October 18, 2021 | Reflections
Alessandro Delfanti is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Biohackers. The Politics of Open Science, and of the forthcoming book The Warehouse. Workers and Robots at Amazon. His latest research has appeared in Science, Technology & Human Values, New Media & Society, Ephemera, and Social Studies of Science. Most of his work is available on his website.
In what ways does your research contribute to recent STS debates on labor?
My recent research is focused on the relation between technology and work, which is certainly not an original topic. It is a classic for STS scholars, and I hope to contribute to our community by studying change in automation and in the politics of labor. My work relies on Marx and Italian Workerist theory (e.g. Wright 2017), but obviously, I have an STS background. So I usually end up exploring somewhat predictable ideas about the imaginaries of technology, the relation between technology and power, and the role of the user, which is what I did in my research on Amazon warehouses. I have tried to innovate some methods, by studying patents as texts where the capitalist desire for technological evolution is inscribed. However, this is part of a long STS tradition of looking at documents to understand how knowledge is negotiated and stabilized.
Your work provides great insights into the sociotechnical dynamics of digital capitalism and forms of contemporary labor. How has the pandemic transformed digital capitalism and labor relations?
More than transforming it, I would say it has laid bare some core dynamics on which digital capitalism is based. I am thinking about the devaluation of essential labor; the use of technology to monitor, organize, and eventually displace living labor; the ability to accumulate value through the widespread generation of data from human activity; the differential exploitation experienced by workers depending on their class, gender and race; and the role of a handful of corporate actors in providing the technological infrastructure through which other firms operate. On the other hand, the pandemic also reveals digital capitalism’s weaknesses, as the emergency has shown the limits of automation and the power workers will always have. Only living labor creates value, and digital capitalism must strive to control workers and their activity, lest it crumbles apart.
You discussed in a recent co-authored article, which appeared in Science, Technology & Human Values, the automation of labor at Amazon. How are the principles of Taylorism translated into the digital era? How do you imagine the future of work in light of ongoing automation processes?
Some have argued that digital Taylorism is nothing but a deeper way to analyze the labor process and optimize it downstream: a reincarnation of Taylor’s dream of control and efficiency (e.g. Gautié, Jaehrling, & Perez 2021). Interestingly, the depth at which digital technology allows capital to analyze the worker’s body (and mind). Forget about supervisors walking around the shop floor armed with stopwatches and notebooks. I have studied technologies that deploy a plethora of digital sensors, often carried by the worker and activated by their movements, to capture and turn into data any activity: the worker’s gaze, position in space, motions, and even emotions can be datafied and used to optimize the operations of robots and algorithms. While we could argue that automation developed by capital tends to displace and even replace workers, to me the most striking effect is a new relation between human and machine: workers serving the machine rather than vice versa, extending algorithms’ ability to sense the environment and act upon it. It’s the flipside of the famous take on media extending human senses by the Candian philosopher Marshall McLuhan. The ST&HV article, which I co-authored with Bronwyn Frey, looks at these phenomena through the study of patents owned by Amazon.
Are there any new projects that you are currently initiating or planning?
I have two things I am currently working on. One is a theorization of worker refusal and resistance within the landscape of digital capitalism. It is based on a conference I organized a couple of years ago, which was titled Log Out! and attracted quite a bit of great speakers. I am working on a special issue with my amazing colleague Julie Chen and scheming a future Log Out book on the topic. Ideally, the book will look at how workers refuse digital capitalism, how logging out can be weaponized by both labor and capital, but also who has the privilege to log out and when. Then I am starting an empirical study of the commodification of piracy in the cultural industry, looking at how corporate actors hire scores of precarious workers to analyze, pirate, and remix content from the internet, and then repackage and extract value from what they have created. It’s something you can see unfolding from TV advertising, to high-end fashion, to Instagram influencers. Digital media and the economic relations underpinning the contemporary cultural industry are generating something new and interesting, at least in my opinion. My old work on open science looked at epistemic communities such as biotechnology and particle physics, a typical focus of STS research. With this new project, I try to use the same lens – the tensions between openness and closure, collaboration and privatization – to study labor in the digital media environment.
Published: 10/18/2021