Labor
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On Sourcery, or the enclosure(?) of remote access
In this post, I try to unpack some of my concerns around Sourcery as raised in my Society of California Archivists keynote, and how they relate to the visibility of archival labor, austerity, and enclosure. -
🔖 Kelly Pendergrast, "Disassembly Required" –
Instead, what would it look like relate to today’s machines as the 19th century weavers did, and make decisions about technology in the present? To look past the false promise of the future, and straight at what the robot embodies now, who it serves, and how it works for or against us.
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One of the things coming out of the #saa20 Research Forum #saa20rf are the net negative structural and strategic impacts of contingent labor on archival practice. It seems to make poor economic, practical, and long-term sense to rely on it further and it’s disheartening to see that we’ve had to.
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Solidarity, logistics, and infrastructure on Prime Day
July 15 and 16th are “Prime Day,” Amazon’s attempt to drive up sales and artificial demand around things we don’t need at prices they’ve convinced us that we can afford. Thanks to Mar Hicks, many of us heard that workers at a Shakopee, Minnesota fulfillment center are holding a six-hour work stoppage on one of the busiest days of the year. Alongside, many have called for a boycott on Amazon and its subsidiaries (Whole Foods, Goodreads, Twitch, etc.), and others have called for a general strike to protest Amazon’s collaboration with Palantir in aiding ICE. With all of this in mind, I’ve been reflecting on what larger scale industrial actions could look like when we look at Amazon’s simultaneous leveraging of centralization and unreliability of single resources to provide critical infrastructure for the IT sector and its own operations.