Antisocial Media

Anxious Labor in the Digital Economy

Greg Goldberg

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781479821907
• eBook ISBN: 9781479898046
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

The debate surrounding the transformation of work at the hands of digital technology and the anxieties brought forth by automation, the sharing economy, and the exploitation of leisure

We have been told that digital technology is now threatening the workplace as we know it, that advances in computing and robotics will soon make human labor obsolete, that the sharing economy, exemplified by Uber and Airbnb, will degrade the few jobs that remain, and that the boundaries between work and play are collapsing as Facebook and Instagram infiltrate our free time.

In this timely critique, Greg Goldberg examines the fear that work is being eviscerated by digital technology. He argues that it is not actually the degradation or disappearance of work that is so troubling, but rather the underlying notion that society itself is under attack, and more specifically the bonds of responsibility on which social relations depend. Rather than rushing to the defense of the social, however, Goldberg instead imagines the appeal of refusing the hard work of being a responsible and productive member of society.

1

Anxiety and the Antisocial

According to critics, the years following the Great Recession of 2007–2009 were not good for most workers in the United States. A prototypical worker during this period might be described as follows: lost his or her job shortly after the housing bubble burst and the market collapsed; subsequently unable to find steady, full-time employment, in part because “good jobs” are increasingly automated; as a result, forced to drive for Uber, or rent out his or her apartment/spare room/sofa through Airbnb, or work odd jobs through TaskRabbit to make ends meet, though some of these “jobs” will also soon be automated (it is only a matter of time until Uber cars are driverless); and finally, driven by the resulting stress or restlessness to distraction online, the economic value of which is siphoned away by the very same industry that is both automating good jobs and replacing them with worse jobs or “gigs” (as critics sometimes refer to them).1

As detailed in the chapters that follow, the handwringing that accompanies these purported transformations is considerable. How should we make sense of these concerns: that our leisure online is being transformed into work and is exploited as such, that the Internet has made possible a so-called sharing economy that produces only precarious jobs, and that all jobs—precarious or not—may soon be automated? Should these concerns be engaged empirically, tested against evidence that might confirm or refute the observed transformations? I take a different approach here, inspired by what I identify as inconsistencies internal to these concerns/arguments, and informed by critical analyses of knowledge production, which highlight the ways that empirical accounts often mask their underlying, structuring motivations and ends.

To take one example of this kind of analysis of knowledge production, in his critique of ethnographic methodology, Vincent Crapanzano identifies a central paradox constitutive of ethnographic research: ethnographers often confess the provisional nature of their interpretations, but do not acknowledge the provisional nature of their observations—what Crapanzano calls “presentations”—though these observations acquire their legitimacy precisely through interpretation.2 As Crapanzano writes, “Embedded in interpretation, [the ethnographer’s] presentations limit reinterpretation.”3 Following Crapanzano, the question that guides the inquiry of this book is not whether or to what extent the institution of work is being transformed or dissolved, but rather what lies beneath these “presentations,” with their originary, embedded interpretations?

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of “paranoid reading” also suggests a mode of analysis that circumvents questions about the truth value of empirical claims and focuses instead on what such claims do, their performative effects.4 For Sedgwick, the practice of paranoid reading is characterized not simply by its particular negative affect, but by the way it disavows this affect and masquerades as “the very stuff of truth.”5 In this mold, the aim of the book is not to arrive at a more definitive empirical accounting of the observed transformations, but rather to leave aside the issue of veracity in order to open up questions about the motivations and ends of the texts examined. To put it another way, for my purposes here, the examined texts are less interesting as a window into the world, than they are as a window into a particular way of seeing the world and, ultimately, of intervening in it.

This way of seeing has two prominent and related characteristics: a particular feeling or affect and particular attachments and investments. Raymond Williams’s concept of the “structure of feeling” is useful here; it describes “a pattern of impulses, restraints, tones”—feelings or affects rather than thoughts—shared between texts that do not appear to be otherwise connected to each other.6 According to Williams, rather than simply looking for shared ideas, it is instructive to look across texts for shared feeling or affect, and for the attachments and investments that these serve.

The texts examined in the chapters that follow are structured by a series of topically related concerns—that leisure is exploited, that jobs will disappear, and that the jobs that remain are degrading in quality—as well as by what I will argue is a shared feeling or affect of anxiety. Why anxiety? All concern is, in a sense, anxious in nature. To be concerned is to be worried. But, as the first half of this chapter explores, anxiety as a feeling or affect can be distinguished in part by its deceptive nature, that is, by the way that it obfuscates its true object. To put it another way, the actual object of concern is not the expressed object of concern. This means that if, as I have suggested, empirical texts often mask their underlying, structuring motivations and ends, then these motivations and ends are doubly masked in anxious texts. So while these texts appear to be concerned about economic exploitation, job loss, and “precarity”—a term that describes the fragmentation and discontinuity of work relations and experiences in contemporary capitalism—I will argue—via contemporary theorizations of anxiety—that they are more precisely concerned about the dissolution of social bonds. Just as the expressed concerns examined here (about exploitation, job loss, precarity) are deceiving, so too are the attachments these objects would suggest. It is not, or not simply an investment in workers’ livelihoods and well-being that lies at the center of this anxiety, but rather, I will argue, an attachment to responsible forms of relationality, and all that these forms entail: sacrifice, discipline, self-governance, accountability, and so on.

To be certain, this is not to say that there has not been anything to worry about in the wake of the Great Recession.7 When workers lose their jobs—as characteristically happens during an economic downturn—and have neither wealth nor other resources to fall back on, nor job prospects, but rather expenses to cover, debts to pay, and/or friends/family to support, there is a lot to worry about. Furthermore, as the effects of an economic downturn are unevenly distributed—for example, by race, sex, gender, sexuality, and class—so too should we expect worry to be unevenly distributed; as some people are more economically vulnerable than others, so too do they have more reason to worry. But this worry might be better characterized as fear rather than anxiety (as I define it below). In any case, it might be distinguished from the anxieties examined in this book by the consistent identification of potential threats—that is, when all potential threats are registered as such (in relation to the object of worry)—in contrast to the inconsistencies detailed in the Introduction and described in more detail in the chapters that follow.

Nor is it to say that there are not legitimate reasons to oppose the corporations, social practices, or government policies that motivate some critics; the book certainly does not aim to offer a defense of playbor, automation, or the sharing economy. For that matter, neither does it contain an exhaustive account of the illegitimate or deceptive reasons one might oppose these. My scope here includes neither an analysis of these other reasons, nor an account of the empirical implications of automation, playbor, or the sharing economy. Rather, my argument here addresses a specific set of concerns—selected for their prominence during the years following the Great Recession—that I propose be understood using the concept of anxiety for reasons articulated below.8

Drawing from work on anxiety by Sara Ahmed and Sianne Ngai, the chapter theorizes anxiety as a particular way of seeing/feeling but also of intervening, of attempting to resolve the underlying cause of anxiety by producing a subject invested in or attached to desired objects in particular ways. In terms of the cases analyzed in this book, expressed concerns about labor mask an underlying anxiety that does not only or primarily aim to improve conditions of labor, but rather to establish or secure valued forms of relationality by soliciting readers to identify as responsible subjects. Anxiety is thus not only the feeling or affect of “digital dystopianism”—that is, the perspective that understands digital technologies as imperiling social, political, economic, and psychological well-being. It is also the means through which this perspective attempts to secure and further that to which it is attached or in which it is invested: in this case the properly social, responsible subject. Understanding dystopian concerns through the framework of anxiety, in turn, draws into focus dystopianism’s attachments and investments and, thereby, its underlying aims and motivations.

To be clear, I do not meant to suggest that the authors of these texts are themselves anxious, and that the texts they write express this anxiety, though this is certainly possible. Rather, following Williams, I see the texts themselves as being structured by the feeling or affect of anxiety. As Sedgwick suggests, the (paranoid) affect of a text describes a particular position or practice, rather than the psychological state of its author. Similarly, Patricia Clough has argued that it is both possible and useful to conceptualize thought outside the intentions of authors. As Clough writes, “Thought is not given by individual thinkers so much as it is given to them as they are drawn to the future by it.”9 This is to attribute a kind of agency to thought, rather than to understand it as simply the product of individual authors; in this conceptualization, thought takes shape “outside subjectivity, even outside human intersubjectivity,” and exhibits “its own movement, intensities, and affects.”10 In conceptualizing thought outside human intersubjectivity, Clough ascribes a kind of agency to thought that exceeds not only the intentions of authors but also the meanings created by readers, who might be similarly reconceptualized as drawn to the future by thought.

It is important to note here that Sedgwick’s account of paranoid reading is meant not as a positive contribution to the tradition (in literary criticism) of “symptomatic reading,” in which primarily fictional texts are hermeneutically mined for hidden or latent truths and for the ideologies served by these, but rather as a critique of this tradition. The paranoid, for Sedgwick, is not the analyzed text but the analyzing text; it is literary criticism that is under scrutiny here. Sedgwick’s account, then, would seem to implicate precisely the project of this book, which offers a non-obvious interpretation of concerns about playbor, automation, and the sharing economy. Furthermore, Sedgwick’s critique is but one iteration of what appears to be a contemporary trend away from symptomatic reading as a critical methodology, from Slavoj Žižek’s proclamation in The Sublime Object of Ideology that symptomatic reading is impossible, to a 2009 special issue of Representations (“The Way We Read Now”) devoted to rethinking and offering alternatives to symptomatic reading.11

In part, the shift away from symptomatic reading has been explained as an effect of the increasing salience of outright expressions of power like the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the United States government’s non-response to Hurricane Katrina; when the exercise of power is so blatant, the argument goes, reading beneath or beyond the surface is unnecessary.12 As Sedgwick asks, “Why bother exposing the ruses of power in a country where, at any given moment, 40 percent of young black men are enmeshed in the penal system?”13 Indeed, in their introduction to “The Way We Read Now,” Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus suggest that the very project of politically radical literary criticism was compromised by the geopolitical landscape of the early twenty-first century, as if literary criticism were suddenly rendered obsolete by the Bush regime, but literary critics still had to show up for work anyway. Rather than unmasking the conservative truths that lurk beneath the deceptive surfaces of the text, some critics now prefer simply to describe the text, appreciating the complexity of its surface without either celebrating or denouncing its supposedly hidden politics.

If literary criticism once provided theoretical tools that could fundamentally draw into question the empirical aspirations of the social sciences, it now flirts with precisely this empiricism.14 While this shift seems to make criticism less necessary or important, it also establishes a less paternalistic and more humble role for the critic, who is no longer required to decode the secrets of the text, as well as relieving literary criticism of any kind of utilitarian function, most notably the pursuit of freedom, albeit from a resigned perspective. There is thus a curious tension in the shift away from symptomatic reading, which seems to offer both a capitulation to the “real”—one manifestation of the Left’s retreat from cultural radicalism after the Culture Wars, the so-called Sokal Affair, and 9/11—and an argument for idleness, a vestigial remnant of that same radicalism, perhaps. While I am sympathetic to the latter argument (for reasons that will soon become clear), the former argument warrants some scrutiny.

The claim that power is now out in the open imagines power as a surface that can be easily read, written on the bodies of the tortured, the incarcerated, the exploited, and the abandoned. It is unclear whether for critics such forms of power are now dominant (having displaced earlier forms) or are simply more important than the hidden, ideological forms that had previously concerned them. In either case, there is a retreat from the symbolic register—in which meaning is hidden and needs to be drawn out—which makes the contemporary interest in surfaces and surface reading seem rather disingenuous. In other words, if symptomatic reading has fallen out of favor, it is not because surface and depth have collapsed in such a way that would render symptomatic reading pointless, and surface reading a worthwhile exercise, but rather because surfaces no longer seem to matter in a world in which the real has become obvious.

It is precisely the Left’s claims of access to the real that make necessary something like symptomatic reading, not because these claims are false—again, my interest here is not in verifying or falsifying empirical claims—but because they are vehicles for an unidentified and unexamined normative project. While these claims have relieved literary critics of the burden of heroically exposing the truth, making possible a less utilitarian if somewhat guilty politics within literary criticism, they also provide a warrant for strengthened forms of communal, collective relations, which become necessary to oppose the status quo; the heroic critic has been replaced by the heroic community. This power play by the (radical?) Left seems remarkably under-examined. Indeed, it rarely if ever seems to register as power at all, as when Best and Marcus suggest that the notion of veiled domination is nostalgic. And while it is rather ironic that the insistence on the visibility of particular forms of power can itself be used to mask other forms of power, this should not come as a surprise, insofar as the Left generally aspires to inclusion; its preferred mode of power is not violent but benevolent, seemingly motivated by a concern for the well-being of those whose normative acquiescence it will demand in the last instance.

In order to account for disavowed normative modes of power, the second half of the chapter turns to queer theory, with its longstanding interest in (if not commitment to) antinormativity. Responding to contemporary debates about the status of antinormativity in queer theory, the chapter argues for the continued relevance and utility of an antinormative perspective or politics, particularly as expressed via the so-called “antisocial thesis,” a much maligned vein of thought that draws into question the normativity of the social itself and theorizes valued forms of relationality as a mode of oppression or subjugation. Drawing in particular from work by Leo B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Anxiety and the Antisocial
• 2. Playing
• 3. Automating
• 4. Sharing
• Epilogue: Immaterial World
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author