Technologies of Hope (Fiction, Platforms, Management)

Abstract This article leverages the Nuit Debout social movement in France and contemporary French science fiction to explore the links between information technologies and economic precarity. To accomplish this, it foregrounds a short story born of the movement, Ketty Steward's “ALIVE,” which follows three contingent workers as they act on, for, and through the megacorporation ALIVE's proprietary platform. Employees access this amalgamation of ratings-based social network and Amazon-like marketplace by way of digital interfaces that the author formally reproduces with modifications to typeface and page layout. The result is much more than a literary portrayal of the so-called Uberization of work; instead, readers of “ALIVE” confront a dystopian tangle of code that, when unraveled, points to how workers can be compelled to manage themselves. Further, the story charts certain historical processes that would usher France into the neoliberal era through a series of intertexts, two of which the article takes as a starting point for establishing Nuit Debout as an inheritor of Mai 68 and for grasping the rise of self-management as a strategy for disciplining labor. These arguments serve as a foundation for a reading of the narrative platform of “ALIVE” that registers the increasingly prominent role played by algorithmic management in the distribution of workplace control today. The article concludes that Steward's tale not only anticipated the informatic enactment of the aforementioned strategy but, more incisively, reveals how it maintains “floating” surplus populations by facilitating the regulation of those workers’ hope.