Holed up w/ the whole fam in the bedroom w/ fans going, finally had a chance to read @afrontiercity on the failures of digital labor as a category of analysis as the social relations connected to digital platforms have gotten more sophisticated https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0163443720948018

Marxist free labor debates— focused on a specific definition of extraction, exploitation, and value— are now applied to every kind of platform-related work, which renders the category of digital labor too broad to be useful. Gandini rightly calls for more precision and clarity

Gandini cites @kylzjarrett, who offered a crucial feminist critique of the free labor discourse's focus on immateriality as novelty. The feminist angle here seems key, and I wonder if more attention to care, in(visibility), and social reproduction may offer a way forward

That said, there's plenty of excellent empirical work on specific labor practices on specific platforms, and locally situated studies examining how work practices involving digital technologies intersect with local regulation, cultural norms, and processes of gentrification

It will be interesting to see how future labor tech researchers combine more platform specificity and precision with richer theories about the social world