What’s immaterial about immaterial labour? Does the digital worker balancing three jobs at once, checking her emails on her iPhone last thing at night before being woken by its alarm six hours later, share anything in common with the featureless but heroic immaterial labourer once seen as an emancipatory figure? Does ‘immaterial labour’ really properly name the kind of work we do – and what kind of work is that? What are strategies of sabotage and resistance at work – and why would it matter? Who and where are all these creative workers anyway? If immaterial utopia – a future free of scarcity and replete with automation – seems as ever distant as it always was, why is it easier and easier to imagine transformations in work as edging closer to dystopia?
James Butler and Aaron Peters of Novara Media will present some ideas and then move to an open discussion on some of these themes:
– Technology and the working day
– Automation and its paradoxes: what if the robots steal my job?
– Workers’ sabotage; social media melancholia and profit.
– ‘Digital’/’Creative’ work as a (failed) solution to the ongoing crisis
– The internet is real: the politics of infrastructure and communication
– Why does my life look like my job? The protestant ethic and the spirit of the internet.
– A worker’s party against work? But my job is fun!
– ‘Post’-Fordism and the rise of the info-prole.
– Workers’ Inquiry, or, I work *how* many hours a week?
Novara Media is an autonomous media organisation, offering critical reflection and exploration on the the present state of things, and attempting to look clearly at the reality of the current crisis. The weekly radio show goes out at 2pm, every Tuesday on Resonance 104.4 FM, and an archive of radio shows, texts.