Digital Labor

Cindy Milstein

person  

Cindy Milstein is author of Anarchism and Its Aspirations (AK Press, 2010), editor of Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism (AK Press, 2015), and coauthor (with Erik Ruin) of Paths toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism (PM Press, 2012). Recently, she has been actively engaged in resisting evictions, including her own collective house/space, and anti-cop organizing in the Bay Area, and has written many “Dispatches from Gentrifying San Francisco” on her blog.

Re-Commoning Our Lives
Behind every app, every platform, in today’s “sharing economy” is a hierarchical social relation. Indeed, “sharing” (and often “cooperation”) only serves to further mask the logic of domination inherent to capitalism, which always results in brutal displacement and an inegalitarian world, and increasingly so. As Audre Lorde rightly asserted, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” So what might it look like to bring our own toolkit to the project of constructing a free society? What might these tools even look like, and how would we make ethical use of them so as to increasingly school ourselves in de-commodified sharing to meet our needs/desires and collective processes of self-determination and self-governance?

 
Platform Society
Fri, November 13
11:00 AM - 12:50 PM

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