The Cubicle Island
 | |
| Author | Ilan Manouach |
|---|---|
| Language | English, a.o. |
| Publisher | La Cinquième Couche, Forlaens (60€) |
| City | Brussels, Copenhagen |
| Date | 2020 |
| Pages | 1500 |
| Format | 18.3 cm x 26.1 cm |
| ISBN | 978-2-3900805-1-0 |
| E-book | PDF (817 mb) PDF (71 mb) |
The Cubicle Island Pirates, Microworkers, Spambots and the venatic lore of clickfarm humor is a conceptual comic book project, and an experiment with the distributed ramifications of digital labor. The book collects hundreds of desert island cartoons, a genre that reached the peak of its popularity in 1957, possibly as an expression of Cold War fear of the nuclear bomb. I have de-texted the original text captions and solicited microworkers, through the interface of a popular digital labor platform, to submit a funny text between 50-70 words for each one of the cartoons. Microworkers are most often asked to complete tasks for which no efficient algorithm has yet been devised. They are considered to be the operators of the smallest unit of work in a virtual assembly line. The term "microwork" describes a series of small tasks that are completed by many people across the Internet to comprise a large unified project, such as this book. It refers to the deployment of human labor occurring in platform-mediated, zero-hour contract regimes that benefit minimal transactional frictions and the absolute circumvention of applicable minimum wage laws. As a labor force, microworkers find themselves in an important moment in the history of labor; a stepping stone to Artificial General Intelligence’s exponential acceleration of technology that promises a new era of social and economic abundance.
The Cubicle Island is a durational performance based on fifty years of desert island press cartoons. The performance highlights the extreme isolation that accompanies new regimes of work alongside the making of an international class of precarious cognitive workers. The book labors silently through the products of an extremely deskilled textual workforce, both human and non-human, and embraces the epistemic and technological accelerationism championed by the interconnectedness of the global precariat. In the age of surveillance capitalism’s selective transparency, it thematizes new formations of labor and leisure.
