Is There a Global Digital Labor Culture?

Antonio A. Casilli (1, 2)

1 CEM - Centre Edgar-Morin
2 I3 SES - Institut interdisciplinaire de l’innovation de Telecom Paris

Digital labor designates platform-based algorithm-mediated tasks performed by human users of websites and apps. It concerns on-demand services such as Uber, micro-work portals such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, as well as data extraction via connected devices or social media such as Facebook. Digital labor studies have so far mainly focused on US and Europe. A new breed of research projects aims to correct this bias by intersecting labor, media, post-colonial, and subaltern studies, and tackle developing and emerging countries where the rise of digital labor accompanies low rates of formal employment. Newly available evidence offers insights into dynamics of social exclusion and exploitation through the outsourcing of online tasks to non-Western countries. The last part of the article discusses the extent to which this vast click farm economy predicated on value and data transfer from the Global South to the North can be construed as a " neocolonial " system.

Mots clés: digital labor; global inequalities; colonialism; imperialism; platform capitalism

Domaines: Sociologie

Antonio A. Casilli. Is There a Global Digital Labor Culture? : Marginalization of Work, Global Inequalities, and Coloniality.. 2nd symposium of the Project for Advanced Research in Global Communication (PARGC), Apr 2016, Philadelphie, United States. ⟨halshs-01387649⟩