E-waste scavenging constitutes digital labor that immaterial labor theory excludes.

Evidence

The manual labor that powers Agbogbloshie is crucial to the functioning of the global digital network and thus deserves to be understood as digital labor… . Digitality has always been associated with smart, geeky, labor, so it is easy to discount manual work that is nevertheless pertinent to digital processes… . This emphasis around being “on” the internet favors “immaterial labor.” … It can easily overshadow the heavy and dirty work involved in electronic waste disposal and recycling. Furthermore, the location of Agbogbloshie in Africa, far away from the cities driving the current global order, contributes to its marginalization in discussions of the digital sphere and labor. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 267

Categorization

• DEFINE: Iheka’s expansion of ‘digital labor’ to include e-waste recycling is a precise conceptual redefinition central to restaging the labor theory of value in the Corpocene.
• XREF: Connects to Andrejevic’s alignment of online worker exploitation with sweatshop and landfill labor, cited earlier in the chapter.