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FCJ-029 Dawn of the Organised Networks
Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter At first glance the concept of “organised networks” appears oxymoronic. In technical terms, all networks are organised. There are founders, administrators, moderators and active members who all take up roles. Think also back to the early work on cybernetics and the “second order” cybernetics of Bateson and others. Networks consist of mobile relations whose arrangement at any particular time is shaped by the “constitutive outside” of feedback or noise.[1] The order of networks is made up of a continuum of relations governed by interests, passions, affects and pragmatic necessities of different actors. The network of relations is never static, but this is not to be mistaken for some kind of perpetual fluidity. Ephemerality is not a condition to celebrate for those wishing to function as political agents. Why should networks get organised? Isn’t their chaotic, disorganised nature a good thing that needs to be preserved?…
FCJ-028 Learning and Insurgency in Creative Organisations
Paul Newfield and Timothy Rayner ‘When capital invests the whole of life, life appears as resistance’. Antonio Negri The concept of the “learning organisation” plays a pivotal role in contemporary management theory and practice.[1] In the idealised view of its advocates, the learning organisation is a mobile, self-deconstructing system, perfectly suited to the unstable environments of “post-industrial” or “informational” capitalism. Flexibility and innovation, in this system, are achieved by reversing the traditional top-down flow of information from managers to workers. Workers use their “tacit knowledge” of processes of production and market activity to autonomously transform their conditions of work. The practical question for contemporary management and human resources (HR) theorists is how to create the kinds of workers that are capable of accumulating tacit knowledge and using it in the service of the organisation . This is a problem of control; it is not without its paradoxes. This paper takes…
FCJ-027 Speculations on a Marxist theory of the Virtual Revolution
Bob Hodge and Gabriela Coronado Everyone engaging with the theme of this special issue would agree on two premises: the post-Fordist global economy is radically new, with profound impacts on social organization and forms of consciousness; and new information technologies play a major role in this newness. In our article we will not add to the set of case studies in particular areas, or develop a new theoretical argument, as others in the issue will be doing. We believe there is space, with so new a phenomenon, for a more speculative form of enquiry, digging around the roots of these basic premises to ask some open questions: how new is this new information era, and is it so radically different? Is it useful to call it a “revolution”, using the term in the considered sense it had for Marx, however much it has been over-used and trivialized by later thinkers?…
FCJ-026 Postcard from the Edge: Autobiographical Musings on the Dis/organisations of the Multimedia Industry
Linda Leung This article is a critical reflection on the dot.com boom and the volatile industry, discipline and conditions of labour it has spawned. It offers an autobiographical insight into my past experiences as one of its labourers, as well as my current perspective as an academic responsible for cultivating these industry professionals. Autobiography offers an opportunity to impart my observations as a practitioner in the multimedia industry during its heyday, and lends to them an ‘experiential authority’ (Clifford, 1988: 35) which has been largely ignored in dot.com studies. According to Stanley (1997), autobiography offers a connection between the individual and the social, in this case, the individual new media worker and larger industry of which I was part. In addition, as an educator I am familiar with the importance of reflective practice in experiential learning (Boud and Miller, 1996: 3; Beaty, 1992: 13) and have access to the experiential…
FCJ-025 Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry
Julian Kücklich The digital games industry comprises a significant part of the creative industries, with revenues comparable to the box office intakes of the Hollywood film industry. A recent report published by British market research firm Informa Media values the global games market in 2003 at 33.2 billion US dollars (Thomas, 2004). Loren Shuster notes: ‘To put those figures into context, the size of the gaming industry is now approaching the music industry, which is worth around $38 billion, and has already surpassed the motion picture industry in terms of box office revenue. Moreover, gaming is growing, and may actually exceed the value of the music industry by the end of 2004′ (Shuster, 2003). This success has led to an industry-wide concentration process, in the course of which smaller developers and publishers have either been taken over by large corporations such as Electronic Arts and Ubisoft, or pushed out of…
FCJ-024 A Playful Multitude? Mobilising and Counter-Mobilising Immaterial Game Labour
Greig de Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford Putting Play to Work in Games of Empire This article is a preliminary portrait of work in the video and computer game development industry, a sector of creative, cognitive labour that exemplifies the allure of new media work. For millions of young men (and many aging ones, and some women) from Shanghai to Montréal, a job making virtual games seems employment nirvana – a promise of being paid to play. But just as game development studios typify the gloss of new media labour they also expose its dark side. Drawing on interviews we conducted with game developers in Canada, this article examines the conditions of digital game labour, this cultural industry’s “work as play” mantra, the pleasures and potentialities of game production, the blemishes that mar this attractive vista, and the new infractions these tensions provoke. In addition to looking at how game labour…
FCJ-023 On the Life and Deeds of San Precario, Patron Saint of Precarious Workers and Lives
Marcello Tarì and Ilaria Vanni Origins of San Precario Noi siamo la generazione post-socialista, la generazione del dopo guerra fredda, della fine delle burocrazie verticali e del controllo sull’informazione. Siamo un movimento globale e neuropeo, che porta avanti la rivoluzione democratica scaturita dal Sessantotto mondiale e lotta contro la distopia neoliberista oggi al culmine. Siamo ecoattivisti e mediattivisti, siamo i libertari della Rete e i metroradicali dello spazio urbano, siamo le mutazioni transgender del femminismo globale, siamo gli hacker del terribile reale. Siamo gli agitatori del precariato e gli insorti del cognitariato. Siamo anarcosindacalisti e postsocialisti. Siamo tutti migranti alla ricerca di una vita migliore. E non ci riconosciamo in voi, stratificazioni tetre e tetragone di ceti politici sconfitti già nel XX secolo. Non ci riconosciamo nella sinistra italyana. We are the post-socialist generation, the post-cold war generation, the end of vertical bureaucracies and of information control generation. We are…
FCJ-022 From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable Networks
Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter In Florian Schneider’s documentary Organizing the Unorganizables (2002), Raj Jayadev of the DE-BUG worker’s collective in Silicon Valley identifies the central problem of temporary labour as one of time. Jayadev recounts the story of ‘Edward’, a staff-writer for the Debug magazine: ‘My Mondays roll into my Tuesdays, and my Tuesdays roll into my Wednesdays without me knowing it. And I lose track of time and I lose hope with what tomorrow’s going to be’. Jayadev continues: ‘What concerns temp workers the most is not so much a $2 an hour pay raise or safer working conditions. Rather, they want the ability to create, to look forward to something new, and to reclaim the time of life’. How does this desire to create, all too easily associated with artistic production, intersect with the experiences of other workers who engage in precarious forms of labour? With the…
FCJ-021 Rhythmic Parasites: A Virological Analysis of Sound and Dance
Stamatia Portanova East London University Introduction This paper sets out a conceptual analysis of rhythm as a force of disruption and of re-organisation. By disentangling rhythm from human corporeality, habits and purposes (rhythm as a prerogative of human movement), we will propose its re-qualification as an attribute of matter itself: rhythm as a galvanising current flowing in and between all human, animal and technological, animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic bodies, simultaneously dissolving their solid organisations and re-modelling their fluid exchanges. Being supported by an ontological dichotomy, most philosophical or musicological theories have perpetuated the difference between rhythm as a mechanical and broken repetition of units subject to physical laws (as in Plato’s essentialist theory of rhythm), and rhythm as an organic, uncontrolled and continuously flowing expression of the natural world (coinciding with phenomenological notions such as Henri Bergson’s ‘duration’). [1] In order to escape this philosophical impasse, the aim…
FCJ-020 Marginal Networks: The Virus between Complexity and Suppression
Roberta Buiani York University, Canada ‘What is a Margin ?’ I asked a friend recently. You know what a margin is” she replied “It’s outside the body of the text. It’s what holds the page together. Also,” she added, “It’s where you write your notes.’ (Berland, 1997) Introduction [print_link] In a recent article, Sampson suggested that the metaphoric relocation of the contagious properties of biological viruses into viral technologies has produced the assumption that computer viruses are ‘imbued with an alien otherness’ (Sampson, 2004). However, it is arguable that such alterity can be ascribed to all viruses, as long as they are analysed as cultural notions or as discursive forms instead of being forced within clearly defined disciplinary boundaries, and being classified as separate and incompatible entities, organisms, or mere strings of code. Suspended between life and death, myth and reality, abstract and concrete, viruses are perfect candidate for the…
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