2.2.12. Digital Labour
Digital labour is alienated digital work: it is alienated from itself, from the instruments and objects of labour and from the products of labour. Digital labour is digital work that is organised within class relations. Figure 2.3 shows a model of the international division of digital labour. Each production step involves human subjects (S) using technologies/instruments of labour (T) on objects of labour (O) so that a product emerges.
The international division of digital labour, for example, involves Congolese slave workers, who mine minerals that form the physical foundation of mobile phones, computers and laptops. Assemblage workers, such as the highly exploited Foxconn workers in China, assemble the ICT components created out of minerals into whole technologies. Such technologies are put to use both by consumers and workers; low-paid software engineers in countries such as China and India as well as highly paid and highly exploited programmers at Google, Microsoft and other large software companies make use of computers for coding application software, operating systems, etc. Consumers put to use both hardware and software for various purposes. On advertising-driven Internet platforms, these users are also workers, whose usage labour creates a data commodity that advertisement-driven platforms, such as Facebook, Weibo, Twitter or YouTube, sell as commodities to their advertising clients. There is also a whole range of precarious online labour that is conducted on the Internet. An example are the users of freelance platforms, who create cultural products and find their clients online at sites such as Upwork, Amazon Mechanical Turk, PeoplePerHour, or TaskRabbit. The international division of digital labour involves diverse forms of exploited digital labour.
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Critical Theory of Communication