Photomediations: An Open Book

PHOTOMEDIATIONS: AN OPEN BOOK

http://photomediationsopenbook.net/

Photomediations: An Open Book from Photomediations Machine on Vimeo.

We are pleased to announce the launch of Photomediations: An Open Book. The project redesigns a coffee-table book as an online experience to produce a creative resource that explores the dynamic relationship between photography and other media. Photomediations: An Open Book uses open (libre) content, drawn from various online repositories (Europeana, Wikipedia Commons, Flickr Commons) and tagged with the CC-BY licence and other open licences. In this way, the book showcases the possibility of the creative reuse of image-based digital resources.

 

Through a comprehensive introduction and four specially commissioned chapters on light, movement, hybridity and networks that include over 200 images, Photomediations: An Open Book tells a unique story about the relationship between photography and other media. The book’s four main chapters are followed by three ‘open’ chapters, which will be populated with further content over the next 18 months. The three open chapters are made up of a social space, an online exhibition and an open reader. A version of the reader, featuring academic and curatorial texts on photomediations, will be published in a stand-alone book form later in 2015, in collaboration with Open Humanities Press.

Photomediations: An Open Book’s online form allows for easy sharing of its content with educators, students, publishers, museums and galleries, as well as any other interested parties. Promoting the socially significant issues of ‘open access’, ‘open scholarship’ and ‘open education’, the project also explores a low-cost hybrid publishing model as an alternative to the increasingly threatened traditional publishing structures.

Photomediations: An Open Book is a collaboration between academics from Goldsmiths, University of London, and Coventry University. It is part of Europeana Space, a project funded by the European Union's ICT Policy Support Programme under GA n° 621037. It is also a sister project to the curated online site Photomediations Machine: http://photomediationsmachine.net

Project team: Professor Joanna Zylinska, Dr Kamila Kuc, Jonathan Shaw, Ross Varney, Dr Michael Wamposzyc.

Project advisor: Professor Gary Hall.

Visit Photomediations: An Open Book: http://photomediationsopenbook.net

Follow us on Twitter: @photomediations

For further enquiries please contact: j.zylinska@gold.ac.uk 

Post-Welfare Capitalism and the Uberfication of the University III: The Freelance Microentrepreneur To Come That I Am

(Post-Welfare Capitalism and the Uberfication of the University is a series of 3 posts. Together they constitute the draft of an essay, which is itself the first part of a larger project on capitalism and inhumanism)

All my previous post's concerns about the sharing economy are of course only too easy to push to the back of our minds when we’re trying to find an inexpensive place to stay for a weekend break, or booking a taxi to take us back home from a friend’s place late at night. Many women consider Uber to be safer than a minicab, with its unknown driver (although there have been complaints that Uber could do more to ensure the safety of female passengers), while having the additional advantages of costing less than a licensed black cab, and being easier and more convenient than both. With Uber you can track your vehicle as it approaches, for instance. Others appreciate the freedom from having to deal with cash that Uber’s frictionless digital payment system provides. In fact, it’s perhaps only when we begin to think about these information and data management intermediaries from the point of view of a worker rather than a user, and consider their potential to disrupt our own sphere of employment (whatever that may be), with the associated consequences for our job security, sick pay, retirement benefits and pensions, that the full implications of the shift to a post-welfare form of capitalism they are helping to enact are really brought home. I don’t want to get into the kind of hype cycle that is still being worked through around open education and MOOCs. But since many readers of this piece are likely to be academics, researchers and students (and if not, then to have been a university student at some point in the past) let’s take Higher Education as an example.

LinkedIn, the social networking platform for professionals, recently spent £1.5 billion purchasing Lynda.com, a supplier of online consumer-focused courses. Although it doesn't address the sharing economy specifically, a report of this acquisition by Goldie Blumenstyk published earlier this month in the Chronicle of Higher Education is very effective in drawing attention to some of the implications of this deal for Higher Education. Of course, with its University Pages and University Rankings Based on Career Outcomes, LinkedIn already has enough data to be able to provide the kind of detailed analysis of which institutions and courses are launching graduates into which jobs and long-term career trajectories that no traditional university can match. And that’s before its purchase of Lynda.com. But what Blumenstyk’s piece in The Chronicle makes clear is that, with its immanent transition into being both a social network and an actual provider of education, it doesn’t require a huge a stretch of the imagination to appreciate how such data could now be used to develop a very successful data and information intermediary business model for Higher Education - if not next year then certainly in the near future, and if not by LinkedIn then by some other platform capitalist company. Such a model would be based on providing ‘transparent’ information on a fine-grained basis to employers, students, funding agencies, governments and policy-makers. This information would indicate which of the courses, classes and possibly even teachers on any such educational ‘sharing economy’ platform are better at enabling students to obtain a particular academic degree classification or other educational credential or qualification, make the successful transition to a desirable job or career, reach the top of a given profession in a particular town, city or country, and so achieve a high level of job satisfaction, security, salary, income and earning capacity over a specific period or even a lifetime.

But it doesn’t end there. The Chronicle article also details how LinkedIn bought a company called Bright in 2014. Bright has developed algorithms enabling it to match posts with applicants according to their particular achievements, competencies and skill sets. And, of course, it would not be difficult for a for-profit business with the kind of data LinkedIn now has the potential to gather to do much the same for employers and students - right down to the level of their salary expectations, extracurricular activities, ‘likes’, or even their reputational standing and degree of trustworthiness. This business could charge a fee for doing so, just as many online dating agencies are able to make a profit from introducing people with compatible interests and personalities as deduced by algorithms. They could then charge a further fee for making this information and data available on a live basis in real time – something that would no doubt be highly desirable in today’s ‘flexible’ economy, where many employers want to be able to draw from a pool of part-time, hourly paid and zero hours workers who are available to them ‘on tap’, often at extremely short notice. Moreover, feeding all the data gathered back into the system would mean the courses, curricula and class content of any such educational data and information intermediary could be continually refined and so made highly responsive to student and employer needs at a local, national and international level.

More ominous still, given that it would be able to control the platform, software, data and the associated ecosystem, such a platform capitalist HE business would also have the power to decide who could be most easily seen and found in any such alternative market for education (much as Google’s does with its page ranking, the European commission having decided this month that Google actually has a case to answer regarding possible abuse of its dominance of search through ‘systematically’ awarding greater prominence to its own ads). Understandably, perhaps, following as it does on the heels of the 2012/2013 clamour about xMOOCs, Blumenstyk’s analysis of LinkedIn’s acquisition of Lynda.com shies away from arriving at any overly exaggerated or pessimistic conclusions as to what all this may mean for Higher Education and its system of certification and credentialing. Nevertheless, if a company like LinkedIn took the decision to provide this level of fine-grained data and information for its own unbundled, relatively inexpensive online courses, but not for those offered by its more expensive market competitors in the public sector, it would surely have the potential to be at least as disruptive as Coursera, Udacity, FutureLearn and co. have proven to be to date, if not considerably more so. For the kind of information about degrees and student final destinations, as well as the ability to react to market changes, that any traditional university is capable of providing on its own would appear extremely limited, unsophisticated and slow to compile and deliver by comparison. And, lest the adoption by a for-profit sharing economy business of such a hostile and aggressive stance toward the public university seems unlikely, it’s worth remembering that Google maintains its dominance of search in much the same way. In the words of its chief research guru, Peter Norvig, the reason Google has a 90-95% share of the European market for search is not because it has better algorithms than Yahoo and Bing, ‘it just has more data’. Indeed, one of the great myths about neoliberalism is that it strives to create competition on an open market. As the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, co-founder of Pay-Pal and early Facebook investor, emphasizes in his book Zero to One, what neoliberal businesses actually want is to be a monopoly: to be so dominant in their area of operation that they in fact escape the competition and become a market of one.

Of course, as a consequence of neoliberalism’s programme of privatisation, deregulation, reduction to a minimum of the state and public sector, and insistence that the university operate increasingly like a business, many of those who work in HE already have fixed-term, part-time, hourly-paid, zero-hour, temporary and other forms of contingent positions. Yet if something along the lines of the above scenario does come to pass, it will surely have the effect of disrupting the public university by means of a profit-driven business operating according to a post-welfare state model, much as Airbnb is currently disrupting the state regulated hotel industry, and Uber state regulated taxi companies. Increasing numbers of university workers will thus find themselves in a situation not dissimilar to that facing many cab drivers today. Instead of operating in a sector regulated by the state, they will have little choice but to sell their cheap and easy-to-access courses to whoever is prepared to pay for them in the ‘alternative’ sharing economy education market created by platform capitalism. They too will become atomised, precarious, freelance microentrepreneurs. And as such, they will experience all the problems of deprofessionalisation, intensification, precarity and surveillance such a post-welfare capitalist economy brings.

(To be continued… and in a more optimistic vein. For the university is also one of the places where the neoliberal forces I have described above are being opposed. The university is where we can create new ideas. It is also where we can help to build a sense of solidarity and common struggle.)

Post-Welfare Capitalism and the Uberfication of the University II: Platform Capitalism

(Post-Welfare Capitalism and the Uberfication of the University is a series of 3 posts. Together they constitute the draft of an essay, which is itself the first part of a larger project on capitalism and inhumanism)

As a socio-economic ecosystem, the sharing economy is understood as supplying individuals with information that makes access to things like ridesharing and sofa surfing possible on a more efficient and expanded basis. Indeed, because of the emphasis that is placed on the collaborative sharing and renting of pre-owned and unused goods, the activities and services of the sharing economy are frequently held as being very different from, or even offering an alternative to, those that are provided through private, state or public means. As such, it is portrayed as a means of bringing community values back into the ways in which people consume, and of helping to address environmental issues resulting from the depletion of the planet’s resources (e.g. by reducing the carbon footprint of transport). It’s almost as if this economic ‘model’ has been devised to take the edge off some of the harsher aspects of life in the anti-welfare regime of financial capital, including those generated in the name of austerity: unemployment, precarity, increasing income inequality, high levels of debt and so forth.

  

In the last few months, however, a number of texts have appeared – e.g. Mike Bulajewski’s 'The Cult of Sharing', Evgeny Morozov’s 'What You Whistle in the Shower: How Much for Your Data?' – that position certain aspects of the sharing economy as enacting a significant societal shift. It is a shift in which state regulated service intermediaries, like hotels and taxi companies, are replaced by information and data management intermediaries, such as the start-ups Airbnb (a community marketplace for renting out private lodging and other kinds of accommodation) and Uber (an app that enables passengers to connect with a taxi, private car or rideshare using their mobile phones). Of course, it's important to acknowledge that the sharing economy ecosystem is made up of a variety of different economic arrangements, many of which are not directly involved in the replacement of state regulated service intermediaries. These arrangements embrace for-profit, non-profit and co-operative structures, too (e.g. those associated with fair trade collectives, freecycyling networks, peer-to-peer file sharing, Open Data or the Occupy movement). Even the information and data management intermediaries of the sharing economy (which also include TaskRabbit, PeoplePerHour and Lyft, among others) are not all the same. Each has its own particular features, characteristics and spheres of operation within the larger socio-economic ecosystem. Nevertheless, rather than sharing activities, goods and services in a fair and resilient fashion that enables a more direct exchange between the parties involved by cutting out the unnecessary middlemen, what most of these for-profit sharing economy start-ups are doing is corporatising and selling cheap and easy access to assets that are underutilised. In the case of Airbnb and Uber, which continue to be the two most well-known examples, these assets take the form of spare rooms in homes and seats in vehicles that are otherwise occupied on an infrequent and temporary basis; idle resources it has up until now been difficult for capital to commodify, and whose value from an entrepreneurial point of view has therefore been wasted.  

For some, this move away from state regulated service intermediaries like hotels and taxi companies toward for-profit businesses is part of market capitalism’s increasing co-option and rebranding of the ‘true’ community values of the sharing economy. Even if this form of economy is presented as a revival of community spirit, it actually has very little to do with sharing access to goods, activities and services, and everything to do with selling this access. It thus does hardly anything to challenge economic inequality and injustice. At best it is capable of providing an additional source of income in what many are experiencing as economically straightened times. For others, including Yochai Benkler, these technology start-ups are simply innovating too fast for the politicians and law makers to keep pace with – a state of affairs seen as likely to have highly disruptive social consequences if it continues unconstrained.  

When it comes to understanding how neoliberalism has been able to proceed with its programme of minimising the role played by the state, the public sector and welfare in the age of austerity, however, the really important point to note is that, by avoiding pre-emptive state regulation, these profit-driven sharing economy businesses are operating according to what can be understood as a post-welfare state model. Here, as Morozov notes, ‘social protections for workers are minimal, they have to take on risks previously assumed by their employers’.  There are also very few possibilities for establishing trade unions or other forms of collective agency, action or means of generating the kind of solidarity that might be able to challenge this state of affairs. It is a situation that often leaves those providing services on the platforms of these information and data management intermediaries labouring for less than the minimum wage and without a host of workers’ rights. The list of lost benefits is a long one. For Bulajewski, it includes ‘the right to have employers pay social security, disability and unemployment insurance taxes, the right to family and medical leave, workers’ compensation protection, sick pay, retirement benefits, profit sharing plans, protection from discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, age or national origin, or wrongful termination for becoming pregnant, or reporting sexual harassment or other types of employer wrongdoing’.  

It thus comes as no surprise that one of the other names associated for this aspect of the sharing economy is ‘platform capitalism’.  Indeed, the for-profit sector of this socio-economic ecosystem appears to be almost the neoliberal ideal. It helps to create a situation in which the general population now not only aspires to own their own homes - which is the vision the conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sold to the British working-classes in the 1980s, with the right to buy scheme - they also have the opportunity to become private capitalist entrepreneurs themselves. And in the case of Airbnb, one way they can do so is precisely by trading otherwise underutilized space in their now privately owned homes. As the company’s cofounder and CEO, Brian Chesky, puts it, previously ‘only businesses could be trusted, or people in your local community. Now, that trust has been democratized - any person can act like a brand.... It means that people all over a city, in 60 seconds, can become microentrepreneurs’. (It is worth noting that this last point is not strictly correct: more often than not you need to have an asset – be it property or a car or time – to be in a position to ‘share’.)

The information and data management intermediaries of the sharing economy may create jobs, then, but ‘it’s a new kind of job’, as Chesky readily acknowledges. ‘Maybe it’s like a 21st-century job’, he suggests. Or maybe, given the lack of worker’s rights and degree of externalised risk, it’s like a very old kind of job, a late 19th, early 20th century job.  For these for-profit companies, and the microentrepreneurs who labour for them (and who in the past would have been known as employees), are operating in an open market that is relatively free from the ability of state regulators, the labour movement and trade unions to not only put a limit on the maximum hours those employed in these new kinds of jobs work in a day or week, but also to specify the minimum wage they should receive, the number of days off they need, as well as the paid holidays and free weekends they are entitled to.  (In the era of platform capitalism it’s as if many of these means of having a break from work are now to be provided by the for-profit sharing businesses themselves - along with other companies with an investment in the management of information and data such as Google and Apple - through their ability to save people’s time and complete tasks for them. Witness, to give one by now quite commonplace example, Google’s linking of users’ electronic diaries to their email accounts and sending of automatic appointment reminders to them on their mobile phones. The ‘taptic engine’ feature of the new Apple Watch means they don’t even have to spend time taking their phones out of their pockets to know they’ve received message: the watch just gives them a gentle tap on the wrist.)

Production and control, profit and risk, are thus not shared in this sector of the sharing economy at all. It’s the networks of users who help to build the platform and who provide the aggregated input, data and attention value that function to generate a market. Noticeably, these users do not themselves form a social community in the manner they can on other kinds of digital platforms: Wikipedia, for example, or even Facebook. What is more, because they never really own the products and services they are purchasing, these users are more susceptible to questionable practices on the part of the sharing economy’s microentrepreneurs than would ordinarily be the case in a state-regulated market. 

Meanwhile, it is the owners of the information and data management intermediary who take the profits generated by financializing, corporatizing and exploiting the ’sharing’ of goods and services between the users and microentrepreneurs that they make possible by turning this exchange into a market. Moreover, the former tend to be well-funded professional entrepreneurs, as opposed to the more amateur microentrepreneurs who do a lot of the actual labour. These owners also control the platform, software, data and associated ecosystem, deciding pricing and wage levels, work allocation, standards, conditions, and preferred user and labourer profile. This means that who does and does not get to work as a microentrepreneur in this economy is not delimited by state legislation or organised union activity designed to protect workers from being discriminated against. In fact, research on the sharing economy shows a certain ‘homophily’ occurs, by which it is often ‘similar “types” of people [who] provide and use these services (in terms of class, education and race)’, especially when a rating system is employed.  (Uber, for example, enables both customers and drivers to rate one another, and suspends drivers if their scores are not high enough. There is also reported to be a regular scarcity of female ‘drivers for hire’ in many of the cities in which Uber operates at present.)

Finally, it is the often quite isolated microentrepreneurs (who can now be potentially ‘any person’, rather than a specific set of employees) who labour to provide services in the market created by the platform on a freelance, on demand, and frequently precarious basis; who take the risks associated with having lost their rights, benefits and protection as employees in this ‘gig economy', as it is also sometimes known; and who, depending on the particular platform, often face ‘increased surveillance, deskilling, casualisation and intensification’ of their labour too. 

Post-Welfare Capitalism and the Uberfication of the University I: Socialism for the Wealthy, Capitalism for the Rest

(Post-Welfare Capitalism and the Uberfication of the University is a series of 3 posts. Together they constitute the draft of an essay, which is itself the first part of a larger project on capitalism and inhumanism)

At first the financial crisis that began in 2008-2009 looked as if it was going to constitute a major a threat to the credibility and long-term viability of neoliberalism. After all, how could the majority of people continue to have faith in free-market capitalism and its ability to deliver growth and prosperity, when it had so visibly brought the world to the brink of economic disaster? Viewed from the vantage point of only a few years later and things have taken on a very different hue. Now what the financial crisis seems to have done is given the champions of neoliberalism an opportunity to carry out, with renewed vigour, their programme of privatisation, deregulation, and reduction to a minimum of the state, public sector and welfare. 

We are thus faced with a situation in which the debt of the 1% – the banks having been bailed out to the tune of over £1 trillion of public money in the UK – is being paid off through a process of social austerity, with the debt of the rest of society, the 99%, enlarged to apply to even the most basic aspects of life: healthcare, social welfare and education. The National Health Service (NHS), firefighters’ pensions and local authority libraries are thus all included on the list of things we can apparently no longer afford to pay for as a society.   So bad has the situation become that the British state has actually refused to take responsibility for feeding its own population. That role now falls to the charities running the food banks. As a result, the Red Cross is engaged in food aid in the UK for the first time since World War Two. The success of large discount retailers such as Aldi and Lidl (who in the last five years have doubled their portion of the British supermarket spend to 10%), Poundland and Primark provides further evidence of the impact of austerity and high levels of household debt on living standards. Yet not only is the degree of risk and debt born by the 99% being enlarged, it also is being extended into the future. This is occurring most notably in the form of the student debt created by the introduction of tuition fees. According to the latest estimates, many of today’s undergraduates will owe around £44,000 by the time they graduate.  

Public money that might otherwise have been spent on food, healthcare, welfare and education (not to mention art and culture) is thus being cut because of the proclaimed need for austerity. Instead it is used to pay to cover for the failures of privately owned businesses. With over 400 people at Barclays Bank alone earning more than £1 million (compare this to Japan, where fewer than 300 executives are paid that amount nationally), it is clearly not the bankers in the UK who are being punished for the mistakes of financial capitalism.  It is the students, users of public healthcare, trade union members, and those sections of the population who rely on benefits or are on low incomes: the in-work poor, as they have come to be known. Indeed, because of deregulation, the weakening of the power of the trade unions, and the flourishing of insecure forms of self-employment along with part-time, hourly-paid and zero-hour contracts (there are currently 700,000 people in the UK who are working in jobs that don’t have guaranteed hours), many citizens fall into both categories as a result of not being paid enough to live on.  

Thanks not least to the way privately owned businesses, including both the banks and the rail operators, continue to receive substantial handouts and subsidies from the taxpayer, this approach to governing society has been characterised as ‘socialism for the already wealthy corporations, and capitalism for everyone else’. It is a portrayal of our current political situation that finds support in the fact that, as Owen Jones points in his book on The Establishment, ‘while the poorest 10 per cent pay 43 per cent of their income in taxes, the richest 10 per cent pay just 35 per cent’.  Indeed, many multinational companies, assisted by banks with arms in Switzerland, aggressively (if legally) avoid paying corporation tax in the UK at all – which of course only serves to increase the tax burden on the rest of UK society, including those businesses that are less wealthy and less powerful.  

Yet for all this two-facedness, nowhere is contemporary capitalism’s ability to adapt and refresh itself in greater evidence than in some of the more apparently community-minded developments that have arisen in recent years. Take the emergence from the mid-2000s onwards of what has come to be known as the sharing economy. 

New Culture Machine Live interview with historian of piracy and the book Adrian Johns

A new Culture Machine Live interview with historian Adrian Johns, conducted by Janneke Adema, is available here:

http://culturemachinepodcasts.podbean.com/e/recursive-historiographical-work-and-the-responsibility-of-the-historian-adrian-johns-1428923430/

This interview focuses on historical efforts to redefine print's past, on the  relationship between technology, science and knowledge, and on our responsibility and performativity as historians. The interview was conducted on March 20, 2015, at the Total Archive Conference at Cambridge University, UK.

Culture Machine Live is a series of podcasts looking at a range of issues including  internet politics, the digital humanities, cultural theory, open access,  and the future of cultural studies and philosophy. Interviewees and speakers include Johanna Drucker, N. Katherine Hayles, Geert Lovink, Alan Liu, Chantal Mouffe, Ted Striphas, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

You can find the whole Culture Machine Live podcast series at: http://culturemachinepodcasts.podbean.com

The series is curated by Janneke Adema, Clare Birchall, Gary Hall & Pete Woodbridge. 

For more information about the online, open access journal Culture Machine, visit www.culturemachine.net