Marx has a brief section near the end of Capital vol 1 chapter 15 where he discusses the reemergence of "unproductive" working classes like domestic servants, which had been integral to feudal society but largely disappeared into the proletariat during primative accumulation, https://twitter.com/mckinneykelsey/status/1253312431843049472

but which he predicted would once again become a major sector of the labor market as a function of (and here's the interesting part) mechanization of the general conditions of production.

you've got factories where machines make commodities, factories that make the machines that make commodities, and factories that make the materials to make the machines that make commodities,

and once the first two factories are machinized youre left with the choice of either working in a mine or exiting the industrial sector entirely. and by then those machines have saved a lot of rich people a lot of money that they'd love to use to hire you as a servant.

historically the proportion of labor-power and technology employed in production acts as a counterbalance against fluctuating profit rates and self-regulates in that sense (sort of) as unemployed proletarian labor builds up until it's cheaper to hire people than machines again

but what makes gig economy jobs different from industrial-age servitude is it's not unproductive! Marx was right that industrialization would create a massive servant class but what he (no meme intended) failed to predict is that it too would be swallowed by technological capital

and that's the point I guess im trying make here. we think of gig economics as something that rests on the availability of cheap labor, which is not strictly false, but why then has it still only seen real returns in the world's richest countries?

I'd say the answer is because gig work requires not just a high level of machinzation in general, but a particularly neoliberal version of that, where there's massive numbers of unemployed proletariat but all (or at least enough) of them have personal ownership of high technology

the first recognizable examples of gig work companies in the US were telemarketing schemes in the 70/80s where housewifes would get paid a few cents by mail for every number in the phone book they could call up and confirm a name+address.

the FCC labor commission tried to prosecute these companies for exploitation but lost on the grounds that the women qualified as independent contractors, not employees. sound familiar?

the way that these type of schemes, whether telemarketing or ride-sharing, are able to pull this off so well is because they all take advantage of technologies which have become generalized such that when the average private individual performs a task, the amount of value imbued

into the product includes a non-negligible amount derived from their personal property -- in the case of ride shares for example this includes their phone, car, and even their spotify subscription -- value which contributes to capitalist profit in addition to labor-power

but requires no fixed investment on the part of the capitalist! BUT (and this is crucial) in every instance where this strategy succeeds, the technology that forms the lynchpin (previously the phone grid, today the internet) is definitively machinic in some sense.

Marx wrote about workers in machinized factories coming to identify the machines as the source of their exploitation, to the point that real class struggle became obfuscated (there's a reason we know the Luddites today as an anti-machine movement instead an anti-capitalist one)

and still today people blame the problems of capitalism on phones, or the internet, and the ironic truth is that yes! without those technologies, many types of exploitation wouldn't be possible! the question then is what makes them unique, and that's what im interested in asking

anyway the answer far as I reckon is that computation specifically contains within itself the logic of dialectical alienation such that it can maintain capitalist social relations even across hugely distributed technological ones.