Goodbye iSlave, a book by Jack Linchuan Qiu, discusses mobile-phone slaves from the perspectives of production regimes in factories and the mechanisms that create dependence on the device. It was the subject of my Ouvir Imagens column on Rádio USP on April 30. I also discussed Radical Technologies, by urbanist and writer Adam Greenfield, who proposes critical uses of technology for political transformation. Update: Greenfield is coming to Brazil in November as a guest of IAU-USP and will participate in SIGraDi 2018.
People are increasingly attached to their phones. The transformations this small multitasking device has brought to everyday life are countless. The mobile phone is almost an extension of our bodies. It is a calendar, means of communication, bank, workspace, reading space, map, camera, album, radio, recorder—in short, a kind of urban remote control that even works as a telephone.
Our dependence on the mobile phone is so great that psychiatrists identified a specific syndrome some time ago: nomophobia, the panic of being without a mobile phone. The name comes from the English phrase “no mobile phone phobia.”
Jack Linchuan Qiu, a professor at the University of Hong Kong, identifies this as a symptom of a more complex process. In his book Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition, he analyzes forms of production in the mobility industry, linking it to slavery in two ways: through forced labor and through the manufacturing of “iSlaves,” or mobile-phone slaves.
At the end of the book, Qiu proposes some forms of resistance. One is to promote worker-generated content, in contrast to the user-generated content so prized by the digital media market. Another is to encourage critical use of social networks and devices. Finally, he advocates supporting more ethical industries, such as the successful Dutch company Fairphone, which recycles equipment, guarantees fair working conditions, and uses certified materials whose production respects the environment and human rights.
Another very interesting author who has been thinking about alternative policies for emerging technologies that do more than reproduce existing power arrangements is Adam Greenfield. In his latest book, Radical Technologies, he maps the main technologies changing everyday life, such as smartphones, the Internet of Things, Augmented Reality, cryptocurrencies, automation, machine learning, digital fabrication, and Artificial Intelligence.
On one hand, he analyzes the cultural and social impacts of the vertical integration and concentration of services in the hands of a few companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon. On the other, he places his bets on a famous statement by technology pioneer and engineer Alan Kay: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
Starting from this premise, Greenfield imagines scenarios in which the radical use of digital fabrication, combined with the Internet of Things and open-source software, could profoundly alter the production chain, reducing poverty and allowing the commons to emerge on a planetary scale.
Greenfield is coming to Brazil in November. He is one of the keynote speakers at SIGraDi, an international conference on architecture, urbanism, design, and digital art being held this year at IAU, the University of São Paulo’s Institute of Architecture and Urbanism in São Carlos.
Good Bye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition
Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life (Verso, 2017)
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