#dividuals

In the end, this is how automation “erases” the human. The full human subject—that rich historic figure endowed with inalienable rights who can draw on a potent spectrum of claims—is deleted. Pasted in its place is a more shadowy figure who is “less-than-human” by design. This is the global digital worker, who may appear only briefly as an avatar or a username. For this figure, agency has been ring-fenced, shrunk to an ideal zero point. Conditions are locked in place by the platform and its set menu of features and functions. The pay rate is fixed and the choices are few: to work on this task, to work on that task—or not to work at all. They are “free” to provide their labor and free to withdraw it. If they provide it, they must compete with others across the globe for the same tasks, carrying them out faster or cheaper. Technology’s triumph, then, is turning all of these laborers into racialized and gendered laborers whose working conditions are defined by a race to the bottom. The global digital worker is a figure whose work is so simple that “anyone” can do it and whose identity is so generic that “anyone” can replace them.

Thinking about when our Social and Cultural Theory teacher told us about a culture where a moose is seen as this feminine animal seducing the hunter. How people are constantly at a risk of becoming mooses themselves - in dreams, in real life. This transformation can be broken only by killing a moose, but the way it is seen is that the animal actually sacrificed itself so that the hunter could live. In another culture, a senior spearsman chooses his time and place of death, a cruel death too - by suffocation. It is believed that if he died naturally, his soul would escape the body, but by sacrificing himself this way, the soul stays in the body and continues to serve the community even after the spearsman is physically dead. You are probably looking for some message here but I am not sure I have one. Unnatural death is seen as something profane in so many cultures, yet an act like this is considered sacred. By committing the profane in the name of sacrifice, you claim its power, you laugh in the face of danger, you show your own strength, and ultimately, serve the people around you. I am looking for an equivalent of this in our own culture but the answer is never satisfying. So many sacrifices without power. So little sacred in profane.

We are entering control societies that are defined very differently than disciplinary societies. Those who are concerned about our welfare no longer need, or will no longer need, places of confinement. The prisons, schools and hospitals are already places of permanent discussion. Wouldn't it be better to expand home visits by doctors? Yes, that is certainly the future. Workshops and factories are bursting at the seams. Wouldn't it be better to use more sub-contracting and working from home? Aren't there other ways to punish people than prison?

Automation promised to liberate us from labor, a future in which machines “would do all the work.” Instead we are faced with systems that are semiautomated and devices that need augmentation. This is actually existing automation, a far more fragmented future of work that can rapidly shift from the promising to the pathological. Human labor is chopped up, split up, and farmed out, but never replaced. Humans are working harder than ever.

Kids today are dividuals. They're divided human beings. They see themselves as bricks within systems. 'I'm this person in the morning, this person in the afternoon, this person at school, I'm this person on Facebook, I'm this person on Twitter.' They experiment and have lots of different personalities. The more personalities you can handle in one body, the more the winner you will be. Because the more fascinating you will be as a person. They have no problem at all changing their personality. This exactly why kids love to take drugs; even legal ones. They don't believe in a sober ego that's always there on Monday morning, reminding them who they really are. There is no 'who you really are' anymore; there are a lot of different 'who-I-can-bes'. And you want more who-I-can-bes to choose from.

"We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks." Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies. The old monetary mole is the animal of the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network."

The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks." Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies.