[Air-L] DigiLabour Book Talks

[Rafael Do Nascimento Grohmann]

Hi AoIR,

I would like to invite you to join us in a series of book talks (online and in-person) we are co-organizing in the next few weeks.

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January 23, 7pm, In-person, College Street United Church, 452 College St, Toronto
Book Talk: Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech and Planetary Crisis<https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3109-cybernetic-circulation-complex>
with Alessandra Mularoni and Nick Dyer-Witheford

Description
Big Tech firms dominate the global economy. But what value do they actually produce? In Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech and Planetary Crisis (Verso, 2024), Alessandra Mularoni and Nick Dyer-Witheford argue that the role of firms like Amazon and Google, Palantir and Uber, is in the speeding up and automation of the circulation of commodities. Big Tech aims to subject everything from advertising and shopping, to logistics and financial services to the level of control and predictability that capital has secured in industrial production. But there is a way out of the multiple crises that Big Tech has helped precipitate. If we are to break their grip on the global economy then it’ll take more than just antitrust legislation or reducing individual time online. What is required instead is a new, ambitious and comprehensive program of democratic collective planning that can move us beyond capitalism and benefit life on earth over profit. “Techno-feudalism is obsolete. The future is digital degrowth. This book proves it.” –  Kohei Saito, author of Slow Down The Leo Panitch School for Socialist Education is honoured to host the authors of the book for the Toronto launch of this exciting new book! All are welcome to join us for this timely discussion as we grapple with how to challenge the Big Tech firms that are quickly cementing their control over international commerce and policy. We would like to acknowledge the vital support of the Jackman Humanities Institute and the Digital Labour Working Group at the University of Toronto. Please stick around after the evening’s program for complimentary refreshments and to continue the discussion. A number of books will be available at a special discounted price!

Register here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/panitchschool/1976270


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January 27, 10am, Online, DigiLabour YouTube channel
Book talk: <https://www.ucpress.edu/books/silicon-elsewhere/paper> Silicon Elsewhere: Nairobi, Global China, and the Promise of Techno-Capital<https://www.ucpress.edu/books/silicon-elsewhere/paper>
with Andrea Pollio
Discussants: Julie Yujie Chen and Rafael Grohmann

Description
Heralded as Africa's "Silicon Savannah"—a cradle of innovation—Nairobi has become a technology and innovation capital for Kenya and for the continent at large. With a national strategy that has prioritized digital technology for the last two decades, many Chinese digital champions, smaller startups, and investors have since chosen Nairobi as their African landing pad. Mapping the interface between Nairobi's innovation scene and China's digital presence there, Silicon Elsewhere tells a unique story of ingenuity and adaptation, failure and speculation, and hopefulness and pragmatism. Andrea Pollio's ethnography draws on interviews with cautious venture capitalists, renegade entrepreneurs, dedicated bureaucrats, and ambitious data scientists to explore the competing meanings of contemporary techno-capital. Moving between leafy coworking spaces and the temperature-controlled rooms of brand-new data centers, Pollio locates Nairobi among the experimental capitals, not peripheries, of technological change in the early twenty-first century

Join us here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Wkm6eWTj2c


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February 5, 9am, Online, DigiLabour YouTube channel
Book Talk: The Social Codes of Tech Workers: Class Identity in Digital Capitalism<https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262553537/the-social-codes-of-tech-workers/>
with Robert Dorschel
Discussants: Helena Wright and Kenzo Seto

Description
Digital technologies shape nearly every aspect of our lives. Yet little attention has been paid to the tech workers who design and program these technologies. Instead, the spotlight often falls on two extremes: the elite class of tech entrepreneurs and the precarious digital proletariat of gig and crowd workers. This narrow focus has left a critical gap in understanding the middle-class professionals operating behind the scenes of digital capitalism. Drawing on over 50 original interviews and discourse analytical research conducted in the US and Germany, The Social Codes of Tech Workers takes readers deep into their hearts and minds. Robert Dorschel demonstrates how tech workers’ subjectivity is structured by a return of social critique, hybrid professional roles, and distinctive lifestyles. The book identifies tech workers as a contradictory class formation, oscillating between a spirit of emancipation and yet another spirit of capitalism. This work will appeal to scholars across disciplines concerned with digital labor, identity, and class, as well as to the broader public interested in the culture of the tech industry and the evolving future of work.

Join us here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5j_bpnzKIQ


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February 5, 7pm, In-person, College Street United Church, 452 College St
Book talk: Organizing Amazon: Building Worker Power Under Conditions of Fragmentation, Precarity and Regimentation<https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/professional-business/organizing-amazon> <https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/professional-business/organizing-amazon>
with Tom Vickers, and a delegation of international Amazon worker-organizers

Description
Amazon workers in Coventry, England have won breakthrough wage gains through years of strikes and organizing at the global giant. Now, a new book documents these achievements, and the militant, grassroots methods the workers and their GMB union employed to build worker power. Organizing Amazon: Building Worker Power Under Conditions of Fragmentation, Precarity and Regimentation offers a rich case study of the factors contributing to the union’s successes and setbacks. It provides a practical organizing model applicable beyond Amazon, offering strategies to engage the workforce, sustain support and develop leadership. We are incredibly honoured to host the author of the book Tom Vickers, and longtime labour activist Jonathan Rosenblum, as well as two workers from the Coventry facility for the first stop on their North American organizing tour. The evening will feature a discussion of the lessons to be learned from the campaign in Coventry and what strategies will be needed for the Canadian labour movement to begin challenging the Amazon behemoth. We would like to thank our friends at the Digital Labour Working Group at the University of Toronto for their support of this event. Please stick around after the evening’s program for complimentary refreshments and to continue the discussion.

Register here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/panitchschool/1899722


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February 12, 7pm, In-person, Friends House, 60 Lowther Ave
Book talk: Notes Toward a Digital Workers Inquiry<https://www.commonnotions.org/buy/notes-toward-a-digital-workers-inquiry>
with The Capacitor Collective.
The Capacitor Collective is a research collective dedicated to digital worker inquiry rooted in labor organizing within and against digital capitalism. The collective includes: Enda Brophy, Julie Chen, Alessandro Delfanti, Brian Dolber, Lilly Irani, and Tamara Kneese.

Description
Join us as we celebrate the launch of Notes Toward a Digital Workers Inquiry, a brand new book full of first-hand accounts from the tech sector’s resurgent labor movement as artificial intelligence gains ground in every facet of our lives. As tech billionaires align with Trump, they are also launching a renewed assault on labor through artificial intelligence and alienating tactics. But for now, it still takes workers to make fortunes for the bosses, and collective action is again on the rise. Previously thought to be “unorganizable,” these workers are part of a North American movement that is reaffirming faith in collective revolutionary action through new methods of organizing, new ways of association, and a new synthesis of traditional labor activities with original research. To capture this growing class consciousness, the Capacitor Collective has conducted ten illuminating interviews with platform workers and organizers whose efforts align traditional motives with new tactics in a text that shakes up the worker inquiry tradition and imagines new ways to produce knowledge with and for the movement. All are welcome to hear directly from the contributors to the book about the findings of this important work and to discuss what lessons can be taken forward by activist-researchers, organizers, and workers alike. The book is available now from Common Notions Press!

Register here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/panitchschool/1978820


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March 3, 2pm, In-person, Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI), UofT, 130 St. George Street, Toronto
Book talk: Digital Queers and High Tech Gays
with Alex Ketchum

Description
Digital Queers and High Tech Gays is the history of LGBTQ+ cyber activism in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and beyond! Beginning in 1980, these queer cyber activists founded regional, national, and international organizations of engineers, scientists, and high tech professionals. They formed LGBTQ+ employee resource groups at tech companies. Throughout the 1990s, queer cyber activists collected money, hardware, and software to distribute to LGBTQ+ community organizations. They wrote guidebooks, zines, and manuals as part of their larger project of information activism. They utilized print, phone lines, and the World Wide Web to teach, share, and advocate. Queer cyber activists built Internet infrastructures and expanded the idea of who could be an Internet user. Through their work with LGBTQ2S+ archives, queer cyber activists ultimately also created the tools needed to preserve their own history. They engaged in this serious labor while continuing to center joy; through sharing food, celebrating together, and making jokes, queer cyber activists nourished a community that could undertake these technical transformations. From advocating for tech workers’ rights, to equipping LGBTQ+ organizations with the hardware and software needed to do their work, to creating in-person and online spaces where they shared information, socialized, and preserved queer histories, LGBTQ+ cyber activists used analog and digital technologies to transform queer folks’ lives both on the Internet and away from the keyboard. Ultimately this book explores how marginalized groups, particularly LGBTQ+ people, respond to, re-work, build, and shape digital technologies. Rather than passive users, marginalized peoples, particularly LGBTQ+ people, have played a role in shaping Internet culture

More info soon


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And you can expect 2-3 more book talks in March and April.

See you there!

best,

Rafael



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dr. Rafael Grohmann

Assistant Professor of Media Studies

Department of Arts, Culture and Media<https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/acm/rafael-grohmann>

Faculty of Information<https://ischool.utoronto.ca/profile/rafael-grohmann/>

University of Toronto

Leader, DigiLabour<https://digilabour.com.br/>
Research Associate, University of Oxford<https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/profiles/rafael-grohmann/>

Founding Editor, Platforms & Society<https://journals.sagepub.com/home/PNS>

Principal Investigator, Worker-Owned Intersectional Platforms (WOIP)<https://digilabour.com.br/worker-owned-intersectional-platforms-woip/>

Co-Lead, Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF)<https://criticaldigitalmethods.ca/creative-labour-critical-futures/>

Researcher, AI Policy Observatory for the World of Work<https://www.essex.ac.uk/research-projects/ai-policy-observatory-for-the-world-of-work>
Senior Fellow, Massey College<https://www.masseycollege.ca/>

Faculty Affiliate, Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society<https://srinstitute.utoronto.ca/>  <https://srinstitute.utoronto.ca/>