Digital Labor in Sleep Dealer
An idea formed in Marx’s article that, “The sum total of the labor of all these private individuals form the aggregate labor of society” (Marx 2). Basically, Marx is trying to say that the men that do the labor, aka Memo, is exactly what helps societies turn objects like a table into a commodity; because now it is being socialized as something we need to have in our communities. It is a necessity. Commodities are objects that turn into a necessity, like Memo getting nodes forced into his body. But we can also look at nodes as a social connectivity.
By using the modern technology known as nodes in “Sleep Dealer,” we follow it as a way through technology, a connector, L. L. Thaver said,
“that awareness of such a technological clearing in which our social being is understood has the double-sided nature of pointing both to the danger posited as well as the saving grace which such awareness endows. The danger is that in an information and knowledge age our expression of everydayness, or the quotidian, is no longer defined by its expression of sociality, or social connectivity as forms of social ‘outreach’, and the ‘sociability’ that involves the practices we enact in effecting such social connectivity” (Thaver 2).
Basically, Thaver is saying that the nodes we see in “Sleep Dealer” are a social connectivity in the expression of everydayness. They use nodes to express a connection with a machine or another person, like Memo and Luz, to give their body a way to communicate with a dream-scape. The nodes use a form of communication through the neurotransmitters of the mind to provide the other with a connection to the other person's thoughts or past dreams. Nodes are dangerous because they connect to the human’s body through their nervous system. If a node were to go into the body wrong, and/or miss where it was supposed to be inserted, it could kill the person. That’s right kill them. When hooked up to the machine in “Sleep Dealer” the body is creating this electric mode of information and knowledge to a system, that runs these robotic machines in a building. But the location is never direct. The workers running this company never know where they are working virtually. What’s even more dangerous is the system could glitch or spark in some way, shape, or form, and the body that is connected to the nodes. Memo has to wear contacts that help him transport his visual mind into another reality for working on work. These contacts are dangerous because during the glitch they are in a virtual reality and if electrocuted, they become stuck and could instantly be blind. Social connectivity in this case is more for the ‘outreach’ of practices that affect the connectivity to technology. But another way nodes are a form of saving grace with the knowledge they carry.