“Digital labour” is not a term that only describes the production of digital content. It is a category that rather encompasses the whole mode of digital production that contains a network of agricultural, industrial, and informational forms of work that enables the existence and usage of digital media. The subjects involved in the digital mode of production (S) – miners, processors, assemblers, information workers, and related workers – stand in specific relations of production that are either class relations or non-class relations. So what is designated as S in Figure 11.1 is actually a relationship $\mathsf { S } _ { 1 } { - } \mathsf { S } _ { 2 }$ between different subjects or subject groups. In contemporary capitalist society, most of these digital relations of production tend to be shaped by wage-labour, slave labour, unpaid, precarious, and freelance labours.
The international division of digital labour is a complex network that involves global interconnected processes of exploitation, such as the exploitation of Congolese slaveminers who extract minerals that are used as the physical foundation for ICT components that are manufactured by millions of highly exploited Fordist wage-workers in factories such as Foxconn, low-paid software engineers in India, highly paid and highly stressed software engineers at Google and other Western software and Internet corporations, or precarious freelancers in the world’s global cities who are using digital technologies to create and disseminate culture, poisoned eWaste workers who disassemble ICTs and thereby come in touch with toxic materials, etc. (Fuchs 2014, 2015).
Chapter Eleven | Digital Labour and Imperialism
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The International Division of Digital Labour