Day 13 — Digital Labour
Hello everyone, today I want to talk with you about the thing we do almost every day: labour (with a ‘u’). I know that’s not how many of you are used to spelling that word, but go with me on this.
Labour is our work, our job, our livelihood. It can be a social activity, a productive outlet or a creative endeavour, and it can take place in fields such as manufacturing, journalism and healthcare. Specifically, I want to talk about Digital Labour, defined as any work that is done in the creation of digital technology. This work is done all around the world, from middle-class programmers in Silicon Valley, California, to enslaved miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo who retrieve cassiterite ore at gun-point to be used in laptop and mobile phone manufacturing (sorry for bringing down the Christmas spirit).
I want to spend some time talking about the way we work in the digital age because it is very different from the way that previous generations worked. I think that we cannot escape the concept of Digital Labour — it is part of everything we do. Let’s start with a simple example: you’re hungry, so you want to go and eat at a restaurant. Firstly, we reach for our smartphone, the creation of which involved blood, sweat and tears. We then use our face to unlock the device, allowing 3rd party developers to use our facial mapping data in the creation of other software. We then open Google Maps, which is filled with information (reviews, photos, etc.) of places we would like to go, contributed by other users for free. We find a nice-looking Italian restaurant but it’s a bit far away. So we open up another app to provide us with convenient and affordable transportation. I’m sure you get my point by now.
We all know that digital technology is an indispensable part of our modern lives, but it cannot be disentangled from Digital Labour. Technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum — it is designed, made, maintained and upgraded by humans. But you might be asking:
What makes this different from regular labour? If someone buys a chair, there was first somebody who designed the product, another person who cut down the tree that was used as lumber, then someone who assembled the chair from the raw materials, and finally someone who can repair it when it breaks. Why is Digital Labour any different?
And that’s a very interesting question.
I think Digital Labour differs from traditional labour through a kind of ambiguity. Let’s look at another example: One of my favourite past-times is watching Twitch streamers. You know, the people on the internet who play video games for our amusement. That seems like a pretty sweet job, right? Getting paid to play video games all day. And some of the people who do this are now multi-millionaires! But if this was a sure-fire path to wealth and success, why aren’t we all doing it? In reality, many face an uphill climb towards the top — not only is much of their early streaming ‘career’ spent in front of a small audience that aren’t paying to watch, but there is also time spent before and after streams in preparation, administrative tasks, and buying and setting up their equipment (Twitch doesn’t provide them with Macbooks like some IT companies do 😉).
I don’t want to discourage anyone from trying something that might become an emotionally and financially valuable experience. But I do want to point out that this kind of labour was not widely done before the digital age. Similar ambiguity can be seen in the gig economy: people ‘work’ for UberEats and Deliveroo, but there are no clear working hours and no base salary leaving many Japanese gig workers earning below the national minimum wage. Gig work is often described as flexible and readily available — and that is true. But it can also be unstable and uncertain, which is not something you want when trying to pay rent and bills. This ambiguity isn’t the fault of the delivery drivers or the hungry consumers (I’ve certainly ordered from these apps dozens of times). Still, we should recognise that this kind of labour wasn’t common during the previous generation when a 9-to-5 job was the norm.
And then there are some digital ‘jobs’ that never pay. Like Local Guides, whose contributions are what make Google Maps such a great service. Or forum moderators on sites like Reddit. Or the open source developers whose free code is “used in practically every modern connected device, from the iPhone to cars, smart fridges and TVs.” These goods and services couldn’t function without the unpaid labour of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people (or at the very least they wouldn’t be nearly as popular).
I don’t think it is necessarily a bad thing that Local Guides and Reddit Mods are working for free. But it’s a new dynamic that the digital revolution has brought to us. Sometimes I think it is a dangerous precedent, that giant corporations like Meta and Alphabet are able to grow so profitable from the collective free labour of their users. And there are other times when I am grateful that I can benefit from all these great services thanks to the collective time and effort of people from all around the planet. Maybe this is the closest we have come to utopia — millions of people from around the world willingly helping each other find good restaurants, or cataloguing all of human knowledge or hosting AMAs with biological anthropologists.
And the services that come out of this transnational cooperation are pretty cool. I am writing this article in Google Docs, a powerful and versatile service available to everyone on the planet with a PC and internet connection. The only thing that Google asks in return is for their machine learning to use what I have written to create better predictive text in the future. A fair trade? Only time will tell.
Maybe we’re not living in a techno-utopia after all. But if we want to get there, then it’s going to take a lot of work. From Google Maps, to Twitch.tv, to Reddit, none of those things would be possible without our Digital Labour. And that’s why I spelled it Labour — because it’s ours.
