Pervasive Labour Union

Welcome to the 11th issue of the Pervasive Labour Union zine. This special issue is marked by a substantial name change motivated both by the refusal to obscure the material dimensions of digital labor and by the determination to scrutinize its pervasiveness. Thus, the zine will engage with work's ability to invade, colonize and commodify the realms of public space, leisure, social bonding, affect, intellect etc. More information on the name change can be found in the previous issue.¹

The strategic colonization and commodification of relationships with others and with the self is one of the predominant features of the ‘entreprecariat’ , which is the focus of this issue. The term emerged from the realization that, while an array of diverse forms of precarity (financial, professional, and even existential) is becoming the norm for a growing number of people, so it is the necessity to tackle them entrepreneurially. As witnessed by the emergence of terms like ‘entrepreneurism’, individuals as well as institutions are increasingly urged to think of themselves as brands, companies or startups. Against a backdrop characterized by relentless destabilization, entrepreneurship, the practice of starting and managing a business through risk, turns into entrepreneurialism, a universal doctrine with its own dogmas, martyrs and plans of salvation.

In this special issue we wanted to explore the multiple ways in which entrepreneurial ideas, models and approaches relate to current perceptions of precarity. We had numerous questions in mind, among them: What happens when the rhetoric of technological innovation meets career-oriented self-help literature? How does the cult of Elon Musk or Marissa Mayer and their unlikely sleeping patterns perturb narratives of self-affirmation and professional lifestyles? When does the conscious adoption of the entrepreneurial attitude turn into a mandate? How to articulate the threshold between passion and self-exploitation? What is the role played by technology? How do productivity tools, social media and wellbeing apps transform or intensify the professional government of the self? Finally, is it possible to combine the entrepreneurialist drive with collective expressions of precarity? Or should insecurity itself become a paradoxically stable ground on which to build social cohesion?

The zine includes 22 (!!) contributions coming from different contexts, both in terms of geography (Netherlands, Belarus, US, Italy, just to mention a few) and practice (academic writing, fiction, visual arts and even videogame review). Several contributions tackle the emotional, relational and psychological dimension of entreprecarity, focusing on the micro- and macro-aggressions that take place in work-related environments (Evening Class); the economic exploitation of stress (Katriona Beales); the ennui and caffeinated solitude of the cognitive worker (Phil N/A); the awkwardness of the work-centric first encounter with strangers (François Girard-Meunier), the psychological toll of a not-so-fictional bot-mediated remote freelancing soliloquy (Juliette Cezzar).

Some texts scrutinize the startup world and the field of tech entrepreneurship, specifically the IT universe of Belarus (eeefff); the somehow dadaist newspeak emerging from the innovation and disruption zeitgeist (Olivier Fournout); the eulogy of sacrifice and martyrdom (Priya Prabhakar); the compulsion to come up with business ideas (Melissa Mesku); the self-help propaganda deriving from the mythological lives of tech founders (Dicey Studios).

The zine also includes the other end of the platform spectrum, populated by the masses of gig workers. The contributions document the emerging forms of struggle in the food delivery sector (Jamie Woodcock), alert us of the way in which artistic critique of precarious labor can easily turn into a new entrepreneurial idea (Max Dovey); tell Her-esque tales of love between a gig worker and her monitoring app (Alina Lupu).

Some contributions deal with the impact of technology on work, in particular they look at the increasing capacity to monitor, quantify and enhance workers' activities, be they physical, cognitive, or even emotional (Phoebe Moore); they design new products and sevices to open up alternative futures and speculate about their consequences (Nefula). Precarious conditions and the entrepreneurial attempts to improve them also affect space, be that at the level of home or the city. So, we read about architects who rent their house via AirBnB while living in their studio (Lucia Dossin) and of buildings whose function is as precarious as the freelancers who inhabit them (Giacomo Boffo).

The zine also investigates the meaning and the role of the artist in an increasingly destabilized social context. The romantic image of the fully autonomous artist working in their studio is here challenged, especially in a moment when its premise of independence is being extended to the working population at large (Martine Folkersma). While the worker starts behaving like an artist, the artist is in turn pushed to outsource all the facets of their practice, thus behaving as a manager or an entrepreneur (Anxious to Make).

In conclusion, the zine calls attention to means of breaking the spell of entrepreneurialism, such as a series of videogames about the dullness and dystopian character of contemporary digital and entrepreneurial labor (Gui Machiavelli); a deconstruction of the 'tyranny of methods' of pervasive optimization techniques (Michael Dieter); and finally, a proposal for collectivized counterbehavior in place of economically exploitable behavioral coherence (Lídia Pereira).

Contributions by:
François Girard-Meunier, Katriona Beales, Evening Class, Phil N/A, Juliette Cezzar, Dicey Studios, eeefff, Olivier Fournout, Priya Prabhakar, Melissa Mesku, Jamie Woodcock, Max Dovey, Alina Lupu, Phoebe Moore, Nefula, Giacomo Boffo, Lucia Dossin, Martine Folkersma, Anxious to Make, Gui Machiavelli, Michael Dieter, Lídia Pereira

All contributions to the zine, unless otherwise specified, are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.3².

Bea Fremderman, Kafka Office (2013)

The use of mobile phone testifies the way in which cognitive work has slipped out its canonical environment --the office-- to become an uninterrupted presence in our lives. Work that exists both as actuality (the email we're replying to) and as potentiality(the red badge notifying that there are still emails to read). Clearly, there have been some antecedents, such as the laptop and, before that, the desktop computer. Even with the telephone, work outside the office was possible. However, the mobile phone represents a qualitative shift since it radicalizes the mobility and ubiquity of work.

Not only digital devices have brought work in our homes, bags and pockets, but they have also multiplied the types of work that we do: we do marketing and PR for ourselves and for our products, we administer our weekly or monthly schedule, we set meetings, reset passwords, and so on. After all this peripheral work, our actual job can begin. We're hyperemployed¹, as Ian Bogost puts it.

The French Socialist Party has recently attempted to fight the "digital burnout" caused by overtime work and exacerbated by peripheral work. The main idea is to grant workers the right not to access their company's email address after the official working hours. Socialist MP Benoit Hamon maintains² that "employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work. They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash - like a dog." Although a positive conversation starter about digital work, the "right to disconnect" law doesn't take into account the fact that contemporary workers do work overtime, often willingly but also inevitably, as peripheral work is almost unescapable. Since work is now both internalized and generalized, any kind of regulation that is not anticipated by a cultural shift is doomed to fail.

Work has crossed several boundaries: the spatial one (where we work), the professional one (the kind of work we do), and finally the imperative one (who demands this work). For the time being, I would like to focus on the spatial dimension and ask: how does the use of digital devices shape the space around nomadic workers? In which ways are cafes, hotel rooms, means of transportations, libraries converted into informal spaces of work? How do laptops, tablets and smartphones determine the way we inhabit them? Do these code/spaces³, as Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge call them, serve the same functions offered by the office? During the 1960s, Mario Tronti noticed that the factory was spilling out into the city. Nowadays, the factory society is turning into an office society.

An obvious consideration comes to mind: informal work spaces are suppliers in the first place. They offer the main utilities needed by the nomadic cognitive worker: electricity and internet connection. Go to a café and you will see people scanning the blackboards in search of the wifi password. Walk through an airport and you will meet passengers connected to the power grid through the umbilical cord of their chargers.

"Is That an Office In Your Pocket?"⁴, asks Micha Kaufman, CEO of the Fiverr. For now, the answer seems to be "no". The idea that a single digital device is enough to carry out any possible task is still delusional: laptops, tablets, e-readers and smartphones coexist (not to speak of blocknotes, printed books, pens, pencils, etc). Because of this multiplicity, workers are particularly careful when they have to choose the equipment to carry devices, peripherals and other instruments.

This is why there are several crowdfunding campaigns promoting the ultimate backpack for work and life, like SOLO⁵, both water resistant and compliant to carry-on baggage regulations, thanks to which you'll "travel happier and be more productive". Or Lifepack⁶, which is solar powered, divided into a "workzone" and a "lifezone" and provided with bluetooth speakers. Its creators claim to have "re-invented the mobile office". Lifepack's crowdfunding goal was $20.000, in the end it raised more than $600.000. Apparently, the primary extension of the nomadic digital worker is not the device, but the backpack.

Luxafor light indicator

The spaces we inhabit have a relational component: they affect, and are in turn affected, by the people who experience them and by their interactions. Our devices do the same: digital technology is creating new social rituals related, among other things, to the notion of busyness (caveat: this is not to say that "all this technology is making us antisocial"). Busyness is even codified into specialized devices, like a traffic light⁷ that turns red when someone is busy. However, even without this light indicator, one can convey the same message by simply wearing headphones, that perhaps aren't emitting any sound.

Google San Francisco. Photo: Scott Beale⁸

The actual office is in turn morphing into an amusement park. It increasingly incorporates facilities for relaxation, entertainment and sociability: take a nap in the pod, call your wife from the private conversation room, play table tennis with your colleagues, have a Mohito at the free bar before going home. In the days of Tronti, the faith in the advent of a soon-to-be "leisure society" was common. This prediction turned out to be somehow correct: some of us live in a leisure society, but one in which leisure has been subsumed by work. Independent workers and freelancers who long for these social functions are welcome to rent a spot in coworking spaces, often filled with propaganda about sharing ideas and having fun while working. In one of these, I once saw a missile (or was it a submarine?) with a big label saying "everybody must like everybody".

Certain routines like lunch break are semi-rigidly regulated by the office. Generally speaking, office life is split into a series of diverse periods of time, it has interruptions. On the contrary, work performed within the digital environment is uniform, seamless. So, the administration of time carried out by the employer is now delegated to apps. Although, there is a difference, both in tone and intimacy: apps now tell us to drink water, to go to sleep or to stand up every 15 minutes. By adopting an informal, friendly language, they resemble a nanny or a mom, rather than a supervisor.

Waterlogged app

While the office is continuously present throughout the city and within the computer, no genuine continuity is granted to the worker, no reliable routine, no control: damn, the cafè is full today and the wifi password just changed... Hey wait, why was my favorite spot replaced with these uncomfortable stools? The zones inhabited by the nomadic worker are temporary but not autonomous. We briefly squat them for energy, connection and the faint feeling of being part of a social group. Like urban sherpas, we carry our devices with us, devices meant to empower us. But if we think of the endless quest for a plug, it looks like we are the ones literally empowering them. We become the extensions of media.

Eric De Nijs (2008)

In 1969, Austrian architect Hans Hollein conceived the Mobile Büro, a portable inflatable office enclosed in a suitcase. In the promotional video (the project was realized for a TV show), we see a small aircraft landing. Together with another man, Hollein walks towards a green field where he inflates his office and can eventually work, equipped only with a phone and a drawing board. Finally, creative workers can now do their job wherever and whenever they like. This is what autonomy and self-sufficiency look like. But this apparently autonomous structure clearly reveals the profound dependence of the worker, who looks almost like a fetus inside the uterus. Acccording to Andreas Rumpfhuber⁹ -- to which this text owes much -- Hollein was very strategic about his personal brand. He was an entrepreneur, an "idea man". Given the chance, would he have launched a crowdfunding campaign to mass-produce his Mobile Büro?

Hans Hollein, Mobiles Büro (1969)

While the traditional office dissolves into computers and informal semi-public spaces, people begin to idealize it. This is how office nostalgia emerges, with its romantic idea of the cubicle, the daily chats in front of the coffee machine, and the joky complicity among colleagues. In this perspective, the office is seen as a symbol of authority meant to be mocked by employees. An instance of office nostalgia is the Generic Office Roleplay Public Group¹⁰ on Facebook, where users simply replicate the typical bureaucratic confabulation you would expect from Microsoft in its heyday. Another case in point is Smash the Office, a mobile game which seems to take inspiration from the cult 1995 movie Office Space and the numerous "office rage" YouTube videos. Here, the player needs to smash as many PCs, desks, plants, chairs as they can. This is the expression of rage left to nomadic workers, because what else could they possibly destroy, the closest Starbucks?

Smash the office

“The flip side of positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility: if your business fails or your job is eliminated, it must be because you didn’t try hard enough, didn’t believe firmly enough in the inevitability of your success.” (Barbara Ehrenreich, 2009)

What’s the recipe of success? According to the dominant, yet invisible ideology (did anyone say “neoliberalism”?), all the necessary ingredients can be found and cultivated inside of the individual. The most important one of which is, to a great extent, attitude: if you really want it, you can and must have it. If the individual is all that matters, what’s the role of the outside world? The world is no less than your oyster, of course.

We are the 99%

When success is the direct result of attitude, positive thinking becomes instrumental to it: you can’t get it if you aren’t optimistic about getting it. A positive attitude is therefore one of the main assets of the entrepreneurial self, for whom any innate or acquired ability — both physical and intellectual — is converted into human capital. In turn, ‘negativity’ — be that sarcasm or critique — is considered unacceptable. In a society where relationships are often the very product of work, naysayers are seen as a threat, even when they’re right. The definition of “naysayer” confirms this common sentiment.

Despite a general feeling that things were going well, a few naysayers tried to cast gloom.

AccelerateMe.net header

While negativity is stigmatized, depression and anxiety disorder are growing worldwide. Instead of trying to change the external conditions that cause distress, people are increasingly required to modify the operation of their minds, to ‘mood-hack’ in order to change their own interpretation of events and personal contingencies. In order to accomplish this, many research efforts are currently put in the fields of positive psychology and motivational literature, which often mix cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and mindfulness techniques.

Scheme of MoodGym app's WUTIWUF (What You Think is What You Feel) strategy

The fundamental logic of cognitive-behavioral therapy is that one should influence the interpretation of thoughts rather than the reasons why these thoughts emerged. Similarly, mindfulness techniques allows practitioners to detach from their own selves in order to ‘visualize’ thoughts and feelings without judgment. In both cases, the person is asked to internalize the rigorous management of emotions. Filtering out social dynamics, both methodologies are conceived for the individual and can be packaged as self-help remedies, leading to an abundance of online services and apps offering exercises and tutorials, but also mood monitoring and anxiety tests. In several cases, these tools are promoted as solutions to the stress caused by multi-tasking and the fatigues of digital interactions, that is, the very symptoms that characterize the daily routine of the entrepreneurial self.

Time cover, February 3, 2014

Every day a push notification appears on my iPhone. It’s the app Pacifica asking me: how are you feeling?

This article was originally published here: http://networkcultures.org/makingpublic/2019/05/20/federated-publishing/

A public conversation on federated publishing took place during the lunch break of the final day of the Urgent Publishing¹ conference. Florian Cramer, reader in 21st Century Visual Culture/Autonomous Practices at Willem de Kooning Academy, asked Roel Roscam Abbing a few questions on federated networks, their origin, and their techno-social implementation.

Roel Roscam Abbing is a researcher and artist who works on networks, infrastructures and the politics that inform them. He’s a founding member of varia², a space for developing collective approaches to everyday technology located in Charlois (Rotterdam). Varia hosts and employs a series of federated networks, such as one based on XMPP³, an open standard for messaging.

Cramer and Roscam Abbing started by explaining what is a federated network and why it matters nowadays. Federation allows diverse entities to preserve some internal rules while still being able to communicate with each other. In this way they are able to maintain a certain degree of autonomy. Roscam Abbing pointed out that federation is not new, email and the web being old examples of it which are still in use. However, in a landscape characterized by an increasingly vicious centralization and by users’ growing awareness of their needs and the limitations of generalist platforms, federation acquires new meaning and relevance.

The subject of the conversation then became Mastodon⁴, a Twitter-like federated social medium. Unlike Twitter, Mastodon is comprised of multiple community-owned “instances”, that can define their own rules, modify user interface, etc. Mastodon itself is part of a bigger network called the Fediverse⁵, which includes different applications (such as the older GNU Social⁶ or the recent PeerTube⁷) that are able to communicate with each other thanks to underlying federation protocols such as ActivityPub or OStatus.

Roscam Abbing is one of the admins of a Mastodon instance called post.lurk.org and dedicated to media, free software and the politics of technology. Post.lurk.org currently hosts 129 users and is invite-only (you can get in touch with the admins on https://talk.lurk.org/). Roscam Abbing explained Mastodon stands in a too a long tradition of projects that reimplement the features of proprietary applications but in free and open source software. Mastodon initially emerged as a fork of GNU Social and was driven by a dissatisfaction towards social media like Twitter. Particularly in the wake of silencing techniques and the harassment campaigns that went through the hashtag #gamergate and the election of Trump. The urgency was that of modifying the software stack and to build organizational techniques to create safe spaces for targeted communities.

In order to join Mastodon, a user needs to pick up an instance, which might be confusing at first given the sheer diversity among the existing ones. Picking one instances doesn’t mean you can’t communicate with other ones, however. They do however form their own distinct communities with rules and guidelines. Roscam Abbing highlighted the presence of code of conducts on many of these instances as well as shared customs, such as stating one’s pronouns in their bio. These codes of conducts are meant to communicate to potential visitors on what that community considers (un)acceptable behaviour.

In this respect, Cramer remarked that safe space doesn’t necessarily mean progressive or left-leaning, but it can also be a zone that purposefully breeds far-right sentiments and ideas. From this point of view, Mastodon can be seen as “the perfect technology for distributing a troll farm”. In fact federated social media share a common ground with the interests of a subset of 4chan users, in particularly the board /g/ where free software and alternatives to commercial media are often discussed and promoted. Similarly interest in these networks can also be linked to cyberlibetarianism.

There are several ways to preserve a sense of safety within an instance. For example, other servers can be silenced (users will still be able to get their content in their personal timeline) or fully blocked, in a process called ‘defederating’. Roscam Abbing pointed out that defederating caused quite a stir among inhabitants of the fediverse, as it goes against the principle of openness and unlimited interconnection that are the hallmark of web and free software ideology. One way to motivate the implementation of silencing and blocking at the instance level can be summarized as “we don’t have to read your bullshit”.

“If silencing and blocking is possible, isn’t there the risk of creating the equivalent of an organic supermarket, of elitism, of leaving the territory unguarded?”, asked Florian Cramer, suggesting that it is important to “stay with the trouble”. Roel’s response was that federated networks and proprietary platforms are not mutually exclusive. However, the safe spaces provided by a specific instance allow to strategize and to produce a different techno-social imagination.

The issue of privacy was also raised by Cramer, who spoke of synchronization while being reminded of ⁸. Roscam Abbing clarified that privacy on Mastodon shouldn’t be understood in the classical sense of a private communication channel as it doesn’t implement any end-to-end encryption. This is because Mastodon has been conceptualized as a publishing platform where most messages are publicly readable. This makes Cambridge Analyitica-style mining is still possible. It also means that direct messages can be potentially read by admins, just like on the major commercial platforms.

Cramer and Abbing discussed the “composition” of the people involved in a project like Mastodon: not necessarily male engineers rooted in computer science but often designers and media people with a particular attention to user interface (Mastodon looks much better than the average free software project) as well as communities typically underrepresented in free software development such as people of color, queer, etc.

The questions from the audience revolved around the notion of governance. Roscam Abbing responded that the development of the project is currently based on the “benevolent dictator” model, as the creator of Mastodon has the power to take final decisions (in fact there have been Mastodon fork-tryouts, where the main focus has been a different form of governance). Furthermore, not all labour that goes in the project is acknowledged: work that is not code is often rendered invisible. This has lead to disenfranchisement from queer and POC communities that in the early stages contributed a lot to the platform. One of the most interesting spaces to understand where Mastodon is going is the issue tracker⁹: this is where plenty of users, not necessarily developers, request, discuss, and criticize features.