The Digital Factory - by Moritz Altenried (Paperback)

About the Book

"In recent years, tech companies such as Google and Facebook have rocked the world as they have seemingly revolutionized the culture of work. We've all heard stories of lounges outfitted with ping pong tables, kitchens with kombucha on tap, and other amenities that supposedly foster creative thinking. Nothing could seem further from earlier workplaces associated with a different revolution in capitalism: factories, in which employees are required to perform highly circumscribed tasks as quickly as possible to meet quotas--for next to no pay. However, as Moritz Altenried shows in The Digital Factory, these types of workplaces are not so far from the Googleplex as we might think. While recent accounts of the transformation of labor after the demise of the factory highlight the creative, communicative, immaterial, or artistic features of contemporary labor, Altenried uncovers the factory-like conditions in which many new digital workers perform their jobs. These workers, such as video game testers, social media content moderators, and Amazon fulfillment center workers, perform highly repetitive, unskilled tasks for low and often contingent wages. Based on more than five years of research in different sites using ethnography and interviews combined with an analysis of infrastructural technologies, Altenried's book gives us a first-hand account of many new forms of digital labor that drive contemporary capitalism. He shows that though today's factories might look and feel different than they did 150 years ago, they still follow the same logics and produce the same unequal outcomes"--

Book Synopsis

The Digital Factory reveals the hidden human labor that supports today's digital capitalism.

The workers of today's digital factory include those in Amazon warehouses, delivery drivers, Chinese gaming workers, Filipino content moderators, and rural American search engine optimizers. Repetitive yet stressful, boring yet often emotionally demanding, these jobs require little formal qualification, but can demand a large degree of skills and knowledge. This work is often hidden behind the supposed magic of algorithms and thought to be automated, but it is in fact highly dependent on human labor.

The workers of today's digital factory are not as far removed from a typical auto assembly line as we might think. Moritz Altenried takes us inside today's digital factories, showing that they take very different forms, including gig economy platforms, video games, and Amazon warehouses. As Altenried shows, these digital factories often share surprising similarities with factories from the industrial age. As globalized capitalism and digital technology continue to transform labor around the world, Altenried offers a timely and poignant exploration of how these changes are restructuring the social division of labor and its geographies as well as the stratifications and lines of struggle.

Review Quotes

"Altenried's insights into the rapidly changing relationship between technological change, digitization and global work are breathtaking. The Digital Factory develops a deeper knowledge of the terrain, both social and physical, on which present and future labor disputes willy-nilly have to be fought. Continuing, expanding and diversifying this endeavor is and will remain an enormous undertaking. Books of similar intellectual thoroughness and comparable political depth are badly needed."-- "Kritisch-Lesen"

"In this extensively researched volume, Altenreid uses interviews with workers in this complex digital economy to deftly link the hidden human labor behind automation and algorithms to the Taylorist factories of the Industrial Age. Covering everything from the complex interactions between humans and automation at Amazon's distribution centers to World of Warcraft gold farmers in China and the unseen human labor behind Facebook and Google algorithms, The Digital Factory gives readers who may not be as familiar with Taylorism and its relationship to the complex landscape of the digital factory age a solid foundation on the topic."-- "Choice"

"The Digital Factory is an important contribution to the discussion of digital labor. But it also makes clear that researchers must now address the next task at hand: how to turn these bad jobs into good jobs."-- "Science"

"Altenried takes readers on an amazing tour into the contemporary mutations of what Marx famously called 'the hidden abode of production.' What looms behind the magic of algorithms, artificial intelligence, and automation is a world of heterogeneous labor regimes, exploitation, and struggles. The Digital Factory is a landmark contribution to the study of contemporary capitalism, a must-read for scholars and activists."--Sandro Mezzadra, University of Bologna

"From the warehouse to the multiplayer game, content moderation to people-as-a-service, Altenried unearths the shifting stakes, geographies, and experiences of digital labor. The Digital Factory offers no solace to purveyors of data and automation fantasies. By exposing how the power of machines entangles living knowledge, intelligence and subjectivity, this remarkable book offers resources for changing the worlds of work and technology alike."--Brett Neilson, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sidney University

"In this ground-breaking book, Altenried shows us that, far from marking the end of the factory era the digital age is spreading the factory model of centralized control of vulnerable labor beyond its walls, extending into every corner of the global economy. Drawing on vivid first-hand observations, he spotlights the experiences of workers carrying out the hidden tasks that keep the information economy going, from the hidden housework of the Internet to the delivery of parcels under the panoptic surveillance of the algorithm."--Ursula Huws, University of Hertfordshire

About the Author

Moritz Altenried teaches at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany.