I wanted to bring to your attention the details for the symposium “Tech and its labours: beyond false consciousness and empowerment” I (Juan M. del Nido, Cambridge University) am organising with Dr. Milagros Miceli (Weizenbaum Institute) on February 6th. It’s an open and free event, so feel free to circulate among your networks!
Tech and its Labours: beyond false consciousness and empowerment
Sponsored by Cambridge University, the Philomathia Foundation and the Weizenbaum Institute, this day-long, hybrid symposium will bring together scholars, activists, and platform workers to discuss the work that creates, reproduces, and sustains platform technologies. This discussion requires, as well, examining the works platform companies engage in to create, reproduce, and sustain the politico-economic, aesthetic, and ethic imagination where they and their ways of knowing make sense.
Questions that we will address include:
What do we miss when discussing tech work by focusing solely either on revealing the false consciousness we claim sustains these platforms or in celebrating their ethos of empowerment and “radical populism” (Mirowski 2009)?
How do platform companies put regulation, popular opinion, and other-than-financial resources to work in order to co-opt, funnel or challenge ways of empowerment, legitimacy and self-reliance?
How do platform technologies affect categories such as work, fairness, and efficiency, thus shifting the very terms in which we can debate them?
Have these companies captured the political and aesthetic imagination, neutralising actual alternatives?
Confirmed Programme (NOTE: all hours Central European Time):
1.30 pm – 1.45 pm: Welcome remarks, by Milagros Miceli and Juan M. del Nido
1.45 pm – 2.45 pm: Opening keynote: Digital platforms and automation in the wake of pandemic capitalism, by Antonio Casilli. Q&A
