Architecture for A Post-Work World

47% to 80% of today’s jobs can be automated in the next twenty years. Most people continue to work in low skill, low wage, manual and service jobs. Only a small number are engaged in high-skilled, high wage, non-routine, cognitive jobs. What will happen to the surplus population- the workers who are most at risk of being replaced by automation? If left at the current trajectory, the private sector, via technological means, will take over traditional public services including: health, environment, and sovereignty. A dystopic condition will emerge in which governments are dissolved and the working class is exterminated. This thesis attempts, via the use of critical architecture, to challenge the hegemonic order of capitalism and align the future toward a post-work condition. The devised semiotic code is an innovative signifier for a new truth - a new language of rebellion against the established hierarchies of contemporary architecture.

Architecture for A Post-Work World

47% to 80% of today’s jobs can be automated in the next twenty years. Most people continue to work in low skill, low wage, manual and service jobs. Only a small number are engaged in high-skilled, high wage, non-routine, cognitive jobs. What will happen to the surplus population- the workers who are most at risk of being replaced by automation? If left at the current trajectory, the private sector, via technological means, will take over traditional public services including: health, environment, and sovereignty. A dystopic condition will emerge in which governments are dissolved and the working class is exterminated. This thesis attempts, via the use of critical architecture, to challenge the hegemonic order of capitalism and align the future toward a post-work condition. The devised semiotic code is an innovative signifier for a new truth - a new language of rebellion against the established hierarchies of contemporary architecture.

Francis Bacon on Imperial and Colonial Warfare

This article offers a textual and historical reconstruction of Francis Bacon's thought on imperial and colonial warfare. Bacon holds that conquest, acquisition of peoples and territory through force, followed by subjugation, confers a legal right and title. Imperial expansion is justified both by arguments concerning the interstate balance of power and by arguments related to internal order and stability. On Bacon's view, a successful state must be expansionist, for two key reasons: first, as long as its rivals are expansionist, a state must keep up and even try to outpace them, and, second, a surplus population will foment civil war unless this “surcharge of people” is farmed out to colonies. These arguments for imperial state expansion are held to justify both internal and external colonization and empire. Paradoxically, Bacon holds that the internally colonized may be treated with greater severity, as suppressed rebels, than the externally colonized, who are more fitly a subject of the ius gentium. Bacon holds that toleration offers both an imperial stratagem and a comparative justification for why English and British imperial expansion is more desirable than Spanish imperial expansion. The article concludes with reflections about how one might understand the place of imperial and colonial projects in Bacon's thought, contending that these projects are central to an understanding of Bacon's political aims and thought more broadly.

Educating 'surplus population': uses and abuses of aspiration in the rural peripheries of a globalising world

Increasing school enrolment has been a focus of investment, even in remote rural areas whose populations are surplus to the requirements of the global economy. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in primary schools and their neighbouring communities in rural areas of Lesotho, India and Laos, we explore how young people, their parents and teachers experience schooling in places where the prospects of incorporation into professional employment (or any well rewarded economic activity) are slim. We show how schooling uses aspiration, holding out a promise of a 'better future' remote from the lives of rural children. However, children’s attachment to such promises is tenuous, boosted yet troubled by the small minority who defy the odds and succeed. We question why education systems continue to promote occupational aspirations that are unattainable by most, and why donors and governments invest so heavily in increasing human capital that cannot be absorbed.

The Conditions of the Global Digital Working Class: The Continuing Relevance of Friedrich Engels to Theorising Platform Labour

This paper examines the conditions of the global digital class of platform labourers by drawing on the theoretical paradigm proposed by Engels in his pioneering contribution, The Conditions of the Working Class in England (CWC). Using a host of empirical sources – surveys, oral narrations, medical and legal journals, and journalistic accounts – the paper develops a political-economic understanding of the working conditions of contemporary crowdworkers while paying close attention to the national and gendered disparities within them. Following Engels’s dialectical mode of presentation in the CWC, the paper proposes a framework that contextualizes the lived experiences of crowdworkers in relation to: 1) the technological infrastructure of platforms, 2) emerging contractual and managerial modes of exploitation, 3) the gendered and racial articulation of labour extraction via Engels’s notion of inter-worker competition, and 4) the macro dynamics of “surplus population” that push workers into precarious employment. The paper argues that the four qualitative attributes of capitalist labour identified in the CWC have experienced quantitative transformation under digital capitalism and at the core remain fundamental to a theoretical appreciation of the impact of digital capital on the lived experiences of the global digital working-class.

Migration Regime and “Language Part of Work”: Experiences of Syrian Refugees as Surplus Population in the Turkish Labor Market

The literature on migration, language and employment is dominated by the human capital approach and promotes multilingualism as a universal good. This paper examines the relationship between language and work for migrants illustrating how they are ascribed value as capital according to their position and the “language part of work.” First, we trace a genealogy of the migration regime in relation to the labor and linguistic market of migrants in Turkey, characterized by informality and exploitation. Then, we look at the experiences of refugees qualitatively to show how language is differentially valued and has modest effects on social mobility. We argue that language learning instead of stemming from individuals’ possession of capital should be examined within a broader linguistic and employment framework. This research goes beyond conventional wisdom about the centrality of language as a means to improve employment by shedding light on the structure that shapes language value.