Rationalized Production

story © Michael Betancourt | published December 7, 2015 | permalink |  |  

The “rationalization” of industrial processes known as “Taylorism,” appears as the fragmentation of production on the assembly line. This theory initially functions to enable mass production, but finds continued application in the algorythmic translation of agency into digital automation. This approach to how factories organized their processes, codified by engineer and theorist Frederick W. Taylor as “scientific management,” enables the particular type of mass production that defined American industry in the first half of the twentieth century. Links between Modernist art theory and industrial protocols inform the development of the digital. The transformation of machine labor from an extension of human action—as the mechanical amplification of human labor—into the digital, where the machine does not augment but supplant.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published November 7, 2015 | permalink |  |  

CTheory just published my new theory article on automation and the structural attempts of digital capitalism to keep the rate of profit from dropping. The Limits of Utiity develops a critical framework for the importance of utility in the production of value.

story © Michael Betancourt | published August 20, 2015 | permalink |  |  

The problematics of value implicit in the productive shift from physical manufacture to the immaterial semiosis characteristic of digital production emerges from the historical expression of value as a storing of human labor in the tangible form of commodities. Any discussion of “profit” (surplus value) depends on this pair of integral concepts—labor and use—both of which rarely figure in discussions of digital technology and automation except in absentia: the immaterial production characteristic of High Frequency Trading software, digital automation linked to pervasive monitoring (characterizing the value of “social networks” generally), and the general complex of relationships between production, facture and labor in digital capitalism propose a production of values without the need for human involvement (either via labor or through use) as a ‘solution’ to the falling rate of profit: the trajectory of automation offers the reduction-elimination of the variable costs presented by wages.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published April 12, 2015 | permalink |  |  

This article is a revision of my article from Vague Terrain published several years ago.

The technical capabilities of computer technology obscure the nexus of capital, human agency, social reproduction, and physical production; thus, the denial of physicality that is specific to the aura of the digital, and apparent in the evolution from hand-labor to the automation characteristic of ‘digital capitalism,’ is inherent in how this technology has been deployed. The nineteenth century “protestant work ethic” is the conceptual starting point for this development, merging the ‘ideology of autonomous achievement’ with digital technology to create a new ‘ideology of automation.’

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story © Michael Betancourt | published April 5, 2015 | permalink |  |  

New American Notes Online is running "An Interview with Michael Betancourt" discussing the theory of digital capitalism.