“Often against their own intentions, the pioneers of human-computer interaction find themselves at the forefront of the development of entirely new ways to control and programme the productivity of an increasingly mobile and flexible workforce.”

Sociologists such as Alain Touraine in France and Daniel Bell in the USA diagnosed the emergence of post-industrial societies at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, precisely at the time when Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) was being established as a field of inquiry and the design of user interfaces was beginning to play a central role in computer science.¹ In this short essay I would like to put forth the argument that there exists an intrinsic relationship between what has been diagnosed as post-industrial modes of production and social organization on the one hand and the emergence of an explicit focus on designing user interfaces for connected computers on the other hand.

My argument is that the design of user interfaces acts as a technique of motivation and mobilization for post-industrial subjects and ties them to diverse value-generating mechanisms. Taking this argument one step further, interfaces can be analytically situated as the central nodes of contemporary regimes of productivity which are being described in terms of immaterial labour, data colonialism and heteromation, as I will argue in the concluding remarks.

Bell gives a succinct summary of what he understands as the main features of post-industrial society: “Broadly speaking, if industrial society is based on machine technology, post-industrial society is shaped by an intellectual technology. And if capital and labor are the major structural features of industrial society, information and knowledge are those of the post-industrial society.”² In addition to the growing importance of the service sector for value creation, a new significance of knowledge processes for the production of economic added value can also be observed in post-industrial societies. Economic and social policy is thus faced with the historically new challenge of constructing infrastructures, which in addition to the classical transport and distribution of energy must now also ensure the circulation of information.

Touraine’s earlier neo-Marxist argumentation, which asks for the future of the working class under post-industrial conditions, is only worth a side note to Bell,³ while this question in particular could prove to be one of the most politically explosive today. Touraine, first in 1969, already very clearly described the phenomenon of a diffusion of the economic into all social areas, due to a decentralization and diffusion of value-creating processes from the factory floor or office building into the capillaries of society: “Growth results from a whole complex of social factors, not just from the accumulation of capital. Nowadays, it depends much more directly than ever before on knowledge, and hence on the capacity of society to call forth creativity. All the domains of social life – education, consumption, information, etc. – are being more and more integrated into what used to be called production factors.”⁴

For post-industrial society, or as Touraine also calls it: technocratic or programmed society, the core problem is how to ensure participation in the social production process of knowledge and information. And it is precisely here, according to my thesis in all due brevity, that interfaces come into play: they operate as the equivalent of the assembly line or office workstation of the old type of industrial societies by connecting the mobile and flexible knowledge workers to the post-industrial production process, which is increasingly shifting towards the immaterial.⁵ As Jan Distelmeyer has repeatedly argued, the “scope of the interface complex”⁶ is decidedly not limited to the symbolic layer of user interfaces, but includes a diversity of connections in computerized environments. For instance, application programming interfaces (APIs) regulate the programmability and interoperability of platforms and third-party applications, thus translating the logics of post-industrial production into code.

At the user side of the interface complex, one can observe a characteristic blurring of the boundaries between work and leisure, because it is sometimes the same operating systems and end devices, possibly the same software, that are used to carry out everyday practices such as flexible work organization or time management. The designers of user interfaces are well aware of the historical threshold situation in which they find themselves: their idea of a post-Fordist work culture, expressed, for example, in Douglas Engelbart’s vision of an augmentation of human intellect,⁷ is, however, only partially consistent with the dream of capital stressed by Franco Berardi in all sharpness, of being able to mobilize the labour potential of a distributed workforce at any time and from any location.⁸ Often against their own intentions, the pioneers of human-computer interaction find themselves at the forefront of the development of entirely new ways to control and programme the productivity of an increasingly mobile and flexible workforce.

Contemporary diagnoses of the digital cultural economy, largely influenced by Italian autonomists such as in the debate around immaterial or free labour⁹ and the emergence of a cognitariat¹⁰, can be fruitfully connected to Touraine’s problematization of the social struggles accompanying the fleshing out of post-industrial modes of production. Vis à vis a process of extensive rationalization and diffusion of value-creating activities into everyday life, one could expect knowledge workers to resist these developments as unreasonable demands and border transgressions between work and leisure time.

Thus, it seems necessary to aestheticize the regime of production in order to connect and affectively tie subjects to the post-industrial production apparatus. The user interface pioneers at Xerox PARC and elsewhere, despite being inspired to a large extent by countercultural imaginaries,¹¹ are dedicating themselves to this task with great ambition and lasting success. Their imagination and design of user interfaces can be described as an aesthetic practice in the sense of Andreas Reckwitz (“ästhetisch-imprägnierte Praxis”), i.e. as a convergence of processes of rationalization and aestheticization characteristic of late modern societies.¹² In Reckwitz’ account, in particular, the creative apparatus firmly anchored in Western culture since the 1980s responds to the lack of affect and motivation of organized modernity and its employee culture oriented towards bureaucratic points of view. Contemporary user experience design answers to this challenge by giving aesthetic form to a regime of productivity that is thoroughly extended in time and space to encompass large domains of everyday life.¹³

The “factories of the mind”¹⁴ hardly resemble the factories of industrial societies on the outside, yet they represent the central instance of value creation in post-industrial societies. Interfaces are the distributed terminals of their socio-technical infrastructure and the core technology of participation in networked value creation processes, whether paid or unpaid. By linking economic, cultural and aesthetic logics with concrete subject designs and affect-constellations, they therefore represent a preferred object of criticism from a media studies perspective. It is at the site of the user interface where everyday practices of socializing, searching and navigating are captured and made economically productive.¹⁵

Sensorial interfaces with the world outside computers are extracting data from the environment that are then transformed into resources for value-creation processes.¹⁶ Many of the transactions initiated and transferred via interfaces in fact don not initiate automated processes so much as to connect customers to legions of clickworkers or physical labourers via platforms that act as central registers for value exchange.¹⁷ In all these instances, the role of interfaces – ranging from user interfaces via application programming interfaces on the software level to the hardware interfaces physically connecting network nodes with each other – requires more scrutiny on the part of media scholars interested in the ways value is created and distributed in post-industrial societies.