Data Workers Union

The Institute of Human Obsolescence advocates for the understanding of the production of data as a form of labor. All of us have unwittingly become data workers, yet we lack the capacity to even negotiate the terms of our labor. In the current context of surveillance capitalism, the struggle for the preservation of our rights over the production of data must go beyond a struggle of human rights. To embrace its complexity we propose to look at it through the framework of workers’ rights.

The industrial revolution witnessed the rise of the movement of the labor unions. Along the way their power and the trust people placed in them has decreased and it has become common to speak about the crisis of the unions. In the advent of human obsolescence and of a new understanding of our relation to work, how can we re-imagine the workers union? We will discuss how to move forward our pursuit of data labor rights through the process of building the Data Workers Union.

RSVP and send questions to workshop@todaysart.nl with the workshop name in the subject line.