I really think that the power of tools lies in their ability to amplify human action or thought, versus the power of human beings is really about our ability to think creatively.
And so, if that's true, then why do computers often ask us to act as almost execution machines ourselves to create something when that's like very uniquely the computers strong suit.
Mielke, Metamuse ep.30 Computers and Creativity with Molly Mielke 12:31, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5HoFWZzo4PAzEhF5Tn3WbD?si=k2HU7gp5TLWwojMeCIAQ2Q
In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage.
“The miserable routine of endless drudgery and toil in which the same mechanical process is gone through over and over again, is like the labour of Sisyphus. The burden of labour, like the rock, keeps ever falling back on the worn-out labourer.”
At the same time that factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and intellectual activity. The lightening of the labour, even, becomes a sort of torture, since the machine does not free the labourer from work, but deprives the work of all interest. Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour-process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman. But it is only in the factory system that this inversion for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality. By means of its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labour confronts the labourer, during the labour-process, in the shape of capital, of dead labour, that dominates, and pumps dry, living labour-power.
Marx, Capital Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p. 285-286
I do feel like more often than not in the modern world, stealing your attention is one example, you're sort of fighting against the computer. And perhaps, it's not the computer itself, it's the whole world of computing: the internet or email inboxes notifications, the way that the web works, and so on. You're often either fighting against this thing trying to make you do things you don't want to do, or take away your attention, or distract you, or it wants you to do its chores: you know, click this update, this do this fill up this box. And it should be be a tool quietly waiting for what you're asking of it and to co-create and help you.
I like this, quote from the original Tron movie, which at a one point the bad guy basically says: “look, the system's overloaded because we don't have time to handle every little user request” and the guy speaking to is kind of the wizened old computer scientist arguing: “actually user requests is what computers are for”, and I feel like it's so often forgotten. They are here to serve us and sometimes it feels more often the human has to serve the computer or perhaps the business interests.
I'm a capitalist, don’t get me wrong. But the business needs, the KPI of whoever designed the product is asking me to do things to serve that rather than my needs.
Wiggins, Metamuse ep.30 Computers and Creativity with Molly Mielke 25:30, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5HoFWZzo4PAzEhF5Tn3WbD?si=nJ1xydCVRs2FqbkIw_4cbQ
Those in charge have even made sure, therefore, that we humans having the leisure are not at liberty to make use of it as we please. It's as if we needed to work more as consumers in proportion as we work less as producers. As if consumption no longer signified a satisfaction, but rather a social obligation. Moreover the technological equipment of leisure increasingly resembles that of labor. While in our fooling around on the Internet all our clicks produce the data that the GAFA resell, work is tricked out with all the enticements of gaming by introducing scores, levels, bonuses and other infantilizing caveats.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.95
We are required to live in the condition that Linda Stone has called “continuous partial attention”, where our attention is habitually distributed across multiple communication platforms.
As Franco “Bifo” Berardi has argued, we now live in the tension between the infinity of cyberspace and the vulnerable finitude of the body and the nervous system. “The acceleration of information exchange has produced and is producing an effect of a pathological type on the individual human mind and even more on the collective mind,” Berardi writes in Precarious Rhapsody,
"Individuals are not in a position to process the immense and always growing mass of information that enters their computers, their cell phones, their television screens, their electronic diaries and their heads. However, it seems indispensable to follow, recognise, evaluate, process all this information if you want to be efficient, competitive, victorious. [...] The necessary time for paying attention to the fluxes of information is lacking.”
The consequence is a strange kind of existential state, in which exhaustion bleeds into insomniac overstimulation (no matter how tired we are, there is still time for one more click) and enjoyment and anxiety co-exist (the urge to check emails, for instance, is both something we must do for work and a libidinal compulsion, a psychoanalytic drive that is never satisfied no matter how many messages we receive). The fact that the smartphone makes cyberspace available practically anywhere at anytime means that boredom (or at least the old style, “Fordist” boredom) has effectively been eliminated from social life. Yet boredom, like death, posed existential challenges that are far more easily deferred in the always-on cyberspatial environment. Ultimately, communicative capitalism does not vanquish boredom so much as it “sublates” it, seeming to destroy it only to preserve it in a new synthesis. The characteristic affective tonality for the insomniac drift of cyberspace, in which there is always one more click to make, one more update to check, combines fascination with boredom.
Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, Time-Wars: Towards an Alternative for the Neo-Capitalist Era, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.520-521
The consequence of the normalisation of uncertainty is a permanent state of low-level panic. Fear, which attaches to particular objects, is replaced by a more generalised anxiety, a constant twitching, an inability to settle. The uncertainty of work is intensified by digital communication technology. As soon as there is email, there are no longer working hours nor a workplace. What characterises the present moment more than our anxious checking — of our messages, which may bring opportunities or demands (often both at the same time), or, more abstractly, of our status, which, like the stock market is constantly under review, never finally resolved?
Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, Time-Wars: Towards an Alternative for the Neo-Capitalist Era, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.519
Perhaps the feeling most characteristic of our current moment is a mixture of boredom and compulsion. Even though we recognise that they are boring, we nevertheless feel compelled to do yet another Facebook quiz, to read yet another Buzzfeed list, to click on some celebrity gossip about someone we don’t even remotely care about. We endlessly move among the boring, but our nervous systems are so overstimulated that we never have the luxury of feeling bored. No one is bored, everything is boring.
Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, No One is Bored, Everything is Boring, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.558
The lack of creative ecology means that today’s great idea for a better society turns into tomorrow’s unemployed taxi drivers and homeless city dwellers. Welcome to platform monopoly capitalism. Groupon, AirBNB, Uber, MyWheels and countless others. Here, we do not witness so much a gross violation of the rules of appropriation as an attempt to reshape existing economic activities and drive labour to its bones: a disruption without a cause. Let’s not delude ourselves: we are not sharing anything when we rate the last wretched soul who gave us a cheap lift with his Uber cab. We do not share anything when we drive a Hertz or Avis rental car (except our likes). Sharing only happens in the absence of market transactions. And it doesn’t have to ‘scale’. This begs the question: can we still speak of creative industries, which in Europe’s policy world (and beyond) rests on the economization of culture? Everyone is keenly aware of the fact that Creative Industries as a policy meme has passed its use-by date. This is why we need to warn ourselves: changing labels will not help us much.
https://networkcultures.org/geert/2014/11/20/the-creative-question-nine-theses/
the incursion of capitalist cyberspace into every area of life and the psyche has intensified the processes of de-socialisation. This is not to say that there are no progressive potentials in the web, but these have almost certainly been overrated, while the impact of cyberspace in de-socialising culture and subjectivity has been massively underestimated. Here I merely rehearse Bifo’s account of semio-capitalism and Jodi Dean’s critique of communicative capitalism, but it is important to operationalise this critique.
Blogs and social media have allowed us to talk to ourselves (but not to reach out beyond the left bubbles); they have also generated pathological behaviours and forms of subjectivity which not only generate misery and anger — they waste time and energy, our most crucial resources. Email and handhelds, meanwhile, have produced new forms of isolation and loneliness: the fact that we can receive communications from work anywhere and anytime means we are exposed to work’s order-words when we are alone, without the possibility of support from fellow workers.
In sum, the obsession with the web, its monopolisation of any idea of the new, has served capitalist realism rather than undermined it. Which does not mean, naturally, that we should abandon the web, only that we should find out how to develop a more instrumental relationship with it. Put simply, we should use it — as a means of dissemination, communication and distribution — but not live inside it. The problem is that this goes against the tendencies of handhelds. We all recognise the by now clichéd image of a train carriage full of people pecking at their tiny screens, but have we really registered how miserable this really is, and how much it suits capital for these pockets of socialisation to be closed down?
Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, Abandon Hope (Summer is Coming) - Socialization Beyond Social Media, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.592
