Pervasive Labour Union

Welcome to the 7th issue of the Immaterial Labour Union zine, this time inspired by the trend of ‘Immersive Advertisement’. In an attempt to cope with the ever-engulfing sensorial pool of data which floods as we drown in it, we looked for contributions that could act as an appeal to reason against our ‘smart’ environment. The concept of immersion immediately evokes that of boundaries. Immersive advertisement, they say, lulls us into product gazing through creative storytelling, but might not one consider just as immersive all these companies inhabiting our digital interactions on corporate social media, thus creating a false sense of intimacy? Lee Nutbean invites us all to participate in his collaborative online persona and, in doing so, hopes this social performance of the self will ‘contaminate’ the well oiled machine of personal data economy.
Δεριζαματζορ Προμπλεμ ιναυστραλια remixes an article presenting the new Facebook Canvas, the mobile platform for immersive advertisement, only to make the already-there disturbing qualities glaringly obvious.
Back in May, Roel Roscam Abbing, Femke Snelting and Peggy Pierrot organized a workshop out of which a comment on the proposal to add new emoji modifiers was produced, which we now share and which concerns itself with the “danger of augmenting racist and sexist undertones”. Dmytri Kleiner underlines the insufficiency of going back to early Internet structures of decentralized servers, as cybernetic capital was designed to defeat precisely such attempts. Alternatives must thus be conceived with that in mind.
On her presentation of “Emergenc(i)es: Control and Calculation : Inheriting Liberation : Improvised Publics”¹, an exhibition which took place in June, D-M Withers, the event curator, speculates about the power of ‘resilience’ and improvisation within a growingly scripted society.
Nick Briz shares with us an instruction guide on how to leave Facebook without deleting your account, as doing so is not always the most feasible option for a lot of its users. So how to reach a compromise?

Contributions by:
D-M Withers, Dmytri Kleiner, Femke Snelting, Lee Nutbean, Lídia Pereira, Mathijs van Oosterhoudt, Nick Briz, Peggy Pierrot, Roel Roscam Abbing, Simone Cassiani, Δεριζαματζορ Προμπλεμ ιναυστραλια

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