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Digital Working Lives
Recent innovations in digital technologies are fundamentally transforming the world of work. A digital gig economy is emerging that threatens to displace traditional labour relations based on legally regulated labour contracts. Companies like Uber, Deliveroo, or Amazon Mechanical Turk rely increasingly on ‘independent contractors’ who earn piece-rate wages by completing tasks sent to them via their smartphones. This development understandably pushes workers to desire more autonomy, but what would workers’ autonomy mean in the digital age? This book argues that the digital gig economy undermines workers’ autonomy by putting digital technology in charge of workers’ surveillance, leading to exploitation, alienation, and exhaustion. To secure a more sustainable future of work, digital technologies should instead be transformed into tools that support human development instead of subordinating it to algorithmic control. The best guarantee for human autonomy is a politics that transforms digital platforms into convivial tools that obey the rhythm of human life.
The Eye of the Master
What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest "to solve intelligence" - a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind or in the deep physiology of the brain, such as in its complex neural networks. The Eye of the Master argues, to the contrary, that the inner code of AI is shaped not by the imitation of biological intelligence, but the intelligence of labour and social relations, as it is found in Babbage's "calculating engines" of the industrial age as well as in the recent algorithms for image recognition and surveillance. The idea that AI may one day become autonomous (or "sentient", as someone thought of Google's LaMDA) is pure fantasy. Computer algorithms have always imitated the form of social relations and the organisation of labour in their own inner structure and their purpose remains blind automation. The Eye of the Master urges a new literacy on AI for scientists, journalists and new generations of activists, who should recognise that the "mystery" of AI is just the automation of labour at the highest degree, not intelligence per se.
Lifelogging
The following anthology delivers sound analysis to the theoretical classification of the current societal phenomenon - between innovative, world changing and yet disruptive technology, as well as societal and cultural transformation. Lifelogging, digital self-tracking and the real-time chronicling of man’s lifetime, is not only a relevant societal topic in the world of research and academic science these days, but can also be found in literature, cultural pages of the written press and the theatre. The spectrum of Lifelogging ranges from sleep, mood, sex and work logging to Thing and Deathlogging. This leads to several questions: How does one live in a data society? Is “measured” man automatically also “better” man? And if so, what is the cost? Do new categories of reality or principles of social classification develop as a result of Lifelogging? How does the “social view” on things change? The authors in this anthology provide insightful answers to these pressing questions.
The Digital Factory
"In recent years, tech companies such as Google and Facebook have rocked the world as they have seemingly revolutionized the culture of work. We've all heard stories of lounges outfitted with ping pong tables, kitchens with kombucha on tap, and other amenities that supposedly foster creative thinking. Nothing could seem further from earlier workplaces associated with a different revolution in capitalism: factories, in which employees are required to perform highly circumscribed tasks as quickly as possible to meet quotas--for next to no pay. However, as Moritz Altenried shows in The Digital Factory, these types of workplaces are not so far from the Googleplex as we might think. While recent ...
Resistance to the Current
How hacking cultures drive contemporary capitalism and the future of innovation. In Resistance to the Current, Johan Söderberg and Maxigas examine four historical case studies of hacker movements and their roles in shaping the twenty-first-century’s network society. Based on decades of field work and analysis, this intervention into current debates situates an exploding variety of hacking practices within the contradictions of capitalism. Depoliticized accounts of computing cultures and collaborative production miss their core driver, write Söderberg and Maxigas: the articulation of critique and its recuperation into innovations. Drawing on accounts of building, developing, and running c...
The Biosecurity Individual
Discoveries in biomedicine and biotechnology, especially in diagnostics, have made prevention and (self)surveillance increasingly important in the context of health practices. Frederike Offizier offers a cultural critique of the intersection between health, security and identity, and explores how the focus on risk and security changes our understanding of health and transforms our relationship to our bodies. Analyzing a wide variety of texts, from life writing to fiction, she offers a critical intervention on how this shift in the medical gaze produces new paradigms of difference and new biomedically facilitated identities: biosecurity individuals.
The Sociomaterial Construction of Users
This book explores the intricate connections that link the current digitalization of manufacturing to our daily lives and identities as members of highly technologized societies. Based on extensive research on the prosthetics industry in Germany, the US, Canada, and Haiti, the author analyzes the sociomaterial construction of users, by demonstrating the ways in which the introduction of 3D printing changes how artificial limbs are designed, manufactured, distributed, and used. Critically examining the capacity of digital technologies to afford greater diversity of user roles, enable the inclusion of marginalized groups, and increase user participation in the innovation process, the author presents a theory of user construction that sheds light on the dynamic relationship between industrial digitalization and the future of use. An empirically grounded and conceptually informed study, The Sociomaterial Construction of Users will appeal to researchers in the fields of sociology, science and technology studies, and organization studies, as well as readers interested in 3D printing and the digitalization of society.
Interrogating Datafication
What constitutes a data practice and how do contemporary digital media technologies reconfigure our understanding of practices in general? Autonomously acting media, distributed digital infrastructures, and sensor-based media environments challenge the conditions of accounting for data practices both theoretically and empirically. Which forms of cooperation are constituted in and by data practices? And how are human and nonhuman agencies distributed and interrelated in data-saturated environments? The volume collects theoretical, empirical, and historiographical contributions from a range of international scholars to shed light on the current shift from media to data practices.
Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights
The scope of Artificial Intelligence's (AI) hold on modern life is only just beginning to be fully understood. Academics, professionals, policymakers, and legislators are analysing the effects of AI in the legal realm, notably in human rights work. Artificial Intelligence technologies and modern human rights have lived parallel lives for the last sixty years, and they continue to evolve with one another as both fields take shape. Human Rights and Artificial Intelligence explores the effects of AI on both the concept of human rights and on specific topics, including civil and political rights, privacy, non-discrimination, fair procedure, and asylum. Second- and third-generation human rights are also addressed. By mapping this relationship, the book clarifies the benefits and risks for human rights as new AI applications are designed and deployed. Its granular perspective makes Human Rights and Artificial Intelligence a seminal text on the legal ramifications of machine learning. This expansive volume will be useful to academics and professionals navigating the complex relationship between AI and human rights.
Society After Money
Project Society After Money is an interdisciplinary project between commons theory, evolutionary political economy, media studies and sociology, that enter into a dialogue with one another in order to look at their specific theories and criticisms of money. Conceived as the beginning of a necessary interdisciplinary dialogue, the possibilities of post-monetary forms of organization and production are taken into account and examined. On one hand there is a lot of talk about 'digital revolution', 'mediatized society', 'networks', 'Industry 4.0'. On the other hand the present is described in terms of crisis: 'financial crisis', 'economic crisis', 'planetary boundaries'. At once there is the des...
