Pret à mourir (12 Aug 2011)

I borrowed the title for this post from my friend Anton of Generation Bubble, who forwarded me a link to this NYT article by Stephanie Clifford about Pret à Manger, sort of the Target of sandwich shops, assuming Subway is the Wal-Mart. If you want to see a horrific application of all the principles of immaterial and affective labor, Virnoesque virtuosity, lateral surveillance, obligatory reflexivity, emotional management, gamification and so on, you need look no further.

How does any company encourage teamwork? At Pret a Manger, executives say, the answer is to hire, pay and promote based on — believe it or not — qualities like cheerfulness.

There is a certain “Survivor” element to all of this. New hires are sent to a Pret a Manger shop for a six-hour day, and then the employees there vote whether to keep them or not. Ninety percent of prospects get a thumbs-up. Those who are voted out are sent home with £35 ($57), no hard feelings.

The crucial factor is gaining support from existing employees. Those workers have skin in the game: bonuses are awarded based on the performance of an entire team, not individuals. Pret workers know that a bad hire could cost them money.

All the joys of tournament labor markets like those that exist in academia, with none of the "life of the mind" rationalizations. And instead of solidarity against management, each worker becomes the face of management, another Stasi spy for the happy police.

But that is not nearly enough surveillance to allow Pret's management to discriminate among workers:

Pret also sends “mystery shoppers” to every shop each week. Those shoppers give employee-specific critiques. (”Bill didn’t smile at the till,” for instance.) If a mystery shopper scores a shop as “outstanding” — 86 percent of stores usually qualify — all of the employees get a £1-per-hour bonus, based on a week’s pay, so full-timers get around $73. “There’s a lot of peer pressure,” said Andrea Wareham, the human resources director at Pret.

DARE sessions in school taught me that peer pressure was bad, but I suppose peer pressure, in this context, is good. It is the vaunted power of worker collaboration and cooperation turned inside out and made into a coercive management tool. One's very ability to get along with others is alienated and quantified,amde into somethign you would only do for money rather than from basic human solidarity. Pret rejects the sort of human sociality that might thrive outside of capital, that is possible in environments where making a profit by selling commodified service experiences isn't the overriding goal. Instead Pret chooses to incentivize human feeling and turn the point of exchange into an explicit, quantified moment of affective labor while turning worker cooperation into a reified shadow of itself. That policy is carried out all down the line, apparently, with no sociality left unincentivized and thus unexploited:

Pret reinforces the teamwork concept in other ways. When employees are promoted or pass training milestones, they receive at least £50 in vouchers, a payment that Pret calls a “shooting star.” But instead of keeping the bonus, the employees must give the money to colleagues, people who have helped them along the way.

There are other rewards. Every quarter, the top 10 percent of stores, as ranked by mystery-shopper scores, receive about £30 per employee for a party. The top executives at Pret get 60 “Wow” cards, with scratch-off rewards like £10 or an iPod, to hand out each year to employees who strike them as particularly good. Pret has all-staff parties twice a year, and managers get a monthly budget of £100 or so to spend on drinks or outings for their workers.

“Rewards, through bonuses or ‘outstanding’ cards, affect behavior,” Ms. Wareham says.

Wow cards, I suppose, are the Scooby snacks of the service industry. It's always nice to be recognized, but there seems to be something backhanded about making even that a lottery scenario. And in the end, it's just Pavlovian manipulation, not genuine recognition of the worker as a human. The incentivizing of feeling leaves no space for the employees to be recognized in and of themselves. Everything about them as feeling creatures has been subsumed by the wage relation. That's what is so creepy about going into a Pret -- you know they are being forced to be nice to you and are being carefully watched by other fake-nice bosses and informers. It feels like those moments in movies about people in a mental asylum, where the patients try to maintain a facade of controlled politeness in hopes of demonstrating their newfound sanity. This sounds sort of insane to me, anyway:

Every new employee gets a thick binder of instructions. It states, for example, that employees should be “bustling around and being active” on the floor, not “standing around looking bored.” It encourages them to occasionally hand out free coffee or cakes to regulars, and not “hide your true character” with customers.

Can a boss really force you to display your "true character" without driving you into an insane spiral of endlessly recursive reflexivity? And is one's "true character" nothing more than picking random lottery-winner customers to hand a cake to? Are human interactions so conditioned by the imperative of exchange that giving and getting something for nothing is the best way to simulate genuineness, or sincere benevolence? Perhaps the looting in London was just a big expression of love.

The article should put to rest any ideas that the implementation of such concepts as gamification and the general intellect are inherently benevolent or subversive. Instead, they can be deployed by management to create a kind of affective Taylorism, where emotional experiences are assembled under hurry-up conditions and energetically concealed duress. Unless you believe that it's more fun to be forced to pretend to be having fun while working a deli counter -- maybe the findings that people who are forced to smile report being happier apply here also. Clifford notes that Pret's "annual work force turnover rate is about 60 percent — low for the fast-food industry, where the rate is normally 300 to 400 percent." Stockholm Syndrome is a powerful management tool.

The emotional labor being extracted from Pret employees exemplifies the way tight labor markets give employers the chance to cement expectations of a more pliant disposition from workers. The new normal is a grotesque sycophancy sugarcoated as a fun, cheerful workplace where "teamwork" rules. In an email, Anton says Pret's approach elicits an "unprecedented self-relation -- instrumentalization of mood and affect as a way of producing surplus value. It can only end in a psychotic break." I'm inclined to agree.

Google and goon squads (15 July 2011)

This December 2010 post by Peter Frase, addressing how capitalism might cope with technology's diminishing the need for labor inputs, has deservedly been put into broader circulation by Matt Yglesias and Metafilter. Frase sets up a thought experiment based on the Star Trek fantasy of a world in which productive labor has been rendered unnecessary, energy supplies are inexhaustible, and all humans apparently share in universal prosperity. Given these conditions, Frase wonders "how would it be possible to maintain a system based on money, profit, and class power?" Would capitalist relations continue to organize society even in the absence of the scarcities that legitimize those relations? If so, how? (Also, are we headed to this sort of society, given the persistence of unemployment and the arguably structural problems with Western economies that economist Michael Spence discusses here?)

Frase imagines that such a society would lean heavily on intellectual property law, presumably enforced by a draconian, all-encompassing surveillance state. It's not too hard to imagine Google facilitating this under the Orwellian auspices of "Don't be evil," especially after reading this article by Evgeny Morozov. "History is rife with examples of how benign and humanistic ideals can yield rather insidious outcomes—especially when backed by unchecked power and messianic rhetoric," he notes, and cites Said Vaidhyanathan's argument from The Googlization of Everything that asserts "the triumph of neoliberalism has made the 'notion of gentle, creative state involvement to guide processes toward the public good ... impossible to imagine, let alone propose.' " As manufacturing increasingly becomes a matter of information rather than manpower, Google's control of the information economy will potentially afford it the opportunity to implement a social structure. We would all essentially work for Google, whether (to draw on Frase's categories of post-productive labor) we are producing, sorting, and circulating content to attenuate its social value -- immaterial labor, by Lazzarato's definition, which Hardt expands to affective labor; I've written a bunch of posts about this sort of thing -- or whether we are muscle for intellecual-property enforcement (lawyers and "guard labor," to use the term Frase adopts from this paper).

Both immaterial labor and lateral surveillance seem to be expanding under the auspices of commercial social media and, as Frase notes, gamification, establishing the infrastructure and the mores to prevent informationalization from leading to an expansion of the commons, as P2P enthusiasts hope. Frase links to Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks, which sounds an optimistic note about the increased role of sharing and cooperation in production. Benkler's analysis resembles in some ways the Marxist theories regarding the "general intellect" that have evolved out of this cryptic section of the Grundrisse. (My effort at decoding it here.) Hardt and Negri extrapolate from the productive cooperation of the "general intellect" -- the development of which capitalists theoretically must foment to sustain productivity -- something they call the Multitude, a emerging political force that transcends state power and instantiates some sort of spontaneously self-organizing communism made of networks and flows. But it seems as though Web 2.0 companies are developing precisely to pre-empt such possibilities, to enclose the emerging commons and fuse them to structures that emphasize competition and individualism in the midst of enhanced sociality, that foreground status hierarchies rather than dissolve them, that articulate class distinctions rather than undermine them, and so on. Social media foster new forms of "artificial" scarcity (in attention, fame, relevance, identity, etc.) at the same time it eases inequalities in access to cultural goods. We can all download all the music and movies we want and remix them to our hearts content, but this doesn't touch the inequalities that form the basis of class. And reproducing class, guaranteeing that pre-existing inequalities in wealth and power can be reproduced and carried forward even in the absence of more-traditional methods of labor exploitation, is capitalism's primary raison d'etre (not increasing productivity or freedom or the "wealth of nations").

That's an implicit point of Frase's thought experiment, I think -- to suggest that no amount of prosperity or labor reduction will get rid of the class system and the exploitation it engenders structurally. It's not a set of social relations designed to promote equality, but its opposite. It creates a dynamic set of values that protect privilege in the face of abundance, in the face of technological improvements, in the face of developments that threatened to invalidate the aristocratic pretenses to inborn and inaccessible superiority.

Frase wonders where the money will come from to sustain the society of the future if zero-marginal-product workers have no right to expect to earn anything (according to neoclassical economic models) in a post-productive economy.

Thus it seems that the main problem confronting the society of anti-Star Trek is the problem of effective demand: that is, how to ensure that people are able to earn enough money to be able to pay the licensing fees on which private profit depends. Of course, this isn’t so different from the problem that confronted industrial capitalism, but it becomes more severe as human labor is increasingly squeezed out of the system, and human beings become superfluous as elements of production, even as they remain necessary as consumers.

He wonders if capitalist ideology would be flexible enough to permit the guaranteed wage system this dilemma seems to require -- people get issued some token amount of money to keep the wheels spinning -- and if this nonetheless implies stagnation, the end of capitalist growth (and possibly capitalism itself). The issue seems to hinge on the difference between that minimal wage paid out (which stultifies its recipients, locks them in class position) and the creation of economic value that continues to accrue to capitalists. The value creators -- the minions of the general intellect -- need some nominal amount of money circulating among themselves to lubricate the gears of the social factory, but enough real value must be extracted from that factory to sustain the class divide -- to forestall redistributive effects. (My postulate is that capitalists will not create or sustain enterprises that redistribute wealth, only ones that concentrate it.) That value probably can't continue to be denominated in the same currency as the wages. Perhaps this is perhaps why more people are becoming content to work for attention, especially in the sectors most transformed by information technology, the ones subsumed by code. Google has indeed rolled out "badges" to reward users for consuming and processing news stories through its interface, as Rob Walker notes here.

In the dystopian Google-run world of the future, workers will have attention rankings and goon-squad thug power to oppress one another and promote general insecurity; meanwhile real power and privilege will adhere to the corporation, its big shareholders, and those politicians it patronizes to protect itself.

Feedback Loops and Self-Consciousness (7 July 2011)

I tend to view reflexivity as a burden, the cost one pays for the broader freedom to shape one's own destiny that modern life has brought to people in wealthy countries. Modernity has brought mediation and mobility and a certain amount of anonymity that lets us become what we want to be, but determining what that is requires a paradoxical sort of self-knowledge -- taking active steps to become what one is supposed to inherently be. This condition is what sociologists like Giddens call ontological insecurity. I'm ceaselessly arguing that technological developments exacerbate this condition while pretending to ameliorate it, mainly because capitalism works better with insecure subjects.

So I'm pretty skeptical of the "quantified self" movement and other efforts to increase the amount of self-knowledge we are burdened with at any given moment. These seem to fundamentally split us, imposing mind/body problems onto us technologically. And they also seem to become self-surveillance, with the data collected on oneself being made available to outside parties for purposes of social control.

I am not persuaded to think otherwise by this Wired article by Thomas Goetz praising the magic power of feedback loops, a banal commonplace idea that is treated here like its some disruptive innovation. Yes, when people are given information about themselves in real time, they will generally change their behavior. In other words self-monitoring changes the self. The observer effect holds for self-awareness. But I'm not sure the resulting changes can be regarded as automatically beneficial; that seems like naive positivism to me. And I couldn't get past my sense that the article existed ultimately to hype a bunch of tech companies and their great gifts to the world, smart meters for the self: "The feedback loop is an age-old strategy revitalized by state-of-the-art technology. As such, it is perhaps the most promising tool for behavioral change to have come along in decades." At points, Goetz's rhetoric is breathless, as when he discusses David Rose, founder of a company that makes devices that get users to take medicine.

Borrowing a concept from cognitive psychology called pre-attentive processing, Rose aims for a sweet spot between these extremes, where the information is delivered unobtrusively but noticeably. The best sort of delivery device “isn’t cognitively loading at all,” he says. “It uses colors, patterns, angles, speed—visual cues that don’t distract us but remind us.” This creates what Rose calls “enchantment.” Enchanted objects, he says, don’t register as gadgets or even as technology at all, but rather as friendly tools that beguile us into action. In short, they’re magical.

Yes, very magical when technology can program us unobtrusively. Take away the benevolent aim of these particular devices and what's left is design as propaganda. How enchanting.

Goetz buys the argument that feedback loops cater to humans' innate striving and are an expression of evolution at work rather than the extension of a regime of quantification and data generation.

Evolution itself, after all, is a feedback loop, albeit one so elongated as to be imperceptible by an individual. Feedback loops are how we learn, whether we call it trial and error or course correction. In so many areas of life, we succeed when we have some sense of where we stand and some evaluation of our progress. Indeed, we tend to crave this sort of information; it’s something we viscerally want to know, good or bad. As Stanford’s Bandura put it, “People are proactive, aspiring organisms.” Feedback taps into those aspirations.

All these propositions seem ideological to me: that learning is a matter of self-monitoring, that success must be measured to be valid, that humans inherently crave confirmation of individual status, that feedback taps pre-existing aspirations rather than inculcating them. These propositions support the overriding idea that self-regulation must be put in service of facilitating competition -- the capitalist way, and the essence of the form of subjectivity assumed by neoliberalism. The meaning of our existence is to be calculated on life's great balance sheet, with feedback loops allowing us to perform the requisite accounting duties. At the same time, feedback implicitly makes us personally responsible in real time for the performance being measured. The gadgets that give us real-time feedback are part of the neoliberal imperative to shift risk on to the individual, making concrete the idea that you alone are responsible for how society is failing you. It's right there in the numbers that you need to try harder.

All of this is to say that feedback loops are mechanisms of social control that are all the more effective as they masquerade as self-regulation; they are not liberating forces bequeathed by magic technology firms to help us improve ourselves according to some transcendent goal for ourselves that we devise.

Life As a Stock Photo (5 July 2011)

I reblogged this bad stock photo on tumblr and was set to be content to leave it at that, but I continued to think about it.

As you can see, it's a picture of fake patrons at a bookstore pretending to shop. The Economist's blog picked it up to illustrate a post about Borders' bankruptcy and the loss of book stores as quasi-public space. I assume the photographer used fake people because you would possibly need to get permission clearances from genuine shoppers if the photo was not documentary? (Somebody out there who knows how this works, please let me know. Comment or email at horning at popmatters.com)

One of my many suspicions is that stock photos such as these will be easily replaceable with far more genuine looking photos from social media pages. This seems like a SEO-generated page, but it gets at another question I have:

Stock Photography companies have lost some of their market share in the digital age, but Flickr is not the biggest cause. The creation of digital cameras has resulted in more people taking and sharing pictures as opposed to the old days of film when there were only a select few in the photography business. Also, non-commercial licenses means that businesses can not use those free photos.

So digital cameras make it easy for aspiring photographers to try to enter the business of selling photos; indeed Getty has a partnership with Flickr to try to help amateurs commercialize what they share (and drive labor prices down).

But wouldn't it be just as easy for publications to search a Facebook database for a photo and pay them a nominal fee for the rights to it (and drive the photographer's wages to zero)? Is there anything in Facebook's terms of service that explicitly prevents the company from doing that, given that it asserts ownership rights over the stuff people upload there? Or is there a non-commercial licensing regime that protects you from having your photos appear in contexts where you don't want them? Must users rely on Facebook's good will to keep that from happening?

I already felt that simply by sharing anything on Facebook, it ended up recontextualized in ways I couldn't control or understand and this made me feel inordinately and perpetually defensive. When he quit Facebook, Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber noted that "one of the things I like about the Internets is that I can present myself in different ways. This isn’t the result of a lack of integrity – you need to present different ‘selves’ if you want to engage in different kinds of dialogue." That makes perfect sense to me; I think my lack of context control was making me opt out of many potential dialogues altogether. I also feared that all the decontextualized communication was collapsing the boundaries that need to be in place for friendship to thrive. If you start seeing what friends do in their alternate contexts, they can seem less likable, or deceptive, or just not as focused on me as I narcissistically prefer them to be and can pretend they are without any evidence to the contrary. Facebook lets you see your friends consistently at their most preening, posturing, needy, and self-exploiting -- not generally their best sides, but in a Zuckerberg world, their only true side with "integrity."

It would be terrible if Facebook resold images you shared without telling you. But it would be even worse if they offered to cut you in, I think. Social media makes it seem natural and validating that one could consider selling one's snapshots to marketers and publishers so that they could be used for some commercial purpose. Social media invites you to turn your own life into a series of stock photos.

Facebook Updates and Disinformation (30 June 2011)

Sociologist Nathan Jurgenson has an interesting post about Facebook and his skepticism about proclamations of the end of privacy and anonymity. He deploys the postmodernist/poststructuralist insight that each piece of information shared raises more questions about what hasn't been said, and thus strategic sharing can create different realms of personal privacy and public mystery.

We know that knowledge, including what we post on social media, indeed follows the logic of the fan dance: we always enact a game of reveal and conceal, never showing too much else we have given it all away. It is better to entice by strategically concealing the right “bits” at the right time. For every status update there is much that is not posted. And we know this. What is hidden entices us.

I think this is missing the point. I feel like I need to use all caps to stress this: LOTS OF PEOPLE DON'T WANT ATTENTION. They don't want to be enticing. Privacy is not about hiding the truth. It's about being able to avoid the spotlight.

The people who are freaked out by Facebook are the ones who aren’t trying to create an air of mystery about themselves. They are people who don’t want additional attention and don’t want to be snooped on, and don’t want to raise more questions and interest about themselves every time they are compelled to share something or inadvertently share something online. Something as simple as RSVPing for a Facebook event can set off a chain reaction of unwanted curiosity and accidental insult if one’s not careful. But social media mores force us to make such RSVPing a public matter, because it benefits the event thrower to pad out the expected crowd, etc. Sharing usually doesn't serve a personal agenda, even one of self-promotion. Often sharing is default exposure that helps someone else sell your attention and presence (to advertisers, etc.)

The fact that every piece of information is incomplete is precisely why people feel overexposed, because it means that everything that gets shared (often against their will) invites more scrutiny into their lives. This is why they feel like they have lost their privacy. Not because perfect information about them is out there, but because the teasing bits of information circulating seems to orient the surveillance apparatus on them. And that surveillance apparatus is distributed so widely, it feels inescapable that speculative information will be produced about you and attached to your identity online for anyone to find. That is the problem, not oversharing. The end of anonymity is not about people knowing accurate things about you; it’s about enough people who know you being in the micro-gossip business to make you feel unfairly scrutinized and libeled.

Jurgenson points out correctly that “‘Publicity’ on social media needs to be understood fundamentally as an act rife also with its conceptual opposite: creativity and concealment.” It also needs to be understood that of course people who are comfortable with sharing are not exposing their authentic character—even if there were such a thing as an authentic self. The point is that they enjoy constructing that pseudo-celebrity self through social media and feel recognized when they are gossiped about and circulated. But the rest of us are being forced to play their game, on their terms, at an inherent disadvantage.

I don’t want to have to send out reams and reams of disinformation online to “protect” my privacy (which is one of the reasons I am not on Facebook anymore. I thought it was stupid that I only logged in to it to play defense). I don’t want to share only to bury things that have come to embarrass me or prompted responses I don’t like. I don’t believe I have the time or inclination to try to imagine what new creative interpretations and lacunae I can generate with my sharing so as to convey the right impression, cultivate the right sort of fascination with me. I don’t want to be “fascinating.” I don’t want to be “seductive” in the Baudrillardian sense and “create magical and enchanted interest” (to use Jurgenson’s phrase). Others may revel in that fantasy, but I don’t want to have to adopt their code if I can help it.

But it may not be tenable for me to avoid it for much longer. For instance, events I might want to go to will be publicized only through Facebook, and I will end up missing out on everything if I’m not trackable there. Everyone I know will be in the social-media circus tent, and I will have to join them.

Social media confronts us with how little control we have over our public identity, which is put into play and reinterpreted and tossed around while we watch—while all the distortions and gossip gets fed back to us by the automated feedback channels. Some people find this thrilling. Others find it terrible. It’s always been true that we don’t control how we are seen, but at least we could control how much we had to know about it. It’s harder now to be aloof, to be less aware of our inevitable performativity. We are forced instead to fight for the integrity of our manufactured personal brand.

Thoughts on Ross Perlin's 'Intern Nation' (21 June 2011)

Many of the reviews of Ross Perlin's recent book Intern Nation seem to be marked by a relief that someone else has taken the trouble to acknowledge (i.e. done all they can realistically be expected to do to solve) an obvious problem -- that interns are like strike-breakers before the fact, except they work not for compromisingly low wages so much as for the privilege of sucking up to bosses and building all-important white-collar social capital (here are two reviews that buck the trend). Employers in certain fields, ones that can establish a nominally plausible but essentially simoniac relationship with universities, can take advantage of loopholes in the U.S. labor protection laws to eliminate full-time positions and hire students as underpaid temps to do the work.

Once, this was restricted mainly to the "glamor industries" -- a situation well-condemned in a Baffler article from 1999 by Jim Frederick (sadly not online, Google books preview here). In the past decade, internships have spread throughout the postindustrial sectors of the economy, so that a period of corvée labor in service to the managerial overlords in corporate America is now simply programmed into the college experience for most privileged kids. Many intern programs are a racket geared not toward democratizing economic opportunity but conserving privilege through nepotistic mechanisms, and the ones that aren't about ensuring that the children of elites meet suitable mentors are typically schemes for offloading as much menial work as possible onto unpaid laborers who have no recourse to legal protections.

Not that anyone should have been surprised by this situation. If you have ever worked in offices or even watched TV shows about working in offices, how can you be surprised that internships aren't especially educational? Or that companies are eager to gain leverage over workers however they can? Does anyone think businesses would do anything but exploit interns as long as they can get away with it? And does anyone think labor-law enforcement is anywhere close to being a priority for the series of neoliberal administrations the U.S. has endured since Reagan? Reviewers least of all should have been surprised, as most of the publications use interns unapolegetically and some of the reviewers admit to having been interns themselves. Presumably they see their own experience as an exception to the general rule of exploitation and the conservation of privilege to those with connections. Internships in general might clearly seem exploitative, eviscerating hard-earned rights for workers, but one's own internship always isn't so bad and gives a necessary leg up, lets you meet some really nice, really useful people.

But if you find internships problematic enough to hail a book like this, then you should be concerned about the collective action problem that perpetuates the system -- the individualistic ethos of interns that prompts them to participate in an obviously corrupt system so that they can get the edge on their competitors in the labor market. Such an attitude is the outcome of an extended effort by employers and universities to normalize the abuse of internships as pseudo-educational training programs (in his book, Perlin effectively traces this), which in turn is part of the larger sweep of neoliberal reform, which is intended to accustom individual workers to a dog-eat-dog capitalist world and get them to shoulder more and more social risk personally. Under neoliberalism, individuals need to live as though there is no social safety net, that they are perpetually vulnerable to bad fortune and thus accrue as much unfair advantage over others as they can as a form of private insurance. Internships are merely among the first steps in this dismal education process.

Perhaps the intended audience for the book is college students who might consider becoming an intern themselves. Such an audience would be appropriate, because the most straight-forward way to derail internship abuses would be to incite a general refusal among college-age workers to accept employment on those terms. Given the competitive realities of the labor market, however, such a turn of events seems extremely unlikely. Instead, internships acclimate those entering the workforce to the realities of at-will employment, which requires that employees perpetually exceed expectations and assume personal responsibility for developing the necessary strategies for success within the firm. To train interns in a set of procedures agreed upon in advance would undermine the whole purpose of internships for most enterprises; internships serve as a elaborate test to see if the interns can invent ways to make themselves useful. If you have to tell them how to be useful, they are not being trained in the realities of the workplace, which necessarily puts a premium on self-starting and solving problems for oneself in the course of the working day (which contributes to overall efficiency and productivity). Thus rote obedience is often less important for interns than being the sort of worker who can intuit ways to be useful through careful observation and open-ended obsequiousness. With the overriding imperative of making a good impression guiding them, successful interns master ways of sussing out the office power-brokers, sidling up to bosses, getting themselves heard in meetings despite their novitiate status, and so on. They create their own opportunities and are paid in goodwill (much like bloggers).

Perlin recognizes the place of internships in the "new spirit of capitalism" (to use Boltanski and Chiapello's phrase as he does), arguing that they represent the evolution of training programs to suit post-Fordist work conditions: "What structured training programs were to the bureaucratic firms of the mid-20th century, internships may well be to the new network capitalism of firms dealing with intangible goods." Modern production in many sectors has less to do with learning industry-specific skills that require focused apprenticeship. Instead, much of production has become social, as Tiziana Terranova explains in this talk. That is to say, production is less a matter of skilled labor than of what is sometimes called immaterial labor -- the ability to collaborate, cooperate and innovate, often in consumption processes, to enrich the symbolic value of commodities. Perlin notes that this serves to justify office internships as de facto training, no matter how menial the intern's actual jobs seem on the surface. "To an economist, the logic goes like this: if white-collar firms are increasingly organized around their intangible human or organizational capital—whether it be their brand or their 'culture of innovation'— then this is what interns have to learn, just as much as any specific skill set."

That sounds a lot like what post-autonomist theory has to say about post-Fordist labor conditions. In Grammar of the Multitude, Paolo Virno describes this shift in labor from away from skills and toward congeniality and what he calls "virtuosity" -- work as ambitiously performative. Often this is a matter of innovating your own work processes, writing your own job description (as the management gurus might put it), finding opportunities to schmooze and impress higher-ups with useful ideas. Virno:

the tasks of a worker or of a clerk no longer involve the completion of a single particular assignment, but the changing and intensifying of social cooperation.... From the beginning, one resource of capitalistic enterprise has been the so-called “misappropriation of workers’ know how.” That is to say: when workers found a way to execute their labor with less effort, taking an extra break, etc., the corporate hierarchy took advantage of this minimal victory, knowing it was happening, in order to modify the organization of labor. In my opinion, a significant change takes place when the task of the worker or of the clerk to some extent consists in actually finding, in discovering expedients, “tricks,” solutions which ameliorate the organization of labor. In the latter case, workers’ knowledge is not used on the sly but it is requested explicitly; that is to say, it becomes one of the stipulated working assignments. The same change takes place, in fact, with regards to cooperation: it is not the same thing if workers are coordinated de facto by the engineer or if they are asked to invent and produce new cooperative procedures. Instead of remaining in the background, the act of cooperating, linguistic integration, comes to the very foreground.

This is essentially what internships are about. As Perlin notes, "the whole point of internships" is that the untrained worker must "come in under the radar, on the cheap, just a bright kid, and then suddenly prove yourself, become somebody worth having." Internships are precisely about teaching interns that they must train themselves and prove their fitness through quick adaptability. The point of most contemporary internships is not what sort of work gets assigned to interns and what specific training they receive from mentors but rather how quickly they learn to create productive work for themselves that their employers can then profit from. Many interns are tacitly expected to figure out how to go beyond what they have been explicitly been directed to do and pitch their own ideas for what they can do.

So it is that internships habituate novice employees to the conditions of the contemporary workplace, where job-specific skills are less relevant than the willingness to cooperate totally with co-workers and managers and make a show of one's perpetual availability and malleability. Much of career training for the postindustrial labor market involves learning to be a weasel, to be one of the cheese-hunting rats of the megaselling 1990s management tract Who Moved My Cheese? Interns learn to become eager self-exploiters. They accept that employers owe no such entitlements as loyalty to employees (superior employees earn favors; all workers shouldn't unfairly be granted rights uniformly); instead the constant demand for self-reinvention is inscribed as an opportunity for self-development, as an investment in one's own "human capital," though ultimately for the company's benefit.

Or to put it in Marxist terms, interns are taught to assimilate to the "general intellect," the wellspring of social productivity that Marx prophesized in the Grundrisse's "Fragment on Machines," and deploy it for capital's advantage. This manifests as an eagerness to show what one can do, to show what one is made of, to show how eager one is -- to show, in short, the quality of one's subjectivity in total and how well that total being can suits the company's needs. "Labor as subjectivity," as Virno, citing Marx, puts it. Interns are given the opportunity to prove that they are well-socialized and have the habitus of the go-getting office worker (or the chance to absorb that habitus quickly). Interns thus develop an entrepreneurial attitude toward their own capabilities and their everyday lives, scouring it all for opportunities to exploit for an employer's sake. Individuals not fortunate enough to inherit it are responsible for equipping themselves with "human capital."

But does this constitute real training? Perlin thinks it doesn't, which would make internships illegal. But enforcing that law wouldn't change the underlying conditions that require that workers adopt such a habitus, which means that interns' legality is something of a sideshow. Whether you are an intern or a mandatory freelancer, the situation is pretty much the same -- you have to constantly hustle. As Perlin notes, the need to supply oneself with human capital (rather than have it be a part of what society supplies to all its members out of an egalitarianism of opportunity) exemplifies how a broadening precarity affects the middle class, rendering its isolated members as responsible for outfitting themselves for social survival as the poor have long been. When internships fall to the nonelites, it still reflects this basic structure, that the intern should be willing to work for nothing because it is an investment in their future. Likewise, secondary education is entirely instrumental, an investment in one's future earning potential rather than an enrichment of one's human capabilities. Though skeptical of the human-capital thesis, Perlin tends to accept this view tacitly, seeing education basically as a mechanism for generating a wage premium.

Perlin's book concludes with a somewhat wide-eyed "Intern Bill of Rights" -- a series of propositions for creating a "common standard by which to evaluate and improve internships." The list seems to suggest that much of the problem with internships is semantic -- the word itself sugarcoats the reality of exploitation with educational pretenses. But why attempt to stabilize a definition of the word? It would seem more constructive to sully the term completely, along with the other euphemisms of the internship racket, like "human capital" and "situated learning," that serve only as tools of opportunistic obfuscation. Under the conditions Perlin advocates in this list, interns are part-time workers, plain and simple, and should be labeled as such. Those in positions that fail to meet those standards he elucidates are best understood as illegals, as scabs, regardless of how prestigious or entitled their upbringing has been. Fighting internships means fighting special favors, denying the personal touches, the exceptionalism of elite colleges -- it means confronting privilege head on and exposing it with contempt. But what we tend to do instead is take advantage of new tools to measure our prestige and figure out ways to leverage it into enduring privileges for ourselves and our friends.

Fashion and intellectual property (9 June 2011)

Some parting thoughts on fast fashion and social media: A section that was cut from that essay I wrote for n+1 about fast fashion had to do with "open innovation," or the laissez-faire attitude toward design piracy advocated by some consultants. Here's how my essay read at one point:

By skirting the borderlines of stylistic piracy, Forever 21 exemplifies so-called open innovation, cherished by consultants who argue that an enhanced and highly exploitable creativity is unleashed under a less rigorous intellectual-property regime. A 2005 tract from the Norman Lear Center (pdf), a think tank, approvingly described how “the past is constantly being plundered for ‘new’ ideas. Stylistic elements are routinely appropriated from the most unlikely places -- Polynesian islands, urban street corners, stock-car races, bowling alleys -- and transformed into new trends. In fashion, nearly every design element is available to anyone for the taking. Any fashion design, one might say, is ‘ready to share.’ ”
Of course, share is the operative word for another burgeoning business. Facebook and other social-media companies have a similarly parasitic business model that depends on appropriating freely shared material and repurposing it as data for marketers. Just as Forever 21 pushes the boundaries of intellectual property, Facebook continually oversteps established norms of privacy, opting users into data-divulging mechanisms by default and backpedalling only when confronted with public outcry.

There are a lot of quotable passages from that "Ready to Share" paper about fostering an "ecology of creativity" and fomenting a "churning tide of innovation" that leads to hyperefficiency and so on, all of which double as useful rationalizations of enclosed communication channels like Facebook. My title for the essay was more or less inspired by this line: "We believe that the styles of creative bricolage exemplified by fashion and new digital environments embody a new grand narrative for creativity, born of ancient tradition." I, on the other hand, believe that the new "grand narrative for creativity" is the current ideological alibi for subsuming everyday life and sociality to capital. Social media allege to enable creativity when they are just appropriating it.

I was reminded of this lost material by this post by GMU economics Phd candidate Eli Dourado, who refers to IP restrictions in fashion as a "tragedy of the anticommons," following legal scholar Michael Heller (jstor). This is what happens when "multiple owners are each endowed with the right to exclude others from a scarce resource, and no one has an effective privilege of use." Dourado points out that fashion "is entirely about signaling. Inframarginally, signaling generates information and serves a useful social function, but at the margin, it’s better if fewer resources go into signaling. For instance, if you impose a tax on the signal that causes everyone to signal half as much, information is preserved and the status of every individual remains the same, but fewer resources are consumed." In other words (as I understand it), the fashion industry seeks to promote inefficiency in signaling, with lots of redundancy and confusion and overdetermination and interpretation problems, generating "information" that no longer serves a "useful social function" but instead drains resources from other uses and binds it to endless acts of decoding. The solution, Dourado suggests, is to stop rewarding fashion innovation by halting IP protection in the industry. I don't think that will work, as the utter lack of intellectual property rights has done nothing to stem the flow of "sharing" in social networks, though admittedly sharers don't perceive their self-fashioning explicitly as innovation (yet).

Also cut from my n+1 essay was a bunch of material from sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky's book The Empire of Fashion, which I think lays the groundwork for an argument that connects the dissemination of fashion with emergent neoliberal subjectivity. He basically argues that fashion accustoms us to accept constant change as freedom of expression rather than insecurity, as providing opportunities for creativity rather than conformism. Of course, it is neither one or the other of these things, but both simultaneously. One of capitalism's great psychological coups is that it allows us to be creative conformists.

Anyway, this is what I originally had drawing on Lipovetsky:

"The consciousness of being an individual with a particular destiny, the will to express a unique identity, the cultural celebration of personal identity were 'productive forces,' the very driving forces of the mutability of fashion,” Lipovetsky argues in The Empire of Fashion. Tracing the development of couture, Lipovetsky claims that "what formerly appeared as signs of class and social hierarchy had a tendency to become increasingly, although not exclusively, psychological signs, expressions of a soul or personality." This allowed fashion to corner the market on giving ordinary people opportunities for, in the words of haute couturier Marc Bohan, "the renewal of their psychological makeup." The promised transformational potential makes fashion, as Lipovetsky notes, "the first major mechanism for the consistent social production of personality" -- that is, our first reflexive sense of self, set in terms of those constantly shifting social meanings, an identity not foisted upon us by birth and tradition but one for which we must hold ourselves personally responsible.
As fashion strays from its role in expressing established hierarchies, it becomes a form of institutionalized insecurity, laundered by the personal expression and individualism it appears to authorize. It yokes us all to the zeitgeist, eradicating the orienting effects of tradition and leaving us all more vulnerable to existential doubt. What Lipovetsky tends to call a “right to personalization” is at once also an ontological burden, the emergence of a permanent identity crisis.
If we don’t have the right to a self simply by virtue of existing, then how do we justify our conviction that we are somebody? How do we prove it to the world? Lipovetsky argues that people respond to fashion’s destabilization of the self by embracing fashion more thoroughly. Having “generalized the spirit of curiosity, democratized tastes and the passion for novelty at all levels of existence and in all social ranks,” he argues, “the fashion economy has engendered a social agent in its own image: the fashion person who has no deep attachments, a mobile individual with a fluctuating personality and tastes.”
Lipovetsky’s “fashion person” is a precursor for the social-media enabled personal brand. A cursory glance at Facebook reveals all sorts of “fashion people” harbored there. We have to watch ourselves become ourselves in order to be ourselves, over and over again. This futile process crystallizes in the irrepressible ideal of youth, the time when all that reflexivity seemed like second nature, was authenticity itself. As Lipovetsky notes: "The exaltation of the youthful look is ... inseparable from the modern democratic individualist age whose logic it carries to its narcissistic conclusion. All individuals are in fact urged to work on their own personal images, to adopt, to keep fit, to recycle themselves. The cult of youth and the cult of the body go hand in hand; they require the same constant self-scrutiny, the same narcissistic self-surveillance, the same need for information, and the same adaptation to novelty."

For me, that is a pretty succinct description of what social media are for, preserving the illusion of youth in a space that doesn't countenance the past or the future but only the now.

Celebritization and Resistance (26 May 2011)

As I inevitably tend to view social media through the lens of my personal experience, I tend to degender it and talk about it in the asexual terms of corporate branding, with adults pursuing their attentional accumulation and personal affirmations like canny entrepreneurs, deploying a kind of abstracted informational commodity in tweets and updates and links and so on. But clearly the imperative of self-exploitation strikes us all unevenly, and it's conditioned by gender and race and class and social capital and innumerable other things that would be impossible to totalize. Because they quantify attention, social media can make it seem as though it is an abstract commodity, like money, uniform and commensurate, but that masks the the fact the different forms of attention available have different consequences for subjectivity. It's one thing to have, say, your blog post on Spinoza tweeted; quite another to have your picture reblogged on Fuck Yeah Self-Shooters. And it is not as though the sort of attention we can seek is some entirely autonomous choice. What is available, or what we know is possible or attainable, is highly conditioned by where we are already situated.

If there is any commonality among the various snares of the attention economy, it may be in an underlying reflexivity, an awareness of identity as an alienated thing rather than a lived-in spontaneity. Reflexivity introduces absence into any sense of presence, an awareness of audiences not directly accounted for which nonetheless must be played to. Still, the different ways in which we are enticed to seek attention, the different audiences we are brought to suspect are in our reach, require different forms of resistance, different precommitments perhaps. So while I feel myself being sucked into a personal-branding spiral; women face a temptation to sexualized modes of attention-seeking that I don't experience.

So the online objectification and fetishization of young women, the generalized idea of their availability, drives a disproportionate slice of the online attention economy, authenticating a certain kind of attention's value and rooting vicariousness in a subject position that's simultaneously powerful and vulnerable. I imagine it as an alluring opportunity to become money, as fungible and fecund and purposeful as money can be, though it is hard to anticipate what it must be like to be spent. Here's how danah boyd put it in an essay that looks at the attention economy, "celebritization" and its consequences mainly for teenage girls.

Celebrity becomes a correlate to a perfect life -- money, designer clothes, and adulthood. What being a ‘celebrity’ means is discarded; fame is an end to itself with the assumption that fame equals all things awesome despite all the copious examples to the contrary. So teens only hold on to the positive aspects, hoping for the benefits of becoming famous and ignoring the consequences.

boyd is writing in response to this Rolling Stone profile by Sabrina Rubin Erdely of a teenager, Kiki Kannibal, who used MySpace to achieve notoriety but as boyd puts it, "lacked the resources to handle the onslaught and never made it big enough to recoup the ground she lost to weather the fame." Because Kiki uses her sexuality for attention but is not sanctioned through a big-media-supported alibi, she is "under attack."

Rubin Erdley explains why Kiki Kannibal doesn't simply go offline:

She can't go offline. One reason is practical: Kiki has a business to run. But the other reason is more existential: If she were to go offline, her link to the world would disappear. This is a girl with 12,000 Twitter followers whose actual life is empty of real relationships. She's trapped in suburban isolation; outside the bubble of her family, her most meaningful interactions are electronic. In real life, she's lost.

The implication seems to be that her pursuit of celebrity has precluded her ability to generate local ties of affection. Learning how to market oneself online is a different skill from learning how to maintain friendships. boyd suggests that girls get trapped in such dynamics because "fame is a toxic substance," noting that "when the attention is good, it’s really good and it feels really good. And when the attention fades, people can feel lonely and anxious, desperate for more, even if it’s negative attention." I wonder if that isn't pathologizing the desire for celebrity too much, pinning it on personal psychology rather than the structure of the new media form that amplifies these tendencies into potentially destructive compulsions. Social media seem to systematically efface the possibility that the desire for fame might not be universal; they do a poor job of allowing people to calibrate their exposure, which is always theoretically infinite despite whatever temporary barrier privacy settings erect. (Anyone within the network can liberate the private information, which in any event belongs to the social media company, not the user.) In other words, I agree with boyd when she writes, "it’s high time that we start reflecting on the societal values that are getting magnified by them."

Maybe this is a bit hyperbolic, but this Vanity Fair story by Amy Fine Collins about prostitution and human trafficking seems the grim logical extension of what the Rolling Stone story describes. The self-coercion boyd mentions with regard to celebritization is arguably on a continuum (albeit a very, very long one) with the horrors described in the Vanity Fair piece, which would make certain Internet users into the equivalent of johns. A lawyer Fine Collins interviewed for the VF story says, “Johns don’t understand what they’re contributing to. It never occurs to them that the woman who is smiling is being abused. They really don’t know what’s going on—and they don’t care." Internet use sometimes seems to invite that kind of indifference, if the manifold examples of trolling, bullying, voyerurism and generalized deinhibition are any testimony. (The Rolling Stone article is about these tendencies as much as it is about the drive for microcelebrity.) The governing ideology seems to be that all the information online has been voluntarily provided and is thus ultimately fair game, as if there are no gray areas or no shifts in context or no possible regrets on the part of the volunteer that should check a consumer's impulse to enjoy it on whatever level one chooses. Social media's immediacy can make it seem as though this sort of heedless entertainment is an entitlement; the underlying implication is that women are naive if they think otherwise. The consumption of microcelebrity is not governed by the norms of friendship, despite social media's liberal usage of its terminology.

Work Refusal (25 May 2011)

I spent the past weekend at the Post/Autonomia conference, which, fittingly enough, mostly took place in a former anatomical pathology laboratory -- the sessions were held in a room that was apparently once a morgue. At first, I was afraid that the ideas we were about to discuss (derived principally from autonomist writers like Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzaurato, Mario Tronti, John Holloway, Harry Cleaver, etc.) were possibly coming there to die, but I left feeling much more optimistic about the possibility that concepts like precarity and affective labor and decolonialization can escape the lab and actually be effectual in social activism.

Discussions ran the gamut from hairsplitting (to the untrained non-Spinozan) philosophical discussions of ontological accumulation and being-as-becoming to more hard-core Marxist themes like the composition of the working class, the organic composition of capital, and who comprises the revolutionary agent of history to practical assessments of the efficacy of, say, social media to activate the "multitude" (or, if you prefer, to sustain the Badiouian "communist hypothesis"), and it ended with a discussion of whether academia was at all a useful place for the discussion of any of this or whether it was fatally subsumed by capital. (I contributed a paper about social media as sustaining the entrepreneurial neoliberal self, not sure where/when/if it will be published.)

I took lots of notes while I was there; now I am having a lot of trouble deciphering them. Many of them, if I recall correctly, refer to the evolving strategies of work refusal discussed. The term is a bit of a misnomer. The idea of refusing work can seem odd in the midst of widespread unemployment and generalized precarity (indeed, one of the papers that stood out for me was Maria Isabel Casas-Cortes's tracing of the broadening circles of whom precarity could apply to), but it makes more sense if work is interpreted in the broadest sense to include the various forms of self-production, self-exploitation, and affective, digital and free labor that often go uncompensated by wages anyway. Franco "Bifo" Berardi's paper adopted this theme, advocating what sounded like voluntary simplicity, presumably as a means of thwarting the "hypercomplexity" and overload of our accelerated information processing capacities, though possibly also to escape the labor of consumption that reinforces consumerism, "semiocapitalism" (which I think means something like Baudrillard's conception of consumerism as consumption of signs), and individualism. I'm not sold on voluntary simplicity or some sort of hermeneutics of asceticism; more interesting to me was the implication that resistance could be organized and targeted at choice architecture and over-friendly user interfaces, which tend toward quietly normalizing one-dimensionality. Some of the same themes appear in his essay "Cognitarian Subectivation", which I commented on here.

Matteo Pasquinelli's paper suggested, in line with Christian Marazzi's work, that capitalism is moving to a model of rent extraction through financialization rather than exploiting surplus labor more directly. One might conceptualize this shift as a reaction to mechanization reducing the input of "living labor" into production, which would also be a way to characterize work refusal. I thought it fit with what Adam Arvidsson and Elanor Colleoni argue in their paper "Value in Information Capitalism and on the Internet" (pdf, my summary) with regard to Facebook.

Emanuel Rota discussed work refusal in terms of the right to be lazy, à la Paul Lafargue, whereas Stevphen Shukaitis stressed the necessity of "learning not to work," and the different forms work refusal must take according to different class positions and situations. He seemed to argue that we needed to better recognize affective labor so as to refuse it and cataloged the history of "art strikes," or the refusal of cultural labor. I presumed he meant the refusal not of creativity as such but the supplemental labor necessary for making creativity subsumable by capital -- the organizational and infrastructural labor that supports creative labor as a product, makes it packageable, profitable. This would include, as I conceive it, the branding, the marketing, the "getting it out there" work as well as the sort of care work that allows people to create in a self-aggrandizing mode. Shukaitis seemed to want to repartition work from leisure in order to facilitate the time-space for autonomous personal development, though this is easier said than done, considering that social recognition is now bound up with forms of self-commodification more than ever thanks to social media.

Refusing work is thus a matter of recharacterizing work as "ludic activity" -- which is a way of saying "play" without risking trivialization. But that can't collapse into entertaining oneself -- I am not sure that an art strike is needed; it seems like an attention strike is what's wanted, a refusal to get caught up in interactive entertainments that make our pursuit of distraction productive. Instead, we need what Federico Luisetti described during the session Q&A as a right to be bored -- a right to refuse to be entertained or distracted. It's easy to see this idea gaining momentum as information overload continues to worsen. Boredom will become a figure for the repose and replenishing necessary before concentration is possible, or perhaps even as a metonym for concentration itself. When capitalism wants to hurry us through commodified information at ever increasing speeds to valorize it all, boredom becomes a way of slowing things down, of resisting, of holding out for a minimal self rooted not in accumulation of trivia but in a kind of open-ended blankness.

I suppose I understand refusal of work as resisting personal branding, of refusing to be, as one speaker said, "dragged into networks of consumerism" in search of identity but holding out for other kinds of nurturing community that social networks increasingly obscure. It seems to me a matter of defying the injunction to be reflexive, to instrumentalize self-awareness, and try for self-forgetting. Instead of pursuing measurable attention, which induces one to see the self in terms of capitalistic accumulation and expansion, one could seek forms of intersubjectivity that supply a reciprocal recognition without lapsing into exploitable performativity. (I am failing by my own standards of course.)

Rent to Pwn (22 April 2011)

I am all for people buying less stuff and sharing more of their stuff with people. I think it is great when people figure out how to give stuff they are getting rid of to people who want to use it. But I am fairly skeptical of "collaborative consumption," which wants to monetize these impulses in new tech startup companies. A current Fast Company article by Danielle Sacks covers this emerging sector, what Silicon Valley investor types apparently call "underused asset utilization" ventures, which includes car sharing and other co-op-like schemes, peer-to-peer rental services, and eBayish resale sites. There is so much scary dystopian potential in what Sacks reports that I almost choked on the omelet I was eating while reading it (at which point it occurred to me that if I coughed it up, maybe I could re-sell it to a underfed peer).

"Underused asset utilization" strikes me as a far more honest term than "sharing," and it certainly sheds a new light on what Facebook is doing: getting us to conceive of ourselves, our social lives and our identity as "underused" assets to exploit. (My web-surfing history is really too valuable to keep to myself -- and really, how can I monetize my friends? What else are they good for? Are they even my friends if I can't profit from them?) The governing principe with all these ventures is to use the deeper mediation of people's personal lives (through smartphones and social media) to get them to behave even more like little capitalist firms. Consider the way Sharable founder Neal Gorenflo talks about his own life:

One afternoon, after a jog through the parking lot of his Brussels hotel, he quit his job. Since then, Gorenflo has deconstructed every aspect of his personal and working life, "removing all the things that don't add value and concentrating on the things that deliver value." Andrea made the cut -- she's now his wife.

Is there anything more to life than adding value? Not from this point of view. "Sharing" might evokes images of potlatch and competitive altruism, but in the world of underused asset utilization, sharing has nothing to do with gifts and everything to do with efficiency, with bringing rationalized use of capital resources to ever single nook and cranny in one's life, even if you had no intention of being a entrepreneur or a capitalist. The backers of these ventures imagine the purpose of the social web and "connections" is merely to make self-entrepreneurializing easier, near automatic. So when you are about to "underuse" some "asset" in your everyday life, your smartphone can intervene to rent it to someone else (and let some Silicon Valley venture capitalists get their cut). "I'm looking at virtually every resource and finding ways to extract additional value or productivity from it, from food to gardens to skill sharing," says one investor. That sounds awesome, a real recipe for joy. (It reminds me of Marx's "Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!")

Gorenflo tells Sacks, "Business has spent centuries making buying really easy. We're just at the beginning of making sharing easy." This had me confused at first, because I don't really get how firms can be capitalist if they are not seeking profits through selling things. This confusion could prompt a person to think that the "sharing economy" is some sort of postcapitalist potentiality -- as when Rachel Botsman, the co-author of a book about "collaborative consumption" declares, "This could be as big as the Industrial Revolution in the way we think about ownership." But these companies are not out to usher in the end fo private-property rights. Botsman says that she realized, ""I just can't help companies sell more stuff," but that doesn't mean that she's looking to decrease the volume of capitalist exchanges or slow the velocity of commerce. It means selling services rather than stuff, brokering the exchange of existing goods between parties, like a pawn shop owner. The for-profit sharing companies are still operating like capitalist companies; only they are now "platforms" that root exploitation deeper into the lives of the independent contractors (i.e. the customers they "serve") they use to generate work product.

The part of the article that struck as most depressing, though, is the development of private "reputation companies" that hope to create a "trust rating" similar to a credit rating based on one's online behavior, the "data exhaust" one's mediatized activity generates.

The challenge that worries everyone in the sharing world, of course, is trust. It's one thing to believe that a knitter on Etsy will mail you that crocheted beret. It's another to let a stranger sleep in your home or borrow your second-most-expensive asset, your car. "Sharing of the kind we're talking about really only works when there's reputation involved," says Freestyle's Felser.... Almost all (including AirBnB) require profiles for both parties and feature a community ratings system. But these ratings would carry far more weight if they traveled with you across the web, so that your eBay reputation helped inform your standing on AirBnB. Startups like TrustCloud would like to become the portable reputation system for the web. The company is building an algorithm to collect (if you choose to opt in) your online "data exhaust" -- the trail you leave as you engage with others on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, commentary-filled sites like TripAdvisor, and beyond -- and calculate your reliability, consistency, and responsiveness. The result would be a contextual badge you'd carry to any website, a trust rating similar to the credit rating you have in the offline world.

By all means, let's automate trust. Who doesn't love the arbitrarity of credit ratings and the way they rob one of a sense of autonomy? Yes! Let's extend that principle more generally, and let computers assign a number to the quality of our ethical character overall, based on how much garbage we look at online! That is a beautiful idea. Who wouldn't "choose to opt in"? (As if opting out won't come to signify having something to hide if, god forbid, these systems catch on -- you already can't really opt out of Facebook and belong socially in the accepted way in the U.S.) Let's let an algorithm score our cultural capital and make that number known so people can more efficiently judge whether it is worth their time to interact with us. Splendid! How efficient will my "sharing" and appropriating become then, when I know who the losers are after a glance at a spreadsheet?

I guess this is why Amazon is constantly pestering me to "rate my transactions" all the time. They can't leave me alone and let me have my book; they want me to volunteer my feelings to grease the wheels of their distribution and rent-extracting mechanisms. I don't want to help build reputations; I want to reserve the trust that my minuscule contribution to this world can build for something better. I don't want to be part of a panopticon that is deemed socially necessary to keep people from cheating one another under a generalized Hobbesean regime of hypercapitalism in which every single gesture and every single thing I think and do is theoretically for sale and is thus a theoretical cheat. Offshoring "reputation management" to private companies seems like a terrible way to build general trust in a society, as does assigning people a numeric rating. These are indications that trust doesn't generally exist, and shouldn't be expected from one another. It's a neighborhood watch society where people are only kept in line through fear, not sympathy.

One of the positive aspects of markets (and possibly the whole point of trust-building between parties) is that they can facilitate anonymous exchange and foster privacy -- granting a modicum of autonomy to getting and spending and owning. What you buy and collect is nobody else's business. But to the sharing czars, it's necessarily everybody's business -- that's where their profit opportunity is, having an itemized list of your stuff. Or even your opinions. In a world where value is primarily created socially at the level of affects and signifiers and brands and so on, privacy makes you into an "underused asset." And Silicon Valley can not let that stand.

Self-Service and Self-Serving (24 March 2011)

Tyler Cowen linked to this paper (pdf) from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation about the many blessings it claims that information technology bestows -- enhancing productivity, tempering the business cycle, making markets more efficient, improving the quality of goods, allowing us to defeat time and space and live forever, and so on. IT, it seems, enables employers to get more productive work per employee by eliminating the jobs of those whose work has been automated out of existence and by "letting" those who remain "do more things at the same time" -- that is, blurring the boundaries between work and nonwork, surreptitiously expanding the working day, and accelerating work processes through multitasking with little regard for the increased stress and irritability this imposes on workers.

What bothered me most is the paper's paean to technology-enabled self-service. Yes, I know, everyone loves checking themselves out at the grocery store and talking to robots on the phone instead of human customer service agents. We all recognize how companies have our best interests in mind when they get us consumers to do things they once had to pay an employee to do. Aware that some of us remain reluctant to rhapsodize over self-service, the paper explores the issue in a dedicated sidebar, which includes this tendentious passage:

Unfortunately, self-service sometimes gets a bad rap. The media routinely portrays the efforts of companies to implement self-service options as creating work for the consumer solely for the benefit of the company. In reality, most self-serve applications don’t cost the consumer more time, they just involve one person (the consumer) doing the work, not two (the consumer and the employee). Granted while some self-service applications (e.g., “press 2 if you are interested in opening an account”) can be maddening and cost consumers more time, overall self-service technologies usually cut overall labor time (for both the worker and consumer). And in some cases, they can save consumers time and add convenience. Even where personal service provides consumers with more value (a chauffeur-driven car is seen as a luxury), it usually costs more (which is why usually why only wealthy people have chauffeurs). Other kinds of personal service are the same. They cost more money to provide than does self-service. However, in the type of competitive markets more companies are facing, savings from self-service are passed back to consumers through lower prices, at least over the moderate to long term. As a result, standards of living go up.

Yes, while quality of living goes down. Notice how the concept of "prosumerism" -- where consumers get to be productive "co-creators" or "innovators" alongside their favorite brand buddies -- is here revealed in its true guise. The company just presumes that the consumer is already an employee, no different from the cashier or stocker. Post-Fordist, immaterial labor and consumption as production is not necessarily about getting to join in with creative-class while they shape social meanings and recast our shared material culture; it's about getting consumers to forgo some of the services they were once accustomed to assume are included and do those things themselves, which add value to the enterprise. When shopping becomes "productive," that means it has become a job you do for them, not yourself. Self-service means "serve the company."

To wash this down, consumers are sold on "convenience" or the ability to skirt human contact that might disrupt their solipsism -- indeed, the paper suggests the idea of personal service is a decadent luxury, not something the firm has implicitly promised in selling services to us ("Only wealthy people have a chauffeur) -- and we are promised that we'll ultimately save money, which after all is the only relevant value in a consumer society. "Standards of living" in this context means exclusively the ability to buy and have more stuff, not to have better experiences or enjoy humanized exchanges in an economy palpably made up of people doing things for one another. Instead we are encouraged to live in a fantasy world where everything is made for our money alone, and naturally we have no choice but to help ourselves to it.

More on the Future of Work (23 March 2011)

Following up on the themes of my previous post (and untold dozens of others -- maybe I should start using a tagging system?): the P2P Foundation blog linked to a write-up (pdf) of a round table symposium put on by the Aspen Institute on the future of work. Among the participants were analysts from McKinsey and Deloitte and executives from Microsoft, IBM and Infosys, along with a bunch of other Silicon Valley think-tank types. It delineates how business elites would like to put across increasing precarity for workers as "freedom" and details some of the ideological resistance they expect to encounter.

The participants identify the emergence of the "post-Sloanist" worker (that is, the worker who exceeds the constraints of 20th century "scientific management" and organization engineering):

Every worker will have to become a continuous learner, he said, and will likely hold multiple jobs over the course of his or her lifetime, if not multiple careers. Many workers will need to work at part-time jobs and perhaps hold down multiple jobs simultaneously, he added. The ability to multitask and deal with interruptions to work will become mandatory skills.

And eventually, ADD will cease to be regarded as a disorder and will instead be an institutionalized educational outcome. The report continues, "a great deal of work is likely to become less routine and more exception-based, especially in knowledge-based jobs." It will be reactive; workers will perform triage as information pours in rather than initiate work processes.

Lots of the round table's conclusions are similar to ideas I've been harping about in previous posts about how changes in how we regard work augment the mounting stressfulness of neoliberal subjectivity. To list some of the changes: that work organization is becoming less directed and hierarchical and more a matter of "crowdsourcing" and post hoc capture; that the fixed workplace is being dispersed into a "social factory"; that firms are being supplanted by "platforms" (think Facebook); that work and leisure are becoming indistinguishable; that identity construction is merging with work, that consumption skills are increasingly regarded as productive and innovative in their own right and are being incorporated into manufacturing processes; that what constitutes work skills is also becoming more nebulous and hazily linked to education. Now, some of the participants suggested, the importance of discrete skills is being supplanted by the significance of "disposition" -- a rough analogue for what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called habitus.

Employers must recognize that they are not just hiring a set of skills, they are hiring people based on their personal temperaments. “In a world of continual and rapid change, maybe the most important things are dispositions that allow you to embrace change,” said John Seely Brown, Independent Co-Chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge.... “You can’t teach dispositions,” said Brown. “You cultivate them.” Employers cannot simply communicate information to workers; they must provide a hospitable, immersive environment for workers to satisfy their dispositions and talents.

So we are enjoined to always be cultivating an identity that will justify our worth to employers, and this perpetual process of becoming our better selves is expected to constantly throw off value. The disposition becomes our job; producing ourselves becomes mandatory, and linked to our economic survival. As a result, being "yourself" has never been more stressful. "Workers will regard their work lives as an experience, a lifestyle and an identity—not just a paycheck," the report suggests, and that is supposed to be a good thing: For some in the creative-class vanguard, work seems to be increasingly unalienated (these people are entrepreneurs of their personal brand and reaping a livelihood from it) and indistinguishable from the process of just living life. And this may be the model of the workplace of the future generally. But this sort of "freedom" comes at the expense of other forms, mainly the freedom from having to capitalize on every aspect of one's selfhood.

To paraphrase from Baudrillard's The Consumer Society, which repeatedly makes the point that our needs are not autonomous and not our own invention, the need to engage in conspicuous self-fashioning has become systemic; it's no longer the product of what individuals actually want, if it ever was so. Identity has been made productive in and of itself, and thus has been subsumed, integrated into the capitalist system. Again, to recast Baudrillard, the strenuously defended right to a unique self actually betokens the loss of such lived uniqueness, its transition to an exchangeable commodity, a form of abstracted labor.

The shift away from specific job skills to dispositions raises many other issues as well: If a disposition for creativity and symbolic-meaning making is the new valuable skill set, can it be differentiated from social and cultural capital that stems from class? Can a person be taught how to make distinction (in Bourdieu's sense of the word) if one lacks the proper class distinctions to begin with, or would the fact that you needed to learn them automatically disqualify you? How do you teach flexibility and a willingness to bend rules as well as follow them, depending on the situation? How do you teach an instinct for design and cultural trends? Can there be a school that teaches hipsterism? And how much hipsterism can the economy support? (Will Davies says not as much as many aspiring bohemians would like; he advises they drop aesthetic consumption for political organizing -- good luck with that!)

"Every Person for Themselves" Economy (18 March 2011)

Justin Fox, who doesn't blog enough anymore, wrote a good post about this Democracy article by Andrei Cherny, about the "Individual Age." That's Cherny's phrase for what used to be called "the new capitalism" and what left-leaning types (like me) tend to describe as "precarity" or "post-Fordist labor conditions." The security that once came from long-term employment with large firms and the safety net supplied jointly by employers and the state (and secured through labor union activism) were discarded with the rise of neoliberalism, which preached deregulation, outsourcing, globalization and total worker flexibility (remember Who Moved My Cheese the 1990s ode to employee servility?). Neoliberal (or post-Fordist or postindustrial) relations of production dispensed with employer-employee loyalty and made most workers free agents, drifting from job to job, perpetually insecure, perpetually having to sell one's usefulness anew to employers always looking for reasons to get rid of you. Fox cites this 1997 Fast Company article, "Free Agent Nation" by Dan Pink, as an early reflection of these changes; Richard Sennett's The Culture of the New Capitalism and The Corrosion of Character are all about these developments as well, and more recently Tina Brown termed it "the gig economy."

Here's how Cherny explains this change:

The differences between the economy of the 19th century and that of the 21st are too many to list, but today, as in Jefferson’s time of independent farmers and shopkeepers, it is individuals, not large conglomerations, that propel the economy. The number of Americans working for themselves is growing rapidly and most Americans no longer work full-time for someone else. Yet it is not just the self-employed or entrepreneurs who are part of this new world. Every worker is grappling with the Individual Age. Lifetime employment with a single company is largely a thing of the past and the dependable health, retirement, and training benefits such a relationship held are fast disappearing. Americans born between 1957 and 1964 held an average of 11 jobs between the ages of 18 and 44. That trend is accelerating and is much more pronounced among those born in later decades. Untethered from large institutions, bouncing from one job to the next, today each individual is ultimately responsible for guiding their own career and economic future. Today, everyone is an entrepreneur; everyone is their own small business.

The way Cherny tells it, this "trend" is just sort of happening and no one is driving it or can do anything about it; it's just the world historical process playing itself out. This elides the actual concerted effort (ideological, political, economic, etc.) that has gone into making the neoliberal condition a reality, allowing for the needs of capital to dictate the living conditions of more and more people, subsuming more and more of everyday life.

Cherny hopes that government will change policy to support personal entrepreneurhood: "Health-care and retirement benefits should be made more personalized, portable, affordable, and universal." But as Fox points out, the emergence of the entrepreneurial self undermines the sort of solidarity necessary to lobby the government for this change to be implemented and for fairer tax treatment and the like. "To get us laws that reflect the new workplace reality, Free Agent Nation, by its very nature dispersed and allergic to large organizations, needs to develop a unified voice. Can it?" Fox asks. I'm pretty skeptical that it can; the destruction of such solidarity is almost explicitly the purpose of neoliberal reform, as the attack on public-sector unions' bargaining rights suggests. The goal is to get every person thinking and acting for themselves, which makes them most desperate and vulnerable -- oh, wait, I'm sorry, I meant free and flexible.

Pink, in the Fast Company article, paints a picture of precarity as knowledge workers making a savvy career choice to be independent, outside the corporate box and therefore "authentic." Various interviewees in the article gloat about their blissful work lives, like this serial small-time entrepreneur:

"I used to think that what I needed to do was balance my life, keep my personal and professional lives separate," she says. "But I discovered that the real secret is integration. I integrate my work into my life. I don't see my work as separate from my identity." The mask is gone. For this free agent, work is who she is.

As Pink stresses, in the neoliberal world, "work is personal" and there are no boundaries separating work and nonwork. This fits with the tendency for our consumption to increasingly serve a productive function in the economy as "immaterial" or "affective" labor, contributing to marketing innovations and enhancing brands' equity and devising new uses for goods, new consumer wants, new ways to get pleasure from spending. As more of our self-presentation can be captured digitally and tracked and amalgamated, particularly through social media and mobile communications, our identities themselves become productive factories of economic value.

Pink assert this sort of thing makes work inseparable from fun. And maybe in a noncapitalist society the disappearance of work-life separation would mean freedom from alienation, pure harmonious praxis, meaningful and recognized work for one's livelihood. But under capitalism, this lack of boundaries yields limitless insecurity, and it leads us to entrepreneurialize ourselves, see ourselves as little firms and work hard to augment our personal brand (which seems to me synonymous with neoliberal subjectivity). Rather than work becoming fun, fun becomes work, and hipsterism in it current guise is born. Our identity work becomes anxious, calculating, inescapably reflexive, the opposite of spontaneous. We become conscious that every little gesture must ideally be turned to account somehow to help us get ahead and protect our standard of living.

I think the rise of social media -- beyond merely mobilizing immaterial labor -- has had a lot to do with structuring, promulgating, and naturalizing the entrepreneurial subjectivity necessary for neoliberalism to function smoothly. They support the concept ideologically and institutionally where government doesn't, giving us a sense that we are capitalizing on ourselves and compensating for the collectivity and security we've lost. So the personal brand supplants the personality or the lifestyle -- terms that horrified earlier generations of social critics worried about commercialized identity. Now we network and self-promote and see this as the extent and purpose of social life. Of course! How else could it be? Why wouldn't we capitalize on our friend quotient, our "social graph" -- why shouldn't we measure ourselves in terms of what we can sell about ourselves? That's now how we discover what is "authentic" about us. It seems that we are approaching a point that only what we can sell or hype about ourselves seems real to ourselves -- only what is retweeted or liked on Facebook speaks to who we really are.

The Accursed Share of Self (11 March 2011)

The most recent issue of the journal Mediations has an interview with Marxist political theorist Paolo Virno, who wrote a short and surprisingly accessible book called A Grammar of the Multitude, which explores the ramifications of "post-Fordist" labor conditions -- that is to say, non-factory employment that emphasizes worker cooperation and flexibility and can involve the production of immaterial goods -- brands, services, experiences, entertainment. (Hence this sort of work is sometimes called "immaterial labor," though that ambiguity of the word immaterial can throw people off.)

Unlike the book, the interview is somewhat forbidding. I'm going to hazard a guess that this interview was not conducted face to face, with such questions as these being asked aloud:

In the contemporary “creative industry,” collective work often takes the paradigmatic form of “brainstorming.” It consists of the discussion and production of both ideas and solutions, even if a considerable part of them are rejected after critical examination, though this work sometimes opens the door for unexpected innovations. In the conditions of Fordism, massive collectivities — organized through a strict disciplinary division of labor — produced the well-known effect of the multiplication of separate productive forces of workers (“the whole is more than the sum of its parts”). Maybe it would be possible to make a (disputable) assumption: under the conditions of post-Fordism, collective work can be organized through “subtraction” when the result of the work is inferior to the sum of the collective effort. This becomes a sort of exception, an unexpected innovation (“the whole is less than the sum of the parts”). On the other hand, if not considered in terms of products, such collective work produces a feeling of strong subjectivity and strength, valorizing each member of the collective. What is your opinion? Would it be possible to connect this “subtractive” mode of functioning with the disappearance of a measure for work in contemporary production?

Stripped of some of the verbiage, there's an interesting point in there, namely, that unlike assembly lines, which paradigmatically maximizes the minimum contribution from workers to make a sophisticated product, creative-class-type work encourages lots of brainstorming, much of which is discarded. The end product is less the than total mental energy poured into it. (This immediately reminds me of when magazine interns are asked to draft huge lists of ideas for various sections only to have most of them summarily rejected, or when dozens of headline ideas are tossed out over the course of interminable meetings.)

Virno's response to this idea is also interesting. He suggests that collective effort doesn't vanish so much as linger and threaten to spoil. It becomes a sort of accursed share that must somehow be expended, or rechanneled.

Nowadays, the quota of collective intelligence that is thrown away in the production of goods is not physically destroyed, but somehow remains there, as a ghost, as a non-used resource that is still available.... Sometimes it becomes frustration and melancholic inertia, or it generates pitiless competition and hysterical ambition. In other cases, it can be used as a propeller for subversive political action. Also, here we need to bear in mind an essential ambivalence: the same phenomenon can become both a danger and a salvation. The copiousness of collective intelligence is, altogether, heimlich — familiar and propitious — and unheimlich — disturbing and extraneous.

One can see in that response the optimistic view of post-Fordism, the opportunities this cooperative energy represents. But I am more familiar, I guess, with the detriments -- the divisive competitiveness, the ambition gone awry, the depression and defeatedness. I associate most of those negative ramifications with the narcissistic implications of post-Fordism -- the way we are encouraged to position ourselves as personal brands in order to succeed in a decentralized workplace that seeks to reward merit over longevity and loyalty; the way the effort we put into shaping our identity becomes a productive economic force; the way commanding and brokering attention begins to justify any means necessary; the way we are taught to regard our consumption as a mode of symbolic production, making us believe our consumer tastes are highly meaningful and in some ways zero-sum. I sometimes end up feeling that I need certain bands to fail in order to vindicate my indifference; I need certain writers to publish mediocre work because I haven't aligned with their brand. I end up being threatened by people when they seem smart, which makes no sense at all, since I generally want to learn things from the people I talk to or whose work I read.

In short, there is a killing reflexivity, an endless recursiveness, to our behavior that seems to stem from post-Fordism, or late capitalism, or the New Capitalism, or whatever you want to call it. Virno notes the ways this reflexivity manifests itself in impossible commands like: I order you to be spontaneous. He writes, "In our present time, the labor force enriches the capital only if it takes part in a form of social cooperation that is wider than the one presupposed by the factory or the office. In post-Fordism, the efficient worker includes — in the execution of his own labor — attitudes, competences, wisdoms, tastes and inclinations matured somewhere else, outside that time specifically dedicated to the production of goods." Part of social cooperation, I think, is carework and affective labor -- the sort of nonmarket nourishing that we all need to reproduce as a species and not just kill ourselves. But arguably, much of the rest of that effort that we spend outside the workplace is spent on self-fashioning -- on presenting a winning identity to our friends, who are now available to us in theory as a potential audience at all times. We engage in a form of "social cooperation" by sharing through social media, often in order to establish our personal brands and test their reach, measure their equity. (Virno's word for what I call the personal brand is virtuoso -- which admittedly gives it a more positive spin, evoking an unalienated, nonprofessional mastery of something.) Then that anxiety, and the fruit of participating in those social networks, are brought to bear on the brainstorming sessions during official work hours; in effect, then, one is always working, because successful job performance depends on developing the right sort of knowledge and connections throughout the whole of one's personal life. You have to be able to leverage not only the office watercooler talk but the similar ambient information one absorbs outside work. This qualifies you to be a Gladwellian influencer, a certified creative-class meaning-maker, a hipster.

We are always aware of ourselves as a brand, and we have to nourish its equity with entrepreneurial thinking -- how can I get it out there better, and position it properly and make the right sorts of alliances to strengthen the core message I am trying to convey? In some ways this beats working as we traditionally think of it -- working for the Man, doing our deskilled and meaningless task on the endless assembly line of existence. Post-Fordism extends the opportunity to make all our work seem more integrated with the great project of self-actualization, of expressing ourselves more fully.

But this self-awareness is the accursed share as well -- the leftover from the competitive workplace-brainstorming sessions, that status-hierarchy battles, the arguments over what music and which movies suck, the experience of checking Facebook and feeling outclassed by what your friends have shared, and so on. It all conjures a certain kind of identity into being, one that is defined by its inadequacy. I suppose Lacanian-leaning types would argue that this is always already inevitably the case, that the self should be constructed around a lack, around desire. But that seems to let the relations of production off the hook, as well as the cultural forces that work to snuff out the optimism that Virno can detect in these forms of cooperation. The self-interested acquisitiveness and insatiability that capitalism encourages are posited as natural conditions, as inescapable human nature, and are allowed to pervert the other side of human nature -- our tendency to get along with one another and combine to achieve things. Our collaborative nature is expropriated, we regard it ourselves as weakness unless we can turn it to account and make it personally advantageous to ourselves alone. Capitalism prompts us to reject the possibility of collective identity -- what Virno talks about here in terms of "a multitude of singularities," of individuality emerging through collectivity -- for something atomized and uncompromisingly individualistic, that relies on forms of recognition that don't rely on interaction with other people, things like money and abstract status.

Hence the structure of Facebook, the exemplary staging ground for post-Fordist subjectivity. It allows for participation in social networks -- it lets us contribute to the "general intellect" or the "social brain" -- but always at our convenience, without messy synchronous interactions with other people, which might compromise our brand or upset our entrepreneurial focus, and always as a strictly discrete identity (as a personal brand) whose value is independently measured and capable of being brokered by and to parties outside the network. At work, we call those parties who capitalize on the value of our sociality and personal creativity our bosses, yet with online social media, our new bosses seem to fade into the background. The revolutionary transformational potential of the enhanced social cooperation that the economy increasingly depends upon ends up being neutralized, frittered away in ostentatious narcissism.

Anyway, that's the gist of what I would argue at the Post/Autonomia conference, if the organizers end up accepting my paper.