The Future of Work

 

Inside the bowels of the third industrial revolution—where industry 4.0 meets crowdsourcing, where digital requests meet physical labor—lies the so-called "sharing" economy. In the revelatory space of  so-called sharing, our laundry is done at the tap of a button; our groceries are delivered from the corner store; we hire others to wait in ticket queues; and we have finally learned how to carpool—or rather, to use the properly commercialized term—to Uberpool. 

 

But what is the future of work? Can we know which tools we will need for work in the future, and which tools will become obsolete? Can we postulate on the shifting landscape of work inside the current accelerationist, neoliberal paradigm of labor? The two-person artist collective Anxious to Make sees a thing called “sharing,” but is not sure of its implications on our share of wealth distribution. 

 

In The Future of Work, Anxious to Make aggregates over one hundred results from a survey asking participants about the sharing economy, labor, bosses, and the future. Some questions are simple, such as: do you consider yourself a worker in the so-called “sharing economy?” Others are more complex, such as: do you ever feel like algorithms are your boss?” This survey was distributed at two different galleries: V2_  in Rotterdam, NL, for the show “The Gig is Up--How New Technologies Are Reshaping The Future Of Work”; and B4BEL4B in Oakland, CA, for the show “Side Gig--Anxious To Make’s solo show”. Responses to the suevey were also commissioned from cloud workers on Fiverr.com and Amazon Mechanical Turk.

 

While the future of work is unknowable, The Future of Work take a stance which speculates, postulates, and and begins to offer potential answers. One thing is certain: the future won’t be a single-authored entity, but a swelling aggregation of the many.

 

Foreword

 

The Survey

 

Making you

video stills

 

HOW TO MAKE YOURSELF [BLANK]

a graphical understanding of needs

 

THINGS MOST DESIRED + MOST GOOGLED

a list-view

 

DO YOU HAVE A BODY?

pie charts on bodies, sharing, and commissioning

 

DO YOU EVER FEEL LIKE ALGORITHMS ARE YOUR BOSSES?

on relationships to labor and the sharing economy

 

TWENTY-FIVE DRAWINGS OF THE SHARING ECONOMY

from citizens of oakland, ca, usa

 

THE FUTURE OF WORK

in long and short answers

 

APPENDIX

“Making You” script

 

AFTERWORD

 

CONTRIBUTORS + ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

 

 

Anxious to Make is the collaborative practice of Liat Berdugo and Emily Martinez, two commissioning bodies. Our focus is on the so-called "sharing economy" and the contemporary artist's "anxiety to make" in the accelerationist, neoliberal economic landscape. While Anxious to Make’s physical existence takes many shifting forms, it often manifests as series of video commissions, downloads, online generators, workshops, net art interventions, and sweepstakes. Anxious to Make believes in absurdist extremes as a way to examine contemporary realities. Our work has appeared recently in EMMEDIA (Calgary, CA), Transmediale (Berlin, DE), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), MoMA PS1 (New York), V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam, NL), and The Luminary (St. Louis, MO). More at anxioustomake.ga.

 Liat Berdugo is an artist, writer, and curator whose work—which focuses on embodiment and digitality, archive theory, and new economies—interweaves video, writing, performance, and computer programming to form a considerate and critical lens on digital culture. Berdugo has been exhibited in galleries and festivals internationally, and she collaborates widely with individuals and archives. She is the Net Art and Special Programs Curator curator for Print Screen; co-founder and curator of the Bay Area’s Living Room Light Exchange; co-founder and curator of World Wide West. Her writing appears in Rhizome, Temporary Art Review, HZ Journal, and others. Berdugo received an MFA from RISD and a BA from Brown University. She is currently an assistant professor of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco. More at liatberdugo.com.

Emily Martinez is an artist working with digital and networked media. Her recent practice and research interests examine the relationship between media, memory, and catastrophe; post-representational forms of subjectivity, emancipatory practices, and the digital archive. Martinez currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. More at http://somethingnothing.me.

Stacy Elaine Dacheux (illustrator) has work featured in the Los Angeles Times, presented at Cinefamily, and published in The Rumpus. Her interviews can be found in FLAUNT, PAPER, BUST, The Awl, Ms., and Los Angeles Review of Books. Most recently, she appeared on IFC’s Comedy Bang! Bang!. More at www.stacyelaine.com.

Tara Shi (illustrator) is designer and organizer based in Northern California. She is the co-founder of This Will Take Time, a non-profit organization dedicated to long-term projects in land-use, arts and education in Point Area, CA; co-founder of Disk Cactus, an art and technology studio based in Oakland, CA; and co-founder and co-curator of World Wide West, and annual art + technology summit in California. She spends a good deal of time digging. More at http://unknownunknown.net/ 

VoiceOverPete is a spokesman-for-hire fromFiverr.com, a website hosting a global, online marketplace for digital tasks and services, beginning at a cost of $5 per gig.