Between Work and Tear: Cultures of “Kinetic” Work
“When workers fell, severing limbs, the pain was acute, but borne. Yet what truly stung was the loneliness and anxiety of falling that weighed on their minds.” – Temporary People [Unnikrishnan 2017]
“In the human body, as with capital, the different elements are not exchanged at the same rate of reproduction, blood renews itself more rapidly than muscle, muscle than bone, which in this respect may be regarded as the fixed capital of the human body” [Marx 1878]
In the novel Temporary People we encounter the forlorn figure of an overworked, porous and empathetic nurse – Anna. In sweltering emirati construction camps Anna tapes people after they fall from incomplete buildings, mordantly piecing them back together as their arms and legs scatter under the stress of work. In Engels’ Conditions of the Working Class in England we find less precise addresses of industrial dis-figuration as he appeals to a more miasmic oppression of the town and factory, laden with fumes and sickness, dirt and drudgery. Accounts like Engels’ and Unnikrishnan’s recount how conditions of labour are often drawn on to paint conditions of exploitation and supplement more abstract or subtle extractive modalities of capital as it extends the working day, de-skills work while de-valorising the atmosphere of its conduct.
Kinetic is a wearable technology that has surfaced as a concrete instance of this concern. A small beeper-like device worn on your waist, its aim is to monitor the posture of workers through the day, either transporting packages or producing fast food, generating real-time feedback to them that prevents high risk motions. Often associated with the onset of digital taylorism these surveillance devices symbolise the reorganisation of working conditions, contracts and post-fordist affect under neoliberalism. However, more than secure efficient outcomes, these devices exist within larger discourses of insurance, body-finance and workers’ compensation.
The import of wellness and health culture in work environments are critical components of neoliberal infrastructure that point us towards modalities of value capture that are immanent to the social life of work, rather than constitutive of the capture of time as Marx’s surplus theory of value might suggest. More than the management of risk at the individual level, how does a technology like Kinetic use its material and affective qualia as a wearable device to mediatize labour, care and posit a new worker’s politics? As wearable technologies come to stand in for routine medical examinations and health metrics, the question of illness and injury is inseparable from the management and control of labour as it simultaneously implicates the subjectivity of the worker in the regulation of their bodily kinetics and the supervision of their injuries and strain by management. This ecology of things poses an interesting dilemma for a politics of care – how are wearable technologies under regimes of flexible labour producing modalities of care? Do these modalities draw on certain images of the body, injury and narratives of wellness as enhancing productivity or are they going beyond questions of efficiency to maintain flexibility?
Kinetic is a wearable technology that performs this function in high intensity workspaces like assembly lines, construction work and warehouse logistics. The device itself is an inconspicuous beeper worn around the worker’s waist, with a display and feedback monitor notifies the user if they are in danger of over-straining their bodies with a buzz. Haytham Elhawary, founder and designer of Kinetic, was trained as a robotics engineer and co-founded the company and product in 2014. In 2018, at an event held at Hardwired NYC, a space for “frontier technology” and soft product launches, Elhawary guided his audience through the moral crisis behind the design:
“… kinetic is an ode to the industrial worker: we’ve seen folks, industrial workers going around, delivering items to your stores, they put 13-14 hour days in the heat you have outside. It’s brutal. We have workers picking up items every ten seconds. Imagine doing that over the course of an eight hour work day. We take for granted the lifestyle we have. Behind it is a tonne of physical labor that is almost physically unsustainable.” [Elhawary at Hardwired, September 2018]
The initial designs for Kinetic weren’t portable beepers but far more robust exo-skeletal prosthesis which were then replaced by belts, watches and straps. Eventually, as Elhawary concludes – they designed a wearable so comfortable it could be forgotten. The final belt beeper design contained elements that were gamified design components – step counters, health metrics and competitive rankings – none of which concerned the original function of the device, but masked concerns that workers had expressed during the design process around privacy and wage docking. The less superficial dimensions of the design were reminiscent of electro-myography scans, images of muscle impact that could calculate the force exerted as the musculoskeletal frame of the worker strained under a heavy load or performed a certain set of actions in a fixed period of time. By mapping out a set of dynamic image points on the workers body, the device is able to cross-reference the angular change and load shifts in relation to a normal body time, and subsequently notify the user as well as a manager operated dashboard that a musculoskeletal system was under duress. This imagery of the body is a three-dimensional rendering of the body that re-constructs pressure points along muscular planes.
In early 2024, Kinetic’s website revealed that the wearable technology was recently repackaged as an insurance suite that would allow firms to not only discipline workers through behaviour modification but ensure that Kinetic would both secure the evidentiary knowledge that would supplement compensation claims – territory already noted by the American Bar Association as exploitative. The images produced by Kinetic are therein part of a larger infrastructure that extends beyond the channel shared by worker and management, a space of language I argue is the site of complaint, absorbed by the subjective sense of being cared for alongside the pre-defined channels of translation that limit the circulation of medical imagery or data between Kinetic and the company. Several blogs that survey OSHA recorded incidents of workplace injury recorded a significant decrease in their counts after Kinetic came into use, suggesting that incidents declined and so did compensation claims.
Daniel Defert argues along similar lines as he describes the role of insurance technologies in managing union politics and discontent in France during the 1970s and 80s. This period is significant as it marks the beginning of deindustrialization and unemployment but simultaneously introduces a slew of measures cutting across state and market boundaries as new forms of social security while older forms are steadily withdrawn. [Defert 1991] The accident is central to this history – as the contingent character of workers safety required two distinct forms of biopower: anatamo- and bio-political. The first, in Foucault’s terms, is the direct disciplining of individual bodies. In the case of Kinetic, this is evident from its behavioural nudges that redirect the gestures and postures of the worker. More subtle and cryptic in its implementation is, I argue, it’s ability to mediatize the language of complaint by introducing insurance technologies into the work space. This latter example, as evidenced by the language used by Elhawathy and his colleagues, recognizes the injured worker not merely as a market (since they don’t purchase Kinetic, the firm does) but as a subsection of a growing population that is potentially transnational, temporary and mobile. [Foucault 1990,2008]
Defert recognised a similar shift in how unions increasingly leaned on industrial accident insurance during the fading era of working class politics in France. Insurance technologies then, were not taylorist modes of regimentation, but the hegemonic reconstitution of social fabric by a political technology that reimbursed injured workers with compensations that were paid out of funds deducted from a population’s wages – a social tax – thus, a debt incurred by the social body. Defert deftly summarises this form of control below: “… insurance is like a diagram, a figure of social organization which far transcends the choice which some thinkers are currently putting to us between the alternatives of privatisation and nationalisation of security systems. People all too often seem to have a false picture of insurance, as a function of community self-regulation antagonistic to the costly bureaucratic centralism of state institutions.” [p.215, Burchell et. al 1991]
Kinetic both images and augments the body through a set of narrative techniques [Lury 1998] that serve as a database or repository through which the memory of an injury can be recounted. The biomechanical terminology that is employed to describe individual cases is articulated, not through a managerial injunction, but through the voice of the wearable. “Rather than us telling them to not bend like this or work like, we have the device do it for us.” [PepsiCo Senior Executive, 2021]