Surveillance and alienation in the online economy

The critical literature on commercial monitoring and so-called ‘free labour’ (Terranova 2000) locates exploitation in realms beyond the workplace proper, noting the productivity of networked activity including the creation of user-generated-content and the profitability of commercial sites for social networking and communication. The changing context of productivity in these realms, however, requires further development of a critical concept of exploitation. This article defines exploitation as the extraction of unpaid, coerced, and alienated labour. It considers how such a definition might apply to various forms of unpaid but profit-generating online activity, arguing that commercial monitoring redoubles the conscious, intentional activity of users in ways that render it amenable to a critique of exploitation. Given the role of commercial monitoring in the emerging online economy, the paper emphasizes the importance of supplementing privacy critiques with approaches that identify the ways in which new forms of surveillance represent a form of power that seeks to manage and control consumer behaviour

Nation branding in the era of commercial nationalism

This article applies critical approaches to branding and marketing in the neo-liberal era to a case study of a recent trend in media studies, international relations and tourism: nation branding. We argue that the critique of brand “co-creation” – a reliance upon consumers to build and disseminate brand identity – helps illuminate the ways in which nation branding serves as a technique of neo-liberal governance in the era of global capitalism. The article first considers the recent development of nation branding as a global phenomenon and then explores the details of one such campaign in post-socialist Slovenia. The case study illustrates the ways in which nation branding seeks to mobilize the populace to “live” the national brand, to promulgate it nationally and internationally in the name of taking responsibility for the nation’s economic development, and by extension of maximizing individual prosperity. The article concludes with a consideration of the way in which nation branding functions as a revamped form of nationalism in an era characterized by what we call the rise of commercial nationalism

From pre-emption to slowness: assessing the contrasting temporalities of data-driven predictive policing

Debates on the temporal shift associated with digitalization often stress notions of speed and acceleration. With the advent of big data and predictive analytics, the time-compressing features of digitalization are compounded within a distinct operative logic: that of pre-emption. The temporality of pre-emption attempts to project the past into a simulated future that can be acted upon in the present; a temporality of pure imminence. Yet, inherently paradoxical, pre-emption is marked by myriads of contrasts and frictions as it is caught between the supposedly all-encompassing knowledge of the data-processing ‘Machine’, and the daily reality of decision-making practices by relevant social actors. In this article, we explore the contrasting temporalities of automated data processing and predictive analytics, using policing as an illustrative example. Drawing on insights from two cases of predictive policing systems that have been implemented among UK police forces, we highlight the prevalence of counter-temporalities as predictive analytics is situated in institutional contexts and consider the conditions of possibility for agency and deliberation. Analysing these temporal tensions in relation to ‘slowness’ as a mode of resistance, the contextual examination of predictive policing advanced in the article provides a contribution to the formation of a deeper awareness of the politics of time in automated data processing; one that may serve to counter the imperative of pre-emption that, taken to the limit, seeks to foreclose the time for politics, action and life

The Profiling Potential of Computer Vision and the Challenge of Computational Empiricism

Computer vision and other biometrics data science applications have commenced a new project of profiling people. Rather than using 'transaction generated information', these systems measure the 'real world' and produce an assessment of the 'world state' - in this case an assessment of some individual trait. Instead of using proxies or scores to evaluate people, they increasingly deploy a logic of revealing the truth about reality and the people within it. While these profiling knowledge claims are sometimes tentative, they increasingly suggest that only through computation can these excesses of reality be captured and understood. This article explores the bases of those claims in the systems of measurement, representation, and classification deployed in computer vision. It asks if there is something new in this type of knowledge claim, sketches an account of a new form of computational empiricism being operationalised, and questions what kind of human subject is being constructed by these technological systems and practices. Finally, the article explores legal mechanisms for contesting the emergence of computational empiricism as the dominant knowledge platform for understanding the world and the people within it

Brand value: how affective labour helps create brands

One way brands create value is by engaging the capacity of cultural labourers to animate affective connections with consumers. Brands assemble social spaces that harness the communicative capacities of cultural actors. A mode of branding that works by managing an open-ended social process depends on affective labour. Affective labour involves not only the capacity of individuals to produce specific meanings and feelings, but also the open-endedly social capacity to stimulate and channel attention and recognition. This affective labour does not always depend on making particular "authentic" representations, but on facilitating a general circulation of meaning. By investing in social spaces and relations corporate brands engage popular musicians in new forms of labour. This article examines the participation of popular musicians in branding programmes run in Australia by corporate brands between 2005 and 2010. I examine the accounts of musicians and managers who participate in these programmes to consider how they make their participation in social relations that create brand value meaningful. They employ a variety of practices: identifying with brands, endorsing brands' claims of socially responsible investment in culture, and distancing themselves from their own participation in branded space

Watching nightlife: affective labor, social media and surveillance

This article examines the affective labor of nightlife photographers within the surveillance economy of social media. I examine nightlife photographers as “below the line” cultural laborers who employ their identities and communicative capacities to create and circulate images of nightlife online. These images stimulate interaction that can be watched, tracked, and responded to by the databases of social media. The study draws on interviews with nightlife photographers to examine how they account for the creative and promotional aspects of their labor. I argue that the analytical capacities of social media databases, and the modes of promotion they facilitate, depend in the first instance on the affective labor of cultural intermediaries like nightlife photographers