This article adopts the Autonomy of Migration approach to analyze the singularization of migrants and refugees from creating work activities based on the perspective of immaterial labor. The ...cartographic method was used to collect data from interviews and participant observation in Porto Alegre (Brazil), exploring events-activities, key informants, and economic migrants and refugees from the global south who work with music, dance, food, fashion, language, and political-cultural representation. The findings show that the mobilization of migrants and refugees in a cooperation network stresses the vernacular references and the migration/refuge situation, making them entrepreneurs of themselves. A mode of singularization is perceived regarding a labor market for migrants and refugees linked to affection and politics, which allows, through immaterial labor, the (re)invention of the self in the destination country.
This introduction frames the six original articles in this issue and the forum on "Corona A(e)ffects: Radical Affectivities of Dissent and Hope" around the concept of immaterial labor. Two full years ...into a pandemic that has uprooted place-based work for many, and forced even more indoors, away from public spaces, and onto screens, we reflect on the very material effects of present-day immaterial and emotional labor.
Outside of visible moments of mass mobilization, ongoing latent work, such as direct service and mutual aid, is a long-standing tradition in social movements. Yet, like all labor, personal digital ...devices have changed the norms and practices of direct service social movement work. In this article, as situated in the technology–media–movement complex (TMMC), I analyze qualitative interview data ( N = 26) with volunteers from a yearlong ethnographic project at an abortion fund hotline in the reproductive justice movement in the US South. To name hotline volunteers’ digital care labor, I offer the term immaterial intimacy to describe its ubiquitous, ephemeral, and intimate nature. I argue immaterial intimate labor enabled the organization to provide a responsive service, but relied on individualized digital volunteer work, existing within gendered and neoliberal norms. I discuss and question the use of personal digital technologies for direct service volunteer work in contemporary social movements.
Through an analysis of two cases of Zimbabwean artistic collaboration and expression, this article proposes the concept “digital unhu” as a useful tool for understanding a Zimbabwean-inflected ...expression of immaterial labor. This concept is premised on the unprecedented rise of mobile phones in Zimbabwe, and contains three main components, including the fusion of older traditions with newer technologies, an emphasis on community and collaboration, and strategies of mobility. Using this framework, this article seeks to add to scholarship that considers a variety of factors that influence digital practices in the rise of mobile phone use in the global south. Specifically, it emphasizes the impact of markets, as well as historical and cultural influences, on mobile phone practices in Zimbabwe.
The article explores Facebook governance – its mechanisms, motivations and sources of power – while identifying wider patterns and logics that apply to other internet corporations. I suggest that (1) ...when digital capitalism turns mundane human interactions into biopolitical production, corporations gain interest in governing these interactions to maximize profit, and make decisions on core political issues; (2) Facebook can effectively govern and discipline users since it remolds various field-specific forms of capital into a single form, generalized social capital, and since it can threaten to confiscate generalized social capital accumulated by users; (3) digital platforms do not simply epitomize a shift from discipline toward neoliberal decentralized governance. Instead, they engage in intensive legislation, administration of justice and punishment, and develop eclectic governing and legitimation apparatuses consisting of algorithms, proletarian judicial labor and quasi-constitutional governing documents.
The designation “gamer” is structurally bound to networked economies of digital play that are rewarded fiscally, socially, and publically, an order of play that is proving difficult to overturn. That ...girls and women have enjoyed at best marginal positions within video game cultures is by now well recognized, yet at the very same time is too easily dismissed in light of persuasively documented increases in the numbers of women who play. This article traces a large-scale transformation of ludic engagement from participation to spectatorship that parallels the professionalizing and commodifying of traditionally embodied sports, games, and play to demonstrate how new and emerging economies of gameplay, far from opening up the playing field, threaten a further entrenchment of gendered relations.
This paper takes recent PTSD claims by content moderators working for Microsoft and Google as a starting point to discuss the changing nature of trauma in the context of social media and algorithmic ...culture. Placing these claims in the longer history of how media came to be regarded by clinicians as potentially traumatic, it considers content moderation as a form of immaterial labor, which brings the possibility to be traumatized into the cycle of digital labor. Therefore, to the extent that content moderators’ trauma exists as a clinical condition, it cannot be taken as an incidental side-effect but as a built-in potentiality. It is about the commodification of traumatic vulnerability itself. The discussion then proceeds to speculate about the possibility of using algorithms to identify potentially traumatic content and what would that mean for the understanding of trauma, especially as a mediated experience.
Contrary to theses that present the emergence of immaterial and digital labor as a paradigmatic break with industrial production, analysis of the “agile methodologies” employed in software production ...suggests that the “new” features of these forms of labor organization in the twenty-first century are configured as adaptations of Taylor-Fordism and Toyotism to a new productive frontier unexplored or explored to a limited extent by capital in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in that the self-Taylorization of labor is one of the bases of software production in Brazil.
In the ongoing debates about the role of immaterial labor in digital media economics, the work of feminist researchers into affective labor performed in the home—“women’s work”—has barely featured. ...This article is an attempt to address this gap in the dominant framework for discussing consumer labor in digital contexts. It draws on feminist frameworks, particularly the work of Fortunati, in arguing that affective, immaterial labor has a variable and often indirect relationship to capitalist exchange. This indirect relationship allows the products of such work to retain their use-values while nevertheless remaining implicated in systems of exchange. This in turn draws attention to the immaterial product of reproductive labor, which is the social order itself, and the importance of the disciplining function of reproductive labor.
In his last scholarly work, L’Immatériel, André Gorz grapples with the emergence of the new cognitive capitalism based on immaterial labor and capital and, crucially, he seeks to comprehend how ...advanced technologies—such as nanotechnology, biotechnology, ICTs, and specifically, AI—reshape the very nature of the human subject. Despite its vital contributions, his conventional form of humanism—one that draws clear lines between organic human culture and inorganic machinic systems—is questioned and challenged by the increasingly complex and pervasive interplay between the two domains. Focusing on his later writings, this essay critically examines Gorz’s social theory of cognitive capitalism with particular reference to knowledge, information and intelligence. In doing so, the essay draws out some theoretical implications of Gorz’s defense of the humanities against post-human civilization for the development of a critical social theory of AI.
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