Please reply to Christian, not to me.

Julian


On 14/10/2014 22:25, "Christian Fuchs" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Call for Papers: The Materiality of the Immaterial: ICTs and the Digital
>Commons
>
>http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/announcement/view/23
>
>Special issue of tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique
>(http://www.triple-c.at)
>Abstract submission deadline: January 15, 2015
>
>Guest editors: Vasilis Kostakis, Ragnar Nurkse School of Innovation and
>Governance, Tallinn University of Technology (Estonia), P2P Lab
>(Greece); Andreas Roos, Human Ecology Division, Lund University (Sweden)
>
>With an escalating environmental crisis and an unprecedented increase of
>ICT diversity and use, it is more crucial than ever to understand the
>underlying material aspects of the ICT infrastructure.  This special
>issue therefore asks the question: What are the true material and
>socio-environmental costs of the global ICT infrastructure?
>
>In a recent paper (Fuchs 2013) as well as in the book Digital Labour and
>Karl Marx (Fuchs 2014), Christian Fuchs examined the complex web of
>production relations and the new division of digital labour that makes
>possible the vast and cheap ICT infrastructure as we know it. The
>analysis partly revealed that ICT products and infrastructure can be
>said to embody slave-like and other extremely harsh conditions that
>perpetually force mine and assembly workers into conditions of
>dependency. Expanding this argument, the WWF reported (Reed and Miranda
>2007) that mining in the Congo basin poses considerable threats to the
>local environment in the form of pollution, the loss of biodiversity,
>and an increased presence of business-as-usual made possible by roads
>and railways.  Thus ICTs can be said to be not at all immaterial because
>the ICT infrastructure under the given economic conditions can be said
>to embody as its material foundations slave-like working conditions,
>various class relations and undesirable environmental consequences.
>
>At the same time, the emerging digital commons provide a new and
>promising platform for social developments, arguably enabled by the
>progressive dynamics of ICT development. These are predominantly
>manifested as commons-based peer production, i.e., a new mode of
>collaborative, social production (Benkler 2006); and grassroots digital
>fabrication or community-driven makerspaces, i.e., forms of bottom-up,
>distributed manufacturing. The most well known examples of commons-based
>peer production are the free/open source software projects and the free
>encyclopaedia Wikipedia. While these new forms of social organisation
>are immanent in capitalism, they also have the features to challenge
>these conditions in a way that might in turn transcend the dominant
>system (Kostakis and Bauwens 2014).
>
>Following this dialectical framing, we would like to call for papers for
>a special issue of tripleC that will investigate how we can understand
>and balance the perils and promises of ICTs in order to make way for a
>just and sustainable paradigm. We seek scholarly articles and
>commentaries that address any of the following themes and beyond. We
>also welcome experimental formats, especially photo essays, which
>address the special issue's theme.
>
>Suggested themes
>
>Papers that track, measure and/or theorise the scope of the
>socio-environmental impact of the ICT infrastructure.
>Papers that track, measure and/or theorise surplus value as both
>ecological (land), social (labour) and intellectual (patent) in the
>context of ICTs.
>Understanding the human organisation of nature in commons-based peer
>production.
>Studies of the environmental dimensions of desktop manufacturing
>technologies (for example, 3D printing or CNC machines) in
>non-industrial modes of subsistence, e.g. eco-villages or traditional
>agriculture, as well as in modern towns and mega-cities.
>Suggestions for and insights into bridging understandings of the
>socio-economic organisation of the natural commons with the
>socio-economic organisation of the digital commons drawing on types of
>organisations in the past and the present that are grounded in theories
>of the commons.
>Elaboration of which theoretical approaches can be used for overcoming
>the conceptual separation of the categories immaterial/material in the
>digital commons.
>
>References
>
>Benkler, Yochai. 2006. The wealth of networks: How social production
>transforms markets and freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.
>
>Fuchs, Christian. 2014. Digital labour and Karl Marx. New York: Routledge.
>
>Fuchs, Christian. 2013. Theorising and analysing digital labour: From
>global value chains to modes of production. The Political Economy of
>Communication 1 (2): 3-27.
>http://www.polecom.org/index.php/polecom/article/view/19.
>
>Kostakis, Vasilis and Michel Bauwens. 2014. Network society and future
>scenarios for a collaborative economy. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
>Macmillan.
>
>Reed, Erik and Marta Miranda. 2007. Assessment of the mining sector and
>infrastructure development in the congo basin region. Washington DC:
>World Wildlife Fund, Macroeconomics for Sustainable Development Program
>Office, 27. http://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/congobasinmining.pdf
>
>Schedule
>
>Submission of abstracts (250-300 words) by January 15, 2015 via email to
>[log in to unmask]
>Responses about acceptance/rejection to authors: February 15, 2015.
>Selected authors will be expected to submit their full documents to
>tripleC via the online submission system by May 15, 2015:
>http://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions
>Expected publication date of the special issue: October 1, 2015.
>
>About the journal
>
>tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique is an academic open access
>online journal using a non-commercial Creative Commons license. It is a
>journal that focuses on information society studies and studies of
>media, digital media, information and communication in society with a
>special interest in critical studies in these thematic areas. The
>journal has a special interest in disseminating articles that focus on
>the role of information in contemporary capitalist societies. For this
>task, articles should employ critical theories and/or empirical research
>inspired by critical theories and/or philosophy and ethics guided by
>critical thinking as well as relate the analysis to power structures and
>inequalities of capitalism, especially forms of stratification such as
>class, racist and other ideologies and capitalist patriarchy.
>Papers should reflect on how the presented findings contribute to the
>illumination of conditions that foster or hinder the advancement of a
>global sustainable and participatory information society. TripleC was
>founded in 2003 and is edited by Christian Fuchs and Marisol Sandoval.

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