Just Say No
My father dressed me as the Berlin Wall for a party the year I turned five. It was December 1989. I couldn’t understand why all the adults thought my cardboard box covered in green bar computer paper was so hilarious. “The problem with your generation is that you have no sense that the future could be otherwise,” my boyfriend told me. It was Spring 2007. I was twenty-two. He was thirty-three, from Northern England. He’d dropped out of school and spent his late teens and early twenties working in a tea factory in Harrowgate, and then gave it all up to go to university and study critical theory, first for a BA and then an MPhil and finally a PhD. Now he was a university adjunct. “You - all my students… you have no sense that things have ever been any other way, that there is any other system besides capitalism”. We could probably say the same for everyone who was born after the fall of the Berlin Wall or was too young to get my Dad’s joke. Mark Fisher called this ‘capitalist realism’, a sense of the ever-diminishing possibilities in the present to think or be otherwise, ‘the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now even impossible to imagine a coherent alternative to it.’ [1]
In 2017, some ten years after the financial crash and my ex-boyfriend’s pronouncements on the end of history, Conor McGarrigle built #Rise&Grind. #Rise&Grind uses Tensorflow, Google’s open source machine learning software, running successive iterations of dialogue from the Twitter hashtag #riseandgrind through the system until it began to learn the vernacular. ‘Rise and Grind’ is the maxim of a particular work hard/work hard ethos, of 5am training sessions and self-reliance, of climb-the-ladder work ethic extolled by a boomer generation that nimbly pulled the ladder up behind themselves. Gradually the bot starts to spew out its own sentiments: ‘handouts don’t exist! Work or you don’t eat!’ McGarrigle’s twitter bot is a crash course in machine learning and selective training data, in the cheery self-optimisation of sleep apps and motivational Instagram quotes, but it’s also a crash course in neoliberal think, the belief, spoon fed to millennials and Gen Z, that if they just work hard enough, success is waiting for them, that economic insecurity is a personal blight for not trying hard enough, for refusing to ‘#RiseandGrind.
We are the rise and grind generation. The generation who periodically feels like they can’t keep going but does so anyway. We’ve been taught since we were children that if we push the boat out, we will eventually ‘win’ the system. Since the financial crash we’ve also been taught not to rock the boat and demand too much in return, in case our zero hours contracts are given to somebody else. Somebody who complains less, sleeps faster, is willing to work harder. The Internet has created killer apps for working outside of work (I’m writing this on a train somewhere in the midlands), just as social media has given us opportunities to witness the seeming productivity and humble-bragging of others in real-time. We may have reached and surpassed emotional and physical exhaustion, as workers and users, as lovers and parents and social media acquaintances, a condition amplified by the pandemic and the endless bleed of work emails and zoom meetings into bath-time and cooking and online shopping, but we have just kept going. We don’t know how to stop or imagine an alternative. Refusal has been scrubbed clean from our vernacular.
How to Do Nothing
It’s hard to refuse. To resist the home appliances demanding we act, the group messages (every few days my husband asks me, a little passive aggressively, if I wouldn’t mind wishing his great aunt a happy anniversary on the family WhatsApp), the work emails and push notifications demanding and monetising our attention. It’s hard to resist the big and mundane calls to act, and in resisting, it’s hard to imagine an alternative. Simply opting out is no longer an option. And, as Jenny Odell argues, It’s also almost impossible to imagine how to resist at a moment when everyone, from Deliveroo drivers to university students, sees their margin for refusal shrinking. [2]
Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy is a backlash against a culture of relentless self-optimisation where even rest and pleasure are now framed as productivity enhancing activities. Instead, Odell is asking us to think about ways to ‘exit the trajectory of productive time’ and reclaim the politics in acts of uselessness and time wasting.[3] Most Californian manifestos calling for more ‘downtime’ or ‘self-care’ frame these moments of retreat as productivity enhancers, recharging the minds and bodies of the worker so they can return to their screens refreshed and more productive than ever. Instead, Odell, an artist and native of California, explores how the fantasy of opting out, from deleting TikTok, to setting up a utopian commune in the hills, is no longer possible. Odell’s call to do nothing isn’t about simple refusal, then, but takes the form of more general types of uselessness and selective inattention in online and offline spaces.
Odell’s search for more mindful engagement with social media chimes with Rob Kitchin and Alistair Fraser’s calls to practice what they call ‘slow computing’.[4] Much as the slow food movement emphasises local economies, degrowth, the development of commons and traditional knowledge, slow computing sets out numerous practical and political means to take back control, redirect attention and counter the more pernicious effects of living digital lives. According to the authors, It does this both personally, by providing tactics for managing how you engage with a digitally mediated world, and collectively, by pooling knowledge, cooperatively acting together, and mobilizing political power to shift public debate and influence the regulation of questionable practices. These include developing new ‘click-ways’ for engaging with online content and finding ways to ‘switch off smart’ that allow the user to do so in a way that lets others know why they are nor engaging or responding, through to what the authors call ‘data dancing’, combining privacy and encryption tools with forms of data obfuscation.
The Art of Uselessness
Another space Odell draws our attention to is art. For Odell, art and craft and the kinds of engagement they require might teach us new scales and tones of attention that we can apply to other areas of our lives. For other theorists, though, art can also be a space for refusing productivity precisely because it produces nothing much. Art, the French critic Maurice Blanchot argues ‘acts poorly and little… as soon as art measures itself against action, immediate and pressing action can only put it in the wrong’.[5] In Not Working, Psychoanalyst Josh Cohen explores art’s semantic origins in uselessness, in deliberately unproductive, pointless pursuits. What, argues Cohen, if we were to value art as the one space where economic measure and the quest for productivity does not apply? [6]
My first introduction to Constant Dullaart was at an event in Science Gallery Dublin. Alongside a juvenile video piece combining .tts and .ass extension files to objectifying rap, there was a video clip of a sculpture I never forgot. It was a manually constructed YouTube loading animation made from a circle of suspended light bulbs. The piece is emblematic of Dullaart’s reflexive Internet works, but it also sticks with me as an example of a particular kind of uselessness, of stalled and idle moments online where no real meaning or value is being produced. More recent works by the artist deal directly in start-up culture, a co-working space in Amsterdam, a real as fake start-up manufacturing video-looping hardware in Shenzhen. Dullaart’s works seem to be a defiant refusal to produce anything of value in a digital space. Instead, they are deliberate works of lassitude that frustrate and mock any measure of economic value, or of time well spent. The viewer comes away with the same slightly greasy feeling of watching porn or falling down a YouTube tunnel, the feeling of inertia, that she has wasted her time.
Refusal as Wage
Just as I sit down to begin this, the washing machine starts to bleep at me. It makes a little bleep-bleep-bleep noise every minute or so until somebody sighs and gets up from their desk and shuffles into the utility room and turns it off, unloads the bed sheets and the tiny, twisted pyjamas bottoms and starts the cycle all over again with a fresh load. As annoying sounds go, the bleep-bleep-bleep isn’t relentless enough to force me into immediate action, but it’s not sporadic enough to allow me to push it to the back of my mind. So I push back my chair and stand. When faced with the domestic to-do list – the rings of spilled milk, the endless stream of buttery toast crumbs from couch to kitchen table - I sometimes feel an urge to just lie down with a big bottle of Jameson and give up. The main thing that stops me, maybe the only things that stops me, is the void that might open on that refusal. If I were to stop now - if I just said ‘no’ – what would happen next? And how would I ever get started again? I can’t really imagine. So I don’t stop. I pick up the slightly dirty dishcloth or the spot sweeper and carry on.
If Dullaart’s work finds a way of making art online that refuses to be of any use, other art works demand or make visible hidden forms of work in order to find new ways to refuse them.
Anthropology team JK Gibson Graham produced a diagram they called the capitalist iceberg.[7] It’s a drawing where only wage labour, capitalist enterprise and commodity markets are visible, while all kinds of practices, from housework, to worker cooperatives, family loans, childcare and eldercare, hunting and gathering, breastfeeding and commoning, operate below the surface. They are the bulk that keeps the economy afloat.
In the 1970s, feminist Marxist theorist Sylvia Federici penned a manifesto called ‘Wages against Housework’. For Federici the fact that women’s work in the home is so often framed as a ‘labour of love’ hides its significance to capitalism. Demanding a wage pulls the veil off the assumption that particular forms of work are natural; to demand payment is, in Federici’s words, to “refuse that work as the expression of our nature, and therefore to refuse precisely the female role that capital has invented for us.”[8] The money itself isn’t really what’s at stake, in other words, but demanding something in return brings this invisible work into a market where it could be seen as work, and, more importantly, can be refused on those terms. Wages against housework stages the first semantic conditions for the very possibility of refusal. It’s an aesthetic demand and it’s this aesthetic – the power of a demand that almost certainly won’t be met - but just imagine for a moment if it were? - that carries the true power of refusal. In calling for something that feels impossible, art gives us the space to refuse, demand and imagine beyond the pragmatics of ordinary political speech.
Laurel Ptak’s Wages for Facebook reworked Federici’s iconic text to point to unwaged data-producing work that shores up the attention economy. Framing social media as pleasurable, something we do in downtime, Ptak argues, foregoes the possibility of refusing or struggling against it.
“They say it’s friendship. We say it’s unwaged work. With every like, chat, tag or poke our subjectivity turns them a profit. They call it sharing. We call it stealing. To demand wages for Facebook is to make it visible that our opinions and emotions have all been distorted for a specific function online, and then have been thrown back at us as a model to which we should all conform if we want to be accepted in this society. Our fingertips have become distorted from so much liking, our feelings have gotten lost from so many friendships…we are seen as users or potential friends, not workers in struggle. We must admit that capital has been very successful in hiding our work.”
Ptak draws comparisons here between women’s work and online work as two models of what Tiziana Terranova calls ‘free labour’, but possibly the third figure in all of this is the artist herself.[9] The mother, the data worker and the creative worker all share the vocational push that casts their work as the fullest form of personal expression, as a true ‘labour of love’. And this makes it very hard to struggle against that work or to resist its terms. Where Cohen’s artists are figures of lassitude, emblems of uselessness, today’s artists are often idealised workers ready to rise and grind, to fill out application forms and self-promote and undertake endless unpaid residencies and internships in the hope of some meaningful exposure.
Refusal as Care. Refusal as Maintenance
If, as JK Gibson Graham argue, acts of care and maintenance are the underbelly of capitalism, are they also a space to cultivate resistance? “Our very idea of productivity", Odell writes, “is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way”. It’s a problem engaged in the work of Mierle Ukeles, a long-standing artist in residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation who penned the Manifesto for Maintenance Art in 1969. While our culture privileges novelty and innovation, maintenance is the work that makes innovation possible and, in Ukeles words, it “takes all the fucking time”.[10]
Elisa Giardina Papa (this issue) highlights invisible online work. Instead of concentrating on unpaid digital work, the repository of clicks and likes and re-grams, she focuses on the very precarious and poorly paid grunt work that shores up the Like economy, from content moderation through to human-in-the-loop labelling and cleaning of data for machine learning. Giardina Papa’s internet refuses the relentless drive of innovation over acts of care and maintenance. In doing so she argues we reframe what we think of as productive and useful. She draws our attention to who cares, to outsourced care work, to the possibilities of non-human care. Like Ukeles, Giardina Papa’s artistic practice also involved working as a data cleaner. This invisible work is her artwork.
Giardina Papa shows us that care can be an act of resistance when it draws our attention to what’s hidden in plain sight or when it shores up other vital capacities. And yet, as Antonia Hernández highlights in this issue, acts of care and maintenance also make it clear that seemingly fixed systems like the economy or the giant platform aren’t so fixed or permanent. They exist moment to moment, buoyed by the hull of these ongoing acts that might one day be refused or withdrawn.
Bartleby the Computer
Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ is a story about a copyist in a law firm who suddenly begins to refuse his assigned tasks with the enigmatic response ‘I would prefer not to’.[11] His refusal adds up to the very kind of withdrawal that Hernández describes – a system that worked suddenly grinds to a halt. It’s the enigma of the refusal that stalls management. If Bartleby had just said ‘no’ or outright refused, he’d be cast as a rebel or insurrectionary. The system could make sense of him, give him a social role, exclude him. Instead, this ‘I would prefer not to’ undoes the social contract that power uses to command. While the employer expects to be obeyed and disavows the individual’s agency, Bartleby has invented a new logic of preference that undermines that structure. Bartleby’s speech act threatens the very social structure of the request itself.
Bartleby’s refusal is powerful because preference appears to operate in a deferential fashion, not an outright ‘no’ but something that rejects the terms of the request. It’s a refusal of refusal. Deleuze speaks about Bartleby’s response as ‘the formula’, seeming to suggest that it represents something like an algorithm for refusal that can be scaled and applied in other contexts. And like a line of computer code that does exactly what it is says, no more or less, as Deleuze argues “it means what it says, literally”.[12]
What kind of human resistance or refusal are available in the face of intelligent machines or endless terms and conditions and the overwhelming network effects that bind us into using systems for work and social connectivity, today, more than ever? What might be an equivalent refusal to the demands of surveillance capitalism? What might Bartleby’s refusal look like in the age of intelligent machines, as a form of refusal that seems at one functional level like compliance and participation, a form of refusal that is, as Deleuze argues “neither an affirmation nor a negation”, a formula that “carves out a kind of foreign language” within the language of machines? [13]
Nope
One place might be in glitch. Writing on E. Jane’s 2016 piece Nope (A manifesto), Legacy Russell argues that the glitch is a refusal, an expression of malfunction that starts with a ‘no’. In the breakdown, there is a refusal. An assertion is made, in Sean Cubitt’s words, that control is incomplete.[14] Like Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to’, the glitch is a form of non-compliance from inside the system, not a withdrawal, but what Russell calls ‘a strategic occupation’.[15]
Another might be in noisy obfuscation or forms of obsessive over engagement that completely destroy the utility of human attention, as we’ve explored in pieces like Finn Brunton (this issue) and Helen Nissenbaum’s Adnauseum, an obsessive ad-clicker that engages with all pop-up advertising served to a user in a browsing session. Addie Wagenknecht’s ‘how to’ makeup tutorials (this issue) that slip in casual references to political dissent are also a case in point here, a form of dissent cloaked in the structural language of online spam and self-promotion designed to, in Wagenknecht’s words, ‘fool the algorithm’.
Speaking of the utility of such tactics at last year’s Transmediale, Katherine Jarmul argued that such interventions are heuristic rather than pragmatic. Here noise has an expressive function more than an outright disruptive function, a means of registering non-consent or protest.[16] James C Scott calls these little acts ‘weapons of the weak’, the forms of refusal that operate just below the threshold of outright insubordination but nonetheless register dissent, the laziness and time theft and foot dragging or feigned stupidity, the sotto voce muttering.[17] An assertion is made, however covertly, that one doesn’t assent.
But it can be hard to say no to the algorithm. There’s a sense, as Finn Brunton points out in his interview, that with unprecedented advances in AI, the margin for refusal is shrinking by the day, the spaces for refusing the machine, opting out, saying one ‘would prefer not to’ are disappearing.
Callum Cant is the author of Riding For Deliveroo, a book that examines the working conditions in the precarious gig economy and tries to develop appropriate strategies for collective refusal.[18] The company makes use of algorithmic forms of control to optimise the logistics of deliveries, but also, through piece wages and algorithmic targets, to always optimise the behaviour of drivers on the job.
The workings of the algorithm (nicknamed Frank by the workers) aren’t often clear, such as how drivers are assigned drops based on their spatial proximity to drop off zones and restaurants. Workers experiment with different strategies to game Frank, Cant tells me, hanging out near restaurants or engaging in GPS spoofing in the hope of getting assigned more deliveries, but for the most part, the usual weapons of the weak were useless in the face of algorithmic management. Foot dragging only hurts the driver who is paid per delivery rather than by the hour. What Cant does emphasise is, despite the fact that Deliveroo trafficked in the fiction that their employees were ‘independent contactors’, organised direct action on the part of drivers revealed new possibilities for collective resistance or what Cant calls ‘democratic reorganization from below’ using online forums and WhatsApp groups. As of March 2021, Delivery riders in Spain will soon be given the same status as other employees, including the right to collectively bargain. Riders will also be given access to information about the delivery algorithm and how it makes dispatch allocations. Uber drivers in the UK are now being afforded worker rights.
Rethinking refusal
These are some ways of thinking about refusal, not as a ‘no’ exactly, but as different forms of engagement and disengagement with the platform. But it’s been hard to write.
It’s been hard to write because, as Marc Fisher suggests, I’m suffering from a broader crisis of imagination. These threads of refusal feel piecemeal. The obstacles feel overwhelming.
And it’s been hard to write for the practical reasons that don’t normally get pointed to in the body of an article, like full-time work, online teaching, no childcare in a third lockdown. These things go together. It’s hard to imagine refusal when basic maintenance takes all the fucking time.
The pandemic has made refusal harder. In a world of precarious work and zero hours contracts with who knows what kind of economic catastrophe waiting around the corner, who among us is in a position to step off the treadmill and say no? But maybe it has also given us permission to speak about our struggles with capitalist realism, from mental health or juggling family life and work demands, things that were absolutely present before we heard of covid-19, but which we were socialised to leave at the door, off the page or the Slack channel. As my friend Maggie put it in a text recently: ‘Do you think that life was actually just as shit before the pandemic but we finally have an excuse to talk about it?’ Acknowledging that things are hard, and that they take all the time, that we don’t know how to keep going but we just keep going… this might be the beginning of refusing… of just saying no.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Regine Debatty for conversations in advance of this piece, and to Callum Cant for his Twitter correspondence.
[1] Fisher, Mark. Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative?. John Hunt Publishing, 2009, p.2
[2] Odell, Jenny. How to do nothing: Resisting the attention economy. Melville House Publishing, 2020.
[3] Odell, Jenny. How to do nothing: Resisting the attention economy. Melville House Publishing, 2020, p.93
[4] Kitchin, Rob, and Alistair Fraser. Slow Computing: Why We Need Balanced Digital Lives. Bristol University Press, 2020.
[5] Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature: A Translation of" l'Espace Littéraire". U of Nebraska Press, 2015, p.213
[6] Cohen, Josh. Not working: Why we have to stop. Granta Books, 2019.
[7] Gibson-Graham, Julie-Katherine. "A diverse economy: rethinking economy and economic representation." Consultado a 19 (2002): 2017.
[8] Federici, Silvia. Wages against housework. Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975.
[9] Terranova, Tiziana. Network culture: Politics for the information age. Pluto Press, 2004.
[10] Ukeles, Mierle Laderman. "Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an exhibition"
[11] Melville, Herman. "Bartleby the Scrivener." Melville’s Short Novels (2002): 3-34.
[12] Deleuze, Gilles. "Bartleby; or, the Formula." Essays critical and clinical 86 (1997).
[13] Deleuze, Gilles. "Bartleby; or, the Formula." Essays critical and clinical 86 (1997).
[14] Cubitt, Sean. ‘Glitch and Labour’. Working Paper https://www.academia.edu/14434817/Glitch_and_Labour_working_paper_
[15] Russell, Legacy. Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. Verso. 2020
[16] https://archive.transmediale.de/content/exchange-5-neural-network-cultures-1
[17] Scott, James C. Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance. yale university Press, 1985.
[18] Cant, Callum. Riding for Deliveroo: resistance in the new economy. John Wiley & Sons, 2019.