DigiLabour Book Talks

Book talk with Miranda Banks and Kate Fortmueller Boom to Bust: How Streaming Broke Hollywood Workers University of California Press

Discussants: Daphne Idiz, Joe Epstein

When Hollywood writers and actors went on strike in 2023, they drew attention to the rapidly changing nature of film and television production. In Boom to Bust, media industry experts Miranda Banks and Kate Fortmueller combine economic and cultural analysis and interviews with industry workers to capture the lived experience of Hollywood in crisis. Tracking major disruptions of the preceding decade—including the transformation of streaming services into studios, the overproduction of series during Peak TV, as well as #MeToo and COVID—the authors explain how the conflicting interests of studio executives, creative workers, and workers’ unions compelled a renegotiation of the terms of work. Grounding readers in the history of Hollywood labor negotiations, the authors provide a road map to make sense of Hollywood’s present—and what comes next.

Book talk with Nick Srnicek (King’s College) Silicon Empires: The Fight for the Future of AI (Polity)

Discussants: Helena Martins (Federal University of Ceara) David Nieborg (University of Toronto)

Since the emergence of ChatGPT, generative AI has been heralded as a technology poised to revolutionize our world. But beyond the hype and hyperbole, who truly wields power over this transformative technology? In Silicon Empires, Nick Srnicek explores the geopolitical economy of artificial intelligence, revealing how a handful of powerful corporations and states are engaged in a monumental struggle to control its future. Srnicek moves beyond the headlines to lay bare the elaborate strategies that these silicon empires – from tech giants to great powers – are deploying to capture the immense value of AI. This incisive analysis uncovers the deep-seated tensions between corporate ambitions and national interests, and the profound consequences of this new era of technological competition. As the race for AI supremacy accelerates, Srnicek compellingly demonstrates that the decisions being made in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley and the halls of government will shape the distribution of wealth and power on a global scale for decades to come.

Book talk with Andrea Pollio (Polytechnic of Turin, Italy and University of Cape Town, South Africa) Silicon Elsewhere: Nairobi, Global China, and the Promise of Techno-Capital (University of California Press).

Discussants: Julie Yujie Chen (University of Toronto), Rafael Grohmann (University of Toronto)

Heralded as Africa’s “Silicon Savannah”—a cradle of innovation—Nairobi has become a technology and innovation capital for Kenya and for the continent at large. With a national strategy that has prioritized digital technology for the last two decades, many Chinese digital champions, smaller startups, and investors have since chosen Nairobi as their African landing pad. Mapping the interface between Nairobi’s innovation scene and China’s digital presence there, Silicon Elsewhere tells a unique story of ingenuity and adaptation, failure and speculation, and hopefulness and pragmatism. Andrea Pollio’s ethnography draws on interviews with cautious venture capitalists, renegade entrepreneurs, dedicated bureaucrats, and ambitious data scientists to explore the competing meanings of contemporary techno-capital. Moving between leafy coworking spaces and the temperature-controlled rooms of brand-new data centers, Pollio locates Nairobi among the experimental capitals, not peripheries, of technological change in the early twenty-first century.

Book talk with Robert Dorschel (University of Cambridge) The Social Codes of Tech Workers: Class Identity in Digital Capitalism MIT Press)

Discussants:
Helena Wright (University of Toronto)
Kenzo Soares Seto (Yale University)

Digital technologies shape nearly every aspect of our lives. Yet little attention has been paid to the tech workers who design and program these technologies. Instead, the spotlight often falls on two extremes: the elite class of tech entrepreneurs and the precarious digital proletariat of gig and crowd workers. This narrow focus has left a critical gap in understanding the middle-class professionals operating behind the scenes of digital capitalism. Drawing on over 50 original interviews and discourse analytical research conducted in the US and Germany, The Social Codes of Tech Workers takes readers deep into their hearts and minds. Robert Dorschel demonstrates how tech workers’ subjectivity is structured by a return of social critique, hybrid professional roles, and distinctive lifestyles. The book identifies tech workers as a contradictory class formation, oscillating between a spirit of emancipation and yet another spirit of capitalism. This work will appeal to scholars across disciplines concerned with digital labor, identity, and class, as well as to the broader public interested in the culture of the tech industry and the evolving future of work.

Book talk with Sophie Bishop (University of Leeds)
Influencer Creep: How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self-Branding Transform Creative Culture
University of California Press

Moderated by Rafael Grohmann (University of Toronto)

Discussants:
Arturo Arriagada (Universidad Adolfo Ibanez)
Jul Parke (University of Toronto)

O Mestrado e Doutorado em Comunicação da UNISINOS, por meio dos Laboratórios DigiLabour, LIC, CultPop e TCAV, convida para as conferências inaugurais do semestre letivo 2021/1 Atividade integrante do CAPES-Print Unisinos – Transformação Digital e Humanidades The Revolution That Wasn’t – How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives Jen Schradie (Sciences Po) 1 de março (segunda)

Os Laboratórios TCAV, LIC, CultPop e DigiLabour, do Mestrado e Doutorado em Comunicação da UNISINOS, convidam para um bate-papo com Wendy Chun, professora da Escola de Comunicação da Simon Fraser University, Canadá.

Ela lançou recentemente o livro Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition, que aborda a centralidade de questões de raça, gênero, classe e sexualidade para análises em torno de big data e redes, e clama por algoritmos alternativos.

Wendy Chun também é autora de livros como Updating to Remain the Same e Programmed Visions.

Book talk with Ignacio Siles (Universidad de Costa Rica) on Living with Algorithms: Agency and User Culture in Costa Rica (MIT Press)

The book analyzes user dynamics in the global south across three algorithmic platforms: Netflix, Spotify, and TikTok. Drawing on a wealth of empirical evidence that privileges the user over the corporate, Siles examines the personal relationships that have formed between users and algorithms as Latin Americans have integrated these systems into the structures of everyday life, enacted them ritually, participated in public with and through them, and thwarted them. Sometimes users follow algorithms, Siles finds, and sometimes users resist them. At times, users do both. Agency lies in the navigation of the spaces in-between. By analyzing what we do with algorithms rather than what algorithms do to us, Living with Algorithms clarifies the debate over the future of datafication and whether we have a say in its development.

Book talk with Sahana Udupa (University of Munich) and Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan (New York University) on Digital Unsettling: Decoloniality and Dispossession in the Age of Social Media (NYU Press)

The book is a critical exploration of digitalization that puts contemporary “decolonizing” movements into conversation with theorizations of digital communication. The authors interrogate the forms, forces, and processes that have reinforced neocolonial relations within contemporary digital environments, at a time when digital networks—and the agendas and actions they proffer—have unsettled entrenched hierarchies in unforeseen ways. Digital Unsettling examines events—the toppling of statues in the UK, the proliferation of #BLM activism globally, the rise of Hindu nationalists in North America, the trolling of academics, among others—and how they circulated online and across national boundaries. In doing so, Udupa and Dattatreyan demonstrate how the internet has become the key site for an invigorated anticolonial internationalism, but has simultaneously augmented conditions of racial hierarchy within nations, in the international order, and in the liminal spaces that shape human migration and the lives of those that are on the move. Digital Unsettling establishes a critical framework for placing digitalization within the longue durée of coloniality, while also revealing the complex ways in which the internet is entwined with persistent global calls for decolonization.

Book talk with Firuzeh Shokooh Valle, author of In Defense of Solidarity and Pleasure: Feminist Technopolitics from the Global South (Stanford University Press, 2023).

Including women in the global South as users, producers, consumers, designers, and developers of technology has become a mantra against inequality, prompting movements to train individuals in information and communication technologies and foster the participation and retention of women in science and technology fields. In this book, Firuzeh Shokooh Valle argues that these efforts have given rise to an idealized, female economic figure that combines technological dexterity and keen entrepreneurial instinct with gendered stereotypes of care and selflessness. Narratives about the “equalizing” potential of digital technologies spotlight these women’s capacity to overcome inequality using said technologies, ignoring the barriers and circumstances that create such inequality in the first place as well as the potentially violent role of technology in their lives. In Defense of Solidarity and Pleasure examines how women in the Global South experience and resist the coopting and depoliticizing nature of these scripts. Drawing on fieldwork in Costa Rica and a transnational feminist digital organization, Shokooh Valle explores the ways that feminist activists, using digital technologies as well as a collective politics that prioritize solidarity and pleasure, advance a new feminist technopolitics.

Book talk with Caroline Shenaz Hossein, Sharon D. Wright Austin, Kevin Edmonds, Salewa Olawoye-Mann and Silvane Silv.

Knowledge-making in the field of alternative economies has limited the inclusion of Black and racialized people’s experience. In Beyond Racial Capitalism the goal is close that gap in development through a detailed analysis of cases in about a dozen countries where Black people live and turn to co-operatives to manage systemic exclusion. Most cases focus on how people use group methodology for social finance. However, financing is not the sole objective for many of the Black people who engage in collective business forms; it is about the collective and the making of a Black social economy. Systemic racism and anti-Black exclusion create an environment where pooling resources, in kind and money, becomes a way to cope and to resist an oppressive system. This book examines co-operatives in the context of racial capitalism-a concept of political scientist Cedric J. Robinson’s that has meaning for the African diaspora who must navigate, often secretly and in groups, the landmines in business and society. Understanding business exclusion in the various cases enables appreciation of the civic contributions carried out by excluded racial minorities. These social innovations by Black people living outside of Africa who build co-operative economies go largely unnoticed. If they are noted, they are demoted to an “informal” activity and rationalized as having limited potential to bring about social change. The sheer determination of Black diaspora people to organize and build co-operatives that are explicitly anti-racist and rooted in mutual aid and the collective is an important lesson in making business ethical and inclusive.

Book talk with Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Trere

Algorithms are all around us, permeating more and more aspects of our daily lives. While accounts of platform power tend to come across as bleak and monolithic, Algorithms of Resistance shows how people can resist algorithms across a variety of domains. Drawing from rich ethnographic materials and perspectives from both the Global North and South, authors Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Treré explore how people appropriate and reconfigure algorithms to pursue their objectives in three domains of everyday life: gig work, cultural industries, and politics. They reveal how forms of algorithmic agency and resistance are endemic and mundane and how the platform society is a contested battleground of contrasting forces. Bonini and Treré begin by outlining their key theoretical framework of moral economies. This framework argues that algorithms exist on a continuum. At its two extremes are two competing moral economies: the user moral economy and the platform moral economy. From here, Algorithms of Resistance chronicles the various inventive ways that individuals can work to achieve agency and resist the ubiquitous power of algorithms. Casting a wide net with a diverse range of case studies, Bonini and Treré reveal the moral imperative for all of us—from delivery drivers to artists to social movements—to resist algorithms.

Book talk with Tanner Mirrlees (Ontario Tech)
Book: Work in the Digital Media and Entertainment Industries (Routledge)

Book talk with Luis Felipe R. Murillo (University of Notre Dame)
Common Circuits: Hacking Alternative Technological Futures

Moderated by Rafael Grohmann (University of Toronto)

How hackers facilitate community technology projects that counter the monoculture of “big tech” and point us to brighter, innovative horizons.

A digital world in relentless movement—from artificial intelligence to ubiquitous computing—has been captured and reinvented as a monoculture by Silicon Valley “big tech” and venture capital firms. Yet very little is discussed in the public sphere about existing alternatives. Based on long-term field research across San Francisco, Tokyo, and Shenzhen, Common Circuits explores a transnational network of hacker spaces that stand as potent, but often invisible, alternatives to the dominant technology industry. In what ways have hackers challenged corporate projects of digital development? How do hacker collectives prefigure more just technological futures through community projects? Luis Felipe R. Murillo responds to these urgent questions with an analysis of the hard challenges of collaborative, autonomous community-making through technical objects conceived by hackers as convivial, shared technologies.

Through rich explorations of hacker space histories and biographical sketches of hackers who participate in them, Murillo describes the social and technical conditions that allowed for the creation of community projects such as anonymity and privacy networks to counter mass surveillance; community-made monitoring devices to measure radioactive contamination; and small-scale open hardware fabrication for the purposes of technological autonomy. Murillo shows how hacker collectives point us toward brighter technological futures—a renewal of the “digital commons”—where computing projects are constantly being repurposed for the common good.

Book talk with Anita Say Chan (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future
University of California Press

Moderated by Rafael Grohmann (University of Toronto)

Discussants:
Paola Ricaurte (Tecnologico de Monterrey)
Esteban Morales (University of Groningen)

Co-hosted by DigiLabour & Tierra Comun