World Processor
Consider the plight of the office drone: more gadgeted-out than ever, but still facing the same struggle for essential benefits, wages, and dignity that workers have for generations.Utopian reveries spill forth almost daily from the oracles of progress, forecasting a transformation of Information Age labor into irrepressible acts of impassioned fun. But we know all too well the painful truth about today’s ordinary work routines: they have become more, not less, routinized, soul-killing, and laden with drudgery. The contrast between the glum reality of cubicle labor and the captivating rhetoric of Internet liberation, which once seemed daft and risible, doesn’t anymore; now it’s only galling. In recent years, for instance, the term “creative” has been captured by advertising agencies, who’ve bestowed on it a capital C and made it into a noun, a coveted job title meant to signify Mad Men–style braggadocio. But all this business-card-ready term usually denotes is someone who writes copy for Google AdWords or applies Photoshop filters to an image of an anatomically impossible woman in carnal embrace with a bottle of vodka.
Even software programmers, once the Brahmins of the new economy, must contend with diminished status. The costs of launching a company have declined, so everyone is doing it. Direct your thanks to the glut of cheap engineering talent in Russia and India and the boom market in cloud computing, where a half-dozen companies control the digital infrastructure of hundreds of others, including Snapchat, Netflix, and the CIA. Please donate to your neighbor’s Kickstarter on your way out, and don’t mind the venture capitalists lazing nearby—they’ll still manage to get theirs, as bankers usually do.Every city hungry to attract high-spending digital workers, from Austin to New York to Chattanooga, now lays claim to its own Silicon district, and lavishes potential corporate recruits with tax breaks and face time with the mayor. But the cyber touts in city government suffer their own version of the digital workplace’s bait and switch. In place of, say, a stream of tax revenues to revive decrepit public transport, they’ll end up with a smartphone app that links commuters with gray-market taxi drivers. At the same time, disconsolate holders of humanities degrees, who once may have caught on in a human resources, customer service, or speechwriting department, have found their jobs outsourced or automated.A glut of digital labor markets—oDesk, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, TaskRabbit—lets companies summon pliable workforces on demand (a postindustrial reserve army, you might say) and deploy them at the stroke of a cursor to perform tasks that in better days would have gone to full-time employees: checking on store displays, organizing documents, performing transcription, writing newsletters. Even translation has become digitized and highly distributed; users of the Duolingo language-learning app are unwittingly translating articles—gratis—for BuzzFeed, CNN, and other media giants....MORE
