Paper short abstract:

In Cluj and Bologna youth go through digital reconversion to ensure a work future, reinventing themselves as tech workers (programmers, testers, and videogame designers). What forms of collective and prefigurative action are possible for workers newly initiated in the politics of abstraction?

Paper long abstract:

Based on comparative research in Bologna (Italy) and Cluj-Napoca (Romania), this paper explores the politics of tech workers contending with rapid technological change (including AI and automation) while navigating the ever more precarious labor landscape of contemporary capitalism. The focus is on youth who go through programs of digital reconversion to ensure a work future, reinventing themselves as tech workers (programmers, testers, and videogame designers) worthy of rewarding, well-paid jobs.

Politics stands here for the meaning and scope of political action in a global context that posits a digitally induced end to politics (post-politics, anti-politics and/or hyperpolitics). Moreover, politics is crucial to the imagination of work futures that can withstand the threat of automation. In an ethnographic key, the relationship between politics and digital technologies is (re)configured as part of everyday labor processes. How do the digital tools employed in everyday labor (programming languages, game engines, machine learning, etc.) impinge upon workers’ understanding of political action and futurity? What forms of collective and prefigurative action are prescribed by these technologies? Digital labor is rife with abstractions and black-boxing – becoming socialized in these abstractions often comes at the cost of bracketing the social and the political. While work with abstraction is generally assumed to lead to a politics subsumed by technological solutionism, this paper also emphasizes those few alternatives and shortcuts that workers imagine as they carve out a potentially new space and vocabulary for work-based political action.