#dividuation

[1000rh]

In the end, this is how automation “erases” the human. The full human subject—that rich historic figure endowed with inalienable rights who can draw on a potent spectrum of claims—is deleted. Pasted in its place is a more shadowy figure who is “less-than-human” by design. This is the global digital worker, who may appear only briefly as an avatar or a username. For this figure, agency has been ring-fenced, shrunk to an ideal zero point. Conditions are locked in place by the platform and its set menu of features and functions. The pay rate is fixed and the choices are few: to work on this task, to work on that task—or not to work at all. They are “free” to provide their labor and free to withdraw it. If they provide it, they must compete with others across the globe for the same tasks, carrying them out faster or cheaper. Technology’s triumph, then, is turning all of these laborers into racialized and gendered laborers whose working conditions are defined by a race to the bottom. The global digital worker is a figure whose work is so simple that “anyone” can do it and whose identity is so generic that “anyone” can replace them.

 – Luke Munn, Automation is a Myth (2022)

[candycoatedghoul]

'human being' more like inhuman becoming am i right freaks ;3

[astranemus]

Guanyin stories and narratives depict the type of agency that she is seen to exercise: a feminine, maternal, intimate agency, one that “hears” all cries of suffering and responds with compassion to all sentient beings. She can take multiple forms to come to the rescue. On the one hand, Guanyin is a singular figure, who manifests herself through the mediation of countless statues, sites, texts, experiences, and miracle tales. On the other hand, each of her statues has its distinctive personality, powers, and trajectory. How can this seeming contradiction be explained by the outside observer? We propose the concept of the “dividuating object,” drawing on Marriott's (1976) and Strathern's (1988) conceptions of personhood.

Western notions of the person or “individual” depict an internally coherent, undivided self that is defined in contrast to other selves and objects outside of it. In contrast, the “dividual” is a composite of qualities, components, and relationships, characterized by the emergence of differentiated attributes in the context of the unfolding of specific interactions. A relationship between two persons is thus a process of mutual “dividuation” (Bird-David 1999) through which each partner expresses and develops a differentiated self that is emergent and unique to the roles and trajectory of the interactions in a mutually constituting process. Mosko (2010, 218) has stressed how such a person “is a product of the gifts, contributions, or detachments of others” and needs, in an exchange, to give part of him- or herself to draw forth a desired part of another person. In relations between humans and deities, for example, the deity absorbs hopes, problems, offerings, and sacrifices from the worshipper, who in turn may absorb divine protections, blessings, and numinous qualities.

Here, we posit that the concept of dividuation can fruitfully be applied to human–idol intra-actions. In a relationship between Guanyin and a worshipper through the mediation of a specific statue, the series of acts and experiences, unique to the worshipper but mediated by the constraints of the material form, location, and ritual prescriptions for approaching the statue, inflects the unfolding of the worshipper's life in a dividuating process (McDaniel 2011, 250).

David A. Palmer, Martin M. H. Tse, Chip Colwell, Guanyin's Limbo: Icons as Demi-Persons and Dividuating Objects

[1000rh]

We are entering control societies that are defined very differently than disciplinary societies. Those who are concerned about our welfare no longer need, or will no longer need, places of confinement. The prisons, schools and hospitals are already places of permanent discussion. Wouldn't it be better to expand home visits by doctors? Yes, that is certainly the future. Workshops and factories are bursting at the seams. Wouldn't it be better to use more sub-contracting and working from home? Aren't there other ways to punish people than prison?

– Gilles Deleuze, “What is the Creative Act?” (1987)

[1000rh]

When you see everything as an outcome — an outcome you may or may not understand, and definitely don’t understand the process behind, let alone care about — you kind of already see your workers as LLMs. 

– Edward Zitron, “The Case Against Generative AI” (2025) Link

[1000rh]

Automation promised to liberate us from labor, a future in which machines “would do all the work.” Instead we are faced with systems that are semiautomated and devices that need augmentation. This is actually existing automation, a far more fragmented future of work that can rapidly shift from the promising to the pathological. Human labor is chopped up, split up, and farmed out, but never replaced. Humans are working harder than ever.

 – Luke Munn, Automation is a Myth (2022)

[1000rh]

...class means class antagonism. It's not a category, it's a relation. One that sometimes connects not individuals but what Gerald Raunig and others call dividuals, units of being smaller than an individual. It turns out that individuals can indeed be further divided. One could think of class locations as including contradictory ones if one thinks of the people located by class as individuals. Or you could think of classes as quite neatly creating locations for dividuals, which don't always correspond to the individuals of which they are parts.

– McKenzie Wark, Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (2019)

[1000rh]

If the capitalist class owns the means of production, the vectoralist class owns the vectors of information. They own the extensive vectors of communication, which traverse space. They own the intensive vectors of computation, which accelerate time. They own the copyrights, the patents, and the trademarks that capture attention or assign ownership to novel techniques. They own the logistic systems that manage and monitor the disposition and movement of any resource. [...] They own the algorithms that rank and sort and assign particular information in particular circumstances.

– McKenzie Wark, Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (2019)