Category: work

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Brave new-old world – gig economy as scientific management

Deliveroo cyclists

They’re gonna be disrupted, yeah! Because your lives are being disrupted, yeah! This is the money you need to live!

An interesting article in the FT: “When your boss is an algorithm“, in which (if you ignore the sort of anthropomorphism of “the algorithm” and its apparently supreme agency) the author,  Sarah O’Connor, draws out the similarity between the claims of efficiency etc. made for ‘gig economy’ -type work platforms, such as Uber and Deliveroo, are very similar to Taylorism:

Algorithmic management” might sound like the future but it has uncanny echoes from the past. A hundred years ago, a new theory called “scientific management” swept through the factories of America. It was the brainchild of Frederick W Taylor … Taylor wanted to replace this “rule of thumb” approach with “the establishment of many rules, laws and formulae which replace the judgment of the individual workman”. To that end, he sent managers with stopwatches and notebooks on to the shop floor. They observed, timed and recorded every stage of every job, and determined the most efficient way that each one should be done. “Perhaps the most prominent single element in modern scientific management is the task idea,” Taylor wrote in his 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management. “This task specifies not only what is to be done but how it is to be done and the exact time allowed for doing it.”

Exemplified by the following excerpt articulating the experience of a Deliveroo driver, Kyaw, which is, in turn, of course similar to the kinds of working conditions of other delivery drivers and Amazon warehouse pickers (as has been covered widely in the press)…

Kyaw whips out his phone. The app expects him to respond to new orders within 30 seconds. The screen shows a map and address for the local Carluccio’s, an Italian restaurant chain. A swipe bar says “Accept delivery”. That is the only option. The algorithm will not tell him the delivery address until he has picked up the food from Carluccio’s. Deliveroo couriers are assigned fairly small geographic areas but Kyaw says sometimes the delivery address is way outside his allocated zone. You can only decline an order by phoning the driver support line. “They say, ‘No, you have to do it, you already collected the food.’ If you want to return the food to the restaurant they mark it as a driver refusal – that’s bad.”

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Academia.edu as an instrument of analytical discipline

Saw a paper, shared (perhaps ironically) on ResearchGate, concerning Academia.edu and the ways it can be seen as a means of self-discipline around ‘impact’, self-promotion and how these may relate reward and recognition. May be of interest to some…

“Facebook for Academics”: The Convergence of Self-Branding and Social Media Logic on Academia.edu

Brooke Erin Duffy and Jefferson D. Pooley.

Given widespread labor market precarity, contemporary workers–especially those in the media and creative industries–are increasingly called upon to brand themselves. Academics, we contend, are experiencing a parallel pressure to engage in self-promotional practices, particularly as universities become progressively more market-driven. Academia.edu, a paper-sharing social network that has been informally dubbed “Facebook for academics,” has grown rapidly by adopting many of the conventions of popular social media sites. This article argues that the astonishing uptake of Academia.edu both reflects and amplifies the self-branding imperatives that many academics experience. Drawing on Academia.edu’s corporate history, design decisions, and marketing communications, we analyze two overlapping facets of Academia.edu: (1) the site’s business model and (2) its social affordances. We contend that the company, like mainstream social networks, harnesses the content and immaterial labor of users under the guise of “sharing.” In addition, the site’s fixation on analytics reinforces a culture of incessant self-monitoring–one already encouraged by university policies to measure quantifiable impact. We conclude by identifying the stakes for academic life, when entrepreneurial and self-promotional demands brush up against the university’s knowledge-making ideals.

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Academic emotional labour

We are getting to the business end of our second term at my institution, when our final year students submit their dissertations, and we shift register looking towards field trips (our 2nd years go this weekend), exams and transitions – including of course graduation. This and some rather troubling conversations and various meetings through the term have got me thinking about the volume of emotional labour some of us perform. I say ‘some of us’ because, as with any organisation, some colleagues variously avoid it due to a range of reasons. Thus, some are faced with quite a bit of such work. Maybe these observations are a bit naive but this is where I currently find myself…

At the beginning of this academic year I ceased to be “Early Career”, in spite having only recently (3 years ago) getting back into geography – I spent three years (overlapping writing-up) as a post doc outside of the discipline. In the three years I’ve been in my current position, and beginning to learn how to teach, I have been surprised and at times overwhelmed by what others have labelled an ‘epidemic’ of mental health issues in universities. The complicated entanglements of anxiety and depression that a significant number of our students are contending with are worrying and at times heart-breaking. Some terms can be measured in the number of boxes of tissues I buy (not only for the students).

My experience has been that you get no training for this and, if you have not been an undergraduate for some time, the level of the issues our students are experiencing may feel utterly alarming and mystifying. I remember my time as an undergrad as pretty care-free and fun. It really saddens me how many of my tutees may well remember their time in a very different and perhaps largely negative way. Likewise, many of us in academia are wrestling with personal mental health issues and to be confronted with those of the students may well be very challenging.

So, what do I/you do, with no training and perhaps little experience of such things? Well, this is not meant to be advice but it gets me to the point I want to make: First things first – we are not counsellors. We are not trained to deal with these issues and can possibly make things worse ont better. Show empathy and sympathy, of course, but my strategy has also been to show respect for the student by explaining as tactfully as possible that they need to seek help from what we call “wellbeing services” and/or their GP. Many have already done this. A surprising number are already medicated.

So, personally, I end up listening, trying to discern the academic/administrative measures I have at my disposal that I can put in place to support the student’s needs and identify when I need help. Sometimes you get through the meeting, close the door and may have to have a cry yourself. Many colleagues will recognise this pattern and I’m not trying to dispense advice here but it does say something about work.

Many of us have a calculated workload, perhaps in a digitally accessible workload model (which some colleagues might suggest inculcates us into internalising the logic of institutional discipline for ourselves 😉 – if you look in that workload allocation the chances are there is figure somewhere that figures in office hours, personal tutor duties and so on. Often, the students you may be ‘supporting’ are not personal tutees but dissertation tutees as well, which is a different workload allocation – but probably not a big number. For some of us this workload figure may be accurate. For others this is a mere fraction of the workload experienced.

It would be easy to retort – “well, don’t take on the work”, don’t ‘pander’ to the students and stick rigidly to the time set out. Of course, with some authority (seniority, grant income buy-out etc.) you probably can do this. However, increasingly there is institutional pressure to improve metrics around student experience, to demonstrate the institution is ‘supportive’. As ‘frontline’ staff, academic tutors can bear a significant amount of responsibility for this.

So, this (potential) labour can be a catch-22: you do it, support students, deal with the related admin and your own emotional wellbeing and it may potentially affect other parts of your work that you value (i.e. research/writing time); or: do the minimum/ don’t do it and the work will be displaced to your colleagues (I don’t think it simply goes away) and you may risk being admonished for damaging the ‘student experience’.

Increasingly, such work is being pooled into particular roles – “senior tutors” of one kind or another: for a year group etc. Likewise, the extraordinary growth in applications for mitigation and the administrative side of the academic support for students with wellbeing issues involves a huge increase in work for our administrative colleagues – who are, in many institutions, increasingly embattled, disenfranchised and pulled in other directions.

It seems to me that the status quo is untenable. We cannot go on, we must go on. According to colleagues researching school-level education and those managing admissions, some students are arriving at university with these mental health issues already at an advanced stage, which seems to me a damning indictment of the ethos of the culture of our education system but also suggests we may need much more concerted responses to managing wellbeing from day one, somehow.

I don’t have the answers, but it seems to me that if we continue like this many of us face an ever-increasing student support workload that carries significant emotional cost. I try to remain positive – it is possible to put measures in place and there are dedicated colleagues in many institutions who are putting in place systems and taking difficult but necessary decisions about how to do this work. Nevertheless, I never imagined this would be such a big part of my job.

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Public scholarship, or: profs should edit wikipedia

Over on Savage Minds Rex Golub has written a compelling provocation about the places of ‘public anthropology’ (which I think could probably be broadened to ‘public scholarship). He points out that it’s all very well writing letters to venerable broad sheet newspapers but that doesn’t necessarily achieve much. Instead, Professors (or academics more broadly) might better spend their time editing wikipedia pages because that is the prime site of the public sourcing, and contestation, of knowledge. I think its quite a compelling argument… not least when thinking about the current trend and push for demonstrating “impact”. Isn’t it quite “impactful” to be the person who attempts to ensure that the most widely used source of knowledge on a given topic is rigorously written/edited? There’s no academic brownie points in that though… no promotions or awards/rewards are going to be given on that basis!

What do you think?

…my issue is that anthropologists are doing public anthropology in the wrong places and in the wrong way because they don’t understand how social media works today and are seduced by an out-moded model of cultural capital that makes them feels heroic, but it isn’t actually efficacious.

The new public anthropology, on the other hand, is not glamorous, will not make you famous, can be emotionally uncomfortable, involves working in new and unfamiliar genres, and can change the world. A good example of this sort of public anthropology is editing Wikipedia

Wikipedia is ground zero for knowledge in the world today. Everyone uses it to look stuff up quickly. Everyone. Some people may take it more seriously than others, but because its content can be reused on other sites, what wikipedia says spreads everywhere. For better or for worse – I’d say for better – it’s the public record of the state of human knowledge at the moment. Unlike letters to the New York Times, Wikipedia gets read. Constantly. When you contribute to Wikipedia, you are concretely and immediately altering what the world knows about your topic of expertise.

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Automation in financial services and the ongoing re-imagination of work

From Technology outsmarts the human investor – FT

“It just gets harder and harder and harder,” reflected one money manager this week. His is the predicament of other professionals – anything done by a person that follows a pattern and can be coded into a form that a computer understands will soon get squeezed. Technology also has the advantage identified in 1970: algorithms stay constantly alert.

It does not imply the complete death – or automation – of the investment manager. A professional can still undertake original research on a company or a security that provides insight. As more of the market becomes automated, originality becomes rarer and more valuable: an idiosyncratic investor should achieve higher returns by standing out from the robotic crowd.

Nor can algorithmic efficiency be wholly divorced from human intelligence, as the Oregon study showed – the point was that humans needed to set parameters for computers to follow. Many asset managers use analysts and researchers to build investment models that then trade securities automatically; others blend their active risk-taking with passive elements.

…

But these difficulties demonstrate how automation eats into professions, not by taking away all the jobs in one day but by unbundling them – dividing them between tasks that only humans can perform and those of which an algorithm is quite capable. Then the boundary relentlessly shifts.

The last paragraph is key – there seems to be a growing consensus that automation doesn’t simply ‘destroy’ jobs, it makes particular aspects of or kinds of role redundant and the implementation and development of automated systems requires the remaining workers to fit around those systems in different ways. In many ways, then, automation is a company or institution-specifc organisational or administrative problem as well as a wider political economic problem.

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Gary Hall > Ten Ways To Affirmatively Disrupt The Sharing Economy ♯3: Become a Microdatapreneur

Interesting from Gary Hall… lots to think through politically here, as with blockchain-like, more-or-less libertarian, strategies for a new “new economy” (as per the Post-Fordists)…  and possibly relevant to the recent interest in “digital” labour in geography…

part of a series of posts in which I provide ten proposals as to how to affirmatively disrupt ubercapitalism and the corporate sharing economy. Together these posts constitute the draft of a text provisionally titled Data Commonism, designed to follow on from my recently published short book, The Uberfication of the University. If the latter provides a dystopian sense of what is lying in store for many us over the course of the next few years, Data Commonism is more optimistic in that it shows what we can do about it. 

…

[We can disrupt the sharing economy by] by working toward the kind of “universal micropayment system” Jaron Lanier envisages in Who Owns The Future: “If observation of you yields data that makes it easier for”¦ a political campaign to target voters with its message, then you ought to be owed money for the use of that valuable data.” In this system we would be paid for the data we generate if it turns out to be valuable. Our relationship with the platforms of the for-profit sharing economy would thus take the form of a “two-way” financial transaction in which we all “benefit, concretely, with real money,” rather than just a few San Francisco-based entrepreneurs and investors.

…

A universal micropayment system may result in some degree of financial redistribution. But while it provides a means of reuniting data with those users who produce it […] there is not really all that much we can do with our own small amounts of data. How much leverage would we have when it comes to negotiating a price for it, bearing in mind most of us will have to rely on these companies to determine for us the extent to which our data […] has actually contributed to a political campaign aimed at targeting voters, to stay with Lanier’s example?

…

for Clare Birchall, it is not at all “clear that data belongs to us in the first place in order for it then to be given or taken“–or monetized, in this case. Instead, “we are within a dynamic sharing assemblage: always already sharing data with human or non-human agents.” Birchall introduces the term “shareveillance” to describe the “condition of consuming shared data and producing data to be shared in ways that shape” what she refers to as an “an ascendant shareveillant subjectivity.” This is a “subject who is at once surveillant (veiller ‘to watch’ is from the Latin vigilare, from vigil, ‘watchful’) and surveilled. To phrase it with a slightly different emphasis: the subject of shareveillance is one who simultaneously works with data and on whom the data works.”

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The internet is mostly bots(?)

“When I am king, you will be first against the wall…“

In an article for The Atlantic Adrienne LaFrance observes that a report by the security firm Imperva suggests that 51.8% of traffic online is bot traffic (by which they mean 51.8% of a sample of traffic [“16.7 billion bot and human visits collected from August 9, 2016 to November 6, 2016”] sent through their global content delivery network “Incapusla”):

Overall, bots–good and bad–are responsible for 52 percent of web traffic, according to a new report by the security firm Imperva, which issues an annual assessment of bot activity online. The 52-percent stat is significant because it represents a tip of the scales since last year’s report, which found human traffic had overtaken bot traffic for the first time since at least 2012, when Imperva began tracking bot activity online. Now, the latest survey, which is based on an analysis of nearly 17 billion website visits from across 100,000 domains, shows bots are back on top. Not only that, but harmful bots have the edge over helper bots, which were responsible for 29 percent and 23 percent of all web traffic, respectively.

LaFrance goes on to cite the marketing director of Imperva (who wants to sell you ‘security’ – he’s in the business of selling data centre services) to observe that:

“The most alarming statistic in this report is also the most persistent trend it observes,” writes Igal Zeifman, Imperva’s marketing director, in a blog post about the research. “For the past five years, every third website visitor was an attack bot.”

How do we judge this report? I find it difficult to know how representative this company’s representation of their data, although they are the purveyor of a ‘global content delivery network’. The numbers seem believable, given how long we’ve been hearing that the majority of traffic is ‘not human’ (e.g. a 2013 article in The Atlantic making a similar point and a 2012 ZDNet article saying the same thing: most web traffic is ‘not human’ and mostly malicious).

The ‘not human’ thing needs to be questioned a bit – yes, it’s not literally the result of a physical action but, then, how much of the activity on the electric grid can be said to be ‘not human’ too? I’d hazard that the majority of that so-called ‘not human’ traffic is under some kind of regular oversight and monitoring – it is, more or less, the expression of deliberative (human) agency. Indeed, to reduce the ‘human’ to what our simian digits can make happen seems ridiculous to me… We need a more expansive understanding of technical (as in technics) agency. We need more nuanced ways to come to terms with the scale and complexity of the ways we, as a species, produce and perform our experiences of everyday life – of what counts as work and the things we take for granted.

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Institute of Network Cultures podcast

This looks interesting… I confess I’ve not listened yet.

The INC has a new publication format: the Zero Infinite podcast!

In May 2016, we invited two podcast hosts to our symposium on art criticism: Stephanie Afrifa (of Nation of Overthinkers podcast network) and Botte Jellema (host of De Eeuw van de Amateur (The Century of the Amateur) podcast). They spoke about the medium with such enthusiasm, that one of our affiliated researchers, Nadine Roestenburg, decided to start her own podcast on post-digital art and we soon felt it was time for the INC to try our hand at it as well! Botte came back to teach us some more skills and to let us experience the delight that is a good microphone. We tested and experimented for some time, and are now very happy to be able to present the very first episode of Zero Infinite to you!

LISTEN TO THE FIRST EPISODE HERE.

The podcast is hosted by Miriam Rasch, and cover topics like digital publishing, economic alternatives, revenue models in the arts and online culture. The first episode features interviews with Alex Foti, Baruch Gottlieb and Henry Warwick, and a discussion on precarity and anti-austerity measures. The latter half of the episode is a homage to the work of the late Mark Fisher. We discuss his ideas on neoliberalism and its influence on individual wellbeing though clips from his talk at MyCreativity in 2014.

Subscribe to our Soundcloud channel, or find the newest episode on our publications page.

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Amateur philosophy – boundary 2 theme issue on Stiegler

Only just seen this. Issue 1 of volume 44 (2017) of boundary 2 is entitled Amateur Philosophy and concerns the work of Bernard Stiegler.

Within the issue are published the three lectures Stiegler gave in California in 2011 (one of which was published in Lana Turner). alongside this are pieces by a stellar cast of contemporary theorists, including: Claire Colebrook, Mark Hansen, Daniel Ross and Gerald Moore. Both of the two translators who have translated the majority of Stiegler’s work into English have pieces: Stephen Barker and Daniel Ross.

This seems like a fairly important contribution to anglophone engagements with Stiegler’s work…

Here’s the full table of contents.

You need a subscription to access the papers, let me know if you have any trouble…

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CFP> Journal of Peer Production Special Issue #11: CITY – Abstracts due 31 Jan 2017

CFP JOPP Special Issue #11: CITY – Abstracts due 31 Jan 2017

Editors: Penny Travlou, Nicholas Anastasopoulos, Panayotis Antoniadis

Call for papers

One of the welfare state’s key jurisdictions was to tend to housing and public space in benevolent ways. However, under the neoliberal dogma, commodification and gentrification threatens both the right to housing and the right to the city while in recent years, cities have become increasingly militarized and surveyed, resembling battlegrounds where freedom and democracy are under attack. At the same time, recent economic, political, and social crises have activated many counter-forces of resistance and creative alternatives for the grassroots production of food, health services, housing, networking infrastructures, and more.

The role of technology has been contradictory as well. On the one hand, the Internet has enabled some of the most remarkable peer production success stories at a global scale, such as Wikipedia and Free and Open Source Software, among many others. On the other hand, it has empowered huge corporations like Facebook and Google to fully observe and manipulate our everyday activities, and oppressive governments to censor and surveil their citizens.

At the city scale, technology offers opportunities for self-organization, like wireless community networks and numerous bottom-up techno-social initiatives, but also animates the top-down narrative of the “smart city” and the commodification of the “sharing economy as a service” provided by globally active platforms such as Airbnb and Uber. In this situation, peer production in space emerges as a vital bottom-up practice reclaiming citizen participation, and inventing new forms of community.

In this context, some core challenges arise:
– If we choose not tο rely on global players to provide peer production support at a local scale, how could different areas of peer production in the city, digital and physical, interact and support each other?
– What types of governance models can adequately support peer production in the city?

To address those challenges one needs to take into consideration the following:
– Lessons learned from the Internet and how they may be incorporated in the context-specific realities of the city.
– Knowledge-transfer methodologies across different localities.
– Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations (urban studies, media studies, sociology, architecture, cultural geography, informatics etc.).
– Possible collaborations and synergies between activists that fight for the “right to the city” and those that fight for the “right to the Internet”.
-Knowedge/experience transfer between non-urban settings (i.e. intentional communities, ecocommunities, the Transition movement, etc.) and the urban movements.
– Inquiry into research methods and methodologies to be developed and used for analysing ICT-mediated peer production in urban space.

This special issue aims to explore a wide variety of alternative and innovative peer practices, like urban agriculture, food sustainability, solidarity economy, right to the city movements, cooperative housing, community networks, P2P urbanism tactics, co-design practices and more, that are directly reflected in the production of urban space. We are particularly interested in novel combinations of theory, methodologies, and practices that can contribute to peer production in the city and enable new synergies between projects and communities.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:
– Urban commons and peer production
– Case studies of innovative peer practices approached from different perspectives
– Comparative case studies on patterns of commoning and think-global / act-local methodologies
– The regional dimension: examples from the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia
– Political issues of autonomy, hegemony, labour, gender, geopolitical and post-colonial perspectives
– Alternative forms of education and learning tools for promoting self-organization and community
– Innovative governance tools for peer production in the city
– Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary methodological approaches
– Urban studies and the right to the (hybrid) city
– Open source urbanism/architecture
– Recycling/upcycling vs buying: making, consuming or prosuming the city?

Important dates
Abstract submission: 31 January 2017
Notification to authors: 15 February 2017
Submission of full paper: 15 May 2017
Reviews to authors: 15 July 2017
Revised papers: 15 September 2017
Signals due: 10 October 2017
Issue release: October/November 2017

Submission guidelines
Abstracts of 300-500 words are due by January 31, 2017 and should be sent to city@peerproduction.net>. All peer reviewed papers will be reviewed according to Journal of Peer Production guidelines. See http://peerproduction.net/peer-review/process/. Full papers and materials are due by May 15, 2017 for review. Peer reviewed papers should be around 8,000 words. We also welcome experimental, alternative contributions, like testimonies, interviews and artistic treatments, whose format will be discussed case by case with the editors.

*This special issue was initiated during the Hybrid City III (Athens) conference and developed further during the IASC Urban Commons (Bologna) and Habitat III (Quito) conferences.