Ulises Mejias

Bio

Ulises A. Mejias is an Assistant Professor in the Communication Studies department at SUNY Oswego. His research interests include network studies, critical theory, philosophy of technology, and political economy of new media.

Abstract

Workers of the Net, disassemble!

Extrapolating from trends in the sociable media industry, I argue that the digital technosocial network is a machine for increasing participation while simultaneously maintaining or deepening inequalities between its participants. This is because network dynamics like preferential attachment tend to create monopsonies (increasingly fewer repositories where Internet users can trade their cultural products). The very rich-get-richer dynamics that make scale-free networks so effective also guarantee that there will be fewer viable alternatives to services like YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter. At the same time, however, the Internet is often wishfully described as a space that escapes capitalism, an emerging collectivist society that heralds--as Kevin Kelly asserted--a new form of socialism. Digital labor is portrayed as a rejection of the commodity form that gives shape to gift economies where goods are produced and exchanged without the need for money. Of course, the fact that the physical layer of the Internet as well as the most popular sociable media platforms end up being controlled by a handful of corporate conglomerates means that a world without money is only possible when it is build on top of a world where money is everything. In this presentation, I explore the contradictions inherent in contemporary theorizings of digital labor and propose a framework for imagining spaces where disidentification from the Net is possible. I argue that it is in these forms of disassembly that an authentic alternative to exploitation and inequality is contained, and where new modes of labor may arise.