readings for designers

Gavin Mueller
from Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job (2021)
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Matteo Pasquinelli
from The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (2023)
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What is the “labor theory of the machine”? Try to describe how a particular design tool (as hardware or software) imitates and replaces a previous division of labor in the design production process. Describe this contemporary “machine” in the terms of the theory that the text elucidates. At the same time, produce a portrait that is imaginary and fantastical — an image of a monster that confronts the human design worker.

Theodor Adorno
from Minima Moralia (1951/1974)
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Let’s begin with this bitter brilliant text, and reflect on how it might make sense as a beginning to our course.

Gilles Deleuze
October, Vol. 59. (Winter, 1992), pp. 3-7.
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This short text presents an provocative historical thesis: older forms of social organization and techniques for controlling individuals within society, based in discrete spaces of enclosure like the school and the factory, are being dissolved and replaced by new “ultra rapid” forms of “free floating control.”

The text was published in 1990. The social and political transition it attempted to describe has perhaps already come to pass. Or it never fully did. In either case, the essay might provide us with some useful and interesting concepts to concretely and imaginatively get a theoretical grasp of our contemporary social life as it is mediated and dominated by technology.

Produce a piece of writing in response to the text. Imagine contemporary examples of social control mechanisms, along the wild lines Deleuze sketches. What are some “ultrarapid forms of free-floating control” that you experience within school, work, design, family, social life? Sample and expand on one of Deleuze’s instances for this new form of social control: code, pharmaceuticals, genetic engineering, contests, “highly comic group sessions”, financialization, the corporation, surfing, viruses.

Start with a particular sentence or short passage in the text and elaborate it in your writing, with reference to a concrete example taken from contemporary life. Test the theory, as you understand it, with the example. Allow yourself to be caught up in the paranoid sci-fi vibe of the essay, but also aim for specificity in describing a particular technique of control. You might think about the world of design as a scene of social control, or maybe school or economic life. You might write in a narrative mode, and tell a story, or write something more expository and focused in an analysis and engagement with the text. Or both.

Print three copies of the writing on a single letter size sheet.