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But are Facebook users productive workers? They are certainly not less important for Facebook’s capital accumulation than its paid employees because without users Facebook would immediately stop making profits and producing commodities. Facebook’s commodity is not its platform that can be used with…

Other, less central aspects of the visions we’re presented of a world without work might trouble us as well. In his book The Zero Marginal Cost Society, Jeremy Rifkin fetishizes fully automated logistics, without considering how often logistics workers specifically have constituted the most radic…

Most of the blue-collar workers that do manage to retain employment will find themselves “below the API”—that is, subject to having their shifts scheduled by optimization algorithm, on little or no notice, for periods potentially incommensurate with their needs for sleep and restoration, their fami…

This shrunken workforce will be asked to do more, for lower wages, at a yet higher pace. Amazon is again the leading indicator here. Its warehouse workers are hired on fixed, short-term contracts, through a deniable outsourcing agency, and precluded from raises, benefits, opportunities for advancem…

[...] networked digital information technology has become the dominant mode through which we experience the everyday. In some important sense this class of technology now mediates just about everything we do. It is simultaneously the conduit through which our choices are delivered to us, the mirr…