The politics of skill and potential in an ‘emerging’ region: Upskilling initiatives in Istanbul

Introduction

In Turkey, tech companies such as Microsoft, Cisco and Vodafone invest in information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) initiatives, for which they partner with local non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The latter provide a range of training programs that not only focus on digital skills but also seek to cultivate among participants a more general potential to learn, create and collaborate. In a personal interview, a corporate social responsibility representative of one of the leading global corporations told me that Turkey had a ‘very young and bright population’ in love with the latest technologies. Yet Turks were ‘not aware of how they can benefit from them’ through self-education, training and ‘more proper’ social interaction. ¹ Following diagnoses of underutilization such as this one, ICT4D initiatives promote investment in the potential of the Turkish population alongside ‘better’ deployment of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Their discourse of potential circulates across private, public and non-governmental sectors and articulates with development plans for macro-economic transition.

Relating everyday practices of ICT use and learning to macro-economic development plans, this article explores the multiple constructions and manifestations of ‘potential’ at stake in ICT4D upskilling programs in Istanbul, Turkey. Rather than equating upskilling with empowerment, I study the discourses and techniques that manage potential during everyday practices of learning and ICT use by volunteer instructors and participants. I investigate the politics of skill and potential by asking in what ways, and to what extent, upskilling programs subject the potential to learn, create and develop oneself to the requirements and conditions of informational capitalism. My analysis suggests that upskilling programs not only stimulate and nurture but also contain, constrain and exploit potential. Nonetheless, participants, NGO affiliates and volunteers – driven by an ethos of equality, ‘sharing’ and peer learning – develop practices that at least to some extent disrupt informational-capitalist control.

Potential as a discursive category is implicated in macro-economic rationalities and labor market norms and reflected in the curriculum design of upskilling programs. Potential in this sense is somewhat under-defined compared to the delimited, particular character conventionally attributed to skills since what is valued in contemporary labor markets is the flexibility of workers to adjust to new tasks and their ability to develop new skills or solve problems creatively. Despite this inherent vagueness, potential is marked, measured and rendered distinctive too (cf. Fleming, 2014: 27 and 37; Mäkinen, 2016: 77–79). That is to say, potential is discursively constructed as a human resource, technically measured in terms of qualification or performance indicants, economically valorized and materially shaped through practices of ICT use. Such articulations of potential function within informational capitalism as a mode of production in which ICTs together with information understood as ‘processes of cognition, communication, and cooperation’ forge production processes that facilitate the accumulation of profits (Fuchs, 2010: 180). Meanwhile, these articulations categorize people variably as ‘talent’ and ‘low-skilled’ workers, or ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ of ICTs and information.

The politics of skill and potential gain particular importance in the context of the so-called ‘emerging region’ where skill trends are equivocal and the multifaceted governance of potential requires us to critically reflect on questions of power and disempowerment. Regarding skill trends, Turkish workers are more likely to end up in jobs involving ICT usage and information that are considered less ‘creative’ and lower skilled. For instance, despite growth, Turkish workers overall are less involved in the upper strata of knowledge work compared to other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Whereas among the 10 highest ranking OECD countries ICT specialists constitute 4–5 percent of the total employment, in Turkey such employment falls below 2 percent (Information Society Department, 2011: 114–115). In many of these OECD countries, ICT-related employment broadly measured constitutes approximately 20 percent of the total employment, yet in Turkey this is merely 10–11 percent. Indicating Turkey’s suboptimal performance in the knowledge economy, indexes such as the Knowledge Economy Index and the Global Innovation Index cast Turkey’s overall ranking on innovation somewhere ‘in the middle’ of the country rankings.

Nonetheless, in Turkey as an ‘emerging region’, the population’s potential, yet underused, is articulated as a macro-economic resource in need of pro-active governance. What defines emerging regions in dominant developmental discourse is that more significant than the measured actual performance of their knowledge and innovation sectors is the speculated potential for their future growth. An anthology on the topic defines development in emerging economies as ‘a process of creative self-discovery’ through which ‘hitherto unsuspected local talents and potentialities are apt to be discovered and mobilized’ (Scott and Garofoli, 2007: 17). A young, growing and relatively educated population that has completed at least secondary school can be one of the ‘unused, hidden resources’ (p. 18). Accordingly, key policy documents by the Turkish government that strategize to develop an ‘information society’ posit the large, ‘dynamic’ workforce as a primary asset of the country (Ahmed, 2007: 50; State Planning Organization, 2006a, 2006b). While Turkey is often considered ‘lagging behind’ in terms of economic transition toward a post-industrial knowledge economy, it is also cast as ‘promising’. The Innovation Union Scoreboard by the European Union forecasts Turkey’s eventual ‘catching up’ with the European Union. ²

More implicitly, part of Turkey’s competitive advantage is that this workforce will toil for lower wages and has more limited access to labor rights than its counterparts in the overdeveloped world (Cam, 2002: 103). Moreover, while the pursuit of macro-economic transition designates potential as a domain of governance, increased ICT access and upskilling become equated with empowerment. Nonetheless, the development toward a so-called information society overall remains a depoliticized process (cf. Chakravartty, 2012: 5; Hoyng, 2016: 142). Taking these concerns into account, this article explores the governance of potential in accord with rationalities of macro-economic development and informational-capitalist logics of accumulation as well as the possibility of resisting such subjection.

In terms of methodology, the majority of ICT4D programs covered here are coordinated by the Istanbul-based NGO Habitat Center for Development and Governance (Habitat Kalkınma ve Yönetişim Derneği (HKYD)), which is Turkey’s most prominent NGO dealing with ICT4D. Its focus on technology as a means toward social change has enabled HKYD to become a key partner for powerful governance actors advocating development toward the so-called ‘information society’ (bilgi toplumu) and ‘e-transformation’ (e-dönüșüm), namely, global tech companies, the United Nations’ development arm and the Turkish state. Some other programs, discussed here comparatively, are initiated by local tech entrepreneurs or companies. I undertook 12 in-depth interviews with key NGO stakeholders, including employees and volunteer instructors at HKYD, as well as two partnering NGOs. I further conducted seven in-depth interviews with professionals in tech industries, who were involved in ICT4D initiatives. I also collected news reporting, publication materials and followed online activities on ICT4D project websites and social media accounts. In order to explore the two aforementioned manifestations of potential, this article’s methodology considers (1) the design of programs and circulation of macro-economic, institutional discourses on skill and potential and (2) ‘on-the-ground’ practices, tactics and experiences that are unintended ramifications of programs. Attending to the first dimension, I deploy the terminology of apparatus of power (cf. Grossberg, 2010: 253) to signify the ways in which conjoined discourses and techniques construct and govern potential. My analysis starts by focusing on curriculum design (i.e. content, duration and formulation of learning aims and objectives). First, I highlight the diversity among training programs, whose aims vary from basic literacy skills to ‘innovativeness’, and the different conditions under which participants are included in socio-digital networks. Second, I turn to in-depth interviews with a program coordinator and participants of advanced programs to explore techniques of self-development through which the potential of young ‘talent’ is channeled to the needs of informational capitalism. Third, I focus on the communal aspect of ICT4D programs, especially practices of volunteering in peer-to-peer teaching, which form a site of exploitation by informational capitalism. All in all, I map three apparatuses of power that, respectively, stratify, contain and exploit potential.

Yet, as further argued here, potential also escapes dominant constructions when it is a vital resource for broader cultural processes. Implicit dynamics of everyday learning and ICT use that are not accounted for in formal discourse and program designs became clear in my interviews with volunteer instructors, complemented by several visits to an ICT4D lab for observation. The last section of this article concentrates on narrated experiences and demonstrated tactics that, to a greater or lesser degree, undermine the effectivity of the aforementioned apparatuses of power.

Before I embark on the analysis of upskilling programs in Istanbul, the following section highlights that debates on skill trends in cultural studies and beyond do not just concern empirical differences but crucially reflect contestations over norms and questions of power and (dis)empowerment. It constructs a nexus of upskilling/deskilling and empowerment/disempowerment, which outlines the politics of skill and potential.

The politics of skills and potential

The argument that the introduction of technology into labor processes induces deskilling and that deskilling implies disempowerment has been given impetus by Harry Braverman’s classical text, first published in 1974, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. Reflecting on the reorganization of labor processes through Taylorism, Braverman (1998: 295) contends that technology deprives workers of craftsmanship, skills and knowledge, thereby aiding control over workers by capitalists. As workers have decreasing levels of insight and oversight with regard to the labor process, they are rendered replaceable.

While shifting focus to contemporary service industries, Bernard Stiegler shares with Braverman the idea of deskilling as disempowerment. He argues that contemporary service industries render people dependent and less capable as they do not know how to work or live in other ways than those facilitated and prescribed by service industries and commercial technologies that have become pervasive in their lives. Being enlisted or enrolled in socio-technical networks that are ‘short-circuited’ means being added to a pre-constituted, non-negotiable system (Stiegler, 2010b). For Stiegler, ‘to undergo the effects of a service industry is in fact to have one’s existence transformed without participating in the transformation’ (Stiegler quoted in Barker, 2009). He reminds us that proletarization for Marx indicated not class membership itself but a condition of deskilling and loss of savoir faire (literally, the know-how to do) resulting in workers’ dependency on machinery (Stiegler, 2010a).

In contrast, the upskilling thesis describes a historical break with Taylorism/Fordism and is most recognizably presented in work such as Daniel Bell’s that heralds the advent of a new type of economy. Negating Braverman’s propositions, the argument is that as technology eliminates the most repetitive jobs, work becomes more complex (Sawchuk, 2006). As many studies claim to observe, capital and skills ‘are complements, not substitutes’ and the insertion of technology into labor processes is accompanied by increasing need for skilled workers (Adler, 2007). The upskilling thesis often relies on criteria for measurement, such as duration of education or training before employment. Nonetheless, skills (or potential) come to include wider sets of less measurable personal qualities, including workers’ attitudes, predispositions and character traits, and capabilities for participatory management and generating tacit knowledge (Fuchs, 2008; Jaros, 2006: 8–9; Sawchuk, 2006: 598). Finally, the upskilling thesis claims to observe an improvement in the quality of (work) life as new types of jobs are counteracting the tendencies toward alienation under Taylorism. Work supposedly provides room for personal experiences of continuous learning and self-realization, in addition to outlets for creativity and play (Fisher, 2010; Sawchuk, 2006).

There is an additional position beyond the arguments of deskilling as disempowerment and upskilling as betterment. This position accepts an incomplete and partial trend toward upskilling, as measured through particular norms such as duration of education, capabilities for self-governance or adaptability of workers to handle new tasks and problems (Adler, 2007). Yet rather than empowerment and the retreat of capitalist control and exploitation, at stake are new technologies of power that govern potential through life-long learning and flexibilization of work (Fisher, 2010; Moore and Taylor, 2009); the exploitation of passion and self-motivation in creative work (De Peuter, 2011; Gill and Pratt, 2008; Hermes, 2015; Tokumitsu, 2014); and the normalization of free labor, or prosumption, in digital culture (Kuehn and Corrigan, 2013; Terranova, 2000, 2004).

Drawing from this discussion on upskilling/deskilling and empowerment/disempowerment, the following three sections map apparatuses of stratification, containment and exploitation, respectively. The last section inquires into challenges to these apparatuses of power.

Stratifying potential

Exploring the stratification of potential, this section considers the ways in which upskilling programs reproduce hierarchies of skill and unequal distributions of capability, thereby strengthening, rather than undoing, social stratifications that categorize people as ‘low-skilled’ labor versus ‘talents’. Building on Braverman and Stiegler’s arguments, I contend that participants are included into socio-digital networks under different conditions, and their inclusion is not always empowering. I review the diversity of upskilling curricula and programs that were in operation during the 2010–2013 period in Istanbul, the relations to technology that they set out to construct especially in the case of more basic skill trainings, and the worker and citizen subjectivities they imply.

Executed by the local NGO HKYD and sponsored by Vodafone, the No One Will Remain Digitally Illiterate Program (Bilgisayar Bilmeyen Kalmayacak (BBK)) reached out to disadvantaged youth, especially women and girls below the age of 30 years, to close the ‘digital gap’. In its first phase in 2007, it attracted over 1,000,000 participants across Turkey. BBK shared its peer-to-peer instruction network with the program The Digitally Skilled Teach the Unskilled (Bilenler Bilmeyenlere Bilgisayar Öğretiyor (BBBÖ)), which had reached more than 150,000 participants by 2013 and fell under Microsoft’s global Unlimited Potential project. These two training programs lasted 25 and 35 hours, respectively, and curricula focused on Microsoft applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, although BBBÖ also offered two advanced follow-up courses. BBBÖ further included a ‘digital life’ component that familiarized participants with the ‘comforts’ of online shopping, e-government services and Internet security, addressing virus and malware prevention and data protection.

Following Stiegler, populations undergoing basic skill trainings were enlisted or enrolled in socio-technical networks that are ‘short-circuited’ (Stiegler, 2010b). Training participants in specific programs rendered them dependent on proprietary products that were ‘user-friendly’ and ‘ready-to-use’, yet at the same time pre-constituted and non-negotiable (Liu, 2004: 165–172). Curricula configured participants as users and loyal consumers of standardized software packages. The emphasis on convenience and security promoted the reliance on well-known global corporate tech brands. Meanwhile, participants were supposed to adapt and integrate into socio-digital networks without contemplating alternative possibilities or considering more particular needs. Curricula avoided more controversial areas such as digital commons, surveillance and censorship, and technological politics addressing the design of the so-called ‘information society’. They did not problematize what counts as knowledge or skill, let alone what kind of society shaped by ICTs would be desirable (cf. Fish and Srinivasan, 2012; Gajjala, 2013; Kapczynski, 2010). HKYD affiliates rationalized trainings sponsored by Microsoft introducing its software packages by pointing to the low education levels among target groups and the limited availability of public resources. As Selim reasoned, ‘Because, at least, a man [sic] who has never used a computer and perhaps has never seen one during his life, can start with Microsoft and that opens a path’. ³ However, appealing to common sense, Selim accepted that these participants would remain consumers of tech brands and primarily be trained for lower skilled jobs rather than preferred, creative ones.

Contrary to basic skill trainings, other programs by HKYD trained participants to become technical experts or even creative entrepreneurs and innovators. Cisco’s Networking Academy Program (CNAP) did not aim for broad inclusion but targeted the future ‘skilled’ workers of the knowledge and Internet economy. As such, 92 percent of CNAP’s participants were university students and graduates (Sungurlu and Benli, 2008). Albeit not members of Florida’s core creative class, the partnering NGO Turkish Informatics Foundation hailed the certified graduates as ‘network experts’, who would fill up shortages of skilled labor. ⁴ Operative between 2011 and 2012, Intel’s Technology and Entrepreneurship Program targeted career-oriented youth who received training in topics such as ‘Technology Literacy, Critical Thinking, Collaboration, [and] Entrepreneurship’. Similarly, the KariyerİST program stimulated ‘innovative entrepreneurship’.

Projects developed by organizations other than HKYD further extended the range of ICT4D programs. Pushing for innovation in the Internet economy, the program E-Seed (E-Tohum), initiated by a local entrepreneur, aimed to introduce junior Turkish Internet entrepreneurs into an ‘ecosystem’ that provided them with connections to investors and insiders’ knowledge. ⁵ Yet in another project, conducted in an impoverished historical inner-city neighborhood of Istanbul, participants would attain the ‘invaluable experience’ of working with concrete products instead of ‘text book examples’. (I did not receive permission from the project’s initiator to disclose its name.) The project, which was the initiative of a returnee tech entrepreneur, trained groups of deprived neighborhood youth to become smart-phone testers. The online description of the project stated that the company had a ‘fresh approach’ that would answer the needs of both universities and the ICT industry: Telecom companies would have highly efficient testers to refurbish defected products and the universities would have access to internship places for students who would function as supervisors in the test labs. Despite the rhetoric of education, the set of skills that trainees attained was very narrow and indeed only applicable to specific products – particular phone brands and models. Participants joined for different reasons beyond the desire to acquire skills. There was a vague promise for health insurance, and university students working as interns had hopes for job placement at the telecom company. Yet as none of these promises materialized, and the only form of compensation was free breakfast, this project tended to blur the boundaries between education or training and unpaid, non-contract labor.

This overview of ICT4D initiatives suggests that while NGOs and tech corporations cast ICT4D in a discourse of inclusion and empowerment, this does not prevent target groups from being included into informational networks differentially. It is true that even the basic skill trainings generated experiences of learning and self-development. Besides, through observations I made during field research, this became clear on the ICT4D-run website ‘This Is Your Story’ (Bu Senin Hikayen), which invited ‘everyone who believes that information has changed their life’ to share their stories. Participants sending in their statements encouraged others to join the ICT4D programs too, testifying that ‘learning’ had helped them overcome hurdles in their lives. One former participant said, ‘You’re never too old to learn, just join the courses of Digitally Skilled Teach the Unskilled and you will see the benefits’. ⁶

However, conditions under which people come to join socio-digital networks vary significantly. Borrowing from Jack Qiu (2010: 3), the ‘information have-nots’ may become merely the ‘information have-less’ who are still less equipped compared to others, while their attainment of ICT access does not dissolve socio-economic and socio-political inequalities. As Cara Wallis (2013) observed in a study on migrant women in China seeking both employment and self-betterment through ICT courses, the experience of self-development during the training often contrasted with later experiences on the job, where tasks were repetitive and management techniques undermined individual autonomy. What such courses generate are not the high-skilled knowledge workers who constitute Richard Florida’s (2005) creative class but low-skilled workers who support communication processes and maintain infrastructure, which informational capitalism also requires (McKercher and Mosco, 2008).

In Turkey, the observations of differential inclusion into socio-digital networks through ICT4D programs and of stratification of potential (and accordingly of people as ‘talents’ vs ‘lower skilled’ workers, or producers vs consumers) should be considered in relation to the aforementioned equivocal skill trends characterizing this country as an emerging region. As critiques of ICT4D have argued, to the extent that ICT4D programs train participants more frequently as low- and semi-skilled laborers engaging in precarious, low-waged work, they merely reproduce skill hierarchies and macro-economic structures (McLaughlin, 2005). Even though basic training programs may aid individuals to improve their chances of employment, ICT4D programs assist in the deepening of global capitalism. They enable the global business elite to extract value from the workforce of so-called ‘emerging’ regions and tech corporations to expand their markets by including new, ‘properly’ trained consumers (Fish and Srinivasan, 2012).

Containing potential

Some of the aforementioned ICT4D initiatives stimulated entrepreneurship, innovation and knowledge work, rather than merely basic digital skills. They were designed to be auxiliary in Turkey’s economic transition, thereby coalescing personal and macro-economic development. Focusing on the containment of potential, the following section explores an apparatus of power that targets, stimulates and cultivates potential through ICT4D but simultaneously renders the latter subservient to economic calculations. As Adler and others argue, even for those who are eventually supposed to end up at the upper strata of the knowledge economy, their position on the ‘skill ladder’ does not imply ‘empowerment’ but effectuation of particular mechanisms of power that benefit informational capitalism: Potential is contained as it is channeled to labor markets, articulated as measurable human resource and considered to be owned on a personal basis. My analysis deploys personal interviews with two university students, whom I call Defne and Ahmet, and a program coordinator of KariyerIST, referred to as Mr Kural.

Partnering with HKYD, the KariyerİST program integrated technology and entrepreneurship. Values of distinctiveness, creativity and unique passions undergirded the philosophy of the program according to the program coordinator Mr Kural. Hence, his advice to participants were as follows: ‘don’t become an ordinary person, [but] differentiate yourself, become aware of your distinctiveness’ and ‘become aware of your own strengths and accordingly choose a profession, do a job you like’. ⁷

Mr Kural’s comments confirm the redefinition of skill away from mastering a narrow set of techniques toward personal dispositions and mentalities. Whereas the construction of personal traits as skills renders the latter category more ambiguous and heterogeneous, it also ‘deepens the penetration of capital into new terrain’ such as extra-curricular and life-long learning and the ‘everyday life of informal learning’ (Sawchuk, 2006: 598). Mr Kural said,

We tell [the participants] that money is actually a side effect. A human’s basic aim is to choose a profession and work life that makes them happy and that they can do with joy. […] If one does that, the money will follow. […] If you are only after money, you won’t get it anyway. Your goal should be more concrete. ⁸

Mr Kural’s comment contrasted the concreteness of self-fulfillment to the abstraction of monetary calculations. However, the logic that money would be a ‘side effect’ of doing what you like also suggests the possibility that cultivating private passions and ‘unique’ qualities would somehow contribute to success in one’s career, although it would do so perhaps in less foreseeable ways.

For my interviewees, next to achieving self-development, concerns over finding a job played a role in their decision to participate in the KariyerİST trainings. To employers interested in innovation and entrepreneurship, Defne would tell about her many certificates, completed trainings and extra-curricular activities. Employers would be impressed and say, ‘at your age, you have so many certificates; you have made good use of your time’. ⁹ Defne’s paraphrased statement demonstrates an employer’s gaze and her understanding of the importance of self-training. KariyerIST mobilized technologies of the self that constituted self-reliant and self-fashioning subjectivities, prepared to take responsibility for ensuring and improving their own welfare through ‘self-trained employability’ (cf. Moore and Taylor, 2009; Neilson and Rossiter, 2005; Rose et al., 2006). Such subjectivities mark a situation of job scarcity and competition as one of ‘opportunity’. Accordingly, KariyerİST participant Ahmet complained that while there were more opportunities in Istanbul, there were also lots of people competing for them as the city attracted aspiring young people from the entire country. He, however, quickly added, ‘Though I think that if you are really motivated, you can achieve what you want in Istanbul’. ¹⁰

KariyerIST fits in a context in which life-long learning and extra-curricular training, leading to (certified and uncertified) skills, personal qualities and experiences, become requirements for the job market. As Tanıl Bora et al. argue in Did We Study For Nothing?, in Turkey continuing education and accumulating certificates form strategies to negotiate conditions of precarity and unemployment for university graduates. In the context of 21.7 percent unemployment among 15–24-year-olds and similar percentages among college graduates in subjects from management to education exiting the workforce (Bora, 2011: 51), self-training keeps one ‘on track’ and supposedly ascertains one’s flexibility and dynamism. Hence, the promised outcome of self-training through ICT4D programs is employability. Employability as a calculative rationality assesses one’s prospects but diverts from the guarantee of employment (cf. Moore and Taylor, 2009).

Interestingly, from Mr Kural’s account it became clear that being ‘driven’ and creative was not just required on the job, but in the first place to negotiate unemployment, precarity and flexibilization of employment schemes. While not having necessarily fewer chances than their peers in business-oriented majors, those with majors less oriented onto the job market would have to ‘push [the boundaries of] their creativity a bit’. Creativity became articulated to flexibility, which was for Mr Kural ‘something that life imposes. [Students] have no choice but to find a way for themselves’. ¹¹

Fleming’s (2014) concept of biocracy underscores the extent to which contemporary capitalism targets all aspects of life to extract value. Self-motivated workers accept this and participate in the pervasive management of their energy and time because they no longer distinguish between work and private life. A governmental type of control operating on ‘skilled’ subjectivities contains potential by ensuring that the potential to learn, develop and innovate will be a resource, if not reserve, for informational-capitalist production. For young people, internships and temporary employment appear as first steps to ‘dream jobs’. Yet precarious conditions might turn structural, accompanying regimented governance of one’s labor rather than self-fulfillment (Bulut, 2015).

Exploiting potential

A third apparatus of power, operating alongside stratification and containment in upskilling programs, effectuates the exploitation of potential by appropriating and extracting value from social and cultural commons (Nonini, 2006: 6–7). When volunteers dedicate their time, effort and communicative capabilities to sustain communities of learning, they are contributing to social commons, namely, resources that benefit the community and result from the human labor of its members. Such communities function as platforms for cultural commons, too, by circulating cultural resources and facilitating collective learning and knowledge creation. This section and the next explore how the social and cultural resources generated by communities of learning can either be appropriated and exploited by informational capitalism or pose a challenge to it.

Volunteerism is a declared principle of HKYD and fundamental to the majority of upskilling programs introduced above. In these programs, former participants provided peer-to-peer instruction to others on a voluntary basis. For affiliates of HKYD, who recruited and coordinated ICT4D volunteers, their work was an example of social entrepreneurship and a mechanism for spreading social entrepreneurship throughout Turkey, together with social awareness and the spirit of volunteerism. ¹² Volunteers would develop capacities to become actively engaged citizens and community leaders. ¹³ As participants stated in interviews, one of the outcomes they expected was self-development, but next to that stood self-fulfillment and social change. Harun argued that for him the decision to do volunteer work had to do with the fact that ‘I do what I do willingly and with pleasure when I volunteer. Then I am more motivated. I think I would not have felt this good, had I done another type of work in exchange for money’. ¹⁴ Others, such as Can, were motivated by the feeling that they could contribute input without the usual set of restrictions being imposed, for instance, by hierarchies on the work floor and capitalist regimes of valorization: ‘But of course in the business world not every idea gets valued. At a place where volunteerism is the standard, you will really feel that your ideas are valued. You are really part of a collective’. ¹⁵

Volunteerism can be a form of uncompensated ‘hope labor’ that is delivered in the present with the hope that one’s merit will be recognized and result in future employment (Kuehn and Corrigan, 2013). Yet more importantly in the present case, volunteerism promises dealienation. Motivations based on care for society, desire to contribute to social commons and quests for self-fulfillment form the opposite of instrumentalization of one’s capabilities for alienating labor processes. Yet such ‘outsides’ can also be exploited as sites of economic value production. The work volunteers performed did not result in commodities immediately but rather in what Terranova describes as ephemeral products: Commodities are integrated into processes of continuous communication, assistance, updating and so on that require continuous digital labor. They become ‘more of a process than a finished product’, as continuous communicative and creative labor animates the commodity (Terranova, 2004: 90–91). Volunteer labor in ICT4D can be compared to the work done by online brand-centered communities that operate on a volunteer or peer-to-peer basis (Fuchs, 2008). Similar to the attachments to online brand-centered communities for peer support concerning software, ICT4D volunteers created value by developing a ‘brand-loyal customer base’ of users in the process of familiarizing participants with particular software applications (McLaughlin, 2005). But more participants tended to feel attached to ICT4D communities. Hence, volunteers stimulated attachments to corporate brands in rather singular ways, namely, by fueling supportive, enthusiastic and intimate user communities with their communicative skills and affective care.

While actual volunteers contributed their know-how, time and energy for the sake of social commons or self-fulfillment and without monetary compensation, the socially constructed figure of the volunteer constituted a moral economy that enhanced corporate reputations. Instructor Kaan explained that software companies like Microsoft were eager to engage in corporate social responsibility in order to appear ‘likeable’ (şirin). ¹⁶ According to him, building such a reputation would be a strategy to fight piracy, which severely undermined corporate profits in Turkey. ¹⁷ Other volunteer instructors did not identify anti-piracy efforts but a closer relationship with the government, leading to partnerships and contracts with the public sector, as the incentive for corporate social responsibility.

In Marxian terms, the unpaid labor of the volunteer is a form of ‘extra surplus labor’ and yields overexploitation, where the value of the product is below its social value because wages are below average employment costs (Fuchs, 2008: 157). In ICT4D programs, overexploitation was possible, exactly because volunteers were self-motivated and preoccupied with non-capitalist regimes of value. Volunteerism in corporate-sponsored ICT4D can be considered as yet another dimension, next to more well-known examples of prosumption in web 2.0 environments, of free labor, which is ‘simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited’ (Terranova, 2000: 33). To this can be added that while corporations took responsibility for certain social and public services, especially ICT-related training, their claims to act on behalf of ‘societal good’ depoliticized questions of societal good. This includes depoliticization of the design of the so-called ‘information society’ facilitating informational capitalism (Hoyng, 2016).

Resisting informational capitalism?

Considering everyday experiences and dynamics of communities of learning, however, reveals some counteracting tendencies toward the disruption of informational-capitalist skill hierarchies and extraction of value. This section draws from in-depth interviews with HKYD affiliates.

While well aware of the exploitation of volunteer labor, volunteers argued that they were ‘using’ corporations, too. For instance, volunteer Nilüfer saw corporate social responsibility as ‘taking back’ what corporate actors took from society in the first place. ¹⁸ Similarly, Selim commented on the appropriateness of a presumably independent NGO seeking corporate funding for ICT4D programs by saying ‘to make use of that money is important’. He posed the rhetorical question: ‘If there is such a resource available, can we take it from those [corporate] guys and use it really for this society on good causes?’ ¹⁹ This notion of ‘taking the money’ and using it for volunteers’ own conception of societal good was not completely misplaced as corporations sought in fact little actual influence or direct control over ICT4D micro-practices. Their ‘responsibility’ lay primarily with corporate stakeholders rather than local communities (Hoyng, 2016: 144–145).

As an institution, HKYD articulated societal good in various ways, among which were information rights. However, beyond the rather abstract and sporadic invocations of information rights, HKYD did little to open up public debates regarding digital commons, pirate party politics, open-source software or copyleft. Arguably, open source or free software would better fit ICT4D commitments to expanding access to knowledge, considering its underlying principle of the freedom to know source codes, to adapt to one’s needs and to redistribute, as formulated by Richard Stallman. When I confronted volunteers and HKYD affiliates with this perspective during interviews, they argued that their NGO’s partnership with tech corporations complicated any organized effort to inform ICT4D participants about open-source alternatives or training them on open-source programs. Arguably abiding by self-censorship, Selim said, ‘You can’t tell Microsoft “I will teach Linux”’. ²⁰

While volunteers seemed to accept the requirement to work with proprietary software, in more implicit ways they worked with an ethos of ‘giving’ and ‘free sharing’. Instructor Kaan stated that knowledge (as an object) is something expensive nowadays and that people do not have to pay money for accessing knowledge. Without that he explicitly referred to illegal peer-to-peer sharing and piracy, he argued that ‘in one way or the other’, people should get knowledge from others, ‘left and right around them’. ²¹ The idea that knowledge should be shared freely related to principles of social justice and inclusion: Disadvantaged groups especially do not have to pay in order to benefit from knowledge. Speaking in terms of a personal ethos, Kaan said, ‘I also share whatever I know’. While some others openly expressed their approval of piracy practices by the poor or confessed their own, hesitance to deviate from dominant attitudes regarding intellectual property appears from the following statement by Orhan:

Of course everyone should respect those [intellectual property] rights. That is the right thing. But, in some way, I approach [piracy] by certain groups with some tolerance. Because our target group, those we are trying to reach, are already disadvantaged. […] Of course, this is not my right, I am not Microsoft, but in my eyes, from the perspective of my conscience, it is okay. ²²

The confessions of feelings and practical habits by volunteers suggest the possibility of ICT4D resulting in forms of sharing and networking that disrupt capitalist control by ICT companies and content industries. As volunteers thought that not only their labor had to be free but also externally existing information and knowledge, the figure of the volunteer slips into becoming the double of the (ideologically motivated) pirate.

It should be noted that while piracy may undermine capitalist accumulation of profits, it does not challenge relations between (skilled) producers and (semi-skilled) consumers, which are the focus of Stiegler’s critique of short-circuited networks. However, during my interviews, NGO affiliates and volunteers underscored open-ended trajectories of learning, development and tacit knowledge production. Kaan suggested that even the basic skill trainings he taught stimulated participants’ capabilities to be autodidacts in the future, asking participants to be self-reflective and critical. ²³ Moreover, instructors made a distinction between centralized, institutional dissemination of proprietary information and ‘exchange’ that generates an open-ended body of knowledge and the capability to act together. The volunteer Can explained that instructors relied on mutual interaction: ‘the training is not unidirectional, but goes both ways. The trainer teaches and learns from the trainees at the same time’. ²⁴ Similarly, Harun said, ‘Interaction takes place. They [participants] convey what they know. When I convey something, I can teach them something. They also can teach something’. ²⁵ Hence, as Ozan argued, people would ‘make great achievements by combining their training with the vision the trainer cultivates in them and what they hear from their friends’. ²⁶ As he further argued, volunteers would not conceive technical skill and potential in the ways labor markets construct them but in relation to the empowerment of communities:

[T]here is something like this among our volunteers: their primary goal is not to be a technical [skills] educator. Their primary goal is to help the people around them. Of course by providing technical training, they want to contribute to [participants’] careers, but the real excitement comes from contributing to the lives of the people in their cities: knowledge exchange, learning from each other, the capability to act together on different issues. ²⁷

Rather than being constructed as a resource for informational capitalism exclusively, this quote suggests that capability or potential can play a role in broader cultural processes and ways of life that do not always partake in informational capitalism. Instead of being obtained and owned on a personal basis, such potential develops on a trans-individual, collective basis and animates social and cultural commons.

Following the stated experiences of volunteers, although formal curricula of ICT4D programs reproduce skill hierarchies and social stratifications in support of informational capitalism, the operation of the communities of learning could form a challenge to it. Such communities worked toward destratification through ‘learning from each other’ in open-ended ways. Moreover, while ICT4D curricula often treat knowledge or information as objectified, standardized entities that can be individually possessed and transmitted to others, the actual operation of the community triggered at least some secondary tendencies toward positioning knowledge as a communal process and a non-standardized resource that has relevance locally and contextually (cf. Fish and Srinivasan, 2012; Gajjala, 2013; Kapczynski, 2010).

Concluding remarks

Rather than subscribing to either the deskilling or the upskilling thesis, the present analysis supports the third position in the debate on skill trends that spans cultural studies and adjacent fields: a partial trend toward upskilling, which does not imply workers’ empowerment but rather the introduction of new techniques of control and capital accumulation. My analysis of upskilling programs in the context of the emerging region further shows that the scope of critical investigation should not remain limited to those manifestations of informational capitalism concentrated in the overdeveloped world representing ‘new’ trends in knowledge work only. While the study of creative/knowledge work and prosumption has given impetus to critical explorations of labor and the governance of populations (Harney, 2010), the continued existence of equivocal skill trends and the coexistence of diverse apparatuses of power governing them deserve our critical attention.

Such attention is especially salient to think through the possibility of resistance. Autonomist scholars such as Paolo Virno (2004) have argued that the key forces of production of post-industrial capitalism – namely, human communicative capabilities and trans-individual dimensions of collaboration and open-ended co-creation – contradict its social relations of production, which revolve around wage labor, competition and restrictive ownership of intellectual property. For Virno (2004: 70), potential exceeds informational-capitalist apparatuses of power and can animate the formation of a self-organized body that resists and undermines the informational-capitalist order. At stake is ‘potential as such, not its countless particular realizations’ or ‘the aggregate of knowledge acquired by the human species’ (p. 66; Read, 2011). On the one hand, confirming Virno’s idea of excessive and unchecked potential, the volunteers’ accounts cited above suggest that ICT4D communities generated a collective potential for learning and knowledge creation in open-ended ways, supporting social and cultural commons. At least to some extent, these communities disrupted informational capitalism by challenging skill hierarchies, the construction of potential as an individually owned asset and the proprietary, objectified character of information and knowledge. As a consequence, upskilling initiatives did not merely result in the consolidation of capitalism through subjecting potential to the requirements and conditions of informational capitalism. Inadvertently, they also wielded an excessive and disruptive force.

On the other hand, this challenge to information capitalism occurred merely in fleeting moments and through tacit practices, without generating more structural modalities of self-organization or ideological opposition to informational-capitalist phenomena. Failing to elaborate such a transition, resistance remained implicit in praxis rather than publicly stated and, in the language of De Certeau, tactical rather than strategic. This is indicative of the political possibilities and limitations of learning spaces in emerging regions that attract corporate social responsibility initiatives by tech corporations. Whereas tech corporations contributed to the depoliticization of development and the so-called information society in emerging regions, ICT4D communities did not launch substantial ideological battles to re-politicize such matters, yet nonetheless they discovered significant tactical practices.

In doing so, ICT4D communities functioned at once as carriers and parasites of informational capitalism: Reproduction of the informational-capitalist order coincided with tendencies toward commons models disrupting this order. Yet if volunteers argued they managed to use corporate resources to their own advantage in a parasitical fashion, the produced commons were open to exploitation, too. ²⁸ In these dynamics, upskilling initiatives intensify the contradictions inherent in informational capitalism’s treatment of potential, which is stimulated and diffused throughout the emerging region yet simultaneously stratified, channeled and contained. Hence, it is the struggle over potential – both a resource for informational capitalism and an excessive force animating social and cultural commons – that spreads.