Precarity Lab: Technoprecarious (2020)
Filed under book | Tags: · care, class, gig economy, labour, precarity, technology, work
“An analysis that traces the role of digital technology in multiplying precarity.
Technoprecarious advances a new analytic for tracing how precarity unfolds across disparate geographical sites and cultural practices in the digital age. Digital technologies—whether apps like Uber, built on flexible labor, or platforms like Airbnb that shift accountability to users—have assisted in consolidating the wealth and influence of a small number of players. These platforms have also exacerbated increasingly insecure conditions of work and life for racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities; women; indigenous people; migrants; and peoples in the global south. At the same time, precarity has become increasingly generalized, expanding to include even the creative class and digital producers themselves.
This collaboratively authored multigraph analyzes the role of digital technology in multiplying precarity. The authors use the term precarity to characterize those populations disproportionately affected by the forms of inequality and insecurity that digital technologies have generated despite the new affordances and possibilities they offer. The book maps a broad range of digital precarity—from the placement of Palestinian Internet cables to the manufacture of electronics by Navajo women and from the production and deployment of drones on the U.S.–Mexico border to the technocultural productions of Chinese makers. This project contributes to, and helps bridge, ongoing debates on precarity and digital networks in the fields of critical computing, postcolonial studies, visual culture, and information sciences.”
Publisher Goldsmiths Press, London, November 2020
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License
ISBN 9781912685981, 1912685981
xi+113 pages
Towards a Fairer Gig Economy (2017)
Filed under pamphlet | Tags: · economics, gig economy, labour, work
“Towards a Fairer Gig Economy is a small collection of articles examining the social and economic problems associated with the ‘gig economy’. The gig economy includes a wide range of labour carried out by workers providing services as couriers, taxi drivers, online freelancers and more. Issues examined include an over-supply of labour, falling wages, long hours and poor working conditions. Each article makes suggestions for how these problems can be addressed and how a fairer gig economy can be built: including through regulation, collective bargaining and wider policy recommendations. The collection’s contributors include cycle couriers, union organisers, academics and researchers.”
Contributors: Janine Berg, Christina Colclough, Mags Dewhurst, Dawn Gearhart, Philip Jennings, Guy McClenahan, Trebor Scholz, M. Six Silberman, Nick Srnicek and Valerio De Stefano.
Edited by Mark Graham and Joe Shaw
Illustrations by Irene Beltrame
Publisher Meatspace Press, 2017
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License
ISBN 9780995577664
34 pages