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Innovation and future developments |
The starting point of this analysis was the neologism 'entreprecariat'. We wanted to inspect through the tools of distant readinig the concepts related to this new reality, trying to see the semantics, entities and underlying aspects that were involved.
Unexpectedly we faced data and results who had a great level of agreement and corcondances between themselves. A phenomenon that could have contradictions in itself (as it was named from two words that are considered semantically far "entrepreneur" and "precariat") seem to be totally well-defined.
Since that, it was also possible to define for difference which aspects were totally absent. This choice changed drastically the results bringing to a totally new view on the social changes that we've been facing in the last 20 years.
Even if we cannot say where 'entreprecariatism' will bring us, we can conclude sharing some general observations that are not directly assumable from our data, but indirectly enlighted by those.
I felt that my ignorance of philosophy, particularly queer theory and critical theory, made (and still makes) this essay woefully incomplete. (Foti 2017)
First we can observe that the authors of our corpus are all men with a pretty similar cultural background. This was not intentional, since the books we selected are the more relevant in the field. Even if there are books written by women, or simply managing to follow the transfeminism queer movement, that deals with entrepreneurship and precarism, however we could not consider them as part of the corpus since the point of view is so different that they seem to draw a completely new narrative.
Our suggestion is that the absence of women's written books related to 'entreprecarism' comes from the different concept of 'entrepreneurship' that is rising in the last years: not a top-down machist figure of entrepreneur, but an inclusive and care-related view of the cooperation between labours. In the first case the new reality can bring to uncertanty and 'panic' as seen from the data, bringing to feel precarious, while in the second one this is seen in a hard challenging reality that needs to be treated through a multidisciplinary approach, as a chance to relevant change.
Further studies could prove this hypothesis making an inspection on this other corpora, making a comparison through distant reading with the data coming from our corpus.
Who’s precarious? A call center operator is precarious. A fast food worker is precarious. A temp coder is precarious. An adjunct professor is precarious. In fact, all youth living and working under informational capitalism are precarious. The precarious are the underpaid, underemployed, underprotected, overeducated, and overexploited. (Foti 2017)
Another aspect is the contrapposition between young and adults. If young have to put all their efforts in order to be on the labour market, taking the tools of entrepreneurships in order to 'sell themselves', adults do not necessarily have to do this effort, because they have already entered somehow the labour market. What happens more frequently is that if the youth effort is all in remaining in the labour market, the effort of the adults is all in exiting it.
A possible explanation is that we are dealing with two different labour market that are interdependent, not a whole: the one of technologies and information and the one of consolidate jobs. The technologies have changed most of the jobs, however some have just evolved in the tools, but not at the core (e.g. the administration managed through computers), others instead are digital-born (e.g. front-end development).
The first need continuity since they are the basis for a working community; the employers are usually adults with a fixed-contract or some garancee of stability and for those reason they are chained to this need of continuity.
The second are usually project-based and competency-based; they follow the need of the companies and the innovations of the technologies; even it is difficult that those workers are unemployed, since there is a large request for their competencies, companies need those workers for the timespan of a project, then another company will need them.
What brings to those workers to feel uncertainty and no long-term perspective is the consciousness that technologies evolves too fast and their competencies could easily become useless.
On the counterpart, works related to technologies need a high level education and till now even when technologies are superseeded, the 'enterprecariats' stay on the labour market, since their knowledge give them a strategic position to access first those new jobs.
Further analysis centered on the actors of entreprecariat (i.e. a corpus centred on those organizations and companies) could confirm them or bring a completely new perspective.
[TECHNICAL FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS] From a pure Natural Language Processing and therefore, statistical point of view, it would be interesting to use non-probabilistic methods for topic modelling, both static and dynamic, and in particular to use Topic Distributions directly as feature vectors in supervised classification models, as described by Marc Kelechava here.
[THE VISION]
Algorithmic criticism seeks a new kind of audience for text analysis — one that is less concerned with fitness of method and the determination of interpretative boundaries, and one more concerned with evaluating the robustness of the discussion that a particular procedure annunciates. (Reading Machines, 2011)*
Our focus here is not centered on the technical development, that can always be improved (you can contact us). As brought out multiple times during his conferences, the way to have an "alternative" response to the actual situation passess through the generative social process of communities, as identified not only by Lorusso. We're dealing here not only with mutual help but most of all, the facilitation for the passage of culture and education. The return to right populism bangs against new forms of community-based aggregations and non-decentralized as it's happening in the web3.
The tacherian motto "There is no alternative" mutuates into "Is there some alternative?". For sure, a possibility in the wide rhizomatic range of the net is represented by less or more spontaneously-born hacktivist and open source realities for producing and publishing content.