Architects of time: Labouring on digital futures

Drawing on critical analyses of the internet inspired by Gilles Deleuze and the Marxist autonomia movement, this paper suggests a way of understanding the impact of the internet and digital culture on identity and social forms through a consideration of the relationship between controls exercised through the internet, new subjectivities constituted through its use and new labour practices enabled by it. Following Castells, we can see that the distinction between user, consumer and producer is becoming blurred and free labour is being provided by users to corporations. The relationship between digital technologies and sense of community, through their relationship to the future, is considered for its dangers and potentials. It is proposed that the internet may be a useful tool for highlighting and enabling social connections if certain dangers can be traversed. Notably, current remedies for the lack of trust on the internet are questioned with an alternative, drawing on Zygmunt Bauman and Georg Simmel, proposed which is built on community through a vision of a ‘shared network’

The Information Economy and the Labor Theory of Value

This article discusses aspects of the labor theory of value in the context of the information industries. First, taking the Temporal Single-System Interpretation (TSSI) of Marx’s labor theory of value as methodology, the paper calculates economic demographics at the level of socially necessary labor time and prices of an example case. Second, the paper questions the assumption that the labor theory of value cannot be applied to the information industries. This paper tests this hypothesis with an analysis of the development of labor productivity in six countries. The paper concludes that the labor theory of value is an important tool for understanding the information economy and the peculiarities of the information commodity

‘Where are we when we think?’ Space, time and emancipatory education in galleries

Adult education in art galleries sits on a fault line, at once an apparatus upholding the affirmative aspects of museum culture cultivated by global elites, a propellant in the whirring of an increasingly dislocated set of events on trendy and consumable political themes, and a site for ‘allyship’ and other kinds of radical and socially transformative work. Resurrecting Hannah Arendt’s question,‘where are we when we think?’ this paper explores how we might move from a moment in which the ‘space’ of the gallery is replaced by the ‘time’ of the event (Helguera) and towards embedded space-times that attempt to address contemporary urgencies through situated practices that collectively analyse and respond to conditions. Drawn from examples derived from the author’s practice, the paper argues for the use of popular education and anti-colonial pedagogies in the production of adult education in galleries, suggesting that such processes support groups in collectively naming and thinking through conflicts to re-shape both the galleries in which they have congregated and the worlds beyond their doors. This paper suggests that the re-construction and use of the often forgotten genealogies of emancipatory education are pivotal to doing social justice work in galleries

‘Hacking multitude’ and Big Data: Some insights from the Turkish ‘digital coup’

The paper presents my first findings and reflections on how ordinary people may opportunistically and unpredictably respond to Internet censorship and tracking. I try to capture this process with the concept of ‘hacking multitude'. Working on a case study of the Turkish government's block of the social media platform Twitter (March 2014), I argue that during systemic data choke-points, a multitude of users might acquire a certain degree of reflexivity over ubiquitous software of advanced techno-capitalism. Resisting naïve parallels between urban streets and virtual global streets, the article draws on Fuller's ‘media ecologies' to make sense of complex and dynamic interactions between processes and materialities, strategies of communication and mundane practices. Such a dense space is mostly invisible to network and traffic analysis, although it comes alive under the magnifying lens of digital ethnography. As the Turkish government tried to stop protesters on both the urban and the Twitter spheres, alternative material configurations and new hybrid formations and practices emerged. I try to bring this process alive following the traces – that is, a combination of digital data and materialities – of a social space between the protest for Twitter access, the ‘digital coup' and the interactions that this situation determined. In the final section, I briefly explore two research trajectories which can further develop my initial formulation of a ‘hacking multitude'. I argue that a generalisation of hacking/multitude is problematic for the political, cultural or economic processes more directly associated with Big Data

Expressive free speech, the state, and the public sphere: A Bakhtinian–Deleuzian analysis of ‘public address’ at Hyde Park

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2008 Taylor & Francis.In this paper I explore how struggles around free speech between social movements and the state are often underpinned by a deeper struggle around expressive images of what counts as either ‘decent’ or ‘indecent’ discussion. These points are developed by exploring what is arguably the most famous populist place for free speech in Britain, namely Hyde Park. In 1872 the state introduced the Parks Regulation Act in order to regulate, amongst other things, populist uses of free speech at Hyde Park. However, although the 1872 Act designated a site in Hyde Park for public meetings, it did not mention ‘free speech’. Rather, the 1872 Act legally enforced the liberty to make a ‘public address’ and this was implicitly contrasted by the state of an expressive image of ‘indecent’ speakers exercising their ‘right’ of free speech at Hyde Park. Once constructed, the humiliating image of ‘indecent’ free speech could then be used by the state to regulate actual utterances of public speakers at Hyde Park. But the paper shows how in the years immediately following 1872 a battle was fought out in Hyde Park over the expressive image of public address between the state and regulars using Hyde Park as a public sphere to exercise free speech. For its part the state had to engage in meaningful deliberative forms of discussion within its own regulatory framework and with the public sphere at Hyde Park in order to maintain the legal form, content and expression of the 1872 Act. To draw out the implications of these points I employ some of the theoretical ideas of the Bakhtin Circle and Gilles Deleuze. Each set of thinkers in their own way make valuable contributions for understanding the relationship between the state, public sphere and expressive images

Co-production: towards a utopian approach

This article outlines how co-production might be understood as a utopian method, which both attends to and works against dominant inequalities. It suggests that it might be positioned ‘within, against, and beyond’ current configurations of power in academia and society more broadly. It develops this argument by drawing on recent research funded through the UK’s Connected Communities programme, led by the Arts and Humanities Research Council; and by attending to arguments from the field of Utopian Studies. It explores particular issues of power and control within the field of co-production, acknowledging that neoliberalism both constrains and co-opts such practice; and explores methodological and infrastructural issues such that its utopian potential might be realised

Review Article: When 'life itself' goes to work: Reviewing shifts in organizational life through the lens of biopower

This review article suggests the English publication of Foucault’s lectures on biopower, The Birth of Biopolitics (2008), might be useful for extending our understandings of how organizational power relations have changed over the last 20 years. Unlike disciplinary power, which constrains and delimits individuals, the concept of biopower emphasizes how our life abilities and extra-work qualities (bios or ‘life itself’) are now key objects of exploitation – particularly under neoliberalism. The term biocracy is introduced to analyse recent reports on workplace experiences symptomatic of biopower. Finally, the conceptual weaknesses of biopower for organizational theorizing are critically evaluated to help develop the idea for future scholarship

In the social factory? Immaterial labour, precariousness and cultural work

This article introduces a special section concerned with precariousness and cultural work. Its aim is to bring into dialogue three bodies of ideas -- the work of the autonomous Marxist 'Italian laboratory'; activist writings about precariousness and precarity; and the emerging empirical scholarship concerned with the distinctive features of cultural work, at a moment when artists, designers and (new) media workers have taken centre stage as a supposed 'creative class' of model entrepreneurs. The paper is divided into three sections. It starts by introducing the ideas of the autonomous Marxist tradition, highlighting arguments about the autonomy of labour, informational capitalism and the 'factory without walls', as well as key concepts such as multitude and immaterial labour. The impact of these ideas and of Operaismo politics more generally on the precarity movement is then considered in the second section, discussing some of the issues that have animated debate both within and outside this movement, which has often treated cultural workers as exemplifying the experiences of a new 'precariat'. In the third and final section of the paper we turn to the empirical literature about cultural work, pointing to its main features before bringing it into debate with the ideas already discussed. Several points of overlap and critique are elaborated -- focusing in particular on issues of affect, temporality, subjectivity and solidarity

‘Contextualizing and Critiquing the Fantastic Prosumer: Power, Alienation and Hegemony’

Abstract The ‘prosumer’ has emerged to become a central figure in contemporary culture. Through the melding of production with consumption, both mainstream and progressive analysts conceptualize prosumption to be a liberating, empowering and, for some, a prospectively revolutionary institution. In this article, these fantastic associations are critically assessed using an approach that situates prosumption activities, including contemporary online applications often referred to as ‘cocreation’, in three social-historical contexts: capitalism as a political economy dominated by mediated abstractions; capitalist society as a hierarchical order; and alienation as a pervasive norm. Among other conclusions, we find that prosumption (particularly its Web 2.0 iterations), constitutes an emerging hegemonic institution; one that effectively frames and contains truly radical imaginations while also tapping into existing predilections for commodity-focused forms of self-realization

(Im)possibilities of Autonomy:? Social Movements In and Beyond Capital, the State and Development

In this paper we interrogate the demand and practice of autonomy in social movements. We begin by identifying three main conceptions of autonomy: (1) autonomous practices vis-à-vis capital; (2) self-determination and independence from the state; and (3) alternatives to hegemonic discourses of development. We then point to limits associated with autonomy and discuss how demands for autonomy are tied up with contemporary re-organizations of: (1) the capitalist workplace, characterized by discourses of autonomy, creativity and self-management; (2) the state, which increasingly outsources public services to independent, autonomous providers, which often have a more radical, social movement history; and (3) regimes of development, which today often emphasize local practices, participation and self-determination. This capturing of autonomy reminds us that autonomy can never be fixed. Instead, social movements' demands for autonomy are embedded in specific social, economic, political and cultural contexts, giving rise to possibilities as well as impossibilities of autonomous practices