10.3.2 Racist Ideology and Digital Labour
Africans and Asians are employed in the most exploitative and precarious jobs in the IDDL. In contrast, high paid software engineers – the digital labour aristocracy – in the Western world tend to be predominantly male and white (Fuchs 2014). A structural form of racism operates in the IDDL.
Racism and challenges to racism also operate in the world of social media. On the one hand, racism makes use of social media. Here are two example tweets that were posted one day after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election:
#Trump 卐 The end of #WhiteGenocide in America. #Nazi #SiegHeil
President Trump wants to know if you have any last words Mr Soros? #RevengeWillBeSweet #WhiteGenocide #RapeJIhad #RWDS #Trump #Trump16 [+ image of a Nazi shooting a Jewish person]
On the other hand, anti-racism is also present on social media: In December 2016, the Twitter account of Black Lives Matter (@blklivesmatter) had around 195,000 followers and its Facebook group around 240,000 followers.
Commodity fetishism makes capitalism and wage-labour appear as natural properties of society, which tends to ideologically sustain both capitalism and class. Racism is an ideology that often justifies slavery and discriminatory labour practices. Sexism is an ideology that tries to chain women to the household and to create a gender pay gap. On Facebook and in housework, there is inverse commodity fetishism (Fuchs 2014, chapter 11; Fuchs 2015, chapter 5). The workers’ immediate experience is not the production of commodities but the creation of social relations. Digital workers have, as Jarrett (2016, 104) says, friends online. And houseworkers tend to care for those they love. The commodity form is hidden behind the social form so that commodity fetishism tends to take on an inverted form. For houseworkers and Facebook workers, it is not directly experienceable that they produce a commodity for Facebook.
Racism, nationalism, sexism, and other ideologies can create economic, political, and cultural advantages for specific groups in society, typically white men. How does this approach relates to the realm of digital labour? Eileen Meehan (2002) introduced the notion of the gendered audience commodity. The advertising industry tends to base advertising on sexism and to “discriminate against anyone outside the commodity audience of white, 18 to 34-year-old, heterosexual, English-speaking, upscale men” (Meehan 2002, 220).
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Themes