INSTITUTE OF HUMAN OBSOLESCENCE
Exploring the potential of the human body to produce capital
The Institute of Human Obsolescence (IoHO) founded by artist and activist Manuel Beltrán, organized a discussion in the context of the Data Production Labor series to investigate the hidden dynamics behind our data work. Despite seemingly moving towards a society without human work, we have started to perform new forms of invisible labour. Human-produced data is a resource already extracted by Big Tech, producing vast amounts of capital. This new role that humans have taken in society is obscured by promises imposed by Big Tech. Why aren't we, the data workers, capitalising from it? If even jobless workers are generating capital by producing data, are we truly unemployed? IoHO is an artistic research project investigating the repositioning of human labor in a time where manual and intellectual labor are increasingly being performed by machines and new forms of inequality and exploitation arise.