Weapons of the Chic: Instagram Influencer Engagement Pods as Practices of Resistance to Instagram Platform Labor

This article examines the phenomenon of Instagram influencer “engagement pods” as an emergent form of resistance that responds to the reconfigured working conditions of platformized cultural production. Engagement pods are grassroots communities that agree to mutually like, comment on, share, or otherwise engage with each other’s posts, no matter the content, to game Instagram’s algorithm into prioritizing the participants’ content and show it to a broader audience. I argue that engagement pods represent a response to the material conditions of platformized cultural production on Instagram, where proprietary curation algorithms wrest knowledge and control of the labor process from producers. Cooperative algorithm hacking of this sort, although quite distinct from traditional organizing strategies, responds to the coercive force of the “threat of invisibility” that necessitates constant data production. They represent a collective attempt to exert some control over their “conditions of presence-to-others” and, in so doing, combat precarity and protect wages in the field. In a post-industrial economy where traditional models of labor organizing have struggled to address the conditions of platformized cultural work, I argue that the unusual phenomenon of Instagram engagement pods represents an organic form of worker resistance that responds to the unique conditions of these workers.

Cooperative Threads with Effective-Address in Simulated Annealing Algorithm to Job Shop Scheduling Problems

This paper presents a parallel algorithm applied to the job shop scheduling problem (JSSP). The algorithm generates a set of threads, which work in parallel. Each generated thread, executes a procedure of simulated annealing which obtains one solution for the problem. Each solution is directed towards the best solution found by the system at the present, through a procedure called effective-address. The cooperative algorithm evaluates the makespan for various benchmarks of different sizes, small, medium, and large. A statistical analysis of the results of the algorithm is presented and a comparison of performance with other (sequential, parallel, and distributed processing) algorithms that are found in the literature is presented. The obtained results show that the cooperation of threads carried out by means of effective-address procedure permits to simulated annealing to work with increased efficacy and efficiency for problems of JSSP.