Gig-economy liberation rhetoric masks new and deeper labor exploitation

Evidence

Summarizing in a way that is applicable to the whole sharing economy, Melissa Gregg puts it well when she says that “liberation [from employee contracts] frees up Uber from the traditional responsibilities of being an employer. It is ingenious to make employment less predictable, and thus less costly, in the name of independence and choice.” As such, regardless of its size or long-term success, Uber remains an important exemplar of a projected direction for global capitalism: it represents the potential to create new forms of exploitative work, to substantially increase the levels of exploitation within established forms of work, and to circumvent human labor altogether (the company is currently investing heavily in driverless cars and trucks). Data-gathering and data tracking are essential to all these functions, the fact of which makes exploitation seem like the “natural” outcome of algorithmic processes. Gone are the narratives of a benign form of capitalism in which institutions still acknowledged a social responsibility. Instead, we have institutions that merely engineer “processes” or “interfaces,” and society has to live with the results. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 225

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘freedom as exploitation’ inversion parallels the reader’s work on resistance-as-activism critiques and data colonialism. — connects to: Silicon Valley’s celebrated culture structurally depends on exploited undocumented labor; New Economy rhetoric framed corporate labor as creative self-actualization to secure unpaid overtime. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 144; Neoliberal freelance work can genuinely provide self-actualization despite exploiting workers — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 519 (+20 more)

Broader Connections

• Voluntary user content creation constitutes unpaid labor enriching platform owners #expands (0.90) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 338
• Gig-economy disruption benefits dissipate as consumers become workers #expands (0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 226
• Digital capitalism profits from unpaid pleasurable user activity. #expands (0.85) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 197
• Self-branding shifts economic risk onto workers while demanding constant unpaid labor #expands (0.85) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 524
• The falling rate of profit forces capitalists to intensify labor exploitation #expands (0.85) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2376
• Neoliberal entrepreneurship rhetoric masks a reality of collective corporate effort #exemplifies (0.85) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 306
• Open-source labor mirrors paid guerrilla marketing in converting faux rebellion into market value #expands (0.82) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 397
• Labor victories on working hours have reversed under the gig economy #expands (0.82) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 113
• Cognitive capitalism blurs the work-play divide by investing in minds and social relations #expands (0.80) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 366
• Capitalist rationalization attempts to co-opt worker militancy through co-operative management schemes #expands (0.80)
• Unpaid cloud-serf labor shrinks aggregate demand and deepens economic crises #expands (0.78) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 639
• Unemployment structurally disciplines workers and lowers labor costs in capitalism #expands (0.77) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 150
• Depoliticized labor markets discipline workers through the threat of unemployment and lower wages #expands (0.75) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 796
• Post-slavery labor exploitation criminalized black unemployment to force unpaid work #expands (0.72) — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 46
• Autonomist ‘social factory’ theory cannot explain data extraction because it presumes labor-like activity #exemplifies (0.72) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 153