One Week, One Tool

"A digital humanities barnraising."

It is striking how the project is presented. This much labor, measured out in terms of this much time, produces this product. The meting out of time for product, the neat measuredness of each, is here pointed up as the essence of the project. It almost doesn't matter what the tool is. The workshop wasn't designed to solve any particular problem. It was set up to construct one unit of "product" in one unit of time.

This is by and large the opposite of digital humanities labor, which is interstitial, ongoing, and in significant part custodial (to take my own example: time spent blocking spammers at Arcade). This is of course why the language of "one week, one tool" is appealing.

One week, one book. One week, one conference. Are we feeling productive yet?

What does this mean, that we are the gold farmers? It means that in the age of postfordist capitalism it is impossible to differentiate cleanly between play and work. It is impossible to differentiate cleanly between nonproductive leisure activity existing within the sphere of play and productive activity existing within the sphere of the workplace. This should be understood in both a general and a specific sense. [...P]ostfordism is a mode of production that makes life itself the site of valorization: that is to say, it turns seemingly normal human behavior into monetizable labor. [...] I dispute the ideological mystification that says: we are the free while the Chinese children are in chains, our computers are a life-line and their computers are a curse. (120-1)

—Alexander R. Galloway, "Does the Whatever Speak?," in Race after the Internet, ed. Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White (New York: Routledge, 2012)

The central forms of productive cooperation are no longer created by the capitalist as part of the project to organize labor but rather emerge from the productive energies of labor itself. This is indeed the key characteristic of immaterial labor: to produce communication, social relations, and cooperation.

—Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (113)