Writings on Digitalization
Writings on Digitalization
Volume 2, Issue 2
By deconstructing the human–machine interface across China's economic history, this commentary on Luger and Schwarze's paper highlights the critical need to explore gender dynamics in post-industrial cities through the human–machine interface. We suggest two new concepts, subjectivity and deep interface, which may offer a way forward for us to move deeper into post-industrial cities for a more intricate understanding of the enduring inequalities shaping these urban landscapes.
Digital platform labor and its complex relationship with capital have stirred scholarly inquiry, calling for a systemic review that bridges foundational theories and various currents of development. In this review, we revisit Marxist and autonomist Marxist theses on the changing nature of work in the platform economy. Following that, we review two major strands of studies on the organization of production at the macro level and labour control at the micro level, which have revealed variegated types of workplace fissuring and different techniques of algorithmic control over bodies. However, we argue that the path forward must transcend these boundaries. We call for a revival of the ‘social factory’ thesis to rekindle ‘networking’ as a way of understanding labor-capital relations on digital platforms. Our premise is that capital and labor mutually constitute the platform economy through their agency of networking the internet and ‘outernet’. We outline four key directions for future research based on this premise: networking with public elements, networking with market-driven elements, networking for financialization in the digital landscape, and networking for resistance. By reinvigorating the social factory approach, we aim to enrich scholarly understandings of labor-capital relations in the platform economy by articulating digital labor in a wider web of sociocultural, technical, political and economic relationships extending beyond and transcending the internet.
Keywords: digital labor, platform economy, platform labor, organization of production, algorithmic control, social factory, networking
South Atlantic Quarterly,
120(4), 777–794
T his essay attempts to explore the three currents of user-generated content (UGC) platform development in China, including one full of improvised endeavors by the public after Web 2.0 opened the door of cultural production to amateurs in illiberal China, one that features affective laboring and networking by prosumers on platforms with algorithm-conditioned visibility, and one that features with regulatory attempts through collaborations of platforms and authorities to introduce a new “creator economy” and subsequently redefine the milieu of capital accumulation (Lefebvre 1991). The three currents have prominent social forces and logics, each of which is prominent at a particular time but is always entangled with others, in a sometimes conflictual yet reciprocal way.
This essay focuses on platforms that produce, share, and disseminate cultural content across a wide range, from online literature to video-sharing, to trace the evolving process of three currents from amateur creativity to creator economy. Our study of UGC platforms looks at the multifaceted role of networking that unfolds among producers, users, prosumers, and platforms, which establishes internal cohesion of a variety of communities and forms multiple territorial clusters (Barns 2019; June Wang 2021), which also constructs relational hierarchies of prosumers and platforms. Thus, this essay endeavors to continue other investigations of the networks and hierarchies in crowd-based capitalism (Sundararajan 2016; Van Dijck 2013). By adopting the spatial parameters metaphorically, we aim to illustrate the power relationship of different actors involved in this process of platform development, which is not viewed as an arena for a fraction of the society and the economy but is more concerned with its role in transforming the organization of production and consumption and the society’s relational structure.
This study examines China’s mass innovation/mass entrepreneurship campaign, with particular attention to the community of maker-entrepreneurs in the new techno-political ordering of society and their social territories. This raises the question of the subject-making of maker-entrepreneurs on a massive scale through what we call the new education–incubatory assemblage. How does the new education–incubatory machine assemble a new participatory community, form a productioncommunications–consumption circuit to imagine the new economy and re-territorialise the techno-political ordering of society? Our study stresses two differences in the social factory. First, by forging a fragmented pattern of production and an individualised society, mass entrepreneurship emphasises social networking. The exploitation of social relations in production has been brought to the foreground. Second, a participatory mass is not only shaped by the new mentality, but also constitutive of the very formation of the new mentality. Such a mass is a collection of actors, from the government, cooperatives, start-ups and individuals. In addition, their agencies vary, from those with a more reified form of power, such as policy, to the mundane, unrehearsed actions of individuals. This process entails the reconfiguration of political apparatus and bio-political power.
Keywords: Mass entrepreneurship, social factory, prosaic geography, China
Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space,
52(3), 483–489
https://doi.org/Artn 0308518x19899428 10.1177/0308518x19899428
Recent debates on the ‘global urbanism’ paradigm have had the merit of questioning longaccepted geographies of centrality, peripherality and marginality in the field of critical urban studies. However, these discussions have rarely interrogated the changing realities of global capitalism (Peck, 2015), particularly after the so-called ‘tech boom 2.0’ of the late 2000s and the 2010s. With the emergence and accelerated development of online platforms, the smartphone, artificial intelligence and other ‘networked digital information technologies’ that have reshaped everyday life in unprecedented ways (Greenfield, 2017), urban environments have become increasingly more attractive for profit-driven economic activity, as vast and heterogeneous concentrations of consumers, knowledge and social relations. This increased profitability of urban environments has led to the rise of a new wave of urban entrepreneurialism across the world, which is under scrutiny here.