Paper short abstract:

The paper takes up the theme "Reorganization of work and labor", asking how participation in hackerspaces is organised in response to changing social conditions, through conventions and technologies? Flexible urban digital laborers develop door systems to better mediate their social relations.

Paper long abstract:

This communication takes up the theme "Reorganization of work and labor", asking how participation in hackerspaces is organised in response to changing social conditions, through conventions and technologies? The units of analysis are changing conditions in society as a whole, hacker clubs as organisations in the middle range, and a case study of techno-social means through which participation is organised: the door systems.

The political economy of hackerspaces is closely tied to the political economy of their membership. Flexible technology workers negotiate the establishment of a shared time and space through a communication network in order to share affect and expertise. The technical medium which mediates these social relations have been developed in hackerspaces and it is specific to its milieu. Starting as an artefact replicated across hacker clubs, it grew into an infrastructure that ties together not just individual spaces, but the scene itself. A techno-social innovation that reinvents opening times and time clocks.

Thus, this invesigation is situated at the intersection of three research programmes. One that fills the void between ethnographic case studies of digital labour and the sociological critique of cognitive capitalism by interpreting initiatives of self-programmable workers in the context of social history. Another that aims to complete the socio-ethnographic account of the hackerspaces as common infrastructures of peer production. And a third which asks the question of material semiotics about socio-technological innovation: how agency is distributed geographically, temporally and logically through material networks comprised of humans and non-humans?