Ned Rossiter

Bio

Ned Rossiter is an Australian media theorist and Associate Professor of Network Cultures, University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China and Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, Australia. He is author of Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions (2006) and co-editor of numerous volumes, including (with Geert Lovink) MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries (2007). His essays of creative labour, media theory and organized networks have appeared in Fibreculture Journal, Cultural Politics, Theory, Culture & Society, Topia, emphemera and borderlands.

Abstract

‘Where’s the Fun in ERPs? Labour, Logistics and the Frontier of Biopolitical Regimes’

With militaristic origins, logistics emerged as a business concept in the 1950s concerned with the management of global supply chains. Today, the complex task of logistics is aided by specially engineered computer software and information technology (IT) tracking devices that facilitate the organization of labour, storage and goods. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) databases are standard platforms used within logistics in combination with customised software applications to manage global supply chains, organizational conditions and labour efficiencies. The prospect of labour and life governed through the biopolitical regimes of logistics software is not some cooked up dystopian fear, but a concrete reality on the horizon of the future-present.

While the rise of software studies presents novel terrain for understanding emergent social-technical systems and collaborative practices, more often than not the focus here is on open source software and associated cultural-political movements. Yet with few exceptions, software studies has very little to say about the existence of free labour so heavily invested in developing open source software. The sooner software studies gets out of its bourgeois-anarchist ghetto of open source celebration and starts to engage the banality of labour and logistics software, then the sooner we will see the question of software politics addressed by digital media research. This presentation makes the case for broadening the spectrum of software studies to take into account the ‘multiplication and division of labour’ (Mezzadra/Neilson) in the global logistics industries. How informational labour goes about organizing itself will be key to developing strategies of autonomy and inventing new institutional forms.