17 June 2011

Quote of the day, yay!

'The non-hierarchical character of network communication becomes dominant in the entire cycle of social labour. This contributes to the representation of info-labor as an independent form of work. But this independence ... is in fact an ideological fiction, covering a new and growing form of dependency ... This new dependency is increasingly apparent in the automatic fluidity of the network: we have strict interdependence of subjective fragments, all distinct but objectively dependent from a fluid process, from a chain of automatisms both external and internal to the labour process which regulate every gesture, every productive parcel.

Both simple executing workers and entrepreneurial managers share the vivid perception that they depend on a constant flow that cannot be interrupted and from which they cannot step back save at the price of being marginalised... Cellular phones are probably the technological devices that best illustrate this kind of network dependency. The cellular phone is left on by the great majority of info-workers even when they are not working. It has a major function in the organisation of labor as self-enterprise that is formally autonomous but substantially dependent.'

- Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Soul At Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, Semiotext(e) 2009 (pp. 88-9)

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