Freelancers not just face a peculiar form of exploitation, but have also self-organised in order to resist precarity. As a result, unions such as the Freelancer’s Union and the Independent Workers’ Union have been created that put an emphasis on being platforms for self-organised struggles of freelancers and other non-traditional workers.
Lukács’ Critique of Quantification Revisited: the Critique of Big Data Analytics
Big data analytics is the newest methodological trend of quantification in almost all academic fields. It is a method that gathers large amounts of data and applies algorithms and mathematical analysis (such as correlation analysis) to this data in order to identify patterns, relations, correlations and predict behaviour that allows “to monitor, manage, and control citizens” (Mosco 2017, 8). As a reaction to the rise of big data, a series of critical studies of big data analytics and its implications for society has emerged (see e.g. Andrejevic 2014; Beer 2018; Boyd and Crawford 2012; Couldry and Mejias 2019; Chandler and Fuchs 2019; Van Dijck et al. 2018).
Big data analytics’ fetishism of quantification has led uncritical tech enthusiasts such as the former editor of the neoliberal Wired magazine Anderson (2008) to argue that big data results in the “end of theory”: “With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves […] [When] faced with massive data, this [traditional] approach to science – hypothesize, model, test–is becoming obsolete. […]”.
Chapter Three | History and Class Consciousness 2.0
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The Reification of Communication Technologies