By retracing how one body is chained to another in precarity, it shows the thickness of desire and potential inside these digital bonds.
i'm still not sold on the idea that there is desire or love for the work that is performed (see annotation about digital worker above).
Any critique of the digital must rec-ognize how precarity is differentially distributed across gender, race, and class
I'm pretty sure this is already happening. It's just not called precarity - but the social inequities have long been studied.
To answer, we dive into the thick realities of inequality faced by women and people of color as links in a digital chain of production. We thicken the flat network of clicks and searches to show the systemic inequalities that determine how people, finance, and things move — and not move — across borde
It took 15 pages to get here.
doxa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxa a Greek word meaning common belief or popular opinion.
“Big Data reveals insights with a particular range of data points, while Thick Data reveals the social context of and connections between data points.”21
Adapting Tricia Wang’s notion of “thick data,”
https://dscout.com/people-nerds/people-are-your-data-tricia-wang So what is thick data? It’s a term you coined, right? "Thick data is simply my re-branding of qualitative data, or design thinking, or user research, gut intuition, tribal knowledge, sensible thinking—I’ve heard it called so many things. Being open to the unknown means you will embrace data that is thick. Ostensibly it’s data that has yet to be quantified, is data that you may not even know that you need to collect and you don’t know it until you’re in the moment being open to it, and open to the invitation of the unknown in receiving that."
We have proposed, then, an examination of precarity attuned to the programmability of power in localized contexts, reflective of their temporalities, and gesturing to their seemingly unbounded zones of encounter.
What?
sur-veillance has been to imagine them as equally affecting all users.
but with our society's biases built in.
User subjects and data objects are treated as programmable matter, which is to say extractable matter.
yes.
Arduino
This doesn't get a footnote or explanation? https://www.arduino.cc/ - Arduino is an open-source hardware and software company, project and user community that designs and manufactures single-board microcontrollers and microcontroller kits for building digital devices.
Foxconn
Isn't Foxconn the folks trying to build in Wisconsin? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn%27s_Wisconsin_plant
Turk,
how is this term being used?
UberPASSPORT was discontinued on September 1, 2016, a mere six months after it was announced. The company’s venture into the busi-ness of international border crossing ended up being mostly a speculative exercise.
That's because this was a dumb idea. Especially if we consider the context of the political environment at the time - this is when Trump was campaigning on "build the wall" rhetoric.
Car loan
It probably could strengthen the argument here to also talk about how uber drivers are also put into further precarity by predatory car loans.
Surely all Uber drivers were submitted to the same labor regime, but those who had to endure it as a means to survive were predominantly people of color.
This is also true of companies like Instacart, GrubHub,etc.
UberPASS-PORT,
This seems like a good way to die.
In short, the borderlands constitute the cutting edge of technological imagi-nation.
Do borderlands create this area for testing because they are regions of no-man's land? That they aren't robustly populated and thus available for this interplay? If we take this out of an American context - in places that don't see borders in the same way as Americans do - would this hold up?
Lily and Bill were part of a supply chain that fed the military indus-trial complex that fed the budding digital industries.
this still reads pre-digital to me.
Scholars at research universities have the capacity to do this labor, the labor of cultural history, to document past precarities and their costs
This seems like a weird throwaway sentence. Is this a call to do this kind of scholarship? Is this an admonishment that scholars aren't doing this work?
or made into totems of digital capitalism’s evils.
OH I HATE THIS. Let's not take sacred objects to indigenous people and still continue to use them as metaphors for white capitalistic evil.
The precarities that characterize our gig economy were beta-tested on Indian reservations, on the US-Mexico border, in Chinese factories.
start of the precarity we see today in the gig economy - I don't know if you can divorce all of this from the history of factory work, they could co-exist, but factory work in general has always been precarious.
The dream of spaceships made other dreams of providing nurturing and care to indigenous children impossible when Asian women in factories overseas took their place as precarious workers in electronics factories.
Obviously, indigenous labor in the US was not the "lowest level of production" (highlighted 2 paragraphs above) if it could be farmed out to equally exploited asian workers.
8 1 Social Text 141• December 2019Precarity Lab · Digital Precarity Manifestofemale and nonwhite labor, all linked to one another across time and space by bonds of capital, material object production, and social reproduction. Theories of network cultures celebrate the new connectivity afforded by digital technology and attempt to erase the chains it puts in place. These chains pull some people up, yet weigh down so many others.
continued from above - invisible labor - chains.
this ten-year span of digital work exemplified the precarity of digital labor before precarity became a term to describe the uncertain and stressful conditions of work for digital workers.
Are they digital workers though? Maybe they need to define digital. I was reading this case study as a proceeding whatever digital was. Is it digital because they made equipment for electronics?
The making of supply chains homogenizes heterogeneity from within.
I hate this kind of academic language - it is so inaccessible. Is their work disconnected from the communities that they're talking about? After googling to be sure I was understanding correctly - they're saying that making supply chains kills diversity from within the supply chain.
A digital worker is not necessarily alien-ated from the commodity she doesn’t own; she finds an unrequited desire and love for the digital work she performs. A feminist methodology shows how being chained is not determined by digital rules and technologies that enable oppression. It is not a result of the material infrastructures and technologies that enable communication, connectivity, and networks.
What? I need to come back to this.
Precarity has always already been mundane reality — and life itself — for those whose race, gender, and sexuality chained them to acts of violence and exploitation. Precarious life feeds off the vulnerable, breaks their bod-ies, and renders them surplus. To notice precarity differently means to be in radical complicity. Precarity is “life in chains.” Life in chains rejects ideals of an outside, of utopia to be rescued from the machines of capital-ist alienation. Chained up is more than complicity; it means noticing the wounds inflicted by false promises of idealized counterculture, techno-logical progress, and digital intervention
Precarity - in chains
by saying the labor is invisible are we erasing the precarity of the work?
This labor has always been visible in the same way that the people who do this labor have been: in plain sight but undervalued. If we pay attention to “invisible labor,” we see not a network of actors or artifacts but, rather, a chain: a supply chain, a blockchain, a chain of
invisible labor - opposition to - refusal to see what's in plain sight - connected across time and space.