In this chapter, we examine processes through which the masses come to participate in computer-mediated networks. The possibilities within these networks are well known to all of us, and underpin capitalism’s techno-utopian dreams of economic prosperity, universal education, political participation, self-expression, and shared ideas and projects. Aspirations for active engagement with technologies have provided ample opportunity for the invention and introduction of an array of new products and services. We are more informed, connected, educated, empowered, and entertained than ever before—thanks, in significant measure, to digital technologies. This is the positive and productive side of engaging with computers.
There is, however, a dark and negative side to the story as well. The predicaments—separation, precarity, futility, and monotony—incite participation in networks as we attempt to find some relief from and practical remediation for the struggles of everyday life. In characterizing the predicaments, we have drawn broadly from the work of Gorz (1985), Giddens (1990), Beck (1992), Rifkin (2000), Hornborg (2001), Holmes (2002), Boltanski and Chiapello (2005), Sennett (2007), Wright (2009), Harvey (2010), Caffentzis (2013), Schiller (2014), and others who describe conditions of contemporary capitalism. We draw also from our own empirical studies of video gaming, healthcare applications, and social media.
We use the predicaments to explain processes of heteromated labor that do not, on their face, make sense. There is not an obvious logic for performing labor that has no expectation of reasonable (or any) remuneration. Capitalism typically supports necessary labor-time so that workers can sustain themselves and participate in the economy. Heteromation is something of an enigma in this regard: it generates economic value for enterprises, but seems to defy expectations of both necessary labor-time (compensation sufficient for subsistence) and labor power (the commodity laborers sell to capitalists). Instead of selling labor power to sustain ourselves and to act in the market as customers, we provide labor for free, or at such a low price point that it cannot be commensurate with necessary labor-time.
What, then, drives us to perform the heteromated labor that contributes to the immense wealth being amassed by Google, Facebook, Amazon.com, video gaming companies, healthcare enterprises, and a host of other corporations? We attempt to answer this question through consideration of the anxieties and agitations the predicaments impel. We examine the ways in which digital technologies may calm or ameliorate the struggles. In doing so, we avoid modernist tendencies to psychologize—that is, we do not assess outcomes of the predicaments as resulting from particular, individualized personal events or personal histories, but rather as shared material experiences of life under contemporary capitalism. Predicaments, as we define them, are not psychological in nature, and they cannot respond to psychological interventions such as therapy. The struggles do respond to culturally shared resources, in this case, digital technologies. The success of computer-mediated interventions varies, sometimes—perhaps often—producing satisfaction, and at other times failing to deal with what ails us, or perhaps even making it worse.
Capitalism pushes us to be mobile, keeping us on the move as we recover from job losses, pursue education, and follow spouses and family members doing the same. Sometimes we move to seek our own bliss, responding to visions of the heroic individual promoted by the neoliberal ideology. Separation from friends, family, neighbors, and acquaintances is the inevitable result of mobility. The varied forms of separation come with many costs: loss of community, loss of connection, and sometimes loss of identity. Separation from loved ones formerly within range of face-to-face contact, reduction in opportunities for participation in geographic communities, and loneliness and boredom are common phenomena of modernity. Stories of the trials and tribulations of immigrant families dealing with separation are chronicled elsewhere, but they are not unique to those recognized as immigrants. Similar phenomena can be found in situations when the individual is not prepared for a move, as happened with a graduate student who wrote the following to one of the authors:
I’ve been having an extremely hard time this semester with my anxiety and depression and being away from everyone I know. It’s the last week of classes and everything is falling apart. I'm completely overwhelmed and scared. I’ve been hiding in my room … Being alone, without any support system, in a large school has been too much to handle.
Loneliness has been a recurring theme in American literary imagination. Robert Ferguson argues in Alone in America that loneliness has a special place in the United States because of the “the openness, mobility, uncertainty, and flux in (what was originally) a spacious new country” (2013, p. 2). Following the theme from the perspective of “dissolved domesticity” in the works of authors such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, and Henry James, Fergusson presents the different faces of loneliness as “failure, betrayal, change, defeat, breakdown, fear, difference, age, and loss.”
Loneliness also has other meanings having to do with loss of identity. Identity concerns one’s perception of one’s place in the world. A key component of this perception for modern persons comes from their careers—a key mechanism for constructing and maintaining identity is to be able to create a meaningful narrative of one’s life, including work. Stable lives, activities, connections, and communities are the basic ingredients of such narratives. Their disappearance generates a strong sense of loss of identity (Sennett 2012). The consequences of separation may thus cut to the core of the contemporary subject, undermining the very notion of who a person is, causing feelings of “falling apart,” as the student wrote.
The loss of a coherent narrative about oneself, as well as the practical realities of being “without a support system,” produce voids into which digital technologies rush. We use them to patch up our “dividualized” selves, as Deleuze called modern persons. Social media and multiplayer games spring to mind in this context; they allow us to connect to and communicate with distant others. A darker side is evident in the peculiar disinhibitions the internet spawns (Kiesler, Siegel, and McGuire 1984; Sproull and Keisler 1986; Suler 2004; Sood, Antin, and Churchill 2012), manifest in, for example, trolls and malicious hackers whose actions seem rooted in an anomie of loneliness and separation. The homophobia, misogyny, and racism gaming communities put up with, even in the midst of the restorative and validating activities that make the games worthwhile, continue to be problematic (Nardi 2010; Huntemann 2014). These expressions of hate flow, in part, from the anger of the dividualized self.
The human condition has long been characterized by “problematic situations,” as Dewey wrote long ago (1931). These situations have, however, acquired a novel scope and dimension in contemporary life, largely deriving from the gradual disappearance of institutional support structures and the undermining of the welfare state, leaving the individual in a condition of economic and professional precarity.
Recent financial crises of 2001 and 2008 provide ample evidence of fragility and uncertainty. Policies adopted by banks, investment firms, auditing organizations, and other economic entities create ongoing risk in financial markets. The economic models and practices of these organizations implement and propagate risky decision-making processes that destabilize the economy (see Snider 2014). Although notorious cases such as Enron in 2001 and Bear-Stearns in 2008 received a great deal of press, risk-taking behavior has been shown to be endemic to the functioning of today’s capitalism (Beck 1992; Neff 2012; Suarez-Villa 2012). Astonishingly, this type of behavior does not stop at the level of the corporation, but moves the unit of “risk management” to the household and individual, where people are literally pulled into perilous scenarios and situations, the appreciation of which is beyond their knowledge and understanding. Risk is pushed down to individuals who must manage complex decisions with respect to taking loans, planning investments, managing healthcare, creating a strategy for retirement, making decisions about how to handle eventual disability or chronic illness, and much more.
Precarity of employment resulting from capital’s need to respond quickly to fluctuating market conditions (and sometimes its own poor planning) creates a workforce of millions of underemployed, unemployed, self-employed, and part-time workers (Standing 2011). They manage risk by constantly retraining, rebranding, and reconfiguring their careers. The notion of “trickle-down economics,” advocated by neoconservative pundits and politicians, makes much more sense if it is understood as pushing risk, rather than benefits, down to the lower strata of society. An obvious example was the housing bubble of 2008, when people were enticed by high-risk, variable-interest loan structures to buy homes and properties significantly above their means.
Other critical aspects of contemporary life, such as pensions, education, and healthcare, have fallen into the same dynamic, forcing individuals into the adoption of risky behavior, or, in the more innocuous scenarios, forging them into units of risk management. The implementation of the Affordable Care Act is an instance of the latter, where individuals are legally required to find the most suitable health insurance plan from a range of options in a marketplace of health exchanges (if they do not get health insurance another way). While the dominant discourse is shaped around giving more people access to healthcare, the law can also be understood as an attempt to detach healthcare from employment, as employers seek to reduce bonds of commitment between themselves and employees, and to continue to push the development of the independent, “free” neoliberal person, responsible for planning and managing his or her own life.
Funding and planning that used to come from government and corporate sources are diminishing, forcing us to figure out how to go forth and manage these needs ourselves. Increasing burdens of self-management create confusion (which health/retirement plan should I choose?), time pressure (the deadline is soon), fear (what if I choose wrong?) and anxiety (how will I pay off my student loans?). Living under a shadow of precarity and unpredictability, we undertake activities we hope will be a bulwark against disaster by establishing a personal brand, educating ourselves, retraining through programs of continuing education, trying to stay healthy (in the face of constant temptations the economy sets in front of us), creating and maintaining a reputation to ensure professional opportunities, self-funding retirement, and so on. Digital technology generates rich sources of information about these activities and decisions, which are ongoing and mutable, in need of constant update and maintenance.
Another outcome of the uncertainty of employment and the unstable life narratives that separation and precarity contribute to is a pervasive sense of uselessness and futility. This sense is reinforced by the inability of educational credentials to provide persistent skills and employment opportunities in the job market. Some people experience permanent unemployability due to age, disability, or the need to provide care to aged or infirm family members.
Career disappointments may be acutely traumatic.1 Too many workers find that lack of opportunity obviates escape from a lifetime of dead-end jobs and economic insecurity, or that advanced education fails to deliver the hoped-for result. The increasing use of perilous payday loans, purchase of lottery tickets, and the abandon with which people acquire luxuries such as costly engagement rings, massive TV screens, and expensive smartphone services, indicate that we may slip into feeling that it does not matter what we do. At the peer-to-peer lending site Prosper.com, for example, the investor chooses among several loan types, the most common of which is “debt consolidation.” The desperation driving people to seek loans to gain control of metastasizing debt, and the determination brought to these grim projects of fiscal discipline, stir our sympathy. Remarkably, other loan categories include “engagement ring financing,” “vacation,” “boat,” and “household expenses.” A vacation loan at the borrower rate of 13.85 percent and a monthly engagement ring payment of $460.20 are typical examples drawn from Prosper.com (the name of which sounds increasingly ironic the more one scans the loan applications).2 Capitalism urges us to consume beyond our means, and then stands by ready to pick us up off the floor when we need to “consolidate debt,” or we have been persuaded to consume even more things we don’t need through easy credit. As Boltanski and Chiapello (2005, p. 435) say, capitalism “takes back on one level what it offers on the other.”
The human experience of monotony probably dates from the time when we learned to use tools and talk to one another. So stimulating are these uniquely human capacities that we have likely acquired a hardwired taste for physical and cognitive stimulation unmatched in other animals. Today, our culture and economy are geared toward intense cultivation and exploitation of our penchant for stimulation. Engagement with products to satiate commodified desire drives people to continually seek an array of comforts or excitements offered online. The high quality and easy availability of entertainment, beginning in the 1950s with the mass production and distribution of televisions and record players, continued in subsequent decades, culminating in the present time in which a profusion of music, film, TV, games, commentaries, opinions, news, gossip, and much more, is available online, on demand. Rather than a pleasant accessory to life, such diversions may become cravings that urge us to continually seek intense, constant stimuli. In 2013, Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, reported that many subjects in his experiment chose to administer a painful electric shock to themselves rather than sit quietly, with no external stimulation.3
The need for constant stimulation encourages people to treat basic aspects of personal and social life as transient and fleeting encounters that need to be dealt with as they arise: marriage is a short-term contract rather than a long-term commitment; the rituals and restraints of romance are superseded by hooking up and pornography; being informed is checking the headlines of customized news streams and tweets; reading is squeezed into short bursts, elevating graphic novels and brief online pieces or relying on data mining technologies that can give the “gist” of a book without the hassle of a close reading; thinking is a luxury of the past that can only be afforded by armchair philosophers of yesteryear, or an experience too drastic to endure, even if electric shock is the only alternative. Jonathan Schooler, a professor from the University of California, Santa Barbara, commented on the University of Virginia experiment: “It seems that the average person doesn’t seem to be capable of generating a sufficiently interesting train of thought to prevent them from being miserable with themselves”(Francis 2014).
If we contextualize the experimental results within the predicaments, it is less surprising that a desire for stimulation—distraction, diversion, sensation—accompanies experiences of separation, precarity, and futility. We would rather not think about them! Amplifying the effect is the well-known phenomenon of habituation, which requires increasingly higher levels of a stimulus to reach the desired state. The constant stimulation of endless content on the internet is a powerful antidote to monotony, yet drives a compulsion for even more stimulation. Few of us with internet access do not turn to its copious offerings for distraction, diversion, and sensation. For the first time in human experience, highly stimulating materials are available to all, any time of day or night, any day of the year. We do not yet know the long-term implications of the availability of such stimulating materials, but it is undeniable that we seek them out.4
After considering the predicaments, we see that the “light” and “dark” sides of neoliberal capitalism are not simplistically black and white. We shift between them at different temporal scales, some momentary, some more enduring. For example, Bonnie’s studies of video gaming demonstrated a plethora of positive social, cognitive, and psychological outcomes, yet gamers themselves were the first to ask about the obsessive behaviors they found themselves and others exhibiting, some of which they were actively attempting to forestall in their lives, or in the lives of others (see Nardi 2010, chapter 6). Anyone who has played a beloved video game knows that the border between passion and mania is not an easy one to defend. Dewey (2005) describes how our passions may “overwhelm” us.
Hamid’s studies of health technologies such as personal health records similarly illustrate their ambivalent character. On the one hand, with their potential for tracking and communication of health-related activities, these technologies can empower patients, allowing them to be informed participants in taking care of their health and in their relationships with doctors. On the other hand, they add the burden of data management onto people who are already overwhelmed by their health conditions, offloading new forms of work onto individuals. The objectification of individuals that derives from these interventions epitomizes the kinds of predicaments that efficiency-driven approaches can generate (Ekbia and Nardi 2012).
Our goal in enumerating the predicaments has been to problematize easy techno-utopian conceptions of the simple utility and beneficence of technology, and uncritical celebration of “innovation.” A broader picture must insert social and economic conditions such as unemployment, learned boredom, outdated credentials, and so on, into the processes that fuel technological participation.
We turn now to presentation of specific cases to see how heteromation plays out in communicative, cognitive, emotional, and organizing labor. Each of these types of labor draws on particular human capacities, inserting living labor into billions of moments of heteromated value creation.