100% Utilization: Computation and Labor after Moore’s Law

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Placing theories of employment in dialectical conjunction with the concrete operations of computing, 100% Utilization explores the consequences of pushing processing power to its limits for a culture seemingly reliant on automation as much as human labor. In accounting for this contradiction, Andrew Lison offers a corrective to theories of digital mediation, emphasizing its symbolic and representational capabilities. He connects the looming end of Moore’s law to trends in semiconductor manufacturing, custom hardware, and parallelized software techniques, including AI. Ultimately, he traces this historical technological boom and impending bust through the racialized history of Silicon Valley to longer-term conceptions of the relationship between machinery and labor