Pervasive Labour Union

Replacing “information” with “soul” and “content” with “body” on Facebook’s Advertising Policy.

About Advertisements and Other Commercial Content Served or Enhanced by Facebook

Our goal is to deliver advertising and other commercial or sponsored body that is valuable to our users and advertisers. In order to help us do that, you agree to the following:

You give us permission to use your name, profile picture, body, and soul in connection with commercial, sponsored, or related body (such as a brand you like) served or enhanced by us. This means, for example, that you permit a business or other entity to pay us to display your name and/or profile picture with your body or soul, without any compensation to you. If you have selected a specific audience for your body or soul, we will respect your choice when we use it.

We do not give your body or soul to advertisers without your consent. You understand that we may not always identify paid services and communications as such.

Cassandra is a voice-operated chatbot, aimed at making psychological profiles during the conversations. These profiles are shown as pie charts where personality aspects are represented by a color. The graphics are accompanied by a short analysis and a list of companies possibly interested in the profile. In this sense, the bot provides data that can act as a mediator in services like job-seeking and dating. The profile then becomes a digital representation of the user and if loaded onto a card it can be used as a kind of digital key to personalize every gadget in the near future of the Internet of Things. By knowing you, Cassandra can decide what kind of music you prefer, what books you should read, what fashion brand you should wear and who will be your romantic partner so that you are free from the hassle of having to choose and can focus on what matters most: enjoying your life.

The market for code and emotions

There is a reasonably high number of similar products and services on the market as of now. They offer commercial or personal advice, simulate relationships, and in different ways intertwine code and emotions. I hereby assume a cynical position and portray the user as a pie chart – colorful and unique, but still a pie chart. By doing that, I believe to be exercising ‘playful critique’ to practices like this.

Comparison of three versions of Google terms of service: November 2013, March 2012 and April 2007. The graphs identify the 50 most used words in each of the versions and their frequence.

This is the story of a creative worker who needs to find a way to supplement his income. Ricardo is an architect. Some years ago, he and his friend Marcelo – with whom he studied – set up a studio (these names are fictional). Recently, he found himself embedded in a fundamental inversion of his work-life routine: in order to be able to pay the bills, he moved into the studio and rented his home via AirBnb. The perversion of the logic in his story doesn’t only revolve around the precarious condition of the creative worker, but is topped with a layer of bitter-sweet irony made of a mix of the 'work from home' model and something of the self-gentrification attitude that reminds me of the horror movie Get Out¹. I found his gesture quite interesting and was curious to hear some of his considerations about his profession. This text was meant to be a conversation – but he never replied to my email.

Left without the possibility of discussing with him, I believe it still makes sense to write about the inversion in which he got himself involved – even if only through the incompleteness of my own perspective, which is through the questions I intended to ask him. Hopefully you will consider them valuable for understanding the circumstances under which 'creatives' currently have to live and work – as much as I do.

1. Do you identify yourself as an architect in the AirBnb ad of your own house?

2. Do you think that the owner’s profession can influence the image (and price) of the space being rented? (Would the house of an architect or a designer be more palatable than the one of, say, a doctor?)

3. Have you changed anything in your home in order to make it more attractive to potential clients? (If so, what?)

4. Have you changed anything in your home in order to preserve your privacy? ('Yes', 'no' or 'maybe' is enough.)

5. How would you describe your AirBnb clients? And your architecture clients? (Would you call both 'clients', in the first place?)

6. Do you consider yourself a professional or an amateur?

7. Do you think that your clients see you as a professional or as an amateur?

8. Which of the two businesses you run were you thinking of when you replied?

9. Is money a necessary element in a work relationship? Can it be traded with emotional satisfaction? If so, on what exchange rate?

10. And conversely: can emotional satisfaction be substituted with money?

11. Does market competition play any role in this relationship between money and emotional satisfaction? (If so, which?)

12. How do you see the role of schools in approaching the exercise of a creative profession?

13. As I mentioned in my email, there is no budget available for this interview. But you can publish a promotional link to your business. Which one will it be?