Associate-Professor
Nick Dyer-Witheford
will deliver a public lecture entitled
"The Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex"
Friday, 6 May
WG404, Sir Paul Reeves Building
AUT City Campus
3:00pm - 4:00pm
DYER-WITHEFORD argues that the combination of automation, logistical command and financialization enabled by information technology raises to a new intensity a fundamental dynamic of capitalism – its drive to simultaneously induct populations into waged labour and expel them as un- or under-employed superfluous to its increasingly machinic systems. Digitization has accelerated this moving contradiction, creating a cyclonic process that on the one hand, envelops the globe in networked supply chains and agile production systems, making labour available to capital on a planetary scale, and, on the other, drives development of adept automata and algorithmic software that renders such labour redundant. In this whirlwind, the traditional, Euro-centrically conceived, stereotypically male "working class" of the global north-west is disintegrating into, one the one hand, a strata of technology professionals, tending to identification with digital capital, though shot through with hacker proclivities and, on the other, a vast pool of un-, under- and vulnerably employed labour; transnational and feminized. They live in the shadowlands between work and worklessness that has always defined the proletarian condition. Divided across border-policed wage-zones of a world-market, the fractions of this global proletariat are frequently in tension with one another, even as they are subject to common exploitation by capital. Thus, though the technical composition of class is apparent, its composition is rife with political contradictions.
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