When the ocean tide retreats, the underlying distribution of the ecosystem of the beach becomes visible: the arrangement of the rocks and pools and the rearrangement of the living organisms since the last low tide are re-exposed to view in new and surprising configurations, in all their shining strangeness. Just so do the recurrent crises of capitalism display the changes in the global landscape of labour, as the tides of profitability retreat. Since the last major crisisâthat of 2007â2008âit has become apparent from the evidence on the newly exposed beach that represents the current state of the labour market that a number of trends that were already present in earlier years are now reaching critical mass. New patterns in the organisation of global value chains have been laid bare and new groups of workers have been sucked directly within the organisational scope of transnational corporations, under new conditions. And, as always, we struggle to make sense of the new patterns, which appear unprecedented, cataclysmic, even, impossible to describe using our existing vocabularies and difficult to categorise in our current schemae.
As the second decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close, the media are abuzz with sharply polarised debates about the future of work. Utopian visions of a post-capitalist world in which all the drudgery will be carried out by machines and people are free to enjoy a life of leisure and creativity jostle with dark dystopian views of a future society in which the majority of the population is reduced to precarious penury under the all-seeing gaze of a panoptic authority that monitors every aspect of life. New technologies play a central role in these forecasts, whether they are seen as elevating us to the status of âcitizen cyborgsâ1 through the use of implanted brain-machine interfaces (BMIs)2 or reducing us to the status of âtechno-serfsâ controlled by algorithms.3 Scholars, policy-makers and pundits attempting to get to grips with the potential impacts of new technologies on the economy and on daily life find the existing vocabularies inadequate (or at least insufficiently headline-grabbing) to describe them and have come up with a veritable thesaurus of new terms.
I apologise in advance for the thicket of quotation marks and footnote references in the next few paragraphs. Readers will probably be familiar with some of these terms, though not all and, even for those who have already come across most of them, encountering them en masse like this may feel very much like trying to swim through a kelp forest. It is, though, this very density of terminology that I want to draw attention to because of the way it impedes clarity of thought and disconnects the current discourse from past scholarship. Any attempt to make sense of the current changes therefore require, as a precondition, that we find some way to cut through this obfuscation.
So, to return to the copious literature on the future of work, are we witnessing the emergence a new kind of capitalism? Some authors suggest that we might think of it as âdigital capitalismâ,4 âinformational capitalismâ5 âcognitive capitalismâ,6 âcommunicative capitalismâ,7 âbio-capitalismâ,8 âplatform capitalismâ9 or âsurveillance capitalismâ.10 Or perhaps these changes mean that capitalism as we know it cannot survive and we are actually entering a world that is âpost-capitalistâ11?
Other pundits do not go so far as to question the impact on capitalism as a system but argue that we need to recharacterise the economy in the digital era. Perhaps, it is suggested, we should think of it as a âplatform economyâ,12 âreputation economyâ,13 âgig economyâ,14 âmesh economyâ,15 âattention economyâ16 or âsharing economyâ17 in which the relationship between production and consumption has been transformed through âpeer-to-peer networkingâ,18 âcollaborative consumptionâ,19 âprosumptionâ,20 âco-creationâ21 or simply âplaybourâ.22
Others ask how we should designate the labour that is accessed in this new kind of economy: âthe human cloudâ23? âliquid labourâ24? a âworkforce on demandâ25? or a âjust-in-time workforceâ26? Can the process by which atomised workers are recruited best be described as âcrowdsourcingâ27 or âcloudsourcingâ28 or sourcing through âonline talent platformsâ29? And should the work itself be designated âclick workâ30 âartificial artificial intelligenceâ31 âcrowd workâ32 âdigital labourâ33 or even, using an apparently oxymoronic term, âimmaterial labourâ34?
This by no means exhaustive catalogue of terms illustrates just some of the ways that commentators struggle to make sense of the immensity of the changes we are living through, in which all past social and economic certainties seem to be put in question. Such confusion is not new. In the 1990s there was a similar spate of hyperbole and new terminology. We heard then, for example, about the âdeath of distanceâ,35 the âend of geographyâ36 and the rise of âturbo capitalismâ.37 We were told that the economy had become âweightlessâ,38 âconnectedâ,39 âdigitalâ,40 âknowledge-basedâ41 or simply ânewâ.42 We were told we were living in an âinformation societyâ43 and working in âvirtual organisationsâ44 with workers defined as âdigital nomadsâ,45 âdigeratiâ,46 the âcognitariatâ,47 âsymbolic analystsâ,48 and many other terms.49 The developments these terms sought to describe seemed exciting and new during the late 1990s, a period of hectic and unsustainable growthâthe âdot-com boomââthat led up to a crash (the âbursting of the bubbleâ) at the turn of the Millennium (in which it was estimated that the worth of most internet stocks, which had peaked six months earlier, declined by 75%, wiping out $1.755 trillion in value50 by November 2000). But this discourse too echoed similar language from earlier periods.
As early as 1966, US management consultant Peter Drucker was using the phrase âknowledge workerâ51 and three years later French sociologist Alain Touraine coined the term âpost-industrial societyâ,52 later taken up in the USA by Daniel Bell.53 âTelematicsâ (a translation into English of the French tĂ©lĂ©matique) was first used in a 1978 French government report54 reflecting a growing public debate about the economic and social impacts of the marriage of computerisation with telecommunications. Much discussion in the mass media in the 1970s focused on miniaturisation and the cheapness of the silicon chip, making the use of computers (which, up to that point had been large expensive mainframes) increasingly ubiquitous. In the UK, a BBC Horizon Programme, broadcast in 1978, called Now the Chips are Down represented a turning point in public attitudes, triggering scare stories in the media about the millions of jobs it was estimated would be lost as a result of computerisation (remarkably similar to the stories in the press in the 2010s about the impact of robotisation). This was also a period when contrasting extrapolations led to predictions in the sociological literature of âthe end of the working classâ55 or âthe end of workâ.56 Some writers saw the new technologies as opening up the possibility for Utopias in which automation would be used to cut back the working week, and minimise the amount of socially necessary work, with the remaining time released for unalienated creative labour.57 Others warned that the new technologies would lead to mass unemployment.58 Among labour sociologists, the work of Harry Braverman59 opened up new d...