COMPUTING INTO AUTONOMOUS SPACES
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Post by Rusty
"Autonomy is the independence of social time from the temporality of
capitalism."
- Franco "Bifo" Berardi
QUESTIONING WORK
You ever been at a party & it seems like all folks can talk about is their
work? And when they try to shift to other issues, an awkward silence
descends? Work, it would seem, eerily defines us not only to our employers
or the government, but to ourselves.
Yet, as the above quote from Berardi testifies, a central part of
achieving true freedom is reclaiming our time, learning to exist outside
the capitalist demands of production & consumption. I begin with Berardi
because I'm thinking through Italy's Autonomia Operaia, which lasted from
the late 1960s to its brutal suppression in 1979. The Automonist movement
loosely connected factory workers, university students, & economically
marginalized folks. Together they fought to dismantle capitalist forms of
alienation, exploring how everyday folks could reclaim power over their
lives. While the Autonomists were influenced by previous Marxist strains
of thought, they loathed the Communist parties & refused any form of
top-down politics. Any change had to emerge from the bottom-up, had to
come from a collective that refused the temptations of power. For the
Autonomists that change could only come if we dismantled traditional
notions of work.
Questioning the value of work is still perceived as threatening & bizarre.
I once taught the CrimethInc's EVASION to a group of horrified college
freshman. This novel follows folks who give up the working life to become
crusty punks that dumpster dive & shoplift. Students simply could not
understand why an individual would desire to escape our economy's
bear-trap. The "work ethic" has transformed an economic imperative into a
moral one, forbidding us to imagine otherwise. According to this moral
regime, to refuse to work is to become an abject parasite, a step away
from being considered expendable. Yet, as Berardi notes, refusing to work
has complex motivations: "by the daily action of withdrawal from
exploitation, of rejection of the obligation to produce surplus value and
to increase the value of capital by reducing the value of life" (75).
Viewed in this light, refusing to work is an attack on the core of how
capitalism operates.
If Autonomists' calls to refuse to work rang true in Milan's Fiat plant in
1973, they have become harder to enact in the 21st century. How to define
work these days? Information is the primary object of production in many
sectors of the economy. Project demands are increasingly digitized,
flexible, & precarious. The factory worker pulling 14 hour shifts on
Fiat's assembly line bears little resemblance to the contemporary person
who balances 5 hour shifts on a graphic design internship while driving
for Uber at night.
Berardi offers this eerie yet accurate description of the 21st-century
worker: "The worker does not exist any more as a person. He is just the
interchangeable producer of microfragments of recombinant semiosis which
enters into the continuous flux of the network. . .The worker (a mere
machine possessing a brain that can be used for a fragment of time) is
paid for his punctual performance." (84). In Berardi's imagining, we've
plugged ourselves into a network that increasingly parcels out our time
until there's nothing left of our subjectivity. Pay attention to how
Berardi relies on machines to produce metaphors for contemporary
personhood. One can longer conceive of people without also taking machines
into consideration.
COMPUTERS AS CAPITALIST ACCELERANTS
This brings us to computers & their relationship to work. Early computer
developers such as Ted Nelson proposed that computers were tools of
liberation, a narrative happily deployed by Silicon Valley behemoths for
their marketing campaigns. However, the opposite is largely the case:
computers actually accelerate capitalism's inherent tendencies &
exponentially increase methods of exploitation. Consider how computers
aided the collapse of industrial labor in the global North through
automation. Consider how computers are intimately tied to electric grids,
those networks still largely reliant of fossil fuels & controlled by
corrupt state & private interests. Consider how computers panoptically
monitor worker performance.
Computers also helped innovate new forms of exploitation. Through the use
of free digital services, consumers are now workers too. For example,
Facebook not only extracts labor from its paid employees; it also extracts
it from users who carefully craft & curate online identities that the
company then markets. The traditional capitalist logic has become
scrambled: we're consumers that labor on the products of ourselves that
ultimately benefit digital capitalists. Even the internet's free
circulation of information just replicates capitalism's insistence that
commodities freely cross borders.
If computers are so heavily implicated in some of capitalism's worst
tendencies, is there any hope for them as liberation tools? There is, but
on one condition: they must prevent the smooth function of socioeconomic
systems, that is, they must destroy the very objectives that they were
invented to aid. We need to find ways to use computers to reclaim our time
& to create safe spaces that forbid capitalist exchanges.
COMPUTERS FIGHTING FOR AUTONOMY
Let's begin this section with the Beastie Boys: "Listen all y'all, it's
sabotage!"
The Autonomist Antonio Negri explains that sabotago disrupts capitalism's
emphasis on exchange, "stripping it of any internal rationality and
compelling it to be an efficacious spectacle of domination and
destruction." In other words, by rupturing smooth exchanges, sabotage
allows us to see capitalism in all its exploitative ugliness. Thus, any
attack on the sacredness of the exchange would allow autonomous spaces to
appear.
The following thoughts are not meant to be definitive or exhaustive. They
undoubtedly possess many flaws. However, they are my attempt to imagine
otherwise. Surely, this is a valuable exercise in itself.
DREAM #1: BARRICADED NETWORKS
Computer networks, like the capitalist system itself, are structured to
run on efficient exchanges. In a global network where data & information
are coveted commodities, any breakdown in that information's access &
circulation creates autonomy, if only briefly. As a result, computers that
aid in the fight for human autonomy need to make the circulation of
information online much more difficult. The prevalent idea that everyone
should be able to access everything everywhere naively relies on the
premise that we all possess freedom. In reality, we're facing what Berardi
dubs, "the post-human transition to digital slavery" (33). Easy network
access merely allows individuals to be exploited by other parties & opens
vulnerable folks to attack.
We should insist on small networks instead, filled with known actors. We
should foster relationships in those networks that don't require
commodities or money to survive. Build barriers that rebuff outsiders.
Hopefully, information will then circulate in a trusted environment
without the fear that it will leak out. A network that's small & cannot be
monetized would create an autonomous space where folks would be free to
imagine otherwise.
DREAM #2: ERASABLE DATA
If data is such a valued commodity, we should build protocols that erase
it. After all, the cataloging & archiving of data only increases
individuals' vulnerability; the quantified individual is the only one
recognizable to capitalism. Methods should be established to erase
nonessential data so it cannot be weaponized against users or monetized by
capitalist interests at a later point in time. Maybe we can break
ourselves of what Pierre Nora diagnoses as the pathological need to
archive everything & revive the practice of collective memory.
DREAM #3: USER-CONTROLLED INFRASTRUCTURE
Users should ban together into small collectives that take ownership of
digital infrastructures. Let's get a critical mass of folks involved in
green computing on network-wide levels, moving us away from the corrupt
electric grid. Cloud services should be discontinued. The very concept of
servers should be closely investigated since they tend to separate users
from their data. In fact, instead of focusing on improving servers, we
should focus our attention on reviving previous peer-to-peer (P2P)
protocols & develop alternative methods of sharing information.
DREAM #4: SIMPLICITY AS A VALUE
We need to break out of our dependence on Big Tech's omnipresent programs
that now monopolize our data &, by extension, our lives. Big Tech often
offers programs that are simple to use, but possess a complex & invisible
structure. We need to develop more & more alternative programs, but ensure
that they remain simple so that they can be more easily adopted by
everyday users & maintained by more & more users. Complexity just
maintains privilege & we need to destroy that.
DREAM #5: TECHNOLOGY'S REDUCED ROLE
Technology has gone from offering us tools, to somehow becoming the
all-encompassing goal in the march of human progress. Fuck that noise. We
find ourselves on a dying planet beset with so much suffering; we can no
longer entrust our collective happiness to the machines & systems we
created. Quite simply, we are not the things we produce. We need to stop
pathologically innovating new technologies just for the sake of
innovation. Technology needs to return to the status of mere tool. With
each new task facing us, we should ask ourselves, "Do we need technology
to achieve our goals? If so, what's the bare minimum of technology
needed?"
PARTING WORDS
All of these thoughts are new to my brain & I fully anticipate changing
them over time. However, we need to indulge in more incomplete dreaming;
it's the first step to declaring our autonomy. If all of this seems
overwhelming, let's remember this words from Berardi: "We cannot know, we
cannot control, we cannot govern the entire force of the global mind. But
we can master the singular process of producing a singular world of
sociality. This is autonomy today" (85-6).
Berardi, Franco "Bifo." PRECARIOUS RHAPSODY: SEMIOCAPITALISM & THE
PATHOLOGIES OF THE POST-ALPHA GENERATION. Eds. Erik Empson & Stevphen
Shukaitis. Trans. Arianna Bove et al. London: Minor Compositions, 2009.
Negri, Antonio. CAPITALIST DOMINATION & WORKING CLASS SABOTAGE. Milan:
1977.
