Seda calls Andrej: January 2017 seda: we want to change the current frame of how the social impact of technology is studied and instead use a political economic lens to engage the cloud infrastructures and associated market and labor practices. andrej: Harvey political economy stuff Arrighi: Long 20th Century Adam Smith in Beijing the really big one: Long 20th Century, a study of the systemic cycles of accumulation affecting every hegemonic regime, from 17th century Netherlands to British hegemony and now the US, which is in decline with some regularity, every hegemonic regime, back then the UK, now the US, in decline, goes from one phase to another the last phase is how financialization signals the ultimate crisis of capitalism and how it signals the decline of a hegemonic power the last phase is how financialization signals the ultimate crisis of hegemonic regime this paved the way for the most exciting collaboration between geography and political economy many people pick up on it, enclosures, commons (Federici, De Angelis, Raquel Guttierez, Retort Collective), continuous (and not primitive) accumulation, accumulation by dispossession (Harvey), accumulation by appropriation (Jason Moore) is all the hot stuff in the left right now what the economy is and what it is supposed to be depending on how deep and how broad you want to go, this literature may be helpful utopia of rules from graeber planetary bureaucracy, the financialization and bureaucratization is central people play with this i just came back from puebla (mexico) gutierrez, politics of the common in latin america giovanni Arrighi what is the financial capital all about how will you set up the historical analysis what is the financialization right now seda: how do you do strategy meetings? (seda explains a little what we are trying to do) andrej: what do we do? this is slightly different my own work is in line with what you are trying to do what we do in our department is very different it is based on the idea of militant research something the italians did and that travelled all the way to the argentines how to intervene in research as an activist it starts with karl marx and the workers questionnaire he created for workers in a particular factory in france he wrote an exhaustive list of questions tension: is this positive scientific knowledge of what is going on in the factory, or is it a tool for organizing? it was left there silar james??, in the US, picked this up. he was also part of the group that came up with the term "autonomy" correspondences is a keyword autonomous sectors of the workers: women, industrial workers, black people, forgot last category are going to write about their own work it became the worker's narrative finally, when this type of research moved into the italian hot summer: operaismo it became less an exact form of figuring out what is happening in the factory but a tool how to use knowledge to organize workers it was an interesting travel from the US, to France and to Italy in Italy, they took it to the factories to get the knowledge about workers in factories and they called this co-research they were taking stuff from industrial sociology finding out what is going on in Fiat and Olivetti factories and organizing workers, most of whom were from the South of Italy and they were studying the "refusal of work" the more interesting groups are the ones in Argentina and Precarious Solidarida in Madrid people trying to understand the immigrant experience to follow these groups and how the composition of work is changing and how we can understand and advance the struggle as militant researchers militant research, inquiry it can have different forms what we are doing now is oral history of direct action practices in the bay area between 1980 until now (BLM) this may be interesting we have two reference points that are practical one is the experience of people you may know Kolinko: they published their work on hotlines they published the process of how they started the research every step of the research is talked and written about there was a new form of work (2001-2002) work in call centers they became call center workers they spent time there and they tried to understand what this work is about and you can see all the questions they asked themselves and people they work with and how they can advance the struggle against this kind of work the other one is this idea of radical oral history i think of it as a sub-genre of militant research most of this is outside of the university basically radical oral history is about putting different workers together and what you do is listen you have your tape recorder back in the days you have workers talking about their experiences but these are not only workers one work along these lines was called: "ours to loose", about squatters in NY (lower east side) what happens when they moved from being rebels to home owners what happened there? they did an extensive research of going and asking questions to everyone that was involved in this project the oral history, sharing authority the idea is that both parties, interviewee and the people asking questions are doing co-research they are all owners of this nobody owns it, in the sense that everybody does it is interesting way of thinking about horizontalizing research practices we try to find out what happened and try to advance the struggle by putting people together in the same room and then transcribing the stuff, sending it back to them and then back to us then it becomes a final document after a few lapses there is a lot of work and there are 50 of us the idea is to organize: we had fun doing, when one person goes to do an interview we organize a listening party, and all the participants in the process we go to a room and listen then what we do is, we transcribe it collectively then we send it to the person that was interviewed and they send it back and then, we try to introduce the historical and theoretical context we do another round and the final product is something that was truly created collectively this is militant research that is called radical oral history the translation element of theory and history history maybe not so much, but the theoretical positioning to embed these interviews in a theoretical interpretation is the most difficult part we try to keep it open to people who are the protagonists, and it becomes a long process of negotiation and the idea is that we are doing this together it is a form of co-research we are not imposing our theoretical understanding onto them seda: you are looking at marginalized communities, but we want to study corporations, or power itself. in a sense, we want to connect the political economy work with some of the more empirical research (interviewing developers). how do we do that? we have people doing interviews with people who are employed by twitter they are trying to find out how the composition of the work is effecting the workplace they are creating a division between lower employees and the more powerful ones it always has the double edge one is to accumulate knowledge and the other is to advances the struggle seda: but part of what we want to do is to expose these companies and their inner workings, so the techniques are used in a different power situation. how does that work? andrej: these terms maybe useful studying up studying down laura nader studying up the role of the anthropologist is to study power there are some useful ethnographies that i can send you these were individual projects the idea was to figure out from a leftist perspective how a corporation works they had really interesting results there is a movement of people doing that then there is studying down, not marginalize people, but people in struggles and this permeates our work as well do we study up and down or both and if we do both, how do we do it? seda: i think we want to do both!? andrej: my own work is about doing both most recent book i wrote how people are impacted by global capitalism and how in turn they impact the re-organization of global capitalism it was a global ethnography the other way to do is doing this collectively. how do you do research collectively? we tried, to figure out several theoretical approaches that would be useful to us we went through "cognitive capitalism" literature and decided that we can't use that framework so we went to commons and enclosures and we are acting within that framework harvey, arrighi, silvia federici and many other people we did decide on a particular theoretical template of understanding what is going on we created a common understanding of "through which prism we are going to look at our research" and this we tried to communicate to the people we are working with and this is i think key, and this is the translation work that is very important what will you do when you sit together with the people in the end of january? seda: we want to discuss the current frame of looking at the social impact of technology, we want to argue that this framing focuses us on certain questions and not others. we then hope that people will think together with us some new questions they can ask, that looks at why certain technologies are being produced, and why they are being produced the way they are, and what are points of intervention after we ask these questions. then, we hope that we can converge on certain kinds of researc questions that we could share in the future. adrej: this is rounds of listening first you present the project then they present, based on their own expertise, a response and the third round would be collectively deciding what questions would be most important to ask once you accomplish that once you get to that stage and you have collectively formulated questions you are going to ask those questions and, the end result you are hoping for is? seda: we are currently a group of three that has an ongoing discussion. we hope to enlist some of the people in the room in our project. expand our conversation together with them. the meeting is also an opportunity to see how some of the things we have been discussing resonate with people we think may be our allies. so many ambitions at once. andrej: this is the moment where you have to be tremendously patient people are going to drop out, have time limitations you want to keep it open and have it as structured as possible so that people feel that they participate in something that is meaningful that is what got people excited that we were working with some people left and many people decided to stay and there was a structure to this to some extent you are trying to figure out what you are trying to do but there are some protocols you should decide the core group of researchers you should decide how to conduct those listening sessions and get interest back and forth you have to be tremendously patient cause everything is going to be longer than you planned the kolinko link is interesting, they are leftists and have boring marxist prose but you will see the process they are the ones you may have seen in brussels, they started the islave research it is the same group you can also count on us at some point in your research of participating in any way that you decide to be meaningful seda: maybe one thing we should do during our meeting in brussels is to map future possibilities for continuing the conversation. some of this may be through local meetings. in may, i will be in san francisco and we can organize something there andrej: that would be great. to do: follow up on twitter work research and intro to kiki Kolinko Hotlines: https://libcom.org/library/hotlines-call-centre-inquiry-communism No Politics without Inquiry! http://www.wildcat-www.de/en/material/cs18inqu.htm Precarias a la Deriva: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCEsKJrKH9c Militant research in Argentina: https://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/25/from-decomposition-to-inquiry-militant-research-in-argentinas-mtds/ Attached is the history of radical oral history in the US.