Pervasive Labour Union

Welcome to the first issue of the Immaterial Labour Union Zine! And what best day to launch our zine than Mayday? The Immaterial Labour Union is a decentralized labour union which occupies the space of the "social factory": Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, etc, where we're being stripped off of our data for the profit of a privileged few. With this zine we hope to deconstruct what it means to equate social media with labor. Each issue will hopefully tackle a piece of the digital economy puzzle and bring a better understanding of our condition as workers. The issue at hand focuses on "Terms of Service" - through poetry, illustration, remix and charting, we'll hopefully shed a light on how ToS govern our online behaviour.

Contributions by:
Aymeric Mansoux, Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba, Lídia Pereira, Lucia Dossin, Simone Cassiani

All contributions to the zine, unless otherwise specified, are licensed under the GNU General Public License¹.

Exceptions:
Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba's contribution is licensed under the CC BY-SA².
Aymeric Mansoux's contribution is licensed under the [CP] COPYPASTA License 1.0³.

We bid you all welcome to the second number of the Immaterial Labour Union Zine! The issue at hand revolves around the theme “Advertisement on Social Media”. The process of marketing audiences for economic surplus was exposed and analysed in Dallas Smythe’s 1977 essay “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism”. According to Smythe, all non-sleeping time is work that we commit to the communications industry, by means of our labour power being sold to advertisement agencies. What with our data being sold to advertisers, corporate entities having their own pages and accounts on mainstream social media, it is clear that we are ever more a part of Smythe’s commodified audience. We hope you will enjoy the valuable contributions we have received, which will further reflect on our experiences of ad-mediated reality and the effects of this phenomena for socio-political movements, as well as for our own subjectivity.

Contributions by:
Christian Fuchs, Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba, Lídia Pereira, Lucia Dossin, Mathijs van Oosterhoudt, Simone Cassiani, Δεριζαματζορ Προμπλεμ ιναυστραλια

All contributions to the zine, unless otherwise specified, are licensed under the GNU General Public License¹.

Exceptions:
Christian Fuchs's contribution is licensed under the CC BY-NC-ND License².
Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba's contribution is licensed under the CC BY-SA License³.

Welcome to the third issue of the Immaterial Labour Union Zine!

This time around we’ll be analysing the technology of power put in place which organizes us, the produsers, for more advantageous, profitable governance - the Social Graph. Initially introduced during the Facebook F8 conference in 2007 within the context of the Facebook Platform, the Social Graph has now expanded to become an attempt at the graphical representation of relationships between everybody and everything on the Internet. In 2010, just three years after its introduction, the Social Graph became the largest social network dataset in the world. The Social Graph, despite and thanks to its blatant bi-dimensionality, is successfully transforming the digital space into the realm of the quantified subject, the privileged structure for power infiltration within the human soul.

We’ll be thinking about alternative platforms, counter-mapping for the advantage of the produsers, and reflecting graphically on how these power structures archive and organise our interpersonal relationships.

Contributions by:
Bob Haugen, Lídia Pereira, Marisol Sandoval, Örsan Şenalp, Simone Cassiani, Δεριζαματζορ Προμπλεμ ιναυστραλια, Tony Cage

All contributions to the zine, unless otherwise specified, are licensed under the GNU General Public License¹.

Exceptions:
Marisol Sandoval's contribution is licensed under the CC BY-NC-ND License².

Welcome to the 5th issue of the Immaterial Labour Union zine. After a somewhat long break, we are back with a new issue: "Like Buttons".And what great timing, when just recently Zuckerberg announced the launching of Facebook Reactions, a response to popular demands of a 'dislike' button.
A small walk-through of this issue: Fauno stresses the assymetry of the 'decentralised' web, Harry Halpin assumes a critical posture towards the premises of corporate and state-based decentralisation, Δεριζαματζορ experiments with the aesthetics of like culture, Mercedes Bunz maps Facebook's affirmative discourse to global power tendencies of stifling critique, Erik H. Zepka conceives of the apathetic button and Mathijs van Oosterhoudt takes us through the different levels of obfuscation associated with the button.
A lot more could be said about this topic, so...stay tuned for part 2!

Contributions by:
Eric H. Zepka, Fauno, Harry Halpin, Lídia Pereira, Mathijs van Oosterhoudt, Mercedes Bunz, Simone Cassiani, Δεριζαματζορ Προμπλεμ ιναυστραλια

All contributions to the zine, unless otherwise specified, are licensed under the GNU General Public License¹.

Exceptions:
Fauno's contribution is licensed under the Peer Production License².
Harry Halpin's contribution is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.3³.
Mercedes Bunz's contribution is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA License⁴