Classical and algorithmic ideologies create a paradoxical situation: in paid digital labour, white men dominate the employment structure and can obtain gendered and racialised wages of whiteness. People of colour (child labour and slaves in the Congo, predominantly female assemblage workers in China, etc.) in contrast have the most highly exploited and most precarious jobs in the international division of labour. At the same time, white men are also the privileged objects of exploitation in online advertising and unpaid digital labour based on racist and sexist ideologies designed into algorithms. New racism justifies the exploitation, exclusion, domination, or annihilation of an out-group. One can draw a “distinction between a racism of extermination or elimination (an ‘exclusive’ racism) and a racism of oppression or exploitation (an ‘inclusive’ racism)” (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, 39). In the IDDL, one can both find the exclusive and the exploitative type of racism.
10.5 Conclusion
This chapter has studied the connection of capitalism, patriarchy, and racism in the digital age. Capitalism is inherently patriarchal and racist in character and uses ideology and discrimination for deepening exploitation and domination. Unpaid labour is not unproductive, but rather constitutes a super-exploited form of productive labour that generates surplus-value without wage. Racism, nationalism, sexism, and other ideologies can create economic, political, and cultural surplus-”wages” or, better expressed, Bourdieuian forms of economic, political, and cultural capital for dominant groups.
I took up Kylie Jarrett’s notion of the digital houseworker in order to show commonalities and differences between three forms of unpaid labour, namely slave-labour, reproductive labour, and Facebook labour. These three forms of labour were also compared to wage-labour. Combining the notion of the digital houseworker with Eileen Meehan’s concept of the gendered audience commodity allows us to understand that Facebook’s data commodity is both gendered and racialised, which shows that digital capitalism instrumentalises both sexism and patriarchy by building their logic into algorithms that determine the data commodity’s price by assuming that the price for one hour of labour should be based on gender and country.
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Themes