Click Work and the New Precariat

You post on social media. You curate a playlist on Spotify. You create a meme in Canvas. All of this effort via using your mind in conjunction with your device is considered digital work. It’s the simple act of purposeful, organizational and often fun interaction with apps, software and platforms. Here you are performing functions for your own specific purpose. We do this daily at work and also during our leisure time. However, there is a distinct shift when the platform, ie., Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, & Microsoft, scrapes the raw data that ultimately underlies your work and algorithmically spins it into a prediction product. It has now become a commodity. You have unintentionally generated value for someone else, that value has been extracted and it is at this point where the boundary between digital work crosses over into digital labor.

Now that we have a framework to go by regarding digital work vs. digital labor, let’s take it a step further. The rise of “gig work” is a phenomenon of digital technology, but not your uncle’s digital technology. In the early days of the internet, cyberspace was deemed a democratizing force, a unifying leveler of social, economic and political classes with a low bar for participation. Nearly everyone had both access and an even playing field on which to engage vast groups of people in discourse of all kinds. Dial ahead 20 years or so and what we see is far from this hopeful imaginary. The cyber landscape looks pretty bleak and GAFAM is falling under the scrutiny of the general public, policy makers and the courts, perhaps not as much in the U.S. but at least more so in many parts of Europe. This is especially true because of companies like Uber, DoorDash, and the myriad of other platform services that make our lives more convenient and efficient. Still, there’s a lot more going on between your click and your Uber driving showing up a few minutes later. And what’s happening is actually quite disturbing.

In order to truly understand how harmful the gig work economy is, we need to take a look under the hood. First is the “entrepreneurial pitch” by the stacks and it goes something like this, “be your own boss” or “set your own hours” and “run your own business”. Why be a cog in a wheel when you can be the “CEO of self inc”? This rhetoric sounds great and it persuasively sells, but it is quite frankly a bunch of bullshit and obscures reality. Think of it in terms of a true business owner who has the ability of price setting, business model, marketing strategy, customer target, etc. This is the reality of business ownership and having the decision making power. As a gig worker, you do not control any of this, the algorithm does. You don’t set the rates, job allocation, or salary. What you do get as a hustle worker is the far more burdensome aspects of running a business such as in the case of Uber, an automobile, the gas, the tires and the insurance. If you get sick or your car breaks down or a pandemic hits, too bad, that’s on you. There is no genuine autonomy and therefore no traditional security, safety, rights or stability of the employee in the entrepreneurial hustle model, instead it lays all of the burden and risk on the individual while freeing up the platform from these very same requirements. The stacks are covertly offloading and rebranding risk and responsibility in the guise of flexibility and freedom. It is the very stark but unseen expression of neoliberal ideology in the digital age.

Neoliberal economics are founded upon free and open markets with little government interference and regulation. We have seen the impacts in our tradition economy ever since the Reagan and Thatcher years, mega-corps, industry consolidation, loss of worker’s rights, widening wealth inequity, and fiduciary malfeasance. In the digital economy however, there is a unique and unprecedented phenomenon occurring -the rise of the “precariat class” of workers. These are gig workers, holding all the responsibility and risk and after overhead is taken into account, often making less than minimum wage. Their livelihood and ability to put a roof over their head and food on the table is precarious. What is so uncanny is that the stacks have turned the neoliberal model upside down. They have socialized their labour needs by outsourcing to “privatized partners”. The social safety net found in the traditional workplace has disappeared and instead of being in solidarity with others workers they are competition with each other, losing bargaining rights, benefits and predictability in employment. The stacks however, run lean and turn greater profits while reserving full time employment to the highly credentialed engineers and mid to top level management and knowledge workers. In many ways it’s the same split as was seen in the Industrial Revolution, higher classes owned the factories while the lower class did the manual labour. This time however, the manufacturing floor is the platform itself occupied by digital laborers.

Quite alarming is the reality of the role of digital laborer expanding into other segments of the work space. The platforms are now carefully categorizing tasks and offloading as many of the low skilled, repetitive jobs as they can to gig workers. Customer service is often contracted out to third party intermediaries such as Zero Chaos or Amazon Turk.

Other click workers perform the daunting task of clean-lining social media posts of content such as porn, abuse and dismemberment and even remotely driving autonomous vehicles when systems fail. The hustle culture has its origin in Silicon Valley and has been exported all over the world, particularly to the global south where poverty and depressed economies attract people willing to work long hours for little compensation (often 90 cents per hour) and without recourse over mistreatment.

Digital technology is a frictionless interface for one person but often a material experience for another and it’s very difficult to see the physicality and human capital that lies underneath it. It’s the later that is in harm’s way and it is steadily creeping into our lives in more ways and more frequently every day. Governments must get involved to counter the effects of the resulting “labour arbitrage” and bring companies to bear on the common ethical and economic rights of every type of worker, throughout the world. In a landmark case the UK Supreme Court (Feb 2021) and French Court of Cassation ruled that Uber drivers were indeed employees, not partners. It is a necessary step that hopefully has set a precedent that will be followed by other nation states in developing law and policy. Just don’t expect the stacks to roll over. It will require activism, alliances and a network of like-minded leaders to solve this puzzle, one of the many brought on by digital tech and hyper scaling platforms. The power of digital tech at this moment could solve many of our problems such as inequality, climate change, and poverty. All it takes is imagination and will but unfortunately, it’s something the stacks seem to lack.