Spectacular Precarity the Condition of Knowledge Workers in the Context of Informational Capitalism

The goal of this paper is to revisit the media theory-informed framework originally advanced by Debord’s Society of the Spectacle in order to acknowledge the changes implied by the shift to a post-fordist information and knowledge driven capitalism. We use the Debordian theory as a lens through which we critically explore both the subjective and objective conditions of precarious labor. More specifically, we will make reference to the concrete setting of informational/knowledge labor in Turin by reporting excerpts of interviews with professionals and their precarious conditions. That will provide an empirical engagement with the subjectivities inhabiting what we define as the Spectacle of precarization, a condition of labor mediated by current information and communication technologies that describes precarity as being characterized by the tensions between autonomy and exploitation, informality and stable structures of value creation. We claim that the notion of Spectacle contributes to explain how informational capitalism produces precarity by creating both a stable system of representation for collectively shared meanings and practices of knowledge working, at the same time, producing a scenario that systematically places its actors in a dependable condition of impermanence.