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

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

Mobilizing User-Generated Content For Canada’s Digital Advantage

Executive Summary: The goal of the Mobilizing User-Generated Content for Canada’s Digital Content Advantage project is to define User-Generated Content (UGC) in its current state, identify successful models built for UGC, and anticipate barriers and policy infrastructure needed to sustain a model to leverage the further development of UGC to Canada\u27s advantage. At the outset, we divided our research into three domains: creative content, small scale tools and collaborative user-generated content. User-generated creative content is becoming increasingly evident throughout the technological ecology through online platforms and online social networks where individuals develop, create and capture information and choose to distribute content through an online platform in a transformative manner. The Internet offers many tools and resources that simplify the various UGC processes and models. Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr and others provide functionality to upload content directly into the site itself, eliminating the need for formatting and conversion, and allowing almost instantaneous access to the content by the user’s social network. The successful sites have been able to integrate content creation, aggregation, distribution, and consumption into a single tool, further eroding some of the traditional dichotomies between content creators and end-users. Along with these larger scale resources, this study also treats small scale tools, which are tools, modifications, and applications that have been created by a user or group of users. There are three main categories of small scale tools. The first is game modifications, or add-ons, which are created by users/players in order to modify the game or assist in its play. The second is modifications, objects, or tools created for virtual worlds such as Second Life. Third, users create applications and tools for mobile devices, such as the iPhone or the Android system. The third domain considers UGC which is generated collaboratively. This category is comprised of wikis, open source software and creative content authored by a group rather than a sole individual. Several highly successful examples of collaborative UGC include Wikipedia, and open source projects such as the Linux operating system, Mozilla Firefox and the Apache platform. Major barriers to the production, distribution and aggregation of collaborative UGC are unduly restrictive intellectual property rights (including copyrights, licensing requirements and technological protection mechanisms). There are several crucial infrastructure and policies required to facilitate collaborative UGC. For example, in the area of copyright policy, a careful balance is needed to provide appropriate protection while still allowing downstream UGC creation. Other policy considerations include issues pertaining to technological protection mechanisms, privacy rights, consumer protection and competition. In terms of infrastructure, broadband internet access is the primary technological infrastructure required to promote collaborative UGC creation. There has recently been a proliferation of literature pertaining to all three of these domains, which are reviewed. Assessments are made about the most effective models and practices for each domain, as well as the barriers which impede further developments. This initial research is used as a basis for generating some tentative conclusions and recommendations for further research about the policy and technological infrastructures required to best mobilize and leverage user-generated content to create additional value in the digital economy internal and external to Canada. Policy recommendations based on this research focus on two principles: balancing the interest of both content owners and users, and creating an enabling environment in which UGC production, distribution, aggregation, and re-use can flourish

Mobilizing User-Generated Content for Canada’s Digital Content Advantage

The goal of the Mobilizing User-Generated Content for Canada’s Digital Content Advantage project is to define User-Generated Content (UGC) in its current state, identify successful models built for UGC, and anticipate barriers and policy infrastructure needed to sustain a model to leverage the further development of UGC to Canada\u27s advantage.This poster session is based on the report, Mobilizing User-Generated Content For Canada’s Digital Advantage (http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fimspub/21/) and is related to the Brown Bag presentation also presented on March 23, 2011 (http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fimspres/11/)

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—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 “resolves„ these issue by grafting the player character’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

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

Disrupting the dissertation: linked data, enhanced publication and algorithmic culture

This article explores how the three aspects of Striphas’ notion of algorithmic culture (information, crowds and algorithms) might influence and potentially disrupt established educational practices.  We draw on our experience of introducing semantic web and linked data technologies into higher education settings, focussing on extended student writing activities such as dissertations and projects, and drawing in particular on our experiences related to undergraduate archaeology dissertations. The potential for linked data to be incorporated into electronic texts, including academic publications, has already been described, but these accounts have highlighted opportunities to enhance research integrity and interactivity, rather than considering their potential creatively to disrupt existing academic practices. We discuss how the changing relationships between subject content and practices, teachers, learners and wider publics both in this particular algorithmic culture, and more generally, offer new opportunities; but also how the unpredictability of crowds, the variable nature and quality of data, and the often hidden power of algorithms, introduce new pedagogical challenges and opportunities