Virtual Labor
by Tim Jackson
In a society of simulation, fantasy does not replace reality; it precedes it.
- Derrick de Kerckhove
The world as we see it is passing.
- Paul of Tarsus
I have been working hard lately. My back is sore. My eyes are dry, red, and sensitive to light. My hands feel as if they have been locked into a fixed curl and my body assumes the devolutionary simian curl of laptop use. Yet, despite these physical ailments I am not physically tired. I haven't even broken a sweat during all of my labors. Although my mind is fatigued, I remain restless and find sleep difficult. My mind continues to labor while my body remains in a suspended state of atrophy. You see, I live and work in cyberspace.
I am writing this in a small town within a rural mountain range in Pennsylvania. It is 3:00 AM in deep winter. I am not being paid to write this, yet I am writing about work in cyberspace, I am working the concept of virtual work. I am an academic and this is spring break. This type of work is a privilege, as is my profession in general. My work in cyberspace allows me the opportunity to think about the conditions and implications of such work. I am therefore no longer working, yet I labor on – virtually. You see, there are no time clocks or bells ringing the end of the workday in one of my several physical work-sites (in this case the one that is also my home). Work in cyberspace runs on the endless digital march, the binary on-off transition which breaks the otherwise cyclical flow of time/space.
Being in digital time is the moment of the blink where time is the event without a horizon, while work is a non-linear function of this ontological state. Imagine digital seasons or sunsets, where the sights and sounds of one moment simply cease and those of another begin. What if the temperature changed digitally, or we aged in a non-linear manner. The digital fragmentation of time/space in these examples illustrates the schizophrenic dimension of life in cyberspace, where thought/events often collide in a surreal manner and one has the occasional feeling of having accidentally assumed the avatar of Oz. These are some of the contradictions that my analog body experiences as my mind works in cyberspace. Even my text/thoughts begin to construct non-sequential digital narrative structures despite my best efforts to stream an analogic path of ideas.
Workers of the world, fan out.
- Stewart Brand, The Media Lab, Inventing the Future at MIT
Work in cyberspace is schizophrenic in part because it gives the worker the delusional sense of being simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, and more importantly, working in cyberspace often leads to a withdrawal from the social relationships which are normal to workers within physical public spaces and communities.
In the information economy, many workers no longer are required to congregate in workplaces to do their jobs. The work of the body becomes eclipsed by the work of the mind. At its worst, urban public are becoming dangerous geographical zones which one must pass through to reach the bunker of one's private space and/or cyberspatial worksite. Such a representation of life may become a succession of border crossings marked by the solace of work and the possibility of intimate physical relationships.
Machines for seeing modify perception.
- Paul Virilio, Aesthetics of Disappearance
While some consider cyberspace an information super-highway leading to a utopian future through a teleological vision of technology, I believe cyberspace provides the last terrestrial frontier for empire building, as in the adage "all roads lead to Rome". While all roads on the Internet do not lead to Silicon Valley, the ideological force of late capitalism as made manifest through cyberspace is no less imperial in nature. The toll for travel and work in cyberspace is indeed prohibitive to many in late capitalist societies and to the majority of our global population.
The illusion of the Internet as a radically democratic space has already become apparent to many, who have to endure endless narrowcast ads through various browsers and information gateways in their search for the desired content online. Cyberspace may provide both a site for ideological ruptures as well as providing a new space for the reproduction of dominant ideological narratives. The content conveyed via cyberspace may therefore serve to reinforce dominant power and identity relations, and/or to subvert them. New media spheres of discourse both resist the traditional politics of closure imposed by ideology while providing new technological forms of hegemony which restrict and minimize such ruptures. For example, the Internet is being portrayed as a radical libertarian space for interaction by the same industrialist forces that exert enormous influence upon the limiting factors of this virtual space. This offers the illusion of freedom to the denizens of this virtual world, a false consciousness dressed up as an ideological rupture.
I sense the circadian pull of dawn, and as I measure the space of my breath and heartbeat against the growing light over the mountains, despite my reservations, I realize the real work of cyberspace has just begun and the analogic forces still hold sway in the wetware of the body.
Copyright © 1999 Tim Jackson
A longer version of this piece entitled "Working Cyberspace" was originally published in Bad Subjects in 1997.
Tim Jackson, M.F.A., Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Penn State. He researches and teaches new media theory and production. He can be reached at taj2@psu.edu. See his work at: http://cac.psu.edu/~taj2/.