Data Production Labour (2017)

Manuel Beltrán

Sponsor: V2_Lab, Host: UNTREF

Machines are outing us. As some time ago happened to horses after the invention of the steam engine, humans are becoming obsolete to perform mechanical labor, soon, with the advance of artificial intelligence, it will also affect our possibilities to be useful workers performing intellectual labor.

The IoHO explores this scenario and tries to ask questions on how to reposition the role of humans in society, particularly how to cope with a labor-market dominated by machines.

Becoming obsolete will create a new scenario on which new forms of labor will emerge and flourish. Our aim is to explore, question and affect scenarios of that transition.

Human-generated data is a resource already extracted by companies like Google and Facebook, producing vast amounts of capital. Why aren’t we, the data workers, capitalizing from it? If even jobless workers are generating capital by producing data, are we truly unemployed? Which propositions for our data labor rights can we think of.

More info via: speculative.capital/

This project was developed during a residency as part of a Summer Sessions residency at V2_.