GRAMMATIZING THE NETWORKS
It is intrinsic to the concept of the social factory that, though composition and decomposition of the working class may start in the workplace, it extends beyond it (Notes from Below 2018a). Within the factory gates, the working class was decomposed by Taylorism and by increasingly advanced automation technology. This process of deskilling continues with AI, but increasingly extends into the spheres of circulation, consumption and social reproduction. To explain the effects of the AI-automated social factory we borrow the concept of ‘grammatization’ from Bernard Stiegler (2010, 2015, 2018), precisely because he uses it to refer to a deskilling that affects workers’ knowledge not just of how to work but also of how to live and think, a process he relates directly to AI.
For Stiegler, grammatization is ‘the process through which the flows and continuities which weave our existence are discretized’ (2010: 31). This concept refers to the development of technologies that record, separate and codify aspects of human activity. The translation of speech into alphabetic writing, with its grammatical rules, is an early and preeminent example of this process (hence ‘grammatization’). But grammatization, in Stiegler’s usage, also involves sense organs (vision and hearing), the movements and gestures of the body (at work, at home or while consuming), and entire patterns of social interaction (Stiegler 2010: 10; 2018: 8). The deskilling of workers by the transfer of their knowledge to machines in a way that subordinates them to capital is but an initial moment of a widening process of the grammatization of proletarians (which we gestured to in the previous chapter). This process later spreads to the automation of consumption – people are trained as consumers by the audio-visual technology of the culture and advertising industries – and then to human self-understanding, a knowledge that is automated by, for example, social media and big data analytics.
automating the social factory
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