Process This!: Processed World's Aesthetics of Resistance

• In Event: Beyond Non-Use: Infrastructuralism and Interruption

Abstract

Burdened with the strain of staring at video display terminals and the existential malaise of menial data entry work, office workers in San Francisco created the Processed World magazine in April of 1981. Emerging from the legacy of New Left activism in the Bay Area, Processed World provided a critique of undervalued, underpaid, and routinized information labor and acknowledged the classed, racialized, and gendered aspects of Silicon Valley’s tech economy. I argue in my paper that Processed World provided a critique of the American belief in technology as an unquestionable social good. In so doing, Processed World revealed rifts behind the oft-discussed “Californian ideology” that shaped innovation in the Bay Area through groups such as the Homebrew Computer Club. Processed World offers to STS scholars today an archive of activism that offered news from the frontlines of the tech industry and advocated a revolution by office workers themselves through “on-the-job direct action.” I analyze the magazine’s “aesthetics of resistance” through the myriad descriptions in Processed World of slowing down information work, tampering with office equipment, and office sabotage in order to understand how 1980s leftist activists critiqued an information economy before the rise of the home computer. My paper provides a historical discursive analysis of Processed World’s efforts to distract attention from a tech industry completely in thrall to capitalism. Incorporating approaches from media archaeology and media studies, my paper contributes to STS discussions on attention, the labor of information work, and the gendered history of computing.

Author

• Joseph DeLeon, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor