Abstract

superconductr’s research is concerned with the political economy of digital platform labour, and how this is connected to issues of power, subjectivity, liquidity and extraction. On-demand work distributed through digital platforms is a relatively recent phenomenon, and represents the latest stage of changes in relations between capital and labour towards increased outsourcing and precarisation, which serve to further widen the power imbalance between capital and labour. These developments are accompanied by a set of ideological operations that construct an imaginary of the figure of the worker as entrepreneur and micro-capitalist themselves, in a permanent state of competition against others. Much of this ideological construct was originally derived from an idealised and reductionist image of the artist as entrepreneur, but this has by now been stripped of any pretences towards allowing for expression of creativity or personal fulfilment, which instead have been replaced by crude celebrations of social Darwinism and self-exploitation to the point of exhaustion. superconductr’s research employs artistic interventions that use digital labour platforms as the medium with which to produce artworks that propose forms of critical engagement with the same platforms. These interventions have had to be adapted to the different possibilities for interaction offered by each platform and its specific ways of facilitating the buying and selling of labour, and at times have run up against restrictions put in place for a particular platform’s use. Thus the interventions can to some extent also be seen as probes for testing what kinds of critical or resistant flows can be inserted into or extracted from platforms that are highly restricted and closely monitored.

Workers Never Leaving the Factory

The film Workers leaving the Lumière factory in Lyon (1895) by the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière is forty-five seconds long and shows the roughly one hundred workers at the factory for photographic goods in Lyon-Montplaisir leaving the factory through two gates and exiting the frame to both sides.1

This is how Harun Farocki begins his essay on his film Workers leaving the factory (1995); in both of which the artist reflects on depictions of the space in front of the factory in cinema. The factory here is a distinct, bounded space where production happens: a space which, according to Farocki, rarely appears in narrative film. One of the reasons he gives for this is the fact that the minutiae of industrial production, with their hierarchically organised and fragmented work flow “which demands few decisions of the individual and which leaves him sic little room to manoeuvre”, and their monotonous, repetitive movements enforced by the division of industrial labour, are not particularly conducive to filmic depiction.2 Even the space in front of the factory gates often only appears at the beginning or end of a narrative. The part of life that is the stuff of cinema happens elsewhere: “most narrative films take place in that part of life where work has been left behind.”3 The factory gates themselves appear here as the boundary that separates the place of work from the places where the rest of life happens.

In post-industrial societies, this distinction between work and life has become increasingly blurred. Work has dispersed into what Italian operaismo thinker Mario Tronti has called the “social factory”. Rather than being confined to a clearly delineated time and space, work can happen at any time and any place. The same goes for the kinds of tasks that count as work. In the earlier Fordist/Taylorist mode of production, workers performed tasks that were precisely defined for maximum efficiency by engineers, strictly monitored for maximum profitability by management, and numbingly repetitive for the workers carrying them out. In post-Fordist times, any activity can potentially count as work—viewed from the perspective of the subject: what used to be socialising is now also networking, going to a museum also builds one’s cultural capital, posting on social media translates into “influence” and builds one’s personal profile, and from the perspective of capital, virtually any activity on the Internet leaves a data trail that is mined by multiple companies. These are only a few examples of a state of affairs where “the subject gives over his or her whole being to the waking part of the production/reproduction cycle” and, by extension, to the creation of value.4 The kind of work that is discussed in this article—on-demand labour mediated through digital platforms—is an area where this expansion and proliferation of work into all aspects of life is particularly explicit.

Farocki raises another issue relevant here when he links the observation and recording of factory gates that is performed by the Lumières’ camera to the position later taken by surveillance cameras equipped with motion detectors in order to safeguard private property, cameras facing “walls, fences, warehouses, roofs, or yards.”5 In some of his later works, including Prison Images (2000), I Thought I was Seeing Convicts (2000), the Eye/Machine trilogy (2000-2003), and Counter-Music (2004), Farocki expanded on this theme. Particularly in relation to the latter two, he referred to the category of operational images: “pictures, made neither to entertain nor to inform. … These are images that do not represent an object, but rather are part of an operation” and they are often made for the purposes of being analysed by a computer algorithm rather than to be seen by human eyes.6 This use of images draws links between the deskilling of industrial labour where the knowledge of workers is incorporated into machines, and the ways in which “the human eye … has been relegated, in line with the automation of surveillance via automatic-recognition systems, to ‘appendages of the apparatus.’”7

In Farocki’s Erkennen und Verfolgen (2003), a single-channel video based on Eye/Machine, computer algorithms can be seen to be fed detailed 3D scans of architectural features such as bridges, synthetic landscape images, or wire-frame models of objects to be identified. These models appear to have been custom-made to represent particular spaces or objects. Since the time of production of the Farocki works under discussion, how this technology operates has shifted significantly. The amount of available visual data to be fed into computer vision algorithms has increased remarkably, for one. But data in its raw state is material that needs to be cleaned and refined before it can be used by an algorithm in a meaningful way, and the work of preparing images for the purpose of training computer vision algorithms is at least in part carried out by humans.8 The humans involved in this process are engaged in a contemporary derivative form of assembly-line work, which, like its original incarnation, tends to be poorly paid, low-skilled, repetitive and alienating. These are the workers who prepare images and datasets to be fed into artificial intelligence algorithms, to help these algorithms learn to detect visual patterns in images.

A widespread method of finding workers to complete these kinds of tasks is to hire them through on-demand labour platforms. On-demand work distributed through digital platforms is a relatively recent phenomenon and represents the latest stage of changes in relations between capital and labour towards increased outsourcing and precarisation. Through on-demand platforms it is possible to hire a worker for a single, potentially minuscule, task, and then fire them again as soon as the task is completed. Platforms tend to present themselves as matchmakers between buyers and sellers of labour power, and enforce some rules to ensure that transactions happen with some degree of reliability and as frictionless as possible. Through specific protocols, the platforms as well as the buyers who use them attempt to shield themselves from any responsibilities towards workers enshrined in labour law, and instead apply a set of rules set privately and unilaterally by platform operators.

Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) is the first online platform of this kind. It emerged out of an internal company project tasked with developing a solution for managing the proliferating range of products sold on Amazon’s e-commerce website. The issue was that algorithms were not capable of detecting duplicates in the product listings, so Amazon engineers created a website that allowed for these checks to be carried out by people for a small fee on their own computers.9 AMT itself was launched in 2005, and since then it has been functioning as a marketplace where these kinds of services are available to be purchased by outside companies. On AMT, requesters post cognitive tasks that usually consist of simple, standardised actions that have been parcelled out from more complex operations, also called microtasks. These are tasks that algorithms are not able to complete, and Amazon calls this aspect of humans performing quasi-algorithmic functions, this assemblage of human labour power being called up through computer code, “artificial artificial intelligence”.10 The submitted work feeds into pattern recognition algorithms and neural networks, that will eventually make this human input redundant altogether, as a final step in the process of incorporating the skills employed by these workers into technology. Thus, work on microtasking platforms such as AMT involves what Vili Lehdonvirta describes as “deskilling and codification: breaking tasks into small parts and formalising them, making interdependencies so simple to manage as to no longer require workers to have strong ties to each other, to the employer, or to the end-client.”11 Indeed, there is no direct interaction between buyer and seller on AMT: tasks can be created with a few lines of code or through an online requester interface, while the worker interface shows a list of available tasks, which can be selected, completed and the result submitted through the website.

 

You Can Check out Any Time You Like, but You Can Never Leave

superconductr’s video Workers leaving the cloud factory (2017-2018) connects the Lumière brothers’ film, Farocki’s visual and textual analysis, and the contemporary reserve army of on-demand platform workers who are employed to act as “appendages of the apparatus”.12 For Workers leaving the cloud factory, workers on AMT, and, after the closure of superconductr’s AMT account (more on which below) on the platform Microworkers, were paid US$ 2.50 each to film themselves leaving the place where they work.


superconductr, Workers leaving the cloud factory, 2017-2018, HD video

One of the questions that motivate the project is how to represent a workforce that is dispersed and atomised, humans who are working at their data machines, whose labour can be mobilised with a few lines of code coming from a requester. The Lumière brothers’ film has given rise to a long succession of reworkings and reinterpretations, including Farocki’s, which was itself followed on by his collaborations with Antje Ehmann in Labour in a Single Shot (2011-2014) and Workers Leaving their Workplaces in 15 Cities (2014), or Andrew Norman Wilson’s Workers leaving the Googleplex (2011). This seemed like a good point of departure to reflect on continuities as well as breaks in how labour power is bought and sold under different regimes of capitalism.

The videos that have been purchased show workers in a range of settings—living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, offices, shops, cafes—and one aspect that is striking is that even with all of these playing simultaneously, the soundtrack is eerily sparse. Chairs creak, fans spin, footsteps, doors open and close—these are the kinds of sounds one only notices when alone. This throws into sharp relief the atomisation that is part and parcel of this kind of work. In the Lumières’ film, as observed by Farocki, the concerted emergence of the workers through the gates “produces the image of a work force”.13 Notwithstanding the alienation that is also inherent in factory work and the fact that “immediately after the workers hurry past the gate, they disperse to become individual people”, the spatial proximity of workers in a factory building carries with it the potential to organise for collective action.14 In Workers leaving the cloud factory, on the other hand, the workers appear from the outset as separate, dispersed. There is no space shared with others where collective organising can easily develop, and the only spaces where workers congregate to find mutual support are online forums such as MTurk Crowd, TurkerView or MTurk Forum. Some forms of organising have, however, appeared through these virtual connections, with the involvement of both platform workers and academic researchers. The Turkopticon and TurkerView browser plugins, for example, allow workers to rate requesters who post work on AMT, so users of these plugins can accept tasks from requesters who are known to pay fair rates and avoid those requesters who abuse the power they wield over workers, for example through refusing to accept a worker’s submission and thus denying payment for completed work.

Another issue brought into play here is related to the phenomenon of the social factory discussed earlier, where more and more kinds of activities are being drawn into potential profit generation, and work itself has spilled out from the factory into society at large. The cloud factory presents an acceleration and intensification of this process. Here work can be carried out almost anywhere and at any time; all that is needed is a computer or mobile phone, an Internet connection and a user account. Like the quasi-metaphysical entity known as “the cloud” itself, the cloud factory is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, extending into a time and space where the boundaries between work and life have collapsed.

Earnings on AMT are usually very low: the typical payment for a single task ranges from 1 US$ cent to a few dollars. One driver behind the growth of this and other kinds of hyper-precarious and underpaid work has been a lack in better earning opportunities after the 2008 financial crisis.15 While debates around the problematics associated with this precarisation of labour have been going on among activists, journalists, academics and others since at least the 1990s, different kinds of discourses have also emerged; ones that aim to conjure up more alluring and enchanting imaginaries of working at the margins of survivability. These are discourses that, in a narrow sense, promote the folklore of entrepreneurial heroism that underpins the ideological apparatus of tech start-up capitalism to the very people whose labour power forms the raw material that is being turned into a resource for extraction. More widely, these discourses form a backdrop that governs the production of subjectivity under neo-liberalism: the self as enterprise.

You Might Be A Doer

YOU EAT A COFFEE FOR LUNCH.
YOU FOLLOW THROUGH ON
YOUR FOLLOW THROUGH. SLEEP
DEPRIVATION IS YOUR DRUG OF
CHOICE. YOU MIGHT BE A DOER.16

Haughty face, sunken eyes, dishevelled hair. The woman is looking straight at the camera, from behind black eyeliner, her jawbones accentuated by stark lighting. The expression on her face shows both exhaustion and determination, a resolve to not be impeded by any obstacle that might cross her path, and obstacles she’s faced a few. This is a woman on a mission. She knows what she needs to do and she does it, whatever it takes. She could be a revolutionary, consumed by that discontent that can grow into a collective outburst and overthrow an existing order; she might be an artist, relishing in her unwavering commitment to surmount any hurdle to realising her vision, her project, inadvertently also embodying the model of being for a new order of work; or she might simply be a doer.17

The text and visual outlined above form one of the core images of a poster advertising campaign by the online platform Fiverr.com, where workers offer “gigs”—small jobs to be completed remotely, ranging from design services to long-distance spiritual healing—for a fee of US$ 5 or multiples thereof.18 The video spot accompanying the poster campaign strikes a similar chord: cut at rapid pace, we see the world from the view of a parade of young upstart entrepreneurs: elbowing her way through a night club crowd to field a call to China from a toilet cubicle; at a meeting of suited office drones in a bland steel-and-glass office, launching a chainsaw attack on a whiteboard; answering a call from a customer while making love (“Woo the customer. Schmooze the customer” the voiceover intimates just before); facing off with sharks in suits, with death, the “gurus”, the “trust fund kids”, the “tech bros”. The breathless voiceover intones: “Promote it. Promote the crap out of it. Cancel the brainstorm. The only one who can do this is you and your power to get shit done. … Above all, and this is important: do. Because thinking big is still just thinking.”19

What is striking about the campaign as a whole is its misanthropic tone cheerfully glorifying self-abuse, celebrating an existence that basically consists in working yourself to death while loving every second of it, a tone which, in any case, is likely to have been deliberate precisely because of its shock value, its potential to generate controversy and thus increase publicity impact. What should perhaps be even more startling than this is the way that the campaign has been described by some of the main actors involved in its creation. As Doug Cameron, CCO of DCX, the advertising agency behind the project, explains: “We decided to … take a more punk rock approach to entrepreneurship, so it’ll be more rebellious.”20 Fiverr founder and CEO Micha Kaufman, for his part, celebrates the age of what he calls the “lean entrepreneur”, who is “asked to do more with less, working longer hours with more competition for the same opportunity.” Thus, the human in the age of Fiverr is a “Doer”: “We’re the ones who get it done. … We know success is earned not through talk, but through action. … Keep hustling and keep grinding each day to make it more productive than the last.”21 In an article titled “Is that an office in your pocket?” Kaufman envisages a future populated by globe-trotting solopreneurs, always available for work through their mobile devices.22

What we are witnessing here is not just a kind of exile from irony, combined with a glib eulogy to a vision of society suffused by breakneck competition to the point of exhaustion. There is another layer here, which consists in the deliberate (while still to some extent unconscious) construction of a new kind of subjectivity, or, at the very least, the radicalisation of certain kinds of subjectivities whose construction has been long underway. This subject is one for whom entrepreneurial precarity, economic Darwinism, self-exploitation (which then normalises exploitation of others) are not only perfectly natural; they are celebrated, glorified as subversive, as ways of being rebellious. The subject that emerges from this frenzy of hustling for the sake of it, is, as it were, one of pure affect, or pure drive, pure energy of some sort, flattened into a conduit crisscrossed by different currents—gig streams, earnings streams, personal brand streams, customer feedback streams, usage data streams, etc.—each of which is also a source of revenue to be tapped into by whoever controls the platform, the machinic assemblage, that each of these streams connects up to and passes through: a superconductor.

Beyond Doing, Nothing

Work hard dream big (2017) can, to some extent, be understood as a response to the rather nefarious advertising campaign described above. To put it in this campaign’s very own terms, this project has, at least in part, to do with how to not give a shit about this boundless drive to “get shit done” that forms one of the core concerns of the campaign, with offering a retort to Fiverr’s promotional materials and their glorification of self-exploitation, through correspondingly straightforward means of communication that lay out their position in fairly unambiguous terms. But beyond the unmistakable gesture of refusal performed, a number of other issues are brought into play that relate to different aspects of subjectivity and that are mobilised through neo-liberal regimes of digital platform labour, and different modes of critique that are proposed in response to these.

Superconductr - Work hard dream big 2.jpg
superconductr, Work hard dream big, 2017, screen grab

The process of creating this gig involved first of all registering a user profile on Fiverr, which is “Wrkharddreambig”—this was the maximum letter count available for the purpose, where one letter had to be deleted from the title of the project when choosing the username. While this was not something planned beforehand, but a decision made out of necessity, this operation does evoke the often mangled spelling found in the names of new Internet start-ups, which presumably serves the purpose of being able to secure a simple and recognisable URL for the company website, but which at the same time has become its own stylistic device, signalling membership of the fast-paced, high-risk and high-reward world of start-up culture. This phenomenon is an instance where the machinic realm—imposing certain techno-linguistic restrictions or in making certain linguistic transfigurations necessary in order to achieve certain ends, such as having a unique and simple URL—can be seen to be intervening directly at the level of language and style. Effects created by machine code, combined with economic considerations, spill over into the realm of semantic representation and become a formative element in certain cultural markers.

The title chosen for the gig is “Do Nothing For 23 Minutes And 2 Seconds”. The “I Will” that can be seen preceding the title is something that the Fiverr website adds of its own accord to every listing, presumably to encourage a positive, proactive, can-do attitude when devising a gig. Yet the offer proposed here, to be doing nothing whatsoever for a set amount of time, evidently stands in direct contradiction to this creed of compulsory enthusiastic productivity, instead opting for a refusal of participation in the same. But the service proposed here could also be read differently, acknowledging the fact that this offer of doing nothing contains its own productive potential, even (although not exclusively) on neo-liberal terms. To begin, the notion of setting aside time to do nothing evokes certain contemporary desires and movements for deceleration, for a state of being in the moment, focused on one’s own existence there and then, temporarily removed from the stresses wrought by securing one’s survival in a world of pervasive competition. This longing for respite can be seen as a necessary corollary of living under neo-liberalism, and has led to the emergence of a market of commodified offerings of self-care, such as wellness, mindfulness, meditation or yoga retreats. In relation to this, the service offered in this gig could be interpreted as a temporary withdrawal of the subject from the anxieties of working under neo-liberal capitalism, thus representing an act of self-care emblematic of how under neo-liberalism even wider socio-economic issues are seen to require individual solutions, adjustments of the person to a given state of affairs instead of any collective demands for a change in the conditions that have brought about this situation in the first place. On the other hand, this gig could also be understood as an offering to perform this withdrawal from activity in someone else’s stead, someone, perhaps, who simply does not manage to allocate enough time to carry this out themselves, but who might expect some benefit from the simple knowledge that another person was entering a state of uninterrupted immobility in lieu of them. It follows that, at least hypothetically, even this extended moment of relief and recovery from stress could be something that could be outsourced to someone else and sold as a commodity.

The photo used to promote the gig was taken, like many a fabled founding milestone of some budding start-up that is destined to become part of its future folklore, in the artist’s bedroom, with the artist as the subject in the image. The cardboard box that covers the figure’s head was lovingly customised with crudely taped-on printouts of images featuring various entrepreneurial slogans, which were sourced through online searches: “Mind of an entrepreneur”, “Work smarter not harder”, “I do not need a drill. I need a hole in the wall”, etc. One of these slogans, not visible in the photo because it adorns another side of the box, is “Work hard, dream big”, which in its alluringly condensed simplicity was chosen as the title for this project. The T-shirt the figure is wearing is emblazoned with the famous phrase repeatedly uttered by Hermann Melville’s literary character Bartleby, who obstinately refuses to perform any of the work he is asked to do by his employer: “I would prefer not to”. Bartleby’s job is that of a copyist/clerk in a nineteenth-century lawyer’s office on Wall Street, and the mundane and atomised tasks he is asked to perform, but doggedly refuses to, can also be seen as exemplary for the kinds of administrative tasks that have come to dominate work in post-industrial societies.23 The figure wears a smart jacket over the T-shirt, to signal membership of the professional, business-oriented class of workers.

Finally, the description accompanying the gig listing reads:

I will do nothing for 23 minutes and 2 seconds. This is equivalent to the amount of time $5 (minus Fiverr and PayPal fees) buy at minimum wage where I live. Video evidence of myself doing nothing for 23 minutes and 2 seconds will be sent to you.

This gig comes with a number of FREE extras:

  • FREE: The time it took me to create my profile and this gig
  • FREE: Holiday pay
  • FREE: Sick pay
  • FREE: Editing and uploading video
  • FREE: Time and money spent on work uniform.

You ONLY pay for the time I will actually be doing nothing, that’s it.

This is the part of the image where a more detailed, and also quite straightforward, critique of conditions prevalent in digital platform labour is put forward. The promise to work for exactly the amount of time covered by the local minimum wage highlights the fact that poor earnings are rife in this field. In fact, there are numerous reports about workers on digital platforms whose earnings turn out to be significantly below the minimum wage applicable in the place where they live.24 On the other hand, the very exact determination of time allocated to the performance of the task draws on the fact that it is very common practice among freelance workers to dedicate however much time ends up being needed to a task, regardless of eventual average hourly earnings. Here, this kind of practice is pre-emptively foreclosed. Finally, the list of “free extras” includes many aspects of free labour performed or labour protections covered on a regular basis by workers on digital labour platforms, as well as by freelance workers in general. These are all elements that need to be in place before one can even begin to enter the realm of potentially paid work, yet drawing attention to these is antithetical to the image of the hustling and bustling “Doer”, always enthusiastic, available and ready for whatever gig might receive a purchase order.

superconductr - Work hard dream big 4.jpg
superconductr, Work hard dream big, 2017, oil on canvas

The offer quickly fell foul of Fiverr’s internal orderlies and was deleted from public view three days after it was posted, and since then it has been languishing in the hidden abode of the “denied gigs” section of Wrkharddreambig’s user profile. However, the visual assemblage that has been created in the process through a collaboration between Fiverr’s coders and graphic designers on the one hand and superconductr on the other, still continues its public existence as a screen grab, which was eventually also given a more material form: with the help of a few emails sent to Meisheng Oil Painting Manufacture Co. in Xiamen, China, and at a cost of US$ 155 including delivery, the screen grab was transformed into a hand-crafted oil painting created by one or several anonymous painters whose daily labour consists of reproducing images in oil on canvas, quite likely in assembly line-like conditions. This transubstantiation of the image from the digital to the material realm points towards the fact that many aspects of the labour relations put into force by digital platforms are not necessarily unique, but exist in different variations in other regimes of labour.

superconductr – Doing and nothingness 2.jpg
superconductr, Doing and nothingness, 2018, HD video

Further investigation has shown that there are frequent appearances of other sellers on Fiverr who propose to do nothing for US$ 5. In a similar vein to Work hard dream big, these offers function as acts of non-participation in the credo of compulsory entrepreneurial productivity proclaimed by the company, still from the view of the platform they amount to no more than a little extra noise in the system. Fiverr eventually deletes these offers when they are detected by humans policing what is offered for sale through the platform, but often the offers do stay available for weeks before they are removed. For Doing and nothingness (2018), superconductr contacted sellers of these gigs, who proposed to do nothing and get paid for it. These sellers were asked, for a payment of US$ 5 each, to create a short video in which they film something that represents nothingness for them, while reading out the text that they had posted with their offer.

Opaque Authoritarianism

As the unilateral decision by Fiverr to remove these offers demonstrates, two of the defining characteristics of on-demand labour platforms are the opacity of their workings, and the disciplinary control they enforce on their users. Before any transactions can be made, buyers and sellers alike need to open accounts on and agree to the terms and conditions of the platform in question. This means that while platform operators spend time, money and effort to ensure that the workers using their platform are legally classified as independent contractors without any entitlement to labour protections in terms of labour law, all communications and transactions that occur through the platform, and particularly the actions and performance of workers, are closely monitored and policed. Reputation and feedback scores, as well as a range of performance metrics, are used as disciplinary tools that serve to control, continually measure and rate workers’ productivity, and flag up workers for potential dismissal (“deactivation” in Uber-speak, or “removal from the community” in TaskRabbit jargon).

These metrics are analysed by algorithms that determine which job is made available to which worker, or in what position a worker’s profile appears in search results for potential buyers. The algorithms that perform these calculations are closely guarded commercial secrets, and are liable to be subjected to arbitrary, and not always publicly announced, changes that leave workers second-guessing the workings of the algorithm in order to increase or at least secure their earnings, and where regular sources of income can be wiped out from one day to the next because of a change in algorithm. Examples of these practices abound: Amazon Mechanical Turk’s Master qualification unlocks a significant number of higher-paying jobs to workers who are awarded this status, but there are no meaningful guidelines about how workers can achieve this, and in online communities such as the mturk Reddit forum, numerous discussions can be found where workers express their frustration with the apparent randomness with which Master qualifications are assigned. The exact figure diverging between different cities, Uber drivers whose rating stays below some 4.5 for a certain amount of time are called in for a “quality session” and potentially dismissed.25 Fiverr’s algorithm that determines the order in which offers by different sellers are shown on the platform appears to be undergoing changes regularly, which means that the income streams of sellers can fluctuate significantly without warning, an issue that is discussed repeatedly in posts on Fiverr’s own user forum.

This state of affairs is reminiscent of the conditions analysed in Gilles Deleuze’s short but influential Postscript on control societies, in which he describes the ways in which power is articulated in post-Fordist societies, in which control takes over from the discipline that Foucault analysed in many of his writings.26 In control societies, according to Deleuze, the factory loses its primary role in enforcing capitalist command, in favour of the business, and more and more aspects of life are subsumed under the function of the business, a line of analysis with parallels Tronti’s social factory thesis: “businesses are constantly introducing an inexorable rivalry presented as healthy competition, a wonderful motivation that sets individuals against one another and sets itself up in each of them, dividing each within himself [sic].”27 And in an often-quoted passage, Deleuze anticipates the kinds of data extraction and algorithmic control that have become fundamental to the workings of digital labour platforms: “Individuals become ‘dividuals,’ and masses become samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’”(emphasis in original).28

Because of their legal status as independent contractors, platforms have virtually unlimited power to discipline and dismiss workers at their whim. The processes on the basis of which these decisions are arrived at are usually as opaque as any other aspect of a platform’s algorithmic infrastructure, and the customer service representatives who deal with the confused, worried or exasperated users who have fallen foul of a platform’s disciplinary system, tend to be either outsourced workers themselves, particularly in the case of call centre representatives, or appear to be mostly selecting responses to queries from a set of pre-written options in the case of email communications. superconductr have experienced some of this first-hand when running up against restrictions put in place by particular platforms. During the collection of videos for Workers leaving the cloud factory, superconductr’s requester account was suspended twice by AMT, and the second time this happened the account was eventually terminated by Amazon for an unspecified violation of the platform’s Participation Agreement. The message that announced this termination also informed superconductr that Amazon would not be able to provide any further insight or action on this matter, the company thus providing a vivid illustration of the total power wielded over AMT’s users by the platform.

uperconductr - Cloud factory 3.jpg

In a similar, although less drastic manner, the Fiverr offer posted for Work hard dream big was removed from public view with a message stating that the gig was not appropriate for the Fiverr marketplace.

superconductr - Work hard dream big 3.jpg

These two instances serve as examples of the absolute authority with which platforms are able to make and enforce decisions, which can have a significant effect on a person’s livelihood, and of the opacity of the systems with which these decisions are arrived at. All that can be said about these instances is that in all likelihood some kind of humans-machines assemblage was involved here, which could have included any or all of the following: an algorithm scouring all interactions happening through the platform for suspicious or undesirable activity; automated messages sent out once proscribed activity has been detected; a human double-checking any items flagged up by this algorithm, possibly themselves working as an outsourced agent for the platform operator; a set of pre-written responses that this human can select from to be sent to the offending user; or a partially custom-written response sent to the user in question. As with the user activities themselves, all these control procedures are likely to be subjected to an intensive monitoring and standardisation programme, carried out again by a combination of humans and machines, with the aim to streamline operations and enforce a productivity regime. All this is embedded in a hierarchical chain of command, atop of which sit venture capital’s demands for rapid growth and profitability. This adds up to a situation where workers who find employment through on-demand platforms are, in addition to their already highly insecure income flows, also at the mercy of the whims of this entire apparatus, whose main purpose is to serve the diktat of venture capital. Workers in this situation are subjected to a kind of epistemic violence which denies them any meaningful understanding of the systems that manage and direct their work.

How Does It Feel?

The need for a palliative to help endure the insecurities enforced by these power imbalances, with the concomitant rise in commodified offers of self-care, has been discussed above. On the surface, Capitalism doesn’t love me (2017) presents itself as one such offer for ameliorating the anxieties engendered by working under a regime of algorithmic control; an offer in which the imperious instructions emanating from on-demand platforms are transformed into gentle, soothing whispers. The messages of refusal and expulsion detailed above were sent to sellers on Fiverr, who for a payment of US$ 5 each, created ASMR videos in which disciplinary messages received from platforms are read out.

 


superconductr, Capitalism doesn’t love me, 2017, HD video

The world of ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) videos is an Internet subculture of people who produce videos that are intended to induce a spine-tingling sensation in the viewer, usually through sounds and performances that signify intimacy: whispers, quiet sounds such as those of skin friction and paper crumpling, or performances of personal care such as hair care or massage. At least initially, ASMR videos were mostly created by enthusiasts contributing to this subculture without expectation of financial gain. They largely existed outside commodification and were made by enthusiasts for enthusiasts. More recently, ASMR culture has given rise to more professionalised actors, whose activities follow the playbook of social media personalities who aim to build up a large follower base and then generate an income through advertising and merchandise sales.

Capitalism doesn’t love me has also found some resonance with artist friends of superconductr. A significant proportion of the work of artists consists in submitting proposals and applications for project grants to open calls for participation in residency programmes and the like. With the volume of applications submitted the barrage of rejected proposals pounding the artist’s inbox like some force of nature increases. In its intimate and therapeutic performance of the experience of rejection and sense of inadequacy induced by a situation of being curtailed in one’s ambitions, Capitalism doesn’t love me calls forth some of the aspects of insecurity that artists share with other precarious workers. The relations between artistic and other forms of precarity are complex, and, without going into too much detail, the discursive field here encompasses at one extreme end movements that aim to build solidarity between art and other precarious workers, while on the other sit reductionist proclamations of the figure of the artist as the model for entrepreneurial self-actualisation.

A perhaps somewhat more despondent variant of self-care is performed in Workers laughing alone for money (2018). Here, workers on the platform Microworkers have been asked to record themselves laughing for approximately one minute, for a payment of US$ 1 per worker.

The title is a play on the meme Women laughing alone with salad, which first appeared on feminist blog The Hairpin, posted as a collection of images showing exactly what the title suggests, without any additional comment.29 These stock photos show images of women who are brimming with health, happiness and success while lovingly gazing at their requisite bowl of salad. Collected, they illustrate how gender stereotypes are among the coercive elements that are mobilised in the dissemination of the neo-liberal imperative for self-optimisation and commodification, where one’s body appears as an asset into which one invests—for example through healthy eating—and from which one can then draw a return. In this respect, Women laughing alone with salad could also be understood as a study in what Mark Fisher has called boring dystopia, a form of coercion which operates through pervasive dissemination of subliminal disciplinary messages.30

But dystopia is not only boring. On the contrary: dystopia can be filled with anxiety and existential dread. For instance, finding oneself in a situation where one is forced to rely on micro-earnings accumulated through the continuous completion of micro-jobs online is one such condition that is rather conducive to a close encounter with anxious and dreadful dystopia. Thus a continuous work on the self is needed to keep this kind of dystopian dread at bay. With a nod to both Jacques Derrida’s notion of auto-affection and to theories of affective labour, this work on the self could be called auto-affective labour. In the situation under discussion, auto-affective labour has to do with the effort of disciplining and motivating oneself, an effort that is particularly needed and at the same time more daunting when one works alone, separate from others. What is one to do when dystopian dread sets in while one is working alone at the computer, and there is no time to compose oneself, as every second spent not focused on the task could mean a potential loss of earnings? The response proposed in Workers laughing alone for money is to erupt in a spontaneous and desolate burst of lonely laughter.

The extended bursts of laughter recorded for Workers laughing alone for money evoke a mantra often found in business self-help literature: fake it till you make it. This injunction is meant to instruct budding entrepreneurs that in order to become successful in business, they need to act in front of potential clients or customers as if the entire business is already up and running, even if in fact it has only barely left the planning stage. The same principle can be applied to auto-affective labour, in the sense that it is possible to induce the subjective experience of an emotion through acting as if one was already feeling that way. Lift up your head, put on a smile, and you’ll feel better already. However, what emerges from Workers laughing alone for money is anything but a convincing performance of success or happiness. What is brought to the fore is rather a sense of the irresolvable contradictions that lie at the heart of the kind of auto-affective labour involved in performing precarious piecework. The laughs have been purchased, and the conspicuous display of their mimicry of actually experienced happiness is further intensified through the performances having been extended to the duration of a minute. What they perform is closer to a question that Mark Fisher has proposed in relation to his definition of the eerie: “Why is there nothing here when there should be something?”31 The laughter, eerily emptied of its emotional content, points towards the rupture just-about held at bay in the act of performing auto-affective labour.

An Uber for Conduct

In physics, superconductivity (often called high-temperature superconductivity) refers to the phenomenon of certain materials exhibiting zero electrical resistance when cooled below a certain temperature. Most conductors still show some resistance even close to absolute zero, but with superconductors, resistance abruptly drops once they are cooled below a critical temperature. superconductr’s borrowing of this term of course has little to do with electronic phenomena as such, but with reasons outlined in the following.

One of Michel Foucault’s best-known definitions of power plays on the double meaning of the term conduct, in terms of conducting others and conducting oneself. Putting into play what he calls “the equivocal nature of the term ‘conduct’”, Foucault states: “to ‘conduct’ is at the same time to ‘lead’ others … and a way of behaving within a more or less open field of possibilities.”32 Here, conduct is interpreted on the one hand as a way of influencing or determining the actions of others, and on the other, as a way of acting, which is in itself always subject to influences and determinations from outside the acting subject. These two meanings of the term conduct are, then, as it were, wrapped up in Foucault’s theory of governmentality.

Government in the Foucauldian sense, this “conduct of conduct”, as a term encapsulates what Foucault delineates in his conception of power as it relates to subjectivity. It provides, in Thomas Lemke’s words, the “missing link” between Foucault’s interest in sovereignty on the one hand, and the subject on the other, and enables him to put forward a theory of power that takes into account the ways in which these domains of the application of power interact and intersect with each other.33 It should be added that the writings of Foucault that are put to work here are from the later part of his life, where his main interests shifted from the archaeology of disciplinary societies to issues such as governmentality, a notion he developed in the late 1970s34; biopower, which is seen as closely related to the Deleuzean societies of control mentioned earlier35; and his analysis of neo-liberal governmental reason in The birth of biopolitics.36

Returning to the issue of the superconductor, there also is, of course, another definition to the term conduct, which relates to a state of being a medium for some kind of flow, a channel that certain quantities can pass through. This particular mode of conducting and its relevance is a question that Foucault himself did not appear to address, but this kind of conduct perhaps is what should be at the centre of an analysis of power in the context of the entrepreneurial self entangled in the distribution of work through digital platforms, given that we are dealing here with configurations of power that are enacted in flows and on flows, that turn a subject into a source, a target, a conduit of flows which at the same time always already are flows of extraction, of capture, that always end up being routed through some opaque structure where they are harvested, reconfigured and rechannelled. This then brings to the fore a subject of and in conduction, which in its ideal state should provide as little resistance as possible to the flows directed to and through it: a superconductor.

The superconductor is caught up in flows, connected to and disconnected from flows in rapid succession, broken apart into channels and streams, recombined and aggregated into bundles of data. The flow represents something of the ideal state of entrepreneurial being in neo-liberalism: Be in the flow. Be the flow.37 The “super” prefix in superconductor indicates zero resistance in its original definition from physics, but at the same time could also be seen to refer to an excess, a remainder, something that might resist subjugation or quantification, or simply something that lies beyond linguistic representation in a similar vein to the machinic realm known from Deleuze & Guattari’s38 and Maurizio Lazzarato’s writings.39 This then could open the path to the question of whether there is something that could potentially be recuperated for a liberatory project; a conductor that is tuned into collective flows, connected to and involved in building cooperative assemblages.

The most hopeful signs in this regard so far have come from workers in the taxi and food delivery sector, working for companies such as Uber, Lyft, Deliveroo or Foodora. In London, for example, Deliveroo workers held their first major wildcat strike in August 2016, in response to the company’s plans to switch from hourly pay to piece rates.40 Foodora riders struck for the first time in Turin in October 2016,41 and there have been many more strikes and protests by taxi and delivery platform workers since, across Europe, North America, in South Africa, India, Australia, etc. These strikes are often organised by workers themselves, who are connected via WhatsApp groups, in response to attempts to impose worse pay and conditions for workers by platform operators.

At the same time, new unions have formed, which focus their organising activities on the precarious and marginalised workers whose interests often are not represented by the major unions. This includes platform workers, and also outsourced cleaners and security guards at universities, government institutions and in retail, food packers, foster care workers, precarious academics, computer game workers, sex workers, and others. In the UK, for example, the Independent Workers’ Union (IWGB), the rejuvenated Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the United Voices of the World (UVW) unions have formed in recent years to help organise those left behind by larger unions. The IWGB has also launched a number of legal challenges against worker misclassification as independent freelancers and against refusal of union recognition by platforms such as Uber and Deliveroo. On a wider level, initiatives such as the Transnational Federation of Couriers represent platform workers internationally42; the Fairwork Foundation is working towards global labour standards for the platform economy; and the Worker Info Exchange campaigns for data rights for platform workers. Besides undertaking artistic and theoretical research, superconductr also contributes to these initiatives. For the time being this mainly involves the production of videos to support various union campaigns.

As workers’ rights have been systematically eroded through decades of neo-liberal governance and through the application of technologies that increase workers’ insecurity and vulnerability towards the ultimate goal of turning labour power into an easily exchangeable liquid asset, new models of solidarity are appearing and new waves of resistance are crashing on the shores of digital capitalism.

Footnotes

  1. Farocki, Harun. “Workers leaving the factory”. In Harun Farocki: working on the sightlines. Edited by Thomas Elsaesser. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 2004. p. 237.
  2. Ibid., p. 238.
  3. Ibid.
  4. Roberts, John. “Art and the problem of immaterial labour: reflections on its recent history”. In Economy: art production and the subject in the twenty-first century. Edited by Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 2015. p. 52.
  5. Farocki, Workers leaving the factory, p. 238.
  6. Farocki, Harun, cited in Blumenthal-Barby, Martin. “Counter-Music: Harun Farocki’s theory of a new image type”. October. No. 151. Winter 2015. p. 136.
  7. Blumenthal-Barby, Counter-Music, p. 137.
  8. Srnicek, Nick. Platform capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2017. pp. 38-39.
  9. Irani, Lilly. “The cultural work of microwork”. New Media & Society. Vol. 17. No. 5. 2015. p. 723.
  10. Ibid.
  11. Lehdonvirta, Vili. “Algorithms that divide and unite: delocalisation, identity and collective action in ‘microwork’”. In Space, place and global digital work. Edited by Jörg Flecker. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2016. p. 58
  12. Farocki in Blumenthal-Barby, Counter-Music, p. 137.
  13. Farocki, Workers leaving the factory, p. 239.
  14. Ibid.
  15. Srnicek, Platform capitalism, pp. 33-34.
  16. Fiverr.com, “In Doers We Trust” advertising campaign.
  17. See McRobbie, Angela. “’Everyone is Creative’: artists as new economy pioneers?”. OpenDemocracy. 2001. Available online at https://www.opendemocracy.net/node/652 (accessed 2017-11-27.)
  18. Some of the ideas and activities described here might appear rather outlandish to the casual observer, to the extent that a reviewer was left questioning whether this company actually exists. It should be emphasised that this is indeed a tech “unicorn” (i.e. a company estimated to be worth more than US$1bn), which is, at the time of writing, in preparation for an initial public offering of shares at Nasdaq.
  19. Fiverr. “In doers we trust | Fiverr”. 2017. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJkfN1Qey8g (accessed 2019-03-13.)
  20. Fiverr. “Behind the scenes of #InDoersWeTrust | Fiverr”. 2017. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UveP8bA-d14 (accessed 2017-11-28.)
  21. Kaufman, Micha. “In Doers We Trust: from an ideal to a movement”. 9 January 2017. See https://blog.fiverr.com/doers-trust-ideal-movement (accessed 2018-04-30.)
  22. Kaufman, Micha. “Is that an office In your pocket?”. Forbes. 2 January 2015. Available online at https://www.forbes.com/sites/michakaufman/2015/01/02/is-that-an-office-in-your-pocket-or-are-you-just-appy-to-see-me/#333991d1371f (accessed 2019-05-14.)
  23. Bernes, Jaspar. The work of art in the age of deindustrialization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2017.
  24. Butler, Sarah. “Deliveroo wins right not to give riders minimum wage or holiday pay”. The Guardian. 14 November 2019. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/nov/14/deliveroo-couriers-minimum-wage-holiday-pay (accessed 2019-04-30); and NatCen. The characteristics of those in the gig economy. 2018. Available at http://www.natcen.ac.uk/media/1543748/The-characteristics-of-those-in-the-gig-economy.pdf (accessed 2019-04-30.)
  25. Knight, Sam. “How Uber conquered London”. The Guardian. 27 April 2016. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/27/how-uber-conquered-london (accessed 2019-04-27.)
  26. Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on control societies”. In Negotiations. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. 1995 [1990].
  27. Ibid., p. 179.
  28. Ibid., p. 180. For a further development of the notion of the dividual, see Appadurai, Arjun. “The wealth of dividuals”. In Derivatives and the wealth of societies. Edited by Benjamin Lee and Randy Martin. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2016.
  29. Zimmermann, Edith. Women laughing alone with salad. 3 January 2011. See https://www.thehairpin.com/2011/01/women-laughing-alone-with-salad (accessed 2019-03-14.)
  30. Kiberd, Roisin. “The rise and fall of ‘Boring Dystopia,’ the anti-Facebook Facebook group”. 22 December 2015. See https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aekd5j/the-rise-and-fall-of-boring-dystopia-the-anti-facebook-facebook-group (accessed 2019-03-14.)
  31. Fisher, Mark. “Introduction”. In The weird and the eerie. London: Repeater Books. 2016.
  32. Foucault, Michel. “ The subject and power”. Critical Inquiry. Vol. 8. No. 4. 1982. p. 789.
  33. Lemke, Thomas. “Foucault, governmentality, and critique”. Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 14. No. 3. 2002 p. 50.
  34. Ibid.
  35. See Thomas Nail. “Biopower and control”. In Between Deleuze and Foucault. Edited by Nicolae Morar, Thomas Nail, and Daniel W. Smith. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2016.
  36. Foucault, Michel. The birth of biopolitics: lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2008.
  37. See Groys, Boris. In the flow. London: Verso. 2016.
  38. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Translated by R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H.R. Lane. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 1983.
  39. Lazzarato, Maurizio. Signs and machines: capitalism and the production of subjectivity. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). 2014.
  40. Osborne, Hilary. “Deliveroo couriers demonstrate against new contract”. The Guardian. 11 August 2016. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/aug/11/deliveroo-couriers-demonstrate-against-new-contract
  41. (accessed 2019-05-14.)Zamponi, Lorenzo. ‘Bargaining with the algorithm’. Jacobin. 6 September 2018. Available at https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/deliveroo-riders-strike-italy-labor-organizing (accessed 2019-05-14.)
  42. Mogno, Clara and Campanile, Felice. “‘A new global challenge against platform capitalism”. Notes From Below. 5 November 2018. Available at https://notesfrombelow.org/article/new-global-challenge-against-platform-capitalism (accessed 2019-05-14.)