twitter, not every one quits the academy and becomes a white, male computer programmer with connections to more lucrative work. I know there are many conversations going on now about the possibilities of new forms of academic work, both in and outside the university, but (as someone who studies social media use and personal brand-building, particularly as a way of re-terraining a life caught in the throws of precarity) it has been very interesting (perhaps even a little too close to home) to watch the way that many academics have been lured to the Internet (myself included) as a place to talk to each other, complain, and make jokes, but also to reconfigure and reconsider what new forms of work are actually possible. And, I am deeply aware and sympathetic to the ways in which women, in particular, use the Internet to put food on their families, but I am also very curious about the work we can’t quit and the endless hustle that becomes our lives inside, outside, and all around the university, particularly as the logic of branding now sits, almost insidiously, inside many of our visions of transforming labor.

Again, I know these conversations around writing for wages (thanks Lee and Tressie), for example, will go on. And, there is much more to say here, but I am wondering what it would really look like to say, “Take this job and shove it.” I certainly hope it means more “meaningful” work for individuals, but when do we start to say this collectively and with demands for policy change attached to it? When is “take this job and shove it” something more than a career-building move? When is it the rallying cry for a new way of doing business altogether?

Below is a copy of the text (and accompanying slides) of the presentation I gave at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (#SLSA13). The paper, entitled “Between Con and Conjure: Thoughts on the Interface”, was part of a panel I coordinated with Patricia Clough, Josh Scannell, and Benjamin Haber. The panel was titled “Big Data and the Call of the Inhuman: Towards an Alien Theory of Liveliness” and took place on Friday, October 4, 2013.

[slideshare id=27470988&doc=conjure-131022202710-phpapp01]

This paper is part of a larger reflection that I’ve been doing on my own work, which took place as a long-term ethnography among a group esoteric, psychic practitioners—and the work that I have been doing with Patricia Clough, Josh Scannell, and Benjamin Haber and what we have been loosely calling “The Life of Things”, which took up issues of objects, new materialism, and eventually data itself. (Our reading archive for anyone interested can be found here.)

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