Moving towards a critical perspective on automation: Theories of technology,labour,and capitalism

Abstract

This commentary considers the complex theoretical discussion in dispositions towards automation, and considers future dialogues and directions the authors might take up. Specifically, the commentary engages with notions of labour, enchantment, and automation, and makes the case for further explorations of these conceptual domains.

Lin, Adey, and Harris (2024) begin their discussion of aeromobolities and automation with the prediction that the world is ‘on the cusp of rupture’. Through an impressive review of current debates, they argue that the encroachment of automated labour in previously protected spheres threatens a loss of human agency, mass permanent disemployment, and as-yet untold human–machine interactions. Everything from creativity and governance to socio-technical arrangements is drawn into the development of autonomous machines and artificial intelligence – but the authors are expressly interested in the question of aviation and aeromobilities.

What are aeromobilities, and what can we learn from their intersection with humans and technology? This is the fundamental question at the heart of their paper. The question is answered through several strands that weave throughout, focused between the existing debates and discourses around automation; a labour and capital-driven analysis of previous and current encounters with automation in aviation; and a theoretical framing that considers the underlying media and mechanisms that disperse ‘dispositions towards automation’, and theories of capital and development that might illuminate the fundamental dynamics between humans and technology.

This history of aeromobilities includes both the long history of air travel, as well as its reception (popularly and academically). Flight, airports, and computational, and simulational features like autopilot are situated in a longer history that includes leisure, travel, mobility studies, shopping malls, railways, and commercial architecture (among other things). ‘Dispositions’ describe ‘the wider cultural and techno-logical milieus’ (Lin et al., 2024) that intangibly direct and reflect variegated modes of engagement with the world that then lead to change, action, or expression (e.g. routines, affective and sensory experiences, memory and recollection, sensation, and consciousness). Media are key to the emergence of different dispositions, both performatively and representationally. As the authors note, it is important that the less tangible, less capturable elements of technological change are recognised for the role that they play in the development of both technology itself, but also the relations between humans and technology. This is because this dynamic imbrication is under constant formation, changing – sometimes slowly, sometimes at speed – as new developments emerge, are politicised or glossed over – alongside corresponding technological changes. How are we to capture or interpret the flux of both innovation, and our encounters with, responses to, and dispositions toward automation?

One key framing I would suggest is through labour – specifically, platformised, gamified, and invisibilised dimensions of augmented work (augmented in the sense, perhaps, of augmented reality). Uber driving, piloting a plane, transporting luggage, or passengers, all are understood by the authors as forms of automated labour within the wider context of aeromobilities. Where physical farm and factory labour, (and later, food preparation and domestic work), were once the key sites of automation, now inter-human relations; human–machine relations; and the role of labour in mobility itself can be automated. For example, the process of moving through an airport using a driverless train and automated passport scanner disappears human labour from the experience of crossing a border, while also smoothing over the points of contact between human and machine through interfaces and information boards that seamlessly guide mobility. This means the intercession of automation not just in hands-on tasks, but in the very foundations of experience and encounter – of dispositions – at an everyday level. To travel from one place to another is to meet with myriad, uncountable forms of automation – AI, robotic machines, algorithms, and other code – that subtly guide the body but also influence payment and shopping, check-in and boarding, and the connections between worker, customer, and manager. The authors argue that key to this dynamic, especially with ride-hailing apps like Uber, is the inter-worker competition for paid tasks ‘automation not only materially impedes workers from congregating or organising for collective action […] it also does so in a way that orients their disposition and self-motivation as labour-commodities whose use value can be calculated and pitched one against another’ (Lin et al., 2024). Through resistance and alternative geographies that ‘erupt’ against this competition and control, the authors identify the trickily persuasive dynamics of this type of automation as lubricants to acquiescence, through design elements like gamification.

Gamification is an interesting case that I’m not wholly convinced has a place in an emphasis on automation. If we take the basic definition that gamification adds game elements to non-game contexts (or even if we take a more commercial definition of using game elements to incentivise labour efficiency), it's hard to see how gamification is the best frame for this debate (Deterding, 2012).

For example, the authors identify Uber and other ride hailing platforms as a defining aspect of gamification in relation to aeromobilities: ‘In the airport, it is the automation of ground transportation, through ride-hailing apps, that has become noteworthy. Booking apps like Uber invoke certain kinds of magic and concealment through a sort of game-like representational trickery, playing on (false) perceptions, urgency, competition, and reward to alter behaviours’ (Lin et al., 2024). Is this representational trickery and ‘magic’ truly automation? What is the defining distinction between the automation made possible by code (i.e. all code is automating and truncating a discrete process); the subtle persuasive dynamics of digital interaction design, and the automation that we describe when we think of Fordism, Taylorism, or the development of robotics? Though there is certainly something significant to be said about media and technological design, and the nature of capitalism and nudge economics – the automation, perhaps, of affect or use of code and computation to induce particular behaviours or actions – I would be curious to see how something like Ash and others’ arguments about interfaces, procedurality, and mobile media would serve better here without gamification at all. That said, the notion of ‘modalities of encouragement’ (Lin et al., 2024) is an exceptionally useful term to describe platform ecosystems and mechanics, and so perhaps my scepticism is unjustified. If we consider that although the gamified elements themselves do not constitute automation proper, the attitude of design towards the effortless extraction of labour from users is perhaps a ‘mode’ adjacent to more traditional definitions of automation. Gamification is presented here as the oil that lubricates the automation machine – not automation as such, but the infrastructure that makes the coordination of labour automation possible, as well as implicitly appealing to a user or worker.

The author's interpretation of gamification builds on notions of enchantment. Enchantment describes the invisibilisation of power and labour/capital relations through the fetishisation and aestheticisation of technology. This conceptual term is deployed as an interpretive frame for the ways in which mobility is automated and justified, and the abstract means by which users are enticed into engagement and forms of labour through digital interfaces or technological spectacles. Yet, their reading of enchantment slips between a fairly literal equation with magic, delight and wonder, and a more critical (Marxism-informed) interpretation around the ways in which technology can mystify relations of capital and labour. The authors’ obfuscation of terms like enchantment and phantasmagoria not uncommon in geographical scholarship – as citations to Anderson (2017) and Goss (1999) indicate – but in this slippage useful nuance is lost. To take Walter Benjamin's approach, for example, enchantment and phantasmagoria need not dwell in the spectacular and intentionally captivating – to find enchantment does not require a feature that presents itself as enchanting or ‘designed to produce a kind of “delight” that will surprise passengers in what is advertised as a “kaleideoscope of wonder”’ (Lin et al., 2024). Enchantment and phantasmagoria – as Benjamin describes in The Arcades Project (Benjamin, 1999) – are intertwined with the banal commodity fetishisation of everyday life; of the push for perpetual newness and novelty that obscures the realities of labour, and distorts value. Candy stores, train stations, fashion, children's toys, wallpaper, and lamps – all share the sense of everyday ‘fascination’ that is central to enchantment. Enchantment, then, as fascination with the new, ‘tricks’ us into practices of consumption and discourses of historical framing that value technological progress over any other endeavor, making it impossible to perceive relations and situations with anything other than a dreamlike perception. A key example from the article – the Jewel attraction at Changi airport – is heavily reminiscent of the kinds of architectural wonders that historically featured at events like the World's Fairs or World Exhibitions, and which Walter Benjamin and others do cite as an exemplar of capitalist modernity – but enchantment is often far more than ‘a “long-wow” disposition’ (Lin et al., 2024). The section on Aspiration in many ways comes closer to a critical reading of enchantment through technologies of automation.

What is compelling within the argument about enchantment is the exemplification of abstraction and occlusion; the way in which complex dynamics and relations are disappeared by ostentatious attractions intended to distract passengers from the very flow of global transportation and the prosaic experience of aeromobility and automation (which no longer hold fascination as novel forms). Much like shopping malls or theme parks, global hub airports must compete to attract visitors who might otherwise find the experience alienating and inhuman (or at least extremely boring). As the authors describe, established forms of automation, from security apparatus, to gate control, to driverless trains (but even newer forms like automated policing or floor cleaning) may not in-and-of themselves serve as a form of enchantment or phantasmagoria (as Benjamin argued about new technologies and spatial designs, like panoramas or shopping arcades). Instead, these automated technologies are unpleasant reminders of the growing intercession of the computational, machinic, and robotic into processes that were once fully human (e.g. checking your identity at a border). The mechanism of enchantment in this way also obscures labour relations – as well as the labour that is being automated. This is something like a second-order enchantment – or perhaps more like Benjamin's media spectacle – in which human–technology power relations must be hidden by a completely different – distracting – feature that abstracts the natural and the technological, concealing not just fundamental relations, but perhaps the very existence of certain technologies and their interpellation with human activity.

One of the most productive contributions that this paper makes is sketching out the huge variety of ways of thinking about automation across geography (and beyond). The authors avoid the doom-scrying and sensationalism of much mainstream commentary and argue for a ‘middle ground’ approach that avoids the pitfalls of one singular or monolithic position on the problems of automation, AI, robotics, and other computational innovations in terms of labour and mobilities. This middle ground is taken towards human–machine relations of technological automation, and social or cultural framings around perceived ‘automation’ or automation-adjacent processes, technologies, or experiences. This is particularly important because of the focus on the embeddedness of capitalist ideological frames in the design of automated technologies, as well as their operations. This framing does, however, beg the question of whether we must assume that all technology has an ideology, or that automation inevitably has intent toward the obsolescence of human labour? The impressive bibliography hints at the answer in citations of Harvey, Hayles, or Amoore – but the absence of figures like Deleuze and Guattari to clarify concepts like assemblage leaves plenty of room for further thinking. It is perhaps beyond this paper to address such complexity, but certainly the key arguments raise future questions around the history of technology, and theories that expand on the intricate associations between humans, social relations, and technological objects or machines.

Though the authors expressly address default dispositions towards technology that lack nuance (e.g. tropes in geography the depict automation as, either, an unstoppable force or a static infrastructure that must simply be dismantled), there are also times when the argument falls into similar base categorisations. For example, I wonder whether – even in this critical mode – the authors reify throw-away groupings of all robots, all machines, all systems of code – as we often see in routine discourses of automation. A future expansion of this conversation could see these categorisations taken up or resisted by the authors, especially in relation to ‘recognising the potential for […] (mis)adherences and cruel optimism […] against reading bottom-up (re)appropriations of automation as necessarily lying beyond the bounds of technological control’ (Lin et al., 2024). What would a more granular understanding of the form and formation of automation look like? Berlant's cruel optimism that ‘appears to promise synergistic co-existence, but in fact, fall[s] trap to capitalistic expectations and demands on labour’ (Lin et al., 2024) captures something of the ‘uneven landscape’ of automation. Automation promises – and occasionally delivers – in wildly inconsistent ways that impact most the very populations that might also invest in the possibilities of change through technological development.

What, then are the potentials of these paradoxical engagements with the technological? There are some answers in sections like Acquiescence and Experimentation, where the centrality of human bodies and agency to computational and automated labour might be revealed; also in the conclusion, where loop-holes or even human–machine collusion might provide space for labour resistance – but more is needed.

As a critical review of the existing critiques and approaches to automation, this is an excellent resource. The authors also present a series of productive cases that illuminate the range of ways that we can define and interpret automation beyond problematic binaries or monolithic pronouncements. I can well imagine a companion piece that explores the theoretical contributions in more depth, taking questions of ideology, human–machine relations, posthumanism, and the fundamental possibilities of technological development to further examine the politics of resistance. Much of what I have expressed above is less criticism, and more a hope for further publication on this topic – perhaps, a book-length work that is able to unpack the rich and varied arguments presented here. I look forward to further dialogues along these vital lines.