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fexpertfundude has 18 post(s)

Y New report on lack of diversity in Silicon Valley

Sensational lede from Gawker (not a surprise.) Includes direct link to The Information’s report.

The basic breakdown – majority of tech venture capitalists are middle aged white men.

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I’m fascinated in particular with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system, a program that is a crowd-sourced marketplace for requesters and workers to bid on “tasks” otherwise known as piecemeal jobs that are not able to be completed by computers. Less exotic and more routinized, this program reduces those that bid on jobs or tasks to the very embodiment of alienated labor. Ross suggests that this and “other e-lance operations would not be thought of as remotely resembling temporary employees… leave no trace of their employment… [and function as] a discrete lump, or piece, or work that exists only for the duration of its fulfillment.” (27-28) These tasks yield not much more than cents to dollars per completed and accepted task per hour – which suggests that though this labor while in demand might also be something that someone performs as a supplement or when bored and using the web while at their other computer-based job (which is almost all jobs at this point.) E-lance (another terrible digital media portmanteau of electronic and freelance) labor, is not as attractive as it sounds. The lure of working as an e-lancer is the promise of self-determined workflow and that the only qualifications required are internet access and usage of the open source software is very appealing, but given the amount of work that one must perform in order make the time worth it, and that there is no guarantee of payment depending on the task hardly seems like all its cracked up to be. It sounds more like e-serfdom or the e equivalent of working in a nail salon (anybody read that NY Times investigative report this past spring?)

Ross also houses the model of the reality television show star as a participant in the volunteer or amateur economy, which he identifies as “a degraded labor sector.” (32) That this highly successful phenomenon emerged long before web 2.0 says more about the entertainment industry than it does about technological innovation. However social media is the perfect vehicle for an even cheaper and more rapidly deployable or accessible reality based entertainment industry to flourish. While Ross doesn’t explicitly name or make connections about particular apps (I’m thinking of Vine) its worth investigating the efficacy of how these user based networks and apps as they utilized by old media or corporate interest at verily no cost to generate viral content. For the average person wanting their 15 minutes of fame or in the case of Vine, 6 seconds, this technology could totally be used to catapult a career as a reality television personality. Youtube is another popular favorite – ever take note of the amount of page views or video plays certain personalities have garnered? What amount of unwaged labor did these people have to perform in order to rack up the hits? How base or humiliating must some content be in order to acquire the necessary amount of views that put a youtuber on the radar of a reality television production house? Subscriptions and followers don’t come cheap, and in many ways it appears that these venues function as no pay internships for aspiring reality television personalities.

 

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When Ross uses the term “false consciousness” in the very last sentence on page 37, he is referring to a Marxist concept that has typically categorized those workers who do not subscribe to a Marxist ideology as being duped or brainwashed by the capitalist overlords. Essentially, it’s a way to enforce pressure on individuals to fall in line with Marxist or rather communist platforms, where the definition of the worker self is in agreement with the necessity for a communist or Marxist revolution against the capitalist system.

Ross begins this section by delving into what the commonly agreed upon (from Marx onward to present day) definitions of work or labor are, in a historic sense. To apply an equally outdated (and definitely intended as a pejorative) term to a subsection of the population that works but not in the traditionally (and rigidly) defined way that waged labor is historically classified as, exposes the limitations that Marxist applications for understanding the way labor has shifted in the digital age. By advocating for a more flexible analysis or perspective on the types of labor being performed in the present day (unwaged labor which is indeed more common across the board in many nations and across many derivations of individual identities of workers) Ross frees the subset of the workforce that might be considered superfluous or in denial about the exploitation of their own labor contributions. By flipping the last two sentences at the close of page 37, Ross is basically saying that perhaps these workers (the under-40’s contending with the mutable conditions and rapidly shifting age of neoliberal economic and cultural mores) are not as naïve or brainwashed as a traditional Marxist analysis of waged labor would suggest.

I liked this section because Ross applied an intersectional analysis of labor through raising the issue of the how these terms have hegemonically dominated ideas of what labor and work look like. When I hear the term unwaged labor I immediately think of several different models of workers that have never had access to the protections of a labor analysis, one that is based on the ideas and models developed out of the organizing of union card carrying cismale industrial workers. This group includes sex workers and undocumented workers; these folks are largely charged with having a false consciousness about their situations… as if agreeing to assume positions that are typically outside of the moral and often nationalistic concerns of society are inherently evil, wrong, or due to the misgivings of an individual. That line of thinking fails to put the onus of the conditions that created a space for this kind of labor to exist – the systems and structures of the capital and the state, these hierarchies are what drive people to participate in “illicit” labor, it’s basic survival of the fittest. (I might even include those who work other street economies – but most folks are going to have a hard time understanding the previous two categories I suggested.)

 

Y Peeple and Phubbing

Hi – this is not an assigned response but I just learned about Peeple earlier today via an email from Diami. Included are two news links about this new app that allows users to rate other human beings.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/01/peeple-review-people-the-user-review-app-you-didnt-dare-ask-for

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/09/30/everyone-you-know-will-be-able-to-rate-you-on-the-terrifying-yelp-for-people-whether-you-want-them-to-or-not/?postshare=6751443650043445

Additionally, there is a study out that confirms what I thought was common sense but essentially that staring into your phone and ignoring your significant other is bad for your relationship (shocker!)

http://www.baylor.edu/mediacommunications/news.php?action=story&story=161554

I’d also like to point out that the above study was conducted by a business school.

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This is a big chapter – Taylor goes in on marketing and the loss of public privacy, the ecological devastation that springs from the overconsumption of gadgetry, and the undermining of cultural value due to overproduction and planned obsolescene of the materials and tools the consumer engages with, and the emergence of the branded self as the marker of cultural capital. To get right to the point, I believe that what Taylor set’s up for the reader in chapter 6, is an understanding of what the web’s swirling economies and landscapes are actually made up of – much of the same stuff that is fueling the flesh world -hierarchical systems of inequality and waste. Referencing Marx’s “hidden abode of production,” which as many of us at this point would gather is typically revealed to be factory floor spaces or other places where the actual labor is taking place, Taylor spends the chapter bringing the “weightless rhetoric of digital technology” to a visible ground. By pointing to the “people and resources on which these systems depend” in order to de-romanticize the opaque openness of the cultural commons, Taylor breaks down what it is she means when she speaks of the “material reality [that] supports the digital commons… hardware, infrastructure, and content.”

Emphasizing the ecological impact of our consumption, Taylor argues that the hidden costs of our first world desires for the latest and greatest gadgetry position ourselves and the people who labor on these gadgets in places of victimization, although several tiers removed from one another. E-waste is not just that out of date smartphone that gets tossed in the trash – it’s the chemical components that go into its making (from minerals mined by enforced labor) and these chemicals eventually leach out into the earth and into the hands of poorer neighbors in the global south who scavenge these materials for scraps. E-waste is almost sounds like junk mail but that’s the allure of the web, this idea that even your trash will be airy and ephemeral. What is true is that here in the U.S. we do not really evaluate the long standing implications of where all that waste goes, until it shows up in our own backyards. I remember watching a documentary a few years ago that featured footage of mountainous piles of junked cellphones in a village in China, children climbing around it and playing all the while as a strange neon colored liquid seemed to stream out from the base of the pile. That’s the ecological and human impact of E-waste – mysterious neon ooze with zero regulation around it and devastating future health implications. This link highlights the impact:

http://usuncut.com/world/12-horrifying-photos-of-the-tech-industry-apple-never-wants-you-never-see/

On the other end of things, in our first world bubble, one of the primary ways that these corporations drive their products and the demand for such cultural capital to the dizzying height that it’s reached is through measuring the impact of the self as a commodity. “Combining the logics of engineering and capitalism, the self has become measurable and maximizable, tallied through metrics such as the number of contacts and Web hits, retweets and reblogs, five stars, ratings, likes, notes, and comments.” The logic follows that the more you participate in online platforms where your brand is cultivated, the more the agencies that calculate your value as someone who will be able to shill their products for them in the most un-shillable way. “The goal, always, is to get more – more friends, more fans, more followers…”

These people are the Tastemakers – “celebrities” propelled forward by their willingness (or in some cases ignorance of how their contribution will be manipulated) to create content that endorses products and brands that will continue to market to their targeted audiences. Their social capital is their branded self. As if there weren’t enough levels of social stratification to contend with – this is the definitely the most transparent reading of what effect these marketing strategies and tech innovations are enabling in our rapidly developing society – further inequality that alienates and separates people from doing the thing that Facebook was supposedly created for – connecting.

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“Amateurs,’ Shirky writes, ‘are sometimes separated from professionals by skill, but always by motivation… The essence of amateurism is intrinsic motivation: to be an amateur is to do something for the love of it.” (47)

“Artist’s often enjoy what they do, suggesting they might continue being creative even when the monetary incentives to do so become weaker. In addition, artists receive a significant portion of their remuneration not in monetary form… many of them enjoy fame, admiration, social status, and free beer in bars.” (48)

I loved this chapter, largely because it brought to mind my own experience as an underpaid and undervalued artist, and my familiarity with the commonness of this experience in the lives of many of my friends and loved ones, artists, teachers, and those who work in human services positions.

Personally speaking, I am often paid solely with free beer in bars when I DJ or am involved in live performance settings that utilize my aesthetic tastes, ability to manage crowds, personally curated collection, technical know how, and stunning personality (j/k). It’s generally fine and accepted (the free beer is definitely enjoyed) when I’m hanging out with friends, vibing, and collaborating with others to create a musical and visual space that feels life affirmative and like an offering of my creativity for a communal kinship (rather than an egoic endorsement of my personal “brand” – can’t brand other people’s music can only feature it, otherwise that’s appropriation). But to think that because I get joy from this experience, that this means it would be shallow and somehow lessen the quality of my offerings or services as a artist, creative, and working person for me to request some form of compensation that is not alcohol, is really frustrating. “We tend to believe that the labor of those who appear to love what they do does not by definition qualify as labor.” (Taylor, 51)

I get the basic principles involved with running a business (I’ve done that too, run other people’s businesses to support myself and my own after hours artistic practice) – if the bar doesn’t make money because only a handful of people show up to the event, then of course you are not getting cab fare home. I enjoy playing music for other people, especially when they enjoy it, but like any work, as Taylor suggests as much, there are plenty of moments or parts of doing that work that don’t feel enjoyable. I’m not going to stop doing this work because I don’t get paid with paper money (the self-actualization is pretty grand) but to suggest that the various struggles that accompany this endeavor do not affect my abilities or “productivity” because the value of this creative output or cultural product is simultaneously fetishized and disregarded is absurd.

Free beer doesn’t pay for my cab home with all my gear at 3 am. Free beer doesn’t acknowledge the years of digging and in-person conversations I gathered pre-spotify, shazam, and youtube to learn about the musical cultures and craft I curate from and it unfortunately doesn’t banish random straight yuppie dude bros that stumble into the scene (it’s not that type of party) and come up to the booth in an aggressive and drunken manner demanding I play some top 40 song off their i-phone. Free beer is not going to entice other potential collaborators to participate in your project if there is no means of other viable accomodation to offer (payment, stipend, or even a couch to crash on.) Admiration doesn’t mean anything if you have promoted a monthly residency across several social media platforms (where 90 – 100 people’s profiles click yes they will attend) and only 9 people come out that night. Social status does not fix the fact that the venue has double booked your space, again, so you have to aimlessly wait around for the last crowd to stagger off and start way later. It’s not like that every time we throw this event, but sometimes it is and then some – unforeseen complications that make you wonder if you should have some sort of additional emergency medical training under your belt.

Passion is nice but it’s not going to pay your bills. Passion is an overly demanded ideal that the public (consumer/shareholder) puts on the artist – I would almost suggest that it is an American invention like the pursuit of happiness as an end goal and only encouraged potential outcome/dividend. It’s like the only recognized authenticity afforded to your labors is your own participation in stepping into the box of the starving artist, you become a product that doesn’t sell but looks sexy. If I’m being lauded for being an artist, can I get some affirmation as a worker, or beyond that, as a human? Because staying up really late in a bar drinking and playing to an empty room is not exactly a life affirmative feeling – it’s not the reason I got into the craft I got into, I got into it for the “feeling-bonds”  that Taylor speaks of on page 49. These feeling-bonds are the crucial piece that drives the passion behind culture and creativity. That I get to form these bonds with people who are open to being moved by music and story-telling is the greatest form of compensation I can imagine but it’s not enough to keep me pragmatically organized and motivated to consistently produce them. If we lived in a bartering society – maybe I could trade the beer for useful things like nourishing food and decent shelter and the various expensive materials I need to continue to be paid in beer – but so far despite how big beer is in America it’s not a valid form of currency for anybody else besides alcoholics and artists who love to perform invisible and unacknowledged labor for it. Where is this almost darwinian stockpile of intrinsic motivation I need in order to gain this idealized cognitive surplus that will unlock my ability to be a fully self-realized working poor artist creating feeling-bonds and getting free beer in bars? Do I need a unique QR code and compatible app to unlock this motivation, because as far as I can tell, all this beer is doing is creating a haze around the larger realities of what it means to be a disregarded worker within a society and world experiencing hyper technological development in an insane market economy.

 

Sergio Rodriguez

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Taylor introduces the term “Open” and it’s related state “Open-ness” on page 21 within Chapter One, about a quarter of the way into the chapter. Taylor, emphasizes investigation of the term “Open” in order to unpack the ideologies of open-ness that were featured in the Don Tapscott TED Talk presentation our class watched.

By emphasizing a platform of Open-ness, Tapscott and others like him implicitly categorize any and all who disagree with this branded concept as being “Closed” as Taylor later explicates.

By bringing the meshed terminology/ideology of Open-ness to the forefront of the chapter, Taylor introduces the working conceptualization of the Internet and digital/social media that so-called New Media thinkers laud. The Internet of their designs, is an idealized space where Open-ness represents freedom and democracy and other values that are worshipped in theory but generally difficult to guarantee because of, ahem, capitalism.

Open-ness is to guarantee that those who make profit off of digital and social media will continue to do so with growing access to information and little to no regulations around how this information is utilized. The purported open-ness of the web that these folks are foaming at the mouth for will continue to erect an invisible but almost identical structure to the unfettered hierarchy of late stage capitalism. It’s not about open-ness for equality and democracy, it’s about open-ness for making a lot of money and keeping that wealth centralized in the same set of hands that has always controlled it – the corporate community. It’s very libertarian and as Taylor rightly identifies it on page 24, “Darwinian.” The New Media cheerleaders applaud this, the techno-skeptics typically do not have a cohesive or adaptable critique of this open-ness that is not self-reflexively knee jerk and closed in response.

Taylor is a true muckraker – a techno muckraker. She upends the ambiguity of open-ness in order to point back to the ideological aims encompassed within its lofty touting by new media cheerleaders and the pessimistic naysaying of less messianic techno-skeptics. This concept of Open-ness as waved about by figures such as Don Tapscott is picked apart by Taylor and shown for what it is really about: promoting competition (economic) rather than protecting the equality and diversity of voices that could theoretically guarantee active participation in a public and global form of true democracy, or a limitless open society.

 

Sergio Rodriguez’s group

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This is a response to question two of Assignment 01.a (Taylor)

The closing paragraph of the Preface from Astra Taylor’s The People’s Platform offers an organizing theme to the detailed analysis she provides later in Chapter one – “Technology alone cannot deliver the cultural transformations we have been waiting for; instead, we need to first understand and then address the underlying social and economic forces that shape it.” (Taylor, 10)

This stood out to me because it loosened the subject matter from the “binary narrative” in which it is generally placed – the role and existence of the internet/social media as savior and revolutionary or the internet/social media as an anti-social neurological threat to humankind. This naïve and idealistic dichotomy typically puts the onus on people to resist the less desirable effects of compulsive social media habits through will power and shame rather than seeking to illuminate in plain language exactly how these internet and social media giants (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, etc,..) strategically exploit these common human frailties in order to utilize the information they collect for monetary gain. All these New York Times best seller non-fiction titles that decry the compulsive behaviors that society en large engages in via the web and social media are too myopic in their scope, as they seek to problematize the individual rather than call out the embedded agendas of the social media conglomerates and the tactics they employ to elicit clicks.

Taylor is also calling out the double speak language used to hail the internet and its tech as ensuring liberation via “Open-ness” – none of these mechanisms of the internet are free of the bias of those who created them. The Internet, its technology, and its interfaces did not emerge from a vacuum. These tools are inflected by the mores and prejudices of the makers behind them, they reflect all the hope and all the limitations that human minds already contain. The internet/social media is shaped by already existing power dynamics and social structures that if left unchecked or not interrogated will continue to contribute to hierarchies of control and power. This is some of what Taylor is getting at so far in these first two sections of her book.

– Sergio