Beyond a bad attitude? Information workers and their prospects through the pages of Processed World

Abstract

It is now thirty years since the first issue of Processed World (PW) hit the streets of San Francisco. Hunt around on the net, and you can find a snippet of film footage showing three editors of PW pacing the Financial District sidewalk, dressed in outlandish costumes (a computer terminal, a can of nuts, and something else-a punch card? the corporate ladder?), waving copies of their magazine (Shaping San Francisco 1982). A year or so later, the PW collective would organize a lively bus tour of Silicon Valley, visiting points of interest that made plain the military connections and dubious management practices of the rising computer industry. But to fail to look beyond this, dismissing PW as no more than a zany eighties "anti- tech" revisiting of the Merry Pranksters (Besher 1984), is to misunderstand the project altogether. From its inception, the journal "with a bad attitude" worked to promote workplace rebellion among "the majority of the work force, i.e., information handlers" (Cabins 1983a, p. 9), employed-typically in an office setting-to "file, sort, type, track, process, duplicate and triplicate the ever expanding mass of "information" necessary to operate the global corporate economy" (Athanasiou 1981, p. 16). While ultimately failing in its goal, PW proved to be an innovative undertaking on a number of levels, from its critical account of information work for capital and the resistance this engendered, to the ways in which the journal sought to mobilize the printed word and graphic design to its ends.Within the space of a few short years, as the Reagan era ushered in a new phase of conformity in both workplace and society, it became clear to editors and readers alike that the premises that had originally inspired Processed World were more and more difficult to realize in practice, at least in the short term. Without abandoning either its leftlibertarian stance or its concern for the sphere of paid work, its editors chose to broaden their field of view in search of what one of them would call an "aesthetics of resistance" (Med- O 1986, p. 53). Issues continued to appear into the nineties and beyond, although with decreasing regularity (the latest was published in 2006, after a five year hiatus, and may have been the last).Processed World's circulation may never have topped 5,000 (Gee 1993, p. 245), although that figure was respectable for a publication positioned outside the mainstream culture and media of its time. A continuing if subterranean influence within leftlibertarian circles in North America and beyond, the journal has since been remembered as part of "a little- recognized punk culture golden age for alternative publishing" (Solnit and Schwartzenberg 2000, p. 35), and as a "legendary magazine [that] covered the growing pains of white- collar office work in the pre-Internet information economy throughout the 1980s" (Ross 2003, p. 267). In terms of its contributions to popular visual culture, Processed World can also lay claim to hosting some of the earliest work by cartoonists such as "Tom Tomorrow" (Dan Perkins) and Ted Rall. Yet Processed World is not simply of historical interest. Examined from the perspective of 2011, it can be argued that many of the questions around information work and workers raised in the early years of the publication continue to be relevant, making their revisiting timely.1 For not only have information and information technology continued to infuse present day work settings, but that sense of ambivalence-ambivalence concerning one's identity, the prospect of a "career," communication with fellow employees, indeed the very possibility and/or desirability of finding fulfillment in paid work-underpinning the flow of words in the pages of Processed World remains an all too common feature of information work today (Armano 2010).This article will explore the images of office workers that emerge in the first fifteen or so issues of Processed World, as its editors and readers attempted a collective self- portrait, centered upon the new generation of temporary staff(temps) then being recruited to the swelling ranks of white collar employees. …