The Digital Factory The Human Labor of Automation

The Digital Factory reveals the hidden human labor that supports today's digital capitalism.   The workers of today's digital factory include those in Amazon warehouses, delivery drivers, Chinese gaming workers, Filipino content moderators, and rural American search engine optimizers. Repetitive yet stressful, boring yet often emotionally demanding, these jobs require little formal qualification, but can demand a large degree of skills and knowledge. This work is often hidden behind the supposed magic of algorithms and thought to be automated, but it is in fact highly dependent on human labor.   The workers of today's digital factory are not as far removed from a typical auto assembly line as we might think. Moritz Altenried takes us inside today's digital factories, showing that they take very different forms, including gig economy platforms, video games, and Amazon warehouses. As Altenried shows, these digital factories often share surprising similarities with factories from the industrial age. As globalized capitalism and digital technology continue to transform labor around the world, Altenried offers a timely and poignant exploration of how these changes are restructuring the social division of labor and its geographies as well as the stratifications and lines of struggle.

ISBN:	9780226815497
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Imprint:	The University of Chicago Press
Published date:	05 Jan 2022
DEWEY:	338.47004678
DEWEY edition:	23
Language:	English
Number of pages:	216
Weight:	408g
Height:	146mm
Width:	224mm
Spine width:	22mm

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