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Conference Presentations by Lukas Schutzbach

Digital Americas, 2021

During the sustained lockdowns and COVID-related social distancing, digital tools for communicati... more During the sustained lockdowns and COVID-related social distancing, digital tools for communication and co-operation have become ubiquitous. Companies like Facebook and Amazon even announced to maintain and extend remote working solutions after the pandemic. They promise benefits such as more freedom, flexibility, and self-management for the workers, although the flaws and exploitative potentials of these measures seem obvious. As Naomi Klein (2020) claims, a digitized “no-touch future” only increases isolation and alienation of workers, leaving them unprotected from hyper-exploitation while simultaneously rendering the individual worker’s conditions invisible.
At first glance, the relocation of work into the home appears to be an encroaching intrusion of work into private spaces, undermining the distinction of the spheres of leisure and labor accompanied by the insertion of technologies of isolation and surveillance. However, in arguing with an idea brought forward by Zizek (2014: 173-8), I want to claim that thinking about the inverse might result in a promising methodological opposition: the result of the increasing translation of work-related processes into digital spaces marks not only the dissolution of the boundaries between labor and leisure, but also – more importantly – the privatization of originally public spaces. Digital technologies aimed at connecting and maintaining collaborative relationships between workers during times of social distancing can be understood to paradoxically contribute to and amplify their isolation and alienation instead.
Communication via video conferences or digital meeting spaces, for instance, is rooted in the digitalization of the self, the insertion of the subject as surface into a liminal “hyperspace.” The communicative medium detaches itself as a space not of communication but of digital re-construction of a decentered subject. Therefore, digital communication constitutes a simulacrum of public space, a detached simulation of cooperation and interaction which only serves to augment the digital alienation characteristic of our late modern societies even prior to the digital offensive during the pandemic.
No doubt, these technologies can be a temporary fix for the immediate hardships of social distancing; my interest, however, lies in the long-term effects, the naturalization of these structures beyond the current “state of emergency” could have on the future of work, regarding the stabilization of exploitative formations, and more broadly the configuration of intersubjective relationships, community, and solidarity.

Papers by Lukas Schutzbach

Springer Berlin Heidelberg eBooks, 2023

Digital Americas, 2021

During the sustained lockdowns and COVID-related social distancing, digital tools for communicati... more During the sustained lockdowns and COVID-related social distancing, digital tools for communication and co-operation have become ubiquitous. Companies like Facebook and Amazon even announced to maintain and extend remote working solutions after the pandemic. They promise benefits such as more freedom, flexibility, and self-management for the workers, although the flaws and exploitative potentials of these measures seem obvious. As Naomi Klein (2020) claims, a digitized “no-touch future” only increases isolation and alienation of workers, leaving them unprotected from hyper-exploitation while simultaneously rendering the individual worker’s conditions invisible.
At first glance, the relocation of work into the home appears to be an encroaching intrusion of work into private spaces, undermining the distinction of the spheres of leisure and labor accompanied by the insertion of technologies of isolation and surveillance. However, in arguing with an idea brought forward by Zizek (2014: 173-8), I want to claim that thinking about the inverse might result in a promising methodological opposition: the result of the increasing translation of work-related processes into digital spaces marks not only the dissolution of the boundaries between labor and leisure, but also – more importantly – the privatization of originally public spaces. Digital technologies aimed at connecting and maintaining collaborative relationships between workers during times of social distancing can be understood to paradoxically contribute to and amplify their isolation and alienation instead.
Communication via video conferences or digital meeting spaces, for instance, is rooted in the digitalization of the self, the insertion of the subject as surface into a liminal “hyperspace.” The communicative medium detaches itself as a space not of communication but of digital re-construction of a decentered subject. Therefore, digital communication constitutes a simulacrum of public space, a detached simulation of cooperation and interaction which only serves to augment the digital alienation characteristic of our late modern societies even prior to the digital offensive during the pandemic.
No doubt, these technologies can be a temporary fix for the immediate hardships of social distancing; my interest, however, lies in the long-term effects, the naturalization of these structures beyond the current “state of emergency” could have on the future of work, regarding the stabilization of exploitative formations, and more broadly the configuration of intersubjective relationships, community, and solidarity.

Springer Berlin Heidelberg eBooks, 2023