Commons and Cooperatives

In the last decade, the commons has become a prevalent theme in discussions about collective but decentralized control over resources. This paper is a preliminary exploration of the potential linkages between commons and cooperatives through a discussion of the worker cooperative as one example of a labour commons. We view the worker coop as a response at once antagonistic and accommodative to capitalism. This perspective is amplified through a consideration of five aspects of an ideal-type worker cooperativism: associated labour, workplace democracy, surplus distribution, cooperation among cooperatives, and, controversially, links between worker cooperatives and socialist states. We conclude by suggesting that the radical potential of worker cooperatives might be extended, theoretically and practically, by elaborating connections with other commons struggles in a process we term the circulation of the common

Neospirituality, Social Change and the Culture of the Post-Fordist Workplace

This dissertation applies a religious studies perspective to the topic of neospirituality in the iconic post-Fordist workplaces of symbolic analysts. Despite a voluminous business literature on the importance of spirituality, this topic is underexplored by scholars of religion. Using secondary sources, I address this neglect by relating the themes of religious modernization and the changing structures of capitalism to this phenomenon. This dissertation outlines the important similarities between the basic beliefs and practices of the neospirituals and the culture, skill-set and worldview of symbolic analysts, dictated by work`s team and networking forms. Like Weber––but for a different class and economy––I analyzed a social stratum that acts as a carrier of a “practical ethic” reflective of a specific religious orientation. To understand this process, I explored neospiritual holism, the corporation as a psytopia, and the dematerialization and second privatization of religion. In relation to post-Fordism, I explored macroeconomic changes, labour-force recomposition, workplace restructuring since the 1970s and the culture of work. Anecdotal evidence and research suggest that neospirituality helps symbolic analysts reconcile themselves to the particular demands and concomitant lifestyle pressures of their creative labour. Five ways are proposed: Neospirituality`s holism supports the transition of early interest in genuine worker empowerment into a neoliberal anti-government sentiment that unites workers and their managers; neospirituality imaginatively collapses the modernist self/other distinction into a unitary world, helping assimilate individual-corporate interests; expensive neospiritual well-being commodities insulate from community relations and direct personal service use, maintaining while denying symbolic analysts superior social status; neospiritual prosumption posits the factory of the self––applied to work, self-production makes workers “owners;” and neospiritual preference for energy over matter mirrors post-Fordism’s privileging of immaterial over material products and its streamlining of all value to commodity value

Automating Content Analysis of Video Games

Content analysis of video games tends to be an extremely arduous task, involving the collection of a very large quantity of data and statistics detailing the experiences of gameplay. Nevertheless, it is an important process that supports many business, policy, social, and scholarly activities related to the games industry. Consequently, supports are clearly necessary to facilitate content analysis procedures for video games. This paper discusses an innovative approach to automating content analysis for video games through the use of software instrumentation. By properly instrumenting video game software to enable data collection and processing, content analysis procedures can be either partially or fully automated, depending on the game in question. This paper discusses our overall approach to automation, as well as our experiences to date with Epic’s Unreal Engine. Sample results from initial experiments conducted so far are also presented. These results have been quite positive, demonstrating great promise for continued work in this area

No measure for culture? Value in the new economy

This paper explores articulations of the value of investment in culture and the arts through a critical discourse analysis of policy documents, reports and academic commentary since 1997. It argues that in this period, discourses around the value of culture have moved from a focus on the direct economic contributions of the culture industries to their indirect economic benefits. These indirect benefits are discussed here under three main headings: creativity and innovation, employability, and social inclusion. These are in turn analysed in terms of three forms of capital: human, social and cultural. The paper concludes with an analysis of this discursive shift through the lens of autonomist Marxist concerns with the labour of social reproduction. It is our argument that, in contemporary policy discourses on culture and the arts, the government in the UK is increasingly concerned with the use of culture to form the social in the image of capital. As such, we must turn our attention beyond the walls of the factory in order to understand the contemporary capitalist production of value and resistance to it. </jats:p

A Redneck Head on a Nazi Body:Subversive Ludo-Narrative Strategies in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus

This article argues that Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, a AAA First-Person Shooter, is not only politically themed, but presents in itself a critical engagement with the politics of its genre and its player base. Developed at the height of #Gamergate, the game is interpreted as a response to reactionary discourses about gender and ability in both mainstream games and the hardcore gamer community. The New Colossus replaces affirmation of masculine empowerment with intersectional ambiguities, foregrounding discourses of feminism and disability. To provoke its players without completely alienating them, the game employs strategies of carnivalesque aesthetics&#8212;especially ambivalence and grotesque excess. Analyzing the game in the light of Bakhtinian theory shows how The New Colossus reappropriates genre conventions pertaining to able-bodiedness and masculinity and how it &#8220;resolves&#8222; these issue by grafting the player character&#8217;s head on a vat-grown Nazi supersoldier-body. The breaches of genre conventions on the narrative level are supported by intentionally awkward and punishing mechanics, resulting in a ludo-narrative aesthetic of defamiliarization commensurate to a grotesque story about subversion and revolt. Echoing the ritualistic cycle of death and rebirth at the heart of carnivalesque aesthetics, The New Colossus is nothing short of an ideological re-invention of the genre

Marx’s "Capital"in the Information Age

This article argues that a media and communication studies perspective on reading Marx’s Capital has thus far been missing, but is needed in the age of information capitalism and digital capitalism. Two of the most popular contemporary companions to Marx’s Capital, the ones by David Harvey and Michael Heinrich, present themselves as general guidebooks on how to read Marx, but are actually biased towards particular schools of Marxist thought. A contemporary reading of Marx needs to be mediated with contemporary capitalism’s structures and the political issues of the day. Media, communications and the Internet are important issues for such a reading today. It is time to see Marx not just as a critic of capitalism but also as a critic of capitalist communications

How to Beat the Boss: Game Workers Unite in the UK

This article provides an overview of the growth of game worker organising in Britain. These workers have not previously been organised in a trade union, but over the last 2 years, they have developed a campaign to unionise their sector and launched a legal trade union branch. This is a powerful example of so-called ‘greenfield’ organising, beyond the reach of existing trade unions and with workers who have not previously been members. The article provides an outline of the industry, the launch of the Game Workers Unite international network, the growth of the division in Britain as well as their formation as a branch of the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain. The aim is to draw out lessons for both the videogames industry, as well as other non-unionised industries, showing how the traditions of trade unionism can be translated and developed in new contexts

Georg Lukács as a Communications Scholar: Cultural and Digital Labour in the Context of Lukács’ Ontology of Social Being

The task of this work is to apply thoughts from Georg Lukács’ final book, the Ontology of Social Being, for the theoretical analysis of cultural and digital labour. It discusses Lukács’ concepts of work and communication and relates them to the analysis of cultural and digital work. It also analyses his conception of the relation of labour and ideology and points out how we can make use of it for critically understanding social media ideologies. Lukács opposes the dualist separation of the realms of work and ideas. He introduces in this context the notion of teleological positing that allows us to better understand cultural and digital labour as well as associated ideologies, such as the engaging/connecting/sharing-ideology, today. The analysis shows that Lukács’ Ontology is in the age of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter still a very relevant book, although it has thus far not received the attention that it deserves. This article also introduces the Ontology’s main ideas on work and culture, which is important because large parts of the book have not been translated from the German original into English. Lukács’ notion of teleological positing is crucial for understanding the common features of the economy and culture