Beyond the Screen: Uneven Geographies, Digital Labour, and the City of Cognitive-Cultural Capitalism
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2017
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Mahmoudi, D. and Levenda, A. (2016). Beyond the Screen: Uneven Geographies, Digital Labour, and the City of Cognitive-Cultural Capitalism. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, Volume 14, Issue 1, pp. 99-120.
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This item may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. It is made available by UMBC for non-commercial research and education. For permission to publish or reproduce, please contact the author.
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Abstract
In this paper, we demonstrate that an examination of the socio-environmental impacts of
digital Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) remains a fruitless enterprise without “materializing”
digital labour. We suggest a two-part approach to materializing digital labour: first, connecting
political economic analyses of digital ICTs to the co-evolution and geography of planetary urbanization
and technological change, and second, examining the relationships between immaterial, digital
labour and the material industrial production system. In the context of broad changes in technology,
social life, and urbanization, many scholars have theorized a shift towards a third phase of capitalism,
beyond mercantilism and industrialism, based in immaterial, digital, and cognitive labour. We introduce
the literature on cognitive-cultural capitalism and third-wave urbanization as markers of contemporary
capitalism, producing uneven socio-spatial arrangements across the global-urban system. Synthesis
of media and communication studies and political economies of urbanization suggests that both capital
accumulation and the social lives of (planetary) urban residents are increasingly mediated and
structured by online, digital ICT platforms. We show that digital ICTs are sophisticated manipulations
of nature that require and illuminate new ways of thinking about digital labour, and more broadly, of
immaterial labour. We suggest that the immaterial labour associated with digital ICTs is actually material
labour responsible for increasing the velocity of capital circulation, as a moment of production and
an appendage of the growing complexity of third-phase capitalist industry and urbanization. The materiality
of cognitive, cultural, and symbolic labour reaches beyond the city, invades the lifeworlds of a
planet of urban residents, and excretes concrete, silicon, bits, servers, and energy waste producing an
urban landscape beyond the city. Through an examination of data centres, we show the necessary
relationship between the third-wave urbanization and its planetary reach into rural, pristine Oregon.
Data centres in Oregon and the broader Pacific Northwest highlight the uneven geography of “clean”
digital labour focused in large urban technopoles; the potentially harmful, material, and socioenvironmental
impacts of data centres in rural areas; and the necessary and dialectic relationship
between the two for cognitive-cultural capitalism. We argue that third-wave urbanization, and the concurrent
and co-produced technological advancement in digital ICTs and digital