The Working Lives and Spatial Practice of Digital Media Developers in San Francisco
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University of Kentucky UKnowledge Theses and Dissertations--Geography Geography 2016 THE WORKING LIVES AND SPATIAL PRACTICE OF DIGITAL MEDIA DEVELOPERS IN SAN FRANCISCO Daniel G. Cockayne University of Kentucky, [email protected] Digital Object Identifier: http://dx.doi.org/10.13023/ETD.2016.305 Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Cockayne, Daniel G., "THE WORKING LIVES AND SPATIAL PRACTICE OF DIGITAL MEDIA DEVELOPERS IN SAN FRANCISCO" (2016). Theses and Dissertations--Geography. 46. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/geography_etds/46 This Doctoral Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Geography at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations--Geography by an authorized administrator of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact [email protected]. STUDENT AGREEMENT: I represent that my thesis or dissertation and abstract are my original work. Proper attribution has been given to all outside sources. I understand that I am solely responsible for obtaining any needed copyright permissions. I have obtained needed written permission statement(s) from the owner(s) of each third-party copyrighted matter to be included in my work, allowing electronic distribution (if such use is not permitted by the fair use doctrine) which will be submitted to UKnowledge as Additional File. I hereby grant to The University of Kentucky and its agents the irrevocable, non-exclusive, and royalty-free license to archive and make accessible my work in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I agree that the document mentioned above may be made available immediately for worldwide access unless an embargo applies. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of my work. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of my work. I understand that I am free to register the copyright to my work. REVIEW, APPROVAL AND ACCEPTANCE The document mentioned above has been reviewed and accepted by the student’s advisor, on behalf of the advisory committee, and by the Director of Graduate Studies (DGS), on behalf of the program; we verify that this is the final, approved version of the student’s thesis including all changes required by the advisory committee. The undersigned agree to abide by the statements above. Daniel G. Cockayne, Student Dr. Matthew Zook, Major Professor Dr. Andrew Wood, Director of Graduate Studies THE WORKING LIVES AND SPATIAL PRACTICE OF DIGITAL MEDIA DEVELOPERS IN SAN FRANCISCO DISSERTATION A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky By Daniel G. Cockayne Lexington, Kentucky Director: Dr. Matthew Zook, Professor of Geography Lexington, Kentucky 2016 Copyright © Daniel G. Cockayne 2016 ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION THE WORKING LIVES AND SPATIAL PRACTICE OF DIGITAL MEDIA DEVELOPERS IN SAN FRANCISCO In this dissertation I examine work practices in the 21st Century, looking in particular at how categories such as labor and value are changing in the context of technological shifts and the valorization of entrepreneurial work. I take the example of digital media workers in San Francisco to show how work is changing in relation to correlative changes in the capitalist mode of production and the devaluation of labor under neoliberal models of reason. This approach interrogates how attachments toward work are produced and reproduced to ask why work has become such a naturalized and unquestionable category in everyday life. Rather than demanding less or better work, entrepreneurs in San Francisco work more and harder, while providing a romanticized ideal of work for others. I ask if standards of precarious, insecure, flexible, and discriminatory work practices are transmitted beyond the confines of digital media work, and become a normative and hegemonic standard for workers in general. By examining these working practices and ethics of software developers in San Francisco’s digital media sector, I address recent calls in cultural economic and critical human geography to pay closer attention to the micro-spatiality of the workplace (rather than the more typical industry- or market-scale focus) and to consider issues of embodiment, emotions, affect, gendered performativity, and the production of sexuality at work. This dissertation attends to topics of inter-disciplinary appeal, including the production of software, precarious labor in a cultural industry, and the role of culture and emotions in the workplace. I view the workplace as a site not just for the production of economic forms of value, but also behaviors and attitudes toward work, working subjectivities, and structures of affect and desire. I take up three main topics: (1) entrepreneurs’ and other workers’ personal attachment to their work, (2) users of social media platforms as unremunerated producers (or ‘prosumers’) of value, and (3) the use of the sharing trope to form a justification for flexible and contract work in the on-demand economy. I draw on eighteen months of fieldwork in San Francisco with workers for digital media firms, presenting data collected through interviews, participant observation, and discourse analysis. Keywords: Digital Media, Economic Geography, Entrepreneurialism, Human Geography, San Francisco, Work Daniel G. Cockayne July 18th 2016 Date THE WORKING LIVES AND SPATIAL PRACTICE OF DIGITAL MEDIA DEVELOPERS IN SAN FRANCISCO By Daniel G. Cockayne Dr. Matthew Zook Director of Dissertation Dr. Andrew Wood Director of Graduate Studies July 18th 2016 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is perhaps impossible to give a full and accurate account of the wide confluence of influences at work in a doctoral dissertation. The list of references at the end of the work is a particularly academic attempt to give this account, while this acknowledgements section is another. Each has their failures. The former risks being taken as a perfunctory or disingenuous condescension to the bare minimum of acceptable academic practice, rather than an earnest act of bringing along with you those that you most want to remember. The latter in risking something perhaps worse, is too often written in a derivative genre of banal sentimentality. This kind of sentimentality may either be too tempting or simply too difficult to avoid here, so my apologies in advance to the reader. In many ways the differentiation between the supposedly ‘intellectual’ act of citation and act of acknowledgement detailed here is an arbitrary one, and one that speaks to the further gaps and failures inherent in the academic practice of citation itself, and the uneven politics reproduced alongside it that academics still seem to struggle to adequately articulate. The world of ideas so finely and scientifically documented in the list of references gives no account of the collaborative emotional work that a dissertation entails, and the levels of personal investment contributed by so many beyond those listed alphabetically there. The writing I present here is collaborative in the sense that, though the prose is my own, I would never have been able to write it alone. So I would like to thank the many people who made this dissertation possible. I’m sure that I’ll be unable to mention everyone, and apologies in advance to those that I have missed. I would first like to acknowledge the National Science Foundation who supported this research through a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award (number: 1536265) that allowed me to stay in the field for a year longer than I would have been able to otherwise. The Department of Geography and the Graduate School at the University of Kentucky also supported this research financially, through the Barnhart and Withington Endowments, several travel awards to attend conferences, the Dissertation Enhancement Award, and the Dissertation Year Fellowship. The journal Geoforum iii through Elsevier also supported this research with funding to attend the Fourth Annual Global Conference on Economic Geography in Oxford, England in 2015. I would like to thank the many people who took their time to speak with me in San Francisco and The Bay Area who contributed to this research through interviews, and those with whom I spoke at networking and conference events. A great many people were extraordinarily generous with their time, and some became close friends and valued colleagues. I would like to thank the partners at Founders Den and in particular Diana Pray for allowing me access to the co-working space at Founders Den. For obvious and less obvious reasons, without my friends and colleagues at the University of Kentucky, this dissertation would never have been possible. I took a number of excellent classes at Kentucky, and would like to thank in particular Virginia Bloom for her brilliant psychoanalysis seminar, Patricia Ehrkamp, who helped me learn to write and led a phenomenal seminar on ‘democracy,’ Michael Samers for his Marx seminar, and Anna Secor for her seminar on post-structuralist theory. As well as Michael’s class, which proved utterly indispensible in this research, it is important too to credit Lindsay Shade for my reading of Marx, as she declared late one evening after a few too many drinks that unless I read Capital, I should not be allowed to graduate. Members of my committee, Jenny Rice, Anna Secor, and Matthew Wilson have all shown me consideration, excellent teaching, and sagacious advice during these years. Andrew Ashley, Brittany Barrineau, Curtis Pomilia, Sophia Strosberg, and in particular Derek Ruez and Anna Secor helped me to read and understand the works of Gilles Deleuze. (I still don’t understand Deleuze, but I’m getting always a little closer, with their help.) Malene Jacobson and Jessa Loomis have helped me see by example what estimable scholarship can look like. At the most recent meeting of the AAG, Jessa gave the best conference presentation I have ever seen, which served as a model for the recent presentation I gave at the University of Waterloo.