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Wikipedia -- Agnotology

'Agnotology is the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt... Schiebinger: "Ignorance is often not merely the absence of knowledge but an outcome of cultural and political struggle."' -- Betancourt: "Agnotologic capitalism": The systemic production and maintenance of ignorance. The creation of systemic unknowns where any potential "fact" is always already countered by an alternative of apparently equal weight and value renders engagement with the conditions of reality – the very situations affective labor seeks to assuage – contentious and a source of confusion... Affective labor is the enabler for the creation of the bubbles that are characteristic of the digital capitalist economy. Where the reduction of alienation is a precondition for the elimination of dissent. Affective labor is part of a larger activity where the population is distracted by affective pursuits and fantasies of economic advancement.'

kipple digital data agnotology usevaluevssignvalue dematerialization financialization immaterialism obscurantism confusionism simulacra hologram pseudoworlds affectivelabour immateriallabour "capitalism" theadvertisedlife ponzi from delicious
march 2011 by adamcrowe

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RWW -- Your Facebook Activity is Now an Ad

'Facebook is launching a new ad format called "Sponsored Stories," which allows participating advertisers to promote your Facebook activity by turning it into homepage ads seen only by your friends. This activity can include liking a Facebook page, checking in via Facebook Places or sharing content to the News Feed from a Facebook application. With Facebook's Sponsored Stories, your activity is now up for grabs, available to the advertiser associated with the brand, business or app you interacted with. Just checked in to a restaurant? That's an ad. Just liked a brand? That's an ad. Just shared a news story from the Web? That's an ad. -- ...it's unclear what level of control advertisers have here. It's important though, because real personalized recommendations work both ways - they deliver the good news and the bad. Without both sides represented, this is just a new way to spam your friends.'

facebook storygraph epistolary advertising errorhandling immunesystem immateriallabour brandmodels subsistenceclicking theadvertisedlife from delicious
january 2011 by adamcrowe

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Marginal Utility -- Mandatory Social Networking

'Is this true: Not having a Facebook page or an active Twitter account proves you have something to hide? Thanks, everybody, for making confessing everything on Facebook seem so normal. Despite “connecting” us more securely with others online, social networking has made our real-life, non-online identities more insecure than ever. With a new tool to investigate what we don’t immediately disclose up front, there is less reason for anyone to take us at face value. I guess people just Google us while nodding along and ignoring what we say. Soon we will be totally isolated, cocooned in data, altogether indifferent to any forms of reciprocity that can’t be measured and adjudicated and put to work in networks.'

socialnetworking panopticon stasi selfservers identity sharecropping immateriallabour
may 2010 by adamcrowe

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Generation Bubble -- Limited Inc.: A Jobless Future and the Narcissist Economy

'Society needs people to elaborate the rituals, to espouse the markers, to prove them in the public process of consumption. As the process accelerates, this becomes more and more difficult and time-consuming to keep up with. Enter Web 2.0, a real-time trend tracker and data harvester, and enter the newly “unemployable” youth leisure class, which may actually be busily working on reproducing the ideology of consumerism online. When a self-conscious group of hyperconsumers take to the internet to chart their retail course among friends and stake out their identity, they are simultaneously working as cultural functionaries, taming the promiscuous field of goods, doing the grunt work in developing the marking services that help the haute-consumer classes perfect its privilege. They secure the appropriate set of meanings to preserve the status of the class to which they have pretensions of belonging.'

socialnetworking socialmedia hipsters trends curation culturalcapital selfservers narcissism identity sharecropping exploitation immateriallabour unemployment subsistenceclicking
march 2010 by adamcrowe

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Times Online -- Children paid to plug junk food on Facebook and Bebo

'Children are being given rewards to promote Fanta, Nintendo and other products to their Facebook friends in a controversial form of stealth marketing. In some cases children as young as seven have been offered the chance to become “mini-marketeers” to plug brands by casually dropping them into postings and conversations on social networking sites. They can earn the equivalent of £25 a week for their online banter — sometimes promoting things that they may not even like. The marketing agencies advise their young recruits to target different sets of online friends with different brands and coach them to sound “natural and unrehearsed”.' They should prepare their product pitch by “thinking deeply about how you would describe it to your best friend ... Write down the key points in your own words and make sure it doesn’t sound too rehearsed. Be natural; be you”.' -- via @MaxKeiser

socialnetworking advertising children predation brandmodels astroturfing immateriallabour theadvertisedlife
february 2010 by adamcrowe

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Marginal Utility -- It’s all one big plastic hassle

'Reflexively defiant consumers are just the avant-garde producers of new consumerist meanings within the code. The sovereignty they convince themselves that they have earned by pseudoresistance is actually more bound up than ever with consumerism. “Authenticity” becomes nothing but a marketing concept; it can no longer serve an an orienting ideal. It is “becoming extinct.” Worse, we confront sovereignty inflation: "To feel sovereign, postmodern consumers must adopt a never-ending project to create an individuated identity through consumption. ...we are in the midst of a widespread inflation in the symbolic work required to achieve what is perceived as real sovereignty." -- ...the contrivance of pseudo-authenticity is limitless, and the absorption of millions of new mini-brand managers on social networks and the like serves to manufacture new ruses at an inexhaustible rate. We have become the brainstorming consultants for corporations, only they don’t have to pay us for the labor.'

consumerism consumering identity authenticity precuperation immateriallabour theadvertisedlife
february 2010 by adamcrowe

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Marginal Utility -- The “protocol economy” and the recalculation argument

'In the U.S., the call for industrial policy often ends up being a plea for a return to the glory days of manufacturing—when America actually made stuff instead of easily copied “protocols;” when we made steel, not software and entertainment goods that can be pirated; when labor was material and delineated, not immaterial and uncompensated in a nebulous service economy. -- The fetishization of education has the effect of encouraging the plethora of highly educated people to manufacture complexity for its own sake, in order to justify bigger salaries for then managing that complexity. This seems to be what happened in the finance industry, which dropped all pretense of serving an intermediary function (matching investments with spare capital) and nakedly served itself, sullying the market signals that are supposed to aid economic recalculation and ease/prevent structural unemployment in the first place.'

economics deindustrialization financialization immateriallabour
january 2010 by adamcrowe

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NYTimes.com -- The Madness of Crowds and an Internet Delusion

'Jaron Lanier's new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” is a manifesto against “hive thinking” and “digital Maoism,” by which he means the glorification of open-source software, free information and collective work at the expense of individual creativity. [He] argues that the mantras of “open culture” and “information wants to be free” have produced a destructive new social contract. “The basic idea of this contract,” he writes, “is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”'

hackersvsvectoralists immateriallabour hivemind sharecropping theadvertisedlife JaronLanier
january 2010 by adamcrowe

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The American Prospect -- The Ruse of the Creative Class

'Cities that shelled out big bucks to learn Richard Florida's prescription for vibrant urbanism are now hearing they may be beyond help. -- "There was a tremendous money-generating aspect to Richard's work," Frantz [Florida's former tour manager] says. "We did it in a grand way. We traveled in style. We stayed in boutique hotels in most of the places we were working." But it is wrong, he says, to see any conflict in Florida's dire pronouncements on the places that bankrolled this success, because he hadn't promised prosperity in the first place. "He wasn't really making prescriptions," Frantz says. "This wasn't Jesus Christ throwing the money men out of the temple; this was an academic. He was a fucking college professor, and you're hoping to resurrect Canton, Ohio? Yeah, good luck with that."' -- Land/real estate pump and dumping 'dressed up' as sustainable/"creative" economic redevelopment.

america deindustrialization immateriallabour attention realestate ponzi happytalk cool hipsters socialengineering gentrification theadvertisedlife bubble
january 2010 by adamcrowe

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Hipster Runoff Exegesis -- "Create your own HRO Post with this bloggable photo."

'The culture and communications industry (represented with some irony in this depiction by Carles himself) produces the means of production for a new kind of labor force that works for no pay to produce its own notoriety, seeking its own distinction within mediatized reality to stand out from the teeming crowd of individuals. These efforts are harvested by the overarching industries and used to enhance the value of their capital. Readers become more insecure as they compete for attention; Carles becomes even more preeminent in his chosen matrix of cultural production. -- So there is more than a little sarcasm in his admission that "Even though a lot of other ppl could probs write my blog, there is only 1 Carles." Carles wants to point out that "Carles" has become a corporate entity, an efficient synthesis of the immaterial labor of the cultural producers the weblog sets out to satirize.'

HipsterRunoff immateriallabour exploitation fame satire
december 2009 by adamcrowe

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Marginal Utility Annex -- Ideas about value, ethical capital as misnomer, etc.

'The main problem is that immaterial labor appears to the laborer as self-fashioning, and the self produced by it is the consumerist self required by exisiting social relations -- only such a self can harvest the "benefits" of identity in the social sphere circa 2009. The superficial recognition in social networks; the reified, measurable influence on has; the personal brand's impact, the mastery of cultural trivia as a status marker; "reputational capital" etc. (Arvidsson thinks if we quanitfy this stuff, somehow it can work to the consumer's benefit -- making us all entrepreneurs of the self. Sounds awful to me.) ...the real problem, though, is the self-fashioning out of that stuff (what Arvidsson unironically equtes to Marx's "General Intellect" -- a debasement, as it limits intellect mostly to the facility to embrace and manipulate popular culture).'

immateriallabour theflexiblepersonality generalintellect circumscription whuffie socialcapital culturalcapital capital marxism
december 2009 by adamcrowe

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Generation Bubble -- The Order of Things: Consumerism’s Grammar of Desire

'Life under conditions of global capital has shown us that there’s no way to consume our way out of the traps of consumerist conformity, no matter how alternative or distinctive our consumption practices are. We simply can’t stop ourselves from producing the terms of our own exploitation. -- ...the various sensual satisfactions that goods might supply have all been supplanted by the overarching satisfaction of having our identity, as expressed through a particular consumption act, recognized and validated. Then we know it mattered, that it meant something. -- Our desire, though it makes our own identity, is someone else’s capital. Though it registers to ourselves as integrity and psychological complexity, it is at the same time an impersonal measure of our productive capacity as immaterial laborers. We can’t prevent our consumption from serving as immaterial labor, and anything else we do is easily translated into a sign, into consumption.'

usevaluevssignvalue consumerism consumering identity performance signalling status socialcapital culturalcapital immateriallabour theadvertisedlife
december 2009 by adamcrowe

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Marginal Utility -- The social factory

'the self as brand ...concern for our uniqueness, our identity in social contexts, becomes a kind of value-generating capital, or rather a circulating commodity. This plays out in seemingly innocuous ways. It can be a matter of hyping a product free of charge but using it or talking about it. Or this can be a matter of going to parties with co-workers, learning to get along better and therefore increasing the efficiency of processes on the job. Or it is a matter of behaving politely among strangers, extending a system of politeness and trust that can be harvested economically as a reduction in transaction costs. Or it can be a matter of friending one another online and creating a social map whose byways can later be retraced by marketing concerns. Web 2.0 is basically a set of tools for capturing that labor, for which we are not compensated with wages but with a stronger sense of self and a feeling that we are relevant, part of a broader discourse, being recognized for knowing things.'

theadvertisedlife socialmedia whuffie immateriallabour socialcapital culturalcapital identity
december 2009 by adamcrowe

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Marginal Utility Annex -- Costs of consuming information goods

'...the "release" of informational goods produced and distributed in social networks is not free; there is a cost to the user in stress, in insecurity, in the fear of exclusion, of not knowing, not keeping up, being hopelessly out of style, being obscure. The self -- the individual subject -- within systems of social production is fundamentally insecure and unstable, and is compelled to continue to produce information by consuming other information and goods in a social forum under conditions the require the consumption to be competitive, signifying. -- The value of social production is that can exploit that source of emotional motivation without having to provide any wage compensation.'

socialnetworking socialedia attention status signalling immateriallabour selfobjects socialobjects objects
december 2009 by adamcrowe

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My Name is Carles. I was Born 2 Blog

'I remember when I was a child, I wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer, or a professional in some other field that would offer me a bright financial future, with a chance to make a difference in my local community. Something that would give me the opportunity to raise a well-fed family and drive a nice car to my nice home every night. Then I turned into a teenager/post-teenager, and discovered my alternative identity. I wanted to express myself, contribute to ‘the arts’, or possibly some sort of niche micro-scene. I wanted to be paid for ‘being myself,’ or at least create a marketable self and ‘make Am Appy ad $$$$.’ The next decade will be our last war, holding on to the power of our demographic as a consumer force before the tween generation evolves. We must control trends so that tweens are late-adopters to technology/products/brands/etc. We must uphold the brands that we hold dear, and not make them affordable to minorities and the poors.'

HipsterRunoff hipsters immateriallabour culturalcapital theadvertisedlife middleclass lulz satire
december 2009 by adamcrowe

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Generation Bubble -- In Dubious Battle: Co-creation and the Coming Insurrection

Beneath the shutter shades, the fixed-gear bicycle! -- 'The revolution wasn’t supposed to be televised. The idea was that we would all unplug from all the administered culture that stupefied us and transform the world with spontaneous justice and generalized, self-evident righteousness. But instead of eschewing pop culture to wage political battles, many young people, as it turned out, delved ever deeper into it, convinced that it was their culture and they were, in some obscure way, guiding it. The route to power was not via opposition to the existing power structure but through mastery of the minutiae of art and music scenes. Everyday life would be changed by making it *cooler*.' -- 'Unfortunately for radical revolution, political and counter-cultural activists open-source innovators were most likely the sort of people the Invisible Committee were expecting to mount the insurrection [b]ut the Committee fail to grasp that entertainment and labor have been merged...'

* hipsters authenticity narcissism identity multitude immateriallabour affectivelabour socialcapital culturalcapital surplusvalue cocreation precuperation theadvertisedlife
november 2009 by adamcrowe

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Marginal Utility Annex -- Technologies, narratives of self

'...digitalization makes the reproduction of the permanently insecure self more integral to the reproduction of consumerist social relations. The capacities and networks of the internet permit an archived self that becomes a subject's most important piece of property ... "reputational capital," the sum total of connections and actions produced within the social space online. This self subsists on postitive affirmation and metrics that establish the visiblity of its activities online. Being is transformed into "presence," which can be measured and ranked ...a self will need to be grounded in commercialized, corporatized discourse before we apprehend it ...narratives of subjectivity are even more impoverished by the restricted classifications of digital data possible within these platforms. The self we are compelled to produce online is smaller, with less potential for growth and less curiosity, the more we produce it and add to the archive that will dictate our future choices.'

internet web consumerism data quantifiedself selfservers self selfobjects taste reputation whuffie immateriallabour subjectivity circumscription theadvertisedlife
november 2009 by adamcrowe

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Marginal Utility -- Where Nobody Knows Your Name and They Never Know You Came

'...what happens when markets become non-anonymous is that we become reliant on consumption more than ever to mediate our relations with others, so that friendships happen only within the context of brand communities and branded social networks and shared affinities for the same products. “Social networking, blogging, etc. have created a huge incentive for people to put themselves on display, when previously they may have just kept their opinions mostly to themselves.” It is that incentivizing that worries me ... its conflation with commercialized self-display and personal branding. Social networks keep score of attention in measurable ways, heightening the stakes, and our physical isolation erodes the traditional mitigating forces of courtesy (which is where the stigma against performing, of hogging attention, arose from in the first place). The danger is that performance as a gift, a carefree act of self-forgetting, instead becomes an ongoing requisite act of self-definition.'

* socialnetworking behaviours attention whuffie reputation consumerism consumering identity selfservers performance signalling masks status sharing socialcapital culturalcapital cults immateriallabour theadvertisedlife
november 2009 by adamcrowe

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Marginal Utility Annex -- More on "Consumer Emancipation"

'One must invent a community, an adoring audience, in order to imagine that self-expression is a gift. and things like Facebook serve to make that fantasy easier to sustain, by making positive feedback thoughtlessly implementable. The ordinary impersonal markets ... are suspended to force participants to sell their own "radical self-expression" instead as a self-conscious product, for approval and attention and status and a stable position in an emerging social hierarchy. This is allowing identity-driven consumerism to supplant capitalist consumption. -- The market is an atavistic structure that works against the sort of self consumerism exalts -- markets prefer anonymous subjects engaging in exchanges ruled entirely by rationality rather than the vagaries of social relations and social/cultural capital. -- ...social networks seize upon the mechanisms Burning Man evinces for creating a community built on coercive sharing, but tosses out the impermanence that excuses the coercion.'

* socialnetworking attention whuffie reputation consumerism consumering identity selfservers performance signalling masks status sharing socialcapital culturalcapital cults immateriallabour theadvertisedlife
november 2009 by adamcrowe

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Generation Bubble -- Public Image Unlimited: Consumerism and Anonymity’s End (3)

'The main purpose of social networks ... is to guarantee us a place to display our consumption. The point is to discourage online anonymity, to get us invested in the notion of reputational capital. We begin to publicize every purchase, to authenticate every choice by broadcasting it. We strengthen our communal ties with every singularized transaction. We will have reason to believe that everything we buy has an impact on our reputation, on how we are seen, on who we really are. We will respond accordingly, stylizing and designing the most mundane commodities so that they can elucidate some aspect of personality. If we share, we contribute information, we add value to the network and we know that our voice has been aggregated. Our drop was added to the demographic data pool, but more important, our own personal archive has been enriched. We become more findable. We can begin to keep score of how often we’re found, how real we are to the world.'

socialnetworking attention whuffie reputation consumerism consumering identity selfservers performance signalling masks status sharing socialcapital culturalcapital cults immateriallabour theadvertisedlife
november 2009 by adamcrowe

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Generation Bubble -- Public Image Unlimited: Consumerism and Anonymity’s End (2)

'Rather than entering into an exchange with a stable identity, we become ourselves through the public transaction, which provides us with a self only for as long as it is approved in the interaction process. The exchange is “singularized,” its uniqueness supplants that of the people involved. They fade into the communal backdrop, waiting to emerge again in another dramatic moment of “sharing.” And every effort at sharing will be judged, fixing our place within a status hierarchy. We can fantasize about finding the status hierarchy we could dominate — maximizing our “subcultural capital.” But this involves doubling down on personalized exchange, moving further away from the capital that circulates with no questions asked (money) and reinforcing the value of contingent capital that has worth only in particularly circumstances. So at that point, we would be dealing in an even more obscure personal currency, begging for people to accept it, exchange it into acceptance and attention.'

attention whuffie reputation consumerism consumering identity selfservers performance signalling masks status sharing socialcapital culturalcapital cults immateriallabour theadvertisedlife
november 2009 by adamcrowe

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Generation Bubble -- Public Image Unlimited: Consumerism and Anonymity’s End (1)

'In order for consumption to be meaningful ... it must be publicized in some way. -- Kozinets notes that though Burning Man “has many similarities to a Disney theme park,” he found that — unlike at Disneyland, I would venture to say — “people indicated that they were constantly judging others in terms of the degree of their participation in the event” in order to identify outsiders to be derided as inauthentic. Of course, these poseur “tourists” serve to structure the authenticity of these self-appointed judges’ own participation, and by extension, their identity. Kozinets suggests that Burning Man participants’ “use of these passive, isolated consumer-as-dupe comparisons may point to the higher cultural capital” denoting the festival goers’ belonging to an “educated intelligentsia.” They engage in “building strong communal ties and using the ancient practice of vilifying the outsider.” Communal relations are indeed reestablished, by the palpable and immediate threat of exclusion.'

* consumerism authenticity consumering identity selfservers performance signalling masks status sharing socialcapital culturalcapital cults immateriallabour theadvertisedlife
november 2009 by adamcrowe

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Hipster Runoff Exegesis -- "Is Target ‘ripping off’ American Apparel?"

'Carles admits, confronted with the collapsing of hierarchies of social capital within the sector of branded retailers, that he is "having a huge crisis." ...the disciplinary locus upon which the full scrutiny of capital, in the form of brands and symbols and their discursive distribution, is brought to bear on the individual, guilty or not, forcing a fatal self-awareness of corporate intellectual property, up to and including not merely the trademarked language with which fashion our identities but those very identities themselves. By freely adapting the look and language of branded products to self-promote, we have been pirating in the semiological sea. We commit the crime of trying to tout our own personal brand at the expense of those from which we construct it. When the ledger of cultural meanings is drawn up, whose bottom line is assessed? Who signs the profit-and-loss statement, and is it signed with the blood of the consuming classes?'

HipsterRunoff semiotics vernacular consumering immateriallabour theadvertisedlife
november 2009 by adamcrowe

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Douglas Rushkoff -- Irish Times Gets Life Inc

'...many readers will enjoy this book most when Rushkoff lets rip at some modern craziness. He’s none too happy about the corporatisation of friendship, charitable causes and even political beliefs via Facebook et al; while the popularity of self-help psychobabble phenomenon The Secret and pseudo-philosopher Malcolm Gladwell (much loved by “compliance professionals”) unsettles him greatly.' -- Compliance Professionals! I really need to read this book.

economics criticism immateriallabour precuperation hype falseconsciousness complianceprofessionals DouglasRushkoff
october 2009 by adamcrowe

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Caliber -- The Future in Labor by Joshua Clover (PDF)

Essay on dystopic worker futures, as explored in Dollhouse, Moon, Sleep Dealer, and The Girlfriend Experience. Cites Molly from Neuromancer as the prototypal robot-zombie-puppet-prostitute-slave worker: "You know how I got the money, when I was starting out? Here. Not here, but a place like it, in the Sprawl. Joke, to start with, ’cause once they plant the cut-out chip, it seems like free money. Wake up sore, sometimes, but that’s it. Renting the goods, is all. You aren’t in, when it’s all happening. House has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for..."

work immateriallabour affectivelabour prostitution puppetry replicants slavery dystopia sciencefiction
september 2009 by adamcrowe

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Marginal Utility -- Fear of Sharing

'Sharing once seemed to me a simple, straightforward thing, but the way tech and social media companies have co-opted it recently have made me increasingly suspicious of it. ...we aren’t sharing at all, we are working to move information and data into digital space where it can be manipulated and harvested for profit.' -- '...don’t we want actual editors filtering content for us rather than our friends? I would be inundated with more information to process about my friends’ efforts to signal who they want to be. And I would have my own performance to worry about as well.' -- '... [we are sending] the message to the world that it is okay to assume that we are always, always performing. That sort of claustrophobic suffocation precludes the possibility of a true public space, as in not private. Everything that once might have delineated the private is now being compulsively shared or extracted and brought into view. ...always on the verge of boasting.' -- Performance anxiety?

socialmedia behaviours narcissism signalling sharing sousveillance performance masks identity ambientexposure immateriallabour anarchism emergentism sharecropping publics
august 2009 by adamcrowe

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Capitalism++ -- Modern Work is Mostly a Lie

'Especially in the so-called knowledge, information, or entertainment sectors, work has all too often become little more than an arbitrary hierarchy of stupidity fees, ignorance fines, influence peddling, and pathetic popularity plays. It's increasingly an unjustifiable waste of time to set up such pointless and counterproductive relationships in the first place. It's no wonder that increasingly, many of the most intelligent, creative, and educated simply opt out. -- We're clueless about how to handle surpluses -- the most dangerous of which is cognitive surplus -- and the Old World Centralized Capitalist Party Bosses began embezzling our exponential productivity dividends long ago by providing myriad creative ways to soak up the first hints of the sociologically volatile stuff. -- So Industrial Era capitalism worked. It succeeded. But it's utterly obsolete for America and today it is our existential obligation to define what comes next -- Postscarcity Agalmics.' -- Post? Hmm...

work immateriallabour hackersvsvectoralists cognitivesurplus arbitrage
july 2009 by adamcrowe

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NYTimes -- In Search of Dignity

'The dignity code commanded its followers to be disinterested—to endeavor to put national interests above personal interests. ...to be reticent—to never degrade intimate emotions by parading them in public. ...to be dispassionate—to distrust rashness, zealotry, fury and political enthusiasm. -- ...the dignity code itself has been completely obliterated. We can all list the causes of its demise. First, there is capitalism. We are all encouraged to become managers of our own brand, to do self-promoting end zone dances to broadcast our own talents. Second, there is the cult of naturalism. We are all encouraged to discard artifice and repression and to instead liberate our own feelings. Third, there is charismatic evangelism with its penchant for public confession. Fourth, there is radical egalitarianism and its hostility to aristocratic manners. -- ...one sees people who simply have no social norms to guide them as they try to navigate the currents of their own passions.'

sociology civility dignity emotionalintelligence manners protocols etiquette affectivelabour immateriallabour entitlement narcissism theadvertisedlife
july 2009 by adamcrowe

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NYTimes.com -- The Case for Working With Your Hands

"The escalating demand for academic credentials in the job market gives the impression of an ever-more-knowledgeable society, whose members perform cognitive feats their unschooled parents could scarcely conceive of. On paper, my abstracting job, multiplied a millionfold, is precisely what puts the futurologist in a rapture: we are getting to be so smart! Yet my M.A. obscures a more real stupidification of the work I secured with that credential, and a wage to match. When I first got the degree, I felt as if I had been inducted to a certain order of society. But despite the beautiful ties I wore, it turned out to be a more proletarian existence than I had known as an electrician. A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this."

doublethink immateriallabour work life do
may 2009 by adamcrowe

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My job/career does not align with my true personal brand. [Generation Y and the mainstream workplace]

"It was as if there is this other form of ‘authenticity’ that I didn’t even know about that has nothing to do with the arts. I feel like there is ’something wrong with me.’ I feel like my ‘alt’ perspectives might have crippled me forever. I feel like my ‘global perspectives’ and the required 2-year core courses at my university made me ‘know too much’ about life, and possibly enabled me to think that ‘nothing matters.’ I feel trapped. I feel like I just wish I really knew a lot about computers, and could have just designed CollegeHumor/vimeo/twitter, or something. I sort of just wish I could have a job where I am ‘paid to have opinions on things that seem important’, and make me feel like I am ‘behind the scenes’ in important decisions regarding meaningful brands. I feel worried. I feel like there is a ‘real world’ that I have always told myself that I will be able to transcend, but it might have just been a gimmick." -- :*(

* HipsterRunoff work lulz existentialism nihilism identity authenticity immateriallabour entitlement theadvertisedlife satire
may 2009 by adamcrowe

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CTheory.net -- Empire@Play: Virtual Games and Global Capitalism

'It is from simulation that virtual games emerged, broke loose only to be reintegrated into the assemblages of world capital, as a means of inducing the "flexible personality" demanded by digital work, war and markets. As this hacker innovation was captured by the game factory, it has continued to generate surplus know-how that escapes complete capture in the commodity form. Some commentators see such "autoludic" activity as automatically empowering and democratizing. We, however, insist on what Paolo Virno terms "the ambivalence of the multitude." We ask of digital play what Félix Guattari asked of collective humanity: "how can it find a compass by which to reorient itself?" His response, by "remaking social practices," was grounded in a reading of transformations already underway. To speak of games of multitude is to assert that the possibilities of virtual play exceed its imperial manifestations, and the desires of many gamers surpass marketers' caricatures of them.'

* culture media gaming virtualgoods mmorpg RMT ludocapitalism work seriousgames affectivelabour immateriallabour virtuality simulation play theory praxis activism multitude cognitivesurplus alternativerealitygaming transformation design socialsoftware gamemechanics recuperation ideology hegemony carrierobjects objects militaryentertainmentcomplex hackersvsvectoralists globalization empire thegamingofeverydaylife nickdyerwitheford via:jullandibbell "capitalism"
may 2009 by adamcrowe

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Marginal Utility -- Hobby economy

"... the internet doesn’t inherently provoke us to meaningful work anymore than it spreads democracy automatically. Even if we find it meaningful to work for nothing, that doesn’t prevent some other entity from exploiting that meaningful labor and expropriating its product. In our ignorance, or in the first rush of enthusiasm we have for these new productive possibilities, we may not care about this, but eventually we could wake up to find it profoundly discouraging. This scenario is easy to imagine: All this time, we were thinking we were undermining capitalism, destroying the cash nexus, restoring human rewards to human efforts, and all that, the capitalists were drawing down our efforts to fortify themselves and retrench for a whole new round of primitive accumulation, only this time in a limitless virtual world."

economics cognitivesurplus socialproduction socialmedia attention immateriallabour sharecropping hackersvsvectoralists #complexity
april 2009 by adamcrowe

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Hipster Runoff Exegesis -- "Feel like making an impulse purchase."

'This post is about organic intellectuals. Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci theorized that a revolution would have to be led by organic intellectuals, self-aware thinkers who problematize their place in the power structure and their culpability in perpetuating class oppression. Carles, obviously, is an organic intellectual par excellence. The reason organic intellectuals are so integral is that the running dogs of bourgeois capitalism have an easy time discrediting the inchoate revolutionary impulses of thinkers whose dialectics are not so sharpened, those disgruntled dilettantes who long for a more meaningful existence outside capitalism but cannot sacrifice the supercilious comforts of being among its protected and entitled ranks. The would-be leaders of the working class are enamored of their own creativity... They are smug, intellectual bullies... They are anarchic nihilists, or -- the same thing -- adroit self-marketers... They have reduced politics to self-branding consumerism'

HipsterRunoff immateriallabour consumering nihilism theadvertisedlife
april 2009 by adamcrowe

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Escape from the Zombie Food Court by Joe Bageant

'More than any other people I have met, Americans fear loss of uniqueness. Yet you and I are not unique in the least. Despite the American yada yada about individualism, you are not special. Nor am I. Just because we come from the manufacturer equipped with individual consciousness, does not make us the center of any unique world, private or public, material, intellectual or spiritual. The fact is, you will seldom if ever make any significant material or lifestyle choices of your own in your entire life. If you don't buy that house, someone else will. If you don't marry him, someone else will. If you don't become a psychologist, lawyer or a telemarketer, someone else will. We are all replaceable parts in the machinery of a capitalist economy. "Oh but we have unique feelings and emotions that are important," we say. Yet I venture to say that none of us will ever feel an emotion that someone long dead has not felt, or some as yet unborn person will not feel.' -- *gulps a gritty red pill*

* economics psychology spectacle immateriallabour corporatism paternalism propaganda control consciousness stockholmsyndrome mimicry hegemony ideology mythology consumerism narcissism individualism delusion hologram theadvertisedlife debt slavery feudalism reality compassion empathy truth gaia one
april 2009 by adamcrowe

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BigShinyThing -- Welcome To The Precariat

"Precarity is most commonly associated with outsiders who compete for low-paying retail and service jobs. Perversely, a similar state of uncertainty falls to the skilled, individualistic young, working their time with zero job security as digital freelancers in the post-industrial economies. A familiar scene at your local coffee-shop franchise is probably the closest the depoliticised members of both groups come to meeting — the one group toiling behind the tills, the other slaving against client deadlines on their MacBooks, making each drink last half a day. Precariat, meet Digital Precariat. Help yourself to sugar over there, by the door. On the way out."

immateriallabour affectivelabour exploitation work retribalization "capitalism"
december 2008 by adamcrowe

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Lulu -- MSG™ Promotional Edition by Howard Ingham (Book) in Games

"You live in a perfect world. You live in the free world. Every new day brings you new challenges. Every new job brings new opportunities. You’re the master of your destiny, your own boss. The future is bright. You just have to keep your soul. And your salary options. MSG™ is a slightly satirical game of negotiation and conscience, for three to six adults."

theadvertisedlife work immateriallabour branding gaming roleplay games rpg parody satire boredom sciencefiction alternativereality pdf
november 2008 by adamcrowe

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io9 -- Kill Mickey Mouse in a Strange Game of Corporate Brand Slavery

"[MSG] Players play the roles of company Reps who all work for the soul-crushing Company in service of the Brand. The point is really to make a mockery of soulless corporations and their often ruthless strategies, not to mention the soulless drones who do their bidding. At the same time, it mocks our own willingness to worship these brands and submit to the will of these companies, all while creating ludicrous scenarios that are maddeningly interconnected with the stories created in the previous round. Maybe this excerpt from the rule book explains it best: Brainstorm for a couple of minutes until you come up with a name for the Brand [that all the players work for]. If some of you hate it — or, better, all of you hate it — that’s brilliant, because it means you’ll understand a little of what it is to work for an organization that makes you cringe every time you look in the mirror and see the Brand logo they tattooed on your forehead." -- Haha

theadvertisedlife work immateriallabour branding gaming roleplay games rpg parody satire boredom sciencefiction alternativereality
november 2008 by adamcrowe

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LinkedIn -- Company Search: Various

We are Various.

various freelance agencyagency immateriallabour work
november 2008 by adamcrowe

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Wired -- The Unreal Estate Boom

"... scarcity has turned out to be a feature, not a bug. Sure, people like the big, graphics-based chat arenas such as the Palace, where talk was the only real commodity, and that commodity was, as usual, cheap. But the worlds they actually want to be in - bad enough to pay an entrance fee - are the ones that make the digital goods hard to get to and even harder to copy. The addictive appeal of online role-playing games suggests that people will choose the constraining and challenging world over the one that sets them free."

* JulianDibbell gaming thegamingofeverydaylife work mmorpg economics virtualgoods virtualworlds digital scarcity immateriallabour virtuality
november 2008 by adamcrowe

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Guardian -- Video: Making millions from virtual worlds

'Jon "Neverdie" Jacobs explains why virtual worlds are better than the real thing, and reveals his staggering earnings from a cyber asteroid and nightclub in Entropia Universe.' -- He's right.

virtualworlds virtualgoods virtualservices entropia markets economics immateriallabour socialmedia work thegamingofeverydaylife
august 2008 by adamcrowe

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Madeleine Bunting -- Faustian pact with your pay slip

'Joanne Ciulla: "Of all the institutions in society, why let one of the more precarious ones supply our social, spiritual and psychological needs? It doesn't make sense to put such a large portion of our lives into the unsteady hands of employers."'

emotionallabour immateriallabour work maslow psychology theadvertisedlife
july 2008 by adamcrowe

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Madeleine Bunting -- Live to work

"You are supposed to be passionate about your products, your services, the brand. But why? It's a paycheque... When did passion creep out of the bedroom and into the boardroom?... When did an employer start wanting employees entirely uncritical?"

work branding immateriallabour emotionallabour cognitivesurplus
july 2008 by adamcrowe

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Adweek -- The True Story of a Bogus Blog

"the irony of a campaign against counterfeiting creating a counterfeit student." - "The course was unequivocally designed to further the interests of the company and the organization." - "Oh, please. People do crazy shit on Facebook like every day." -- 1

* chaoticfiction pr reality advertising marketing education identity spoof ethics facebook socialmedia theadvertisedlife immateriallabour
may 2008 by adamcrowe

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The Daedalus Project -- The Blurring of Work and Play

"Given that MMORPGs are creating environments where complex work is becoming seductively fun, how difficult would it be for MMORPG developers to embed real work into these environments?" -- Renting out capitalism at $25 per month. Grim.

* hackersvsvectoralists immateriallabour thegamingofeverydaylife theadvertisedlife work time play production ludocapitalism virtualworlds mmorpg seriousgames gaming deepgame experiencepoints competition levels flow games gamemechanics economics markets serviceecologies design psychology "capitalism"
april 2008 by adamcrowe

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Guardian - Read me first: You say you've never considered the politics of search engines?

"Wikia's search project is trying to draw on the fear and doubt stemming from the dominance of Google...it's safe to say that framing search as a public good has been good for Wikia's bottom line"- the commodification of discontent and corporate co-option

wikia search spin opensource open transparency advertising hackersvsvectoralists peerproduction immateriallabour ethics mahalo google SethFinkelstein
january 2008 by adamcrowe

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Yuwie.com

Get paid to be your digital *self*.

attention socialnetworking businessmodels content stocks money work identity self immateriallabour theadvertisedlife
january 2008 by adamcrowe

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Wired - Facebook Ads Make You the Star -- And You May Not Know It

"Currently, there is not even any way to opt-out of participation in Social Ads, other than by avoiding associating yourself with any corporate brands on Facebook."

facebook socialads advertising theadvertisedlife immateriallabour work
january 2008 by adamcrowe

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The Advertised Life

"The Advertised Life, an emerging mode of being in which ... one expects and looks for advertising, learns to lead life as an ad, to think like an advertiser, and even to anticipate and insert one-self in successful strategies of marketing." - Thomas Frank

theadvertisedlife advertising cognition criticaldistance criticism feedback consumerism consumering attention fame celebrity immateriallabour vernacular reality freedom panopticon * "capitalism"
november 2007 by adamcrowe

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New York Times - Pay Me for My Content

"People happily pay for content in certain Internet ecosystems, provided the ecosystems are delightful. People love paying for virtual art, clothing and other items in virtual worlds like Second Life, for instance."

aggregation content intellectualproperty free virtualgoods virtualworlds businessmodels art creativity place hackersvsvectoralists economics immateriallabour affectivelabour work augmentationistsvsimmersionists immersion narrativeenvironments storytelling objects narrativeobjects
november 2007 by adamcrowe

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Web Strategy - Why Hyper Targeting, Social Ads and rise of the “Fan-Sumer” matter to brands

Comment: "The sell must be extremely soft to the point of non-existence. If companies can provide users with incentives, benefits, and a feeling of superior exclusiveness, the way applications do, then I think this type of advertising is here to stay."

advertising facebook beacon socialads socialgraph p2p immateriallabour status attention friendship people storytelling propagation
november 2007 by adamcrowe

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Facebook Ads - do they have a cluetrain?

"its more designed to allow a brand to force entry into a closed network by co-opting one of the nodes. And all the evidence of the way social networks operate is that we tend to cut off rogue nodes once we identify them."

facebook socialads advertising socialnetworking attention trust identity selling immateriallabour affectivelabour propagation
november 2007 by adamcrowe

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Facebook - Press Releases: Facebook Unveils Facebook Ads

Zuckerberg: “Social actions are powerful because they act as trusted referrals... people influence people. It’s no longer about messages broadcasted by companies... we use these social actions to build a new kind of ad system.”

advertising marketing facebook socialgraph immateriallabour affectivelabour p2p people theadvertisedlife
november 2007 by adamcrowe

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Nicholas Carr's Blog - The social graft

"First you get your users to entrust their personal data to you, then you not only sell that data to advertisers but you get the users to be the vector for the ads. And what do the users get in return? An animated Sprite Sips character to interact with."

facebook socialads socialgraph theadvertisedlife immateriallabour affectivelabour advertising datamining socialnetworking distribution privacy propagation
november 2007 by adamcrowe

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New York Magazine - Gawker and the Rage of the Creative Underclass

"Success is not solid. That’s part of the weird fascination with Gawker—it’s about the anxiety and class rage of New York’s creative underclass. It supplies a Manhattan version of social justice."

writing newyork class immateriallabour satire gossip journalism blogging "capitalism"
october 2007 by adamcrowe

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BigShinyThing - Strike Bike

"... an inspiration to those of us in the knowledge precariate as well. Use your internet time at work wisely, fellow workers. You know what I mean." (Hehe)

work activism immateriallabour
october 2007 by adamcrowe

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<nettime> - The Flexible Personality, Part II

"deeper and perhaps more insidious effects arise from the inscription of cultural, artistic and ethical ideals, once valued for their permanence, into the swiftly changing cycles of capitalist valorization and obsolescence."

* criticism immateriallabour work designwank "capitalism"
september 2007 by adamcrowe

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<nettime> - The Flexible Personality, Part I

"To be effective, a cultural critique must show the links between the major articulations of power and the more-or-less trivial aesthetics of everyday life."

* criticism immateriallabour socialmedia culture consumerism essay work theadvertisedlife "capitalism"
september 2007 by adamcrowe

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Advertising Age - Gillette Taps 9,000 Creatives Online

On OpenAd and IP rights: "It's such an unpopular subject," she said with a laugh. "But I think now we probably have the most litigious bunch of creatives you've ever seen." - GOOD!

immateriallabour businessmodels advertising marketing planning freelance agencyagency creative collectiveintelligence crowdsourcing via:russelldavies
september 2007 by adamcrowe

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BURAK ARIKAN - The Market of Spectacles

"There is a difference between Guy Debord’s Society of Spectacle and today’s networked society of spectacle. Today, the spectacle is digitally measurable."

markets societyofthespectacle immateriallabour economics socialmedia work "capitalism"
september 2007 by adamcrowe

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A Stock Market in Life

"For each location, sensors mounted in the entrance register how many people are in the room at any one time and send this information to the Stock Market central server. The number of visitors define the fair value for each place."

immateriallabour economics markets location stocks
september 2007 by adamcrowe

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META-MARKETS

"Meta-Markets is an online stock market for trading socially networked creative products... With Meta-Markets we aim to help people to retain the value of their immaterial labor in social web services."

immateriallabour markets socialmedia economics data information metadata stocks celebrity fame ratings emotionallabour
september 2007 by adamcrowe

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Guardian - Read me first: Don't email me about Google's wheeze for targeted advertising

EVIL. It was only a matter of time.

google advertising theadvertisedlife DONTBEEVIL immateriallabour emotionallabour "capitalism"
september 2007 by adamcrowe

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Tom Coates - This is not a brothel...

"There has to be one place in your life where you're not for sale. For me, that place is my personal site, the representation of me online. I'd no more let someone else compromise that voice than I'd let them tattoo their logo on my children."

theadvertisedlife blogging immateriallabour spam marketing fame celebrity ethics criticism pr lists
august 2007 by adamcrowe

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Fast Magazine - The Young Turks of Personal Branding

For fucks sake!

immateriallabour affectivelabour theadvertisedlife fame celebrity hype feedback "capitalism"
august 2007 by adamcrowe

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iain tait - Recruitment Musings

"all of the really good people seem to have their own game going on. They’ve either started their own small companies, or they’re freelancing and living the life that they want, on their terms."

work agency career freelance entrepreneurship recruitment skills businessmodels immateriallabour backlash
august 2007 by adamcrowe

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dead insect - how neurotic R U? xxx

Facebook Emo Manager: "it would tell you who your emotional dumping ground is, who always says nice things to you and who texts you loads and whom you never reply to." (It could also help advertisers use you to identify your friends as 'prospects'.)

* ideas facebook socialnetworking emotionalintelligence emotionallabour immateriallabour selling datamining work theadvertisedlife friendship feedback behaviours neurosis
july 2007 by adamcrowe

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3pointD.com - Seriosity Teams With IBM to Study Work 2.0

“Today’s gamers are learning collaboration, self-organization, risk-taking, openness, influence, and how to earn incentives linked to performance and be flexible in the way they communicate.”

gaming work virtualworlds immateriallabour management career
july 2007 by adamcrowe

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Guardian - Bill Taylor on big ideas

"Are you top in your field or just an also-ran? You have to get competitive to find out - and improve."

competition immateriallabour collectiveintelligence crowdsourcing businessmodels code innovation prototyping management
july 2007 by adamcrowe

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QDB: Quote #779320

"<dsully> please describe web 2.0 to me in 2 sentences or less.

web immateriallabour work businessmodels "capitalism"
july 2007 by adamcrowe

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Guardian - Immoral support

"We also described the way young people wield Cool as protection against the depression that failure in a highly competitive and celebrity-obsessed culture may induce. If you can't win, then refuse to play the game by dissing it as uncool."

cool behaviours attention psychology immateriallabour emotionallabour affectivelabour ethics youth crime celebrity class consumerism fame "capitalism"
june 2007 by adamcrowe

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Logic+Emotion - What's In Your DNA?

"What’s in your personal DNA? How are you wired? Left brained, right brained, all brained? Where do you excel? Where do you need help? How does your personal DNA affect what you do for a living?"

career thinking dna immateriallabour emotionallabour work
june 2007 by adamcrowe

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murketing - iSelfPromote

On iPhone fanboy ads: "My guess, in other words, is that this is not about evangelizing for Apple’s brand. It’s about leeching off of Apple’s brand."

apple fandom marketing content theadvertisedlife immateriallabour work advertising video youtube productnarratives storytelling objects narrativeobjects identity fame
june 2007 by adamcrowe

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Invading Our Own Privacy

'The prevailing paradigm is a seamless integration of content, communication, data collection and targeted marketing. Companies build brands by purposely cultivating this process, creating spaces where they're encouraging people to pour their hearts out.'

identity privacy extensionsofman immunesystem centralnervoussystem reputation hive datamining disintermediation feedback strangeattractors immateriallabour consumerism information ideology fame selfservers psychology retribalization
june 2007 by adamcrowe

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Guardian - Inside IT: How we have been fooled by utopian visions of the future

Initial thought is this guy is confused: "What he wants is to show how we're told that the importance of a new technology lies not in what it can do in the here and now, but what the more advanced models might be able to do one day." Will read his book

technology utopia dystopia media McLuhan ideology information immateriallabour augmentationistsvsimmersionists singularity transhumanism psychology culture governance "capitalism"
june 2007 by adamcrowe

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TimesOnline - Thinking is so over

"Wikipedia is premised on a contrary theory of truth that would have seemed familiar to George Orwell: if the crowd says that two plus two equals five, then two plus two really does equal five."

web democracy participation content politics pr culture theadvertisedlife immateriallabour intellectualproperty information ideology spin media disintermediation popculture consumerism "capitalism"
june 2007 by adamcrowe

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SFGate - ON THE JOB / The mystery of the daytime idle: Why aren't you working?

"People aren't just working here - they're doing more of their non-work, too," he observed. "People play massively multiplayer games, they work on their MySpace pages. It isn't just an extension of the office here, it's an extension of the living room."

work freedom freelance boredom ADHD attentiondeficithyperactivedisorder attention continuouspartialattention intermittentvariablerewards immateriallabour life vernacular people
june 2007 by adamcrowe

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Henry Jenkins - Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTube

"The digital divide has to do with access to technology; the participation gap has to do with access to cultural experiences and the skills that people acquire through their participation within ongoing online communities and social networks."

academic participation immateriallabour disintermediation media literaryculturevsoralculture convergence HenryJenkins socialsoftware youtube academia retribalization
june 2007 by adamcrowe

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Guardian - The WikiGame Interview: Dave Perry (Part 2)

"They're doing it for the love of it. On the other hand, if you feel like you're learning and your career is advancing, it's probably worth it. I think there will be spin-off games as well. You can't really predict how people are going to interact"

gaming collectiveintelligence crowdsourcing collaboration content wiki immateriallabour
june 2007 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

BBC - Third of bloggers 'risk the sack'

Gonna happen. "Croner surveyed 2,000 people who keep a personal internet blog or diary and 39% said that they made harmful comments."

blogging backlash work immateriallabour
may 2007 by adamcrowe

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