Temporary Expert Week 2

Systems

Readings

1. Life Within and Against Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-Fordist Politics

2. The Managed Heart - Commercialization of Human Feeling

3. “Racial Ethnic Women’s Labor: The Intersection of Race, Gender and Class Oppression”

Project Idea

My idea is creating a global “accounting system” for affective labor.

We have so many ways of quantifying informational labor (I’m most familiar with the software engineering world, where it’s the number of completed tasks, number of git commits, etc), but so few ways of tracking how much emotional labor has been expended for a project.

There are biometric ways of measuring how much emotional labor has been expended, however imprecise (that’s ok - informational labor measurement systems are also imprecise).

What if you could automatically receive an invoice at the end of a social interaction based on the amount of emotional effort of both participants? Maybe I could issue a new cryptocurrency that tracks the consumption/production of affect.

Experts

Two experts I’m reaching out to:

• Michael Hardt (Developed the concept in the “Affective Labor” essay)

• Kathi Weeks (Has written extensively on affective labor in Life Within and Against Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-Fordist Politics and The Problem with Work)