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Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex

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Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex Cyber-Proletariat Dyer CP 00 pre 1 05/03/2015 08:50 Digital Barricades: Interventions in Digital Culture and Politics Series editors: Professor Jodi Dean, Hobart and William Smith Colleges Dr Joss Hands, Anglia Ruskin University Professor Tim Jordan, University of Sussex Also available Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society Tim Jordan Dyer CP 00 pre 2 05/03/2015 08:50 Cyber-Proletariat Global Labour in the Digital Vortex Nick Dyer-Witheford Between the Lines TORONTO Dyer CP 00 pre 3 05/03/2015 08:50 First published 2015 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com First published in Canada in 2015 by Between the Lines 401 Richmond Street West, Studio 277, Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8 Canada 1-800-718-7201 www.btlbooks.com Copyright © Nick Dyer-Witheford 2015 The right of Nick Dyer-Witheford to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7453 3404 2 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 3403 5 Pluto Press paperback ISBN 978 1 77113 221 3 Between the Lines paperback ISBN 978 1 7837 1278 6 Pluto Press PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 77113 223 7 Between the Lines PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 7837 1280 9 Kindle eBook ISBN 978 1 7837 1279 3 Pluto Press epub ISBN 978 1 77113 222 0 Between the Lines epub All rights reserved. In Canada, no part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Between the Lines, or (for photo- copying in Canada only) Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, M5E 1E5. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Dyer-Witheford, Nick, 1951-, author Cyber-proletariat : global labour in the digital vortex / Nick Dyer-Witheford. Co-published by: Pluto Press, London. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-1-77113-221-3 (bound).--ISBN 978-1-77113-222-0 (epub).--ISBN 978-1-77113-223-7 (pdf) 1. Information technology--Social aspects. 2. Electronic industry workers--Social conditions. 3. Digital divide. 4. Computers--Social aspects. I. Title. HM851.D94 2015 303.48’33 C2015-901312-7 C2015-901313-5 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. Between the Lines gratefully acknowledges assistance for its publishing activities from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Text design by Melanie Patrick Simultaneously printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America Dyer CP 00 pre 4 05/03/2015 08:50 Contents Series Preface vi Acknowledgements vii 1 Proletariat 1 2 Vortex 19 3 Cybernetic 39 4 Silicon 60 5 Circulation 81 6 Mobile 102 7 Globe 124 8 Cascade 147 9 Aftermath 168 10 Front 188 Bibliography 206 Index 236 Dyer CP 00 pre 5 05/03/2015 08:50 Series Preface Crisis and conflict open up opportunities for liberation. In the early twenty-first century, these moments are marked by struggles enacted over and across the boundaries of the virtual, the digital, the actual and the real. Digital cultures and politics connect people even as they simultaneously place them under surveillance and allow their lives to be mined for advertising. This series aims to intervene in such cultural and political conjunctures. It will feature critical explorations of the new terrains and practices of resistance, producing critical and informed explorations of the possibilities for revolt and liberation. Emerging research on digital cultures and politics investigates the effects of the widespread digitisation of increasing numbers of cultural objects, the new channels of communication swirling around us and the changing means of producing, remixing and distributing digital objects. This research tends to oscillate between agendas of hope, that make remarkable claims for increased participation, and agendas of fear, that assume expanded repression and commodification. To avoid the opposites of hope and fear, the books in this series aggregate around the idea of the barricade. As sources of enclosure as well as defences for liberated space, barricades are erected where struggles are fierce and the stakes are high. They are necessarily partisan divides, different politicisations and deployments of a common surface. In this sense, new media objects, their networked circuits and settings, as well as their material, informational, and biological carriers all act as digital barricades. Jodi Dean, Joss Hands and Tim Jordan Dyer CP 00 pre 6 05/03/2015 08:50 Acknowledgements I thank my wife Anne for her companionship as this book was written, while we were both working on different but related academic projects, which made life together even more complex, interesting and enjoyable. Cyber-Proletariat owes a special debt to a group of young scholars who are or were recently doctoral students at the University of Western Ontario’s Faculty of Information and Media Studies and at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism. Their work is reflected in various ways in these pages. Thanks to Svitlana Matviyenko, for insightful editorial assistance and an education in the politics of Ukraine and Lacan’s cybernetics; to Atle Kjøsen and Vincent Manzerolle, for their exciting new materialist analyses of circulation and automation; to Elise Thorburn, for her inspiring analysis of assemblies, assemblages and social reproduction; to Indranil Chakaraborty, for sharing his intrepid fieldwork on service work in India’s IT industry; to Rafael Alarcón, for his visit from Mexico and all the resultant debates and conversations; to Brian Brown, for wonderful talks about unpaid labours on Flickr; to Eric Lohman, for help over offshored office work; and to Emmanuel Leonardi, whose research contributed to the early stages of the book, even though he may not recognize the form it now takes. Thanks also to Greig de Peuter and Enda Brophy, for allowing me to make extensive use of their work on the circuits of cell phone exploitation; to Tony Weis, for advice on land-grabs, enclosures and primitive accumulation; to Tobias Nagl, for translations of the work of Karl Heinz Roth; to Warren Steele, for conversations on Jünger, Ballard and weather machines; to Kane Faucher, for vortical discussions; to Sarah T. Roberts, for permission to cite her forthcoming work on commercial content moderation; to my friend Gil Warren, for help finding a few bright political glimmers in a generally dark scene; to two long-time comrades and colleagues, Dorothy Kidd and Santiago Valles, for the example of their scholarly work and political engagements; to the editors of the Digital Barricades series, for helpful revision suggestions; to Tim Clark, for incisive copy editing; and to David Castle at Pluto Press, for his great editorial patience. Thanks, finally, to all who have over the years accused me of being ‘too optimistic’; this book is for you. Dyer CP 00 pre 7 05/03/2015 08:50 Dyer CP 00 pre 8 05/03/2015 08:50 1 Proletariat Deep Knowledge Ventures On 13 May 2014, a press release from Deep Knowledge Ventures, a Hong Kong-based venture capital fund specializing in biotechnology, age-related disease drugs and regenerative medicine projects, announced that it ‘formally acknowledges VITAL, a crucial Artificial Intelligence instrument for investment decision-making, as an equal member of its Board of Directors’. VITAL was the product of Aging Analytics UK, a provider of health-sector market intelligence to pension funds, insurers and governments. Developed by ‘a team of programmers, several of which have theoretical physics backgrounds’, the system ‘uses machine learning to analyze financing trends in a database of life science companies and predict successful investments’. VITAL 1.0 was a ‘basic algorithm’, but the goal was ‘through iterative releases and updates ... to create a piece of software that is capable of making autonomous investment decisions’ (Fontaine 2014). Apparently, however, Deep Knowledge Ventures thought VITAL was already pretty good: it told reporters the program would ‘vote on whether to invest in a specific company or not’ (BBC 2014). All this sounded very futuristic. As commentators quickly pointed out, however, it was really ‘publicity hype’ (BBC 2014). This was not because decision-making algorithms are impossible, but, on the contrary, because their use, often in forms far more complex than VITAL, is commonplace in today’s capitalism. Such programs are, for example, central to the operations of the financial sector, whose high-speed multi-billion trades are entirely dependent on algorithms – and whose bad decisions brought the world economy to its knees in the great Wall Street crash of 2008. The press release was a stunt because the future to which it seemed to point exists now. Whatever interest VITAL’s debut may have stirred was immediately eclipsed by more sombre news. On the same day 301 workers died in a Dyer CP 01 text 1 05/03/2015 08:49 2 Cyber-Proletariat massive explosion at Turkey’s Soma coal mine. The mine, once publicly owned, had been privatized in 2007. The disaster was caused by neglect of safety equipment generally attributed to profit-boosting cost-cutting.
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