Cyber-Proletariat Summary

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Nick Dyer-Witheford’s intellectually challenging, yet highly rewarding and informative, book Cyber-proletariat takes the reader on a journey through cybernetic capital connecting the dots from the deadly coltan mines of the Congo to the infamous high-tech campuses of the Silicon Valley, all the way to the laptop on your desk or the cell phone in your pocket. However, what really piqued my interest was Dyer-Witheford’s analysis of the dangers of cybernetic capital: automation, algorithms, and cybernetics and showing their relationship to the widespread precariousness of employment across multiple socio-economic strata. Could these phenomena be the catalyst to push the working class towards the formation of a revolutionary “cyber-proletariat”? …show more content…

In fact, many corporations have used the threat of automation in addition to outsourcing as a means of suppressing labor union activity. Dyer-Witheford writes “The threat of relocation and replacement cowed the once powerful union into a cycle of concession bargaining, and participation in programmes of labour-management cooperation which suppressed struggles against plant closings and mass layoffs in the name of increasing the competitiveness of the Detroit automakers” (53). It would appear that the modern worker has been caught in a bit of a quagmire, either accept that you will be exploited as a condition of employment or run the risk of your job being outsourced or simply automated out of …show more content…

In the mainstream media automation typically denotes “low-skilled” labor or heavy manufacturing jobs such as those found in automobile plants, steel mills, and coal mines which are all traditionally blue-collar, working-class, factory jobs. Contrarily, much of the automation today can be found in the corporate and service sectors of the job market. Dyer-Witheford writes that automation is “increasingly directed not just against manual work, but at the white collar jobs of intermediate positions once imagined as secure” (169). Further illustrating this idea he writes, “Even jobs apparently not easily automated may be algorithmically transformed as data-processing technology breaks them down into smaller and smaller cognitive chunks that can either be outsourced to networked micro-laborers or fully automated” (179). As this paragraph illustrates, regardless of what industry one is in and the types of work one performs, nobody is immune to the threat of displacement or precarious employment under the system of cybernetic

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