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The use of data to profile and make decisions about data subjects for citizenship, targeted advertising, job recruitment and other reasons, has been eminently normalised, which is an emerging threat to protected spaces for personal subjectivation and identity formation. The 'right to the subject'; or to agency via personal subject formation outside bilateral profiling; is at stake. This is especially true for workers. Algorithmic management infused with worker control mechanisms occurs in structurally and objectively unequal conditions within subjective, and unequal, social relations. Data harms protections in European privacy and data protection law, despite being heralded as the strongest in the world, are insufficient to protect workers' right to the subject. Indeed, structural features of inequality within the capitalist data political economy mean that workers experience different power relations to consumers and citizens. Analysing the social relations surrounding policy features of 'consent', and 'risk', with focus on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the negotiations for the AI Act, it is not difficult to see that these policies do not protect all data subjects' rights to the subject identically. Indeed, workers never have the capacity to truly consent at work; and the risks workers face are different from that of other data subjects, such as consumers. Data subjects do not, across categories, have equal access to equality, within, and because of, the social relations of data production. From a cross-disciplinary perspective and with contributions to sociology, critical theory, media and policy studies, this article argues that workers' right to the subject is at stake, in datafied social relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'The mirror for (artificial) intelligence in capitalism' expands on the historical episodes outlined in the article by Engster and Moore in the current Special Issue, to develop the historical materialist critique of the history of ideas leading up to and during the eras of artificial intelligence, but also as a way to critique the contemporary moment where machines are ascribed autonomous intelligence. Specifically, the history of the ideational manufacturing of human intelligence demonstrates a pattern of interest in calculation and computation, intelligent human and machinic behaviours that are, not surprisingly, ideologically aligned with capitalism. The simultaneous series of machinic and technological invention and related experiments shows how machines not only facilitate the processes of normalisation of what is considered intelligent behaviours, via both human and machinic intelligence, but also facilitate and enable the integration of capitalism into everyday work and life. Intelligent behaviours are identified as the capacity for quantification and measure and are limited to aspects of thinking and reasoning that can provide solutions to, for example, obstacles in the production and extraction of surplus value, based on the specific postulations and assumptions highlighted in this piece. Today, ideas of autonomous machinic intelligence, seen in the ways artificial intelligence is incorporated into workplaces outlined in the sections below, facilitate workplace relations via intelligent behaviours that are assistive, prescriptive, descriptive, collaborative, predictive and affective. The question is, given these now autonomous forms of intelligence attributed to machines, who/what is looking in the mirror at whose/which reflection? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence is being touted as a new wave of machinic processing and productive potential. Building on concepts starting with the invention of the term artificial intelligence in the 1950s, now, machines can supposedly not only see, hear, and think, but also solve problems and learn, and in this way, it seems that actually there is a new form of humiliation for humans. This article starts with a historical overview of the forerunners of artificial intelligence, where ideas of how intelligence can be formulated according to philosophers and social theorists begin to enter the work sphere and are inextricably linked to capitalist production. However, there always already has been an artificial intelligence in power in, on the one hand, technical machines and the social machine money, and on the other, humans, making both sides (machines and humans), an interface of their mutual capitalist socialisation. The question this piece addresses is, then, what kind of capitalist socialisation will the actual forms of artificial intelligence bring? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Free and open-source software (FOSS) communities constitute an arena in which thousands of users voluntarily explore design codes, spot bugs in codes, and make contributions to the code in a fashion at odds with the otherwise hugely competitive software market. This computerisation movement emerged as a challenge to the domination of such behemoth firms as Microsoft and IBM, and is portrayed us having a revolutionary ultimate goal: to provide free software to do all of the jobs computer users want to do' (Free Software Foundation, 2008). We ask to what extent FOSS actually challenges the orthodoxy. Does ego-less programming of the information bazaar really free participants from the stuffy pews of the cathedral, and challenge the essence of capitalism? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'parallel visions' proposed by the contributing authors to this issue are intended to challenge the dominant themes of capitalist organisation and production through an in-depth look at peer-to-peer production and the development of software and sharing -- a movement which, the authors argue, is based on new visions for value systems, ethics and governance. We have organised their contributions into sections based on the relevant aspects of these economies in order to look into the politics of how these networks are governed, the likelihood of new avenues for worker organisation, and the possibilities for entirely new models of economies that can be classified outside the hegemony of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the global economy, workers are increasingly expected to cultivate an unprecedented repertoire of abilities in an immaterial world of work. This signifies a limited shift in capitalist expansion in the post-Fordist world in relation to workers' employability therein. A model of worker subjectivity was introduced into Western management and psychology discourse surrounding employability in the 1960s and 1970s. In a developed, post-industrial global economy, management has begun to view workers less as cogs in the wheel or less as rational and predictable entities than as dynamic individuals with the capacity for symbolic reasoning, intelligence, independently generated ideas, and even the desire to work for the sake of self-fulfilment! The Fordist workplace was expected to become a distant memory and organisations were to become “learning organisations” rather than the hierarchical, Dickensian workfloors of the manufacturing age. Nevertheless, rather than offering freedom from the iron cage of capitalism, workers face a contemporary form of coercion that substitutes political representation with a set of expectations and limitations intended, ironically, to result in workplace emancipation. Emphasis on employability of individuals through workers' creation of self-woven safety nets demonstrates an elite-led project to reduce government responsibility for employment welfare. In order to make this claim, the article looks at the case of education policy in South Korea after the economic crisis of 1997. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]