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Notes from conversation 2/10/14

Division of labor: what counts as labour.

Productive and reproductive economies.
Bringing it to concrete situation 


But let's first get things done! On division of labor and practices of delegation in times of mediated politics and politicized technologies
 
During particular historical junctures, characterized by crisis, deepening exploitation and popular revolt, referred to here as “sneaky moments”, hegemonic hierarchies are simultaneously challenged and reinvented, and in case of the latter in due course subtly reproduced. The current divide between those engaged in politics of technology and those participating in struggles of social justice requires reflection in this context. We argue that especially the delegation of technological matters to the experienced "techies" or "technological platforms", and the corresponding flattening of politics and all political activities in the process of developing technical tools and platforms exacerbate this problem. The paradoxical consequences can be baffling: (radical) activists organize and sustain themselves using "free" technical services provided by Fortune 500 companies. At the same time, "alternative tech practices", like the Free Software Community, are sustained by a select (certainly visionary yet also predominantly white and male) few who propose crypto with 9-lives as the minimum infrastructure for any political undertaking, and refute the rest as naive and unsophisticated in their technical practices.
 
These tangible divergences in daily practice, however, are not only due to philosophical or political differences. They are also related to the ways in which specialization of work and scarcity of resources leads to a division of labor which often expresses itself across existing fault-lines of race, gender, class and age. Assuming that these moments in which collectives fall back on hegemonic divisions of labor are part and parcel of the divergence between technology politics and social justice politics, we want to ask: are these divisions of labor inevitable?
 
To answer this critically in this paper we need to get a grasp of those moments of pragmatic decision making and how the historical juncture we identified is mediated accordingly. Through real-life anecdotes we propose to study the “sneaky moments” in which the urgency of the situation reinforces hegemonic hierarchies in divisions of labor within collectives. This allows us to spell out how it is that the very communities of technology activism and communities of social justice activism that are potentially and ideally a natural match, in these "sneaky moments" come to oppose each other instead and thus contribute to cementing the delegation of "technological matters" to techies and "politics" to activists.





focus on the pragmatic delegation of responsibilites, the resulting re-definition of the politics of the collective projects



Let's first get things done: on division of labor and practices of delegation in times of mediated politics and politicized technologies
 
During particular historical junctures, characterized by deepening exploitation and revolt, referred to here as “sneaky moments”, hegemonic hierarchies are simultaneously challenged and get reproduced. The current divide between politics of technology and struggles of social justice, as well as the delegation of technology matters to "techies" or "technological platforms" exacerbates this problem. The paradoxical consequences can be baffling: (radical) activists organize and sustain themselves using "free" technical services provided by Fortune 500 companies. At the same time, "alternative tech practices", like the Free Software Community, are sustained by a select (visionary and predominantly male) few, proposing crypto with 9-lives as the minimum infrastructure for any political undertaking. 
 
These tangible divergences in daily practice, however, are not only due to philosophical or political differences, but also has to do with the ways in which specialization of work and scarcity of resources leads to a division of labor across existing fault-lines of race, gender, class and age. Since a division of labor between technology politics and social justice politics is increasingly articulated, the question is: is this inevitable?
 
Through real-life anecdotes we propose to study the “sneaky moments” in which the urgency of the situation reinforces hegemonic hierarchies in divisions of labor. This allows us to spell out in this paper, how it is that communities of technology activism and communities of social justice activism that are potentially and ideally a natural match, in these "sneaky moments" come to oppose each other instead and contribute to cementing the delegation of technological matters to techies and "politics" to activists.




[THIS IS ABOUT COMMUNITIES BEING APART]
The current distance between those who organise their activism to develop "technical infrastructures" and those who bring their struggles to technical infrastructures is remarkable. One explanation is that, values and practices of those activists heavily using networked technology for their struggles, and of techno-activists who struggle for progressive and alternative technologies do not always concur. Loyal to the utopia of a globally functioning interwebs, techno-activists usually organize around universal values: information must be “free”, secure, “privacy-preserving”, accessible, decentralized etc.
These technological projects tend to locate their politics solely in and through the lens of technology and related infrastructures. [MIRIYAM HELP!!!] In comparison, those who bring their political struggles to the interwebs may express political differences across a broader spectrum, situated in local and/or global contexts often contesting universal categories. For this latter group, technology is a means to organize collectives or mobilize greater movements, and is often treated as a black box that can be leveraged for these objectives.

Another explanation is that this is the consequence of a natural division of labor. The naturalization of this division of labor may be recognized in statements about activists having better things to do than to tinker with code or hardware, or in technological projects that develop tools for "activists" independent of whether they are located in Egypt, Venezuela, Madrid or New York. The paradoxical consequences can be baffling: (radical) activists organize and sustain themselves using "free" technical services provided by Fortune 500 companies. At the same time, "alternative tech practices", like the Free Software Community, are sustained by a select (visionary, mostly North American and male) few, proposing crypto with 9-lives as the minimum infrastructure for any political undertaking. 

But is this division of labor so natural? Be it in getting out the call for the next demonstration on some "cloud service", or developing a progressive tech project in the name of an imagined user community, scarcity of resources and distribution of skills makes short cuts in decision making inevitable. But do they really? In this paper, we want to critically reflect on three case studies in which collectives of design and political collectives have succumbed to the urgency of the moment in falling back to undesirable divisions of labor. 

We will fix our analysis on what we call "sneaky moments", moments of political urgency that determine which way a collective defines roles, selects technology, and transforms collective practices. What become at these moments of political significance, and We will conclude by thinking about ways in which we can resist reasserting hegemonic divisions of labor in the urgency of "first getting things done".


Imagining our futures together, we may want to radically reconfigure these divisions of labor. 



Especially in moments of political urgency, action is prioritized over reflection, leading to hegemonic hierarchies expressed in divisions of labor that reinforce fault-lines of race, gender, age and class.


Our objective is to explore how we can resist the divisions of labor between “activists” and “techies” that occur in those sneaky moments of moving forward?



For tech and social justice initiatives pragmatic decisions in moments of pressure may mean that these struggles integrate themselves into proprietary and conservative technical infrastructures that are at odds with their political underpinnings. Regardless of the justification of the decisions, through such pragmatic turns many organizational matters are delegated to techies or to technological platforms. Once the roles have been distributed, technical decisions may not be open to a broader political discussion and contestation.
Through the convenient delegation of "tech matters" to the techies or to commercial services, collectives may experience a shift in the collective's priorities and a reframing of their activist culture through technological decisions.  Consequently, pragmatic decisions in order to "first get things done" may distract from actively considering the way in which changes in our political projects are entangled with technological infrastructures.

The current distance between those who organise their activism to develop "technical infrastructures" and those who bring their struggles to technical infrastructures is a topic of increasing importance.
and put links to all the meetings over this summer, maybe also to miriyam and paulo's articles? 


[THIS IS ABOUT SNEAKY MOMENTS IN BOTH COMMUNITIES]

The paradoxical consequences can be baffling: (radical) activists organize and sustain themselves using "free" technical services provided by Fortune 500 companies. At the same time, "alternative tech practices", like the Free Software Community, are sustained by a select (visionary, mostly North American and male) few, proposing crypto with 9-lives as the minimum infrastructure for any political undertaking. 

In the process of launching political projects or techno-solutions,




WE WANT TO SAY, THESE COMMUNITIES ARE A NATURAL MATCH, BUT THEN IN THESE SNEAKY MOMENTS THEY LOOSE EACH OTHER?
OR
THERE ARE SNEAKY MOMENTS IN WHICH HEGEMONIC HIERARCHIES GET REPRODUCED. THE CURRENT DIVIDE BETWEEN POLITICS OF TECH AND OTHER POLITICS STRUGGLES AS WELL AS THE DELEGATION OF TECH MATTERS TO TECHIES OR PLATFORMS EXACERBATES THIS PROBLEM.


THERE IS A DIVIDE BETWEEN POLITICS OF TECH AND POLITICS OF SOCIAL JUSTICE WHICH IS INCREASINGLY BEING ARTICULATED.
THIS IS NOT ONLY A PHILOSOPHICAL OR POLITICAL DIFFERENCE BUT ALSO HAS TO DO WITH THE WAYS IN WHICH SPECIALIZATIONS AND EXPERTISE, SCARCITY OF RESOURCES LEADS TO A DIVISION OF LABOR ACROSS EXACTLY THESE LINES
BUT IS THIS INEVITABLE
IN THIS PAPER WE WOLD LIKE TO STUDY THROUGH ANECDOTES THE SNEAKY MOMENTS IN WHICH THE URGENCY OF THE SITUATION REINFORCES HEGEMONIC HIERARCHIES IN DIVISIONS OF LABOR AND IN THE DELEGATION OF TECH TO TECHIES AND POLITICS TO ACTIVISTS.

[productive and reproductive economies: an intertwingled set of practices... but how?] 
since primitive accumulation, specialization has liderated the deep separation betweek life and work spheres for a long time. But now this is not working any more. How this challenge can be an opportunity?
&: How does the reproductive behave in sneaky times?

[on space issues (regarding temporalities?)]
there are several gestures (gestures that can be both/either individual and/or collective)  that relate space and time in sneakiness & might be interesting to look at: displacement, orientation, focus, situation, spots, position, co-location, dispersion, co-ordination, pushing and pulling...

[notion of agency]
amount of will, decision-making, posession etc when developing a task. 
Who's working for whom, and to what extent this is happening in the level of conscience?

[look at the notion of human resources]
our actions (not only our bodies, energies or times) are human resources. As living and active resources we are ourselves a corpus of decision-making possibilities, time keeping, power unfolding, etc.


+ (doubting...)

[work paradigm within flexibility]
how is the labor paradigm of flexibility a challenge and perhaps also a tool for tool-construction and use?

regarding the possibility of thinking towards a possible protocol or coordination system for tasks, works and labour:
convergence, composition, hubbing etc.: values and risks on what amount?

regarding time: there is a confluence of different definitions of " urgency ". Does it matter to make hierarchy of urgencies? why? how?

**

FEMKE:

what are you ready to risk at some point, in some action?

conversation with spideralex: keeping to more experimental forms of work. Forms of operating that are less pleasent?

suggests to make efficiency orient divisions of labor. Either preparation or find to know what to achieve, 

wasn't so clear on when these moments are but for sure different urgencies that go for different approaches for dividing tasks

how you deal wih the stuff no one wants to do

self-surveillance situations

it's either a situation in which you distribute tasks or you take it on

not necessarily distributing responsability with the amount of knowledge

tired of doing everything: needing to have things moving. In a way becoming more efficient: specialization can bring that.

SEDA:
    
    Arendt calls reproductive "labor" (distinguished from "work"
    labor is the things that have to keep taken care of, the ones that sustain you
    
    different to specialization. 
    efficiency comes from specialization -- you're not going to become more efficient if the bathrooms are clean
    
    ideological difference between the "techie" and the "activist" is we calling them as such
    
    more universalist values of the techies - that universalism (almost like universal rights/values)
    
    genealogy of open standards comes from not wanting to have regulation by a central authority for engineers // usualy a culture against bureaucracy (engineering community)
    
    market success = efficiency ?
    
    efficiency is a guiding principle in engineering
    
    interesting to focus on this universalism, mostly looking at this engineering culture and efficiency as a thing that differenciate their philosofies: how in sneaky moments manifest themselves
    
    read also the tyranny of structurelessness: value to think of this in a posistive way (not so much about experimentation) but as values perhaps ¿?
    she lays out the mechanisms to deal with this issues
    
    delegation of specific authorities/individuals
    requiring responsabiliy
    rotation of tasks
    rational criteria of 
    information to everyone
    
    engineers in calafou? facebook engineers? -> difference/concretion is important
    
    FEMKE:
        
        interesting to look at organiztions like tactical tech (who work at the intersection we look at)
        there's different types of attpemts being done in the last few years to make these things come together 
    language: they service activist to be more effective, and they (T.T) develop tools -- so they are like brokers between technology and the activists
    there's different levels or ways in which these communities get together -- need of translators?
    
    how in actual technologies these divisions are encoded? <<-- you can see who's the expected user, who you're supposed --- who's the actual object? where in the things that are being provided (language, interface, ) 
    maybe looking at software can be slightly poetic (closereading), but it should be somehow mentioned
    in-between
    lots of attempts to bring the two in a good relationship -- attempts to make it happen/work
    
    examples/case studies:
    security in a box https://securityinabox.org  
    idea of the box, language, the tech itself, the naming... etc
    
    
    SEDA
    counter-surveillance community (very easy to tie to tactical tech and liberation tech)
    
    FEMKE
    there's not only the direct confrontation, there's also the inbetweens - powerful relationships
    
    
    to nail down a structure of some sort:
    questions?
    expectations
    efficiency
    specialization and division of labor
    other issues like: the users want to have a facebook-like experience
    questionnair to each of the tools. For example: "tools you can trust" suggests that the tool will do the work, "reset the net" is a call for action, etc
    the privacy thing - these projects ended up just attracting white techie males (other types of users go for the "i've got nothing to hide"): who judges those communities
    TIME is still a place? 
    

**

    timeline:

october 1st: themes we want to work on: three themes before our next call, add them to etherpad http://pad.constantvzw.org/public_pad/letsfirstgetthingsdone   (recommendation: in case of emergency pick themes we already discussed)  1- 2 paragraphs on the description of the theme, and relevance to our  abstract about division of labor and sneaky moments

october 2nd: next call NYC 3pm, UK 8pm, EU 9pm: objective: nail down themes and outline

october 11th: submit a raw draft for each section

october 13th: raw draft deadline!!! meaning there is text in every section and the outline is stabilized

october 27th: a comprehensive draft

november 3 - 9th: submission