Watching Nasim’s world: aesthetics, technology and subjectivity of digital labor

Abstract

This article discusses the relationship between subjectivity, technology and aesthetics drawing on the case of Nasim, a youtuber of Iranian origin based in California who attacked employees and died at Google’s headquarters in 2018. Nasim’s self-produced videos provide an entry point to reflect on the encounters between the making of self and audiovisual technologies under current capitalist conditions. Analyzing the formal features of Nasim’s videos and the labor they entail, the article reflects on the mutual imbrication of self-determination (autopoiesis) and techno-social articulations, to sketch the hypothesis that freedom and control far from being opposites are inextricably linked and define the conditions of a current mode of existence in which the expression of life results in death.