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Lecture Uni Graz: "Disrupting Silicon Valley Futures: A Radical Critique of Relentless Efficiency".

Efficiency is necessary in many contexts: It can save lives, reduce post-harvest losses, prevent waste.... But there is also a violent form of efficiency that not only aims to take control of the body for the sole purpose of competitive capital accumulation, but also uses it in ways that cause harm: Stress, depression, exhaustion, burnout, illness, death. At its worst, it turns people into mere "objects" - "human capital" whose efficiency characteristics are monitored and violently enforced. This "relentless efficiency" is the subject of the lecture. It has had several rebirths in the history of capitalism, the connection of which is the will for absolute control and improvement: the minimisation of social friction in order to shorten the time period in which capital can work through the hands of living labour. An objectification of labour that makes it a cog in a larger machine. A diacritical regime that determines who is valuable and who is not. But also the resistance of workers, which has historically been socially organised and articulated in different ways.

Further information can be found here: https://static.uni-graz.at/fileadmin/urbi-institute/Geographie/Veranstaltungen/KolloquiumSS2023/Flyer-SS2023Teil2.pdf