Are we doomed because of the new digital technologies used in workspaces? Can we avoid measuring in our work? Or are we trapped in a metrification dystopia? Can we create workspaces that can produce what we prefer about human effort, and if yes, what technologies could we use?
Here, monetary-theorist Irene Sotiropoulou explores and critiques the production means that were created for capitalist profit-making, showing how we can subvert these and use them for our own non-capitalist purposes. Machines against Measure shows that in times of capitalist restructuring and multiple social reproduction crises, there open up new possibilities to experiment with quantity, measuring, machines and digital technologies, creating new ways of production and transaction. Within these, are ways of sharing that defy many principles of capitalist production. Using everyday examples from grassroots organisations, this offers new insights into how to be inventive with what we have at hand, revealing a more utopian vision of technology and work, based on re-defining how we measure what we do.
Author(s): Irene Sotiropoulou
Series: Autonomy and Automation
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 174
City: London
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
Part 1 The non-mainstream modes of transaction and production and the quantity question
1 Introduction: The non-mainstream modes of transaction and production, or when what works in practice struggles to work in theory
2 Theoretical background: Capitalist patriarchy, quantification and the alternatives to capitalism
3 Theory again: Is measuring a form of violence?
4 Approaches, research methodologies and the quantitative methods problem
Part 2 The practices of quantifying otherwise
5 Quantities and measures in the non-mainstream field
6 The question of time
7 The question of value
8 Information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the non-mainstream field
9 Machines otherwise?
Part 3 Machines, measures and (social) reproduction
10 Machines, measures and the neoliberal version of capitalist patriarchy
11 Machines and measures in service of (social) reproduction
12 Capitalist patriarchal reprise: Measures and machines as contested means of (re)production
13 Conclusion: ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ and the options we have
Notes
Bibliography
Index
