The Digital Factory: interview with Moritz Altenried

Moritz Altenried is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and researches platform labor in three European projects, Digitalisation of Labour and Migration, Platform Labour in Urban Spaces (PLUS) and Fairwork.

He recently released the book The Digital Factory: the human labor of automation. Altenried analyzes workers in a variety of industries, such as content moderators, delivery drivers, Amazon warehouse workers, gamers, and search engine optimizers. This is another book that shows the role of human labor in the current stage of capitalism. Moritz Altenried explores issues around division of labor, geographies, and workers’ struggles.

In an interview with Rafael Grohmann, Altenried explains what these digital factories mean, the notion of digital Taylorism, the role of infrastructure, migration and gender, as well as analyzing commonalities in the sectors analyzed in the book.

DIGILABOUR: One of the most interesting things in your book is the variety of sectors analyzed: logistics, gaming, crowdwork and social media. What are the commonalities across the sectors? 

MORITZ ALTENRIED: The idea behind looking at these very different sites was to test the ideas and hypotheses of the book across different sectors and locations to think about broader developments characterizing the current transformation of labor and capitalism. At the same time, I wanted to account for the diversity of labor regimes and situations that we find globally, but even in one given location such as a city. So, my idea is less to describe a new paradigmatic form of labor but rather to account for the heterogeneity of labor regimes in contemporary capitalism. Arguably, it is this very heterogeneity that is the characterizing feature of labor in today’s global capitalism.

That being said, I was interested in a certain type of what I call digital factories. The term factory refers here less to a concrete building (it might also be a gig economy platform or a video game) but rather to sites in which digital technology ensures and enforces labor regimes sometimes curiously resembling those of Taylorist factories in the early twentieth century, even if they look completely different. Google’s scanning workers, Amazon warehouse workers, gig workers, and game testers, delivery riders, or content managers for social media platforms are all examples of the workers of today’s digital factories. Their labor is repetitive and stressful, often boring but can also be emotionally very demanding. Often it requires little formal qualification but a large degree of skill and knowledge. These forms of labor are inserted into digital systems but – at least for now – not automatable.

In the book, I am using the term digital Taylorism to describe new modes of digitally-driven standardization, decomposition, quantification, and surveillance of labor. And this is observable in all different sites of my research. At the same time, these forms of algorithmic management, digital organization, and control of labor allow for the quick inclusion – and equally quick expulsion – of very heterogenous, often migrant workforces into production processes. We can observe this in different industries. I am trying to theorize this process with the concept of the multiplication of labor borrowed from Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson.

We may think of an Amazon distribution center. Here, a highly standardized and digitally organized labor process allows the flexible inclusion of short-term and seasonal workers to scale the workforces according to fluctuating demand, for example in the Christmas season. Or, to take an example from my more recent research, of the way gig economy platforms with their flexible contracts, tight digital supervision of workers are geared almost perfectly toward the exploitation of migrant workers. Through work guided by multilingual apps, there is very little training necessary and a high level of control over the labor process is easily achievable. A high fluctuation in the workforce is no problem here. Rather, it is part of the calculation of the platforms that can count on a latent reserve army of – often predominantly migrant – workers who can be allowed into and expelled from the platforms with minimal costs and problems.

DIGILABOUR: If the book started writing today, which sector would you include?

ALTENRIED: This is a very good question. I feel that all examples from Amazon to gaming, from the online gig economy to content moderation for social media, are as important if not more than they were nine years ago when I started with the research for this project. But there would certainly be other and more very good sites. For example, as the book is concerned with the limits of automation, the fields of care and social reproduction more generally are incredibly interesting. Also, the newer work on gig platforms, urban logistics, and migration that I am doing with my colleagues here in Berlin and Europe would fit into the book very nicely. More traditional industries such as the automotive sector would also be very interesting. I have been planning to look at temp labor agencies for a long time and so much more…

Also, the case studies might take into account more and other locations. For example, research on gold farming in video games would today probably start in Venezuela and not in China (where the heydays of gold farming seem to be over). I was able to describe this transition in the book, but it would be very interesting to speak to digital workers from Venezuela today, for example, and see how this shadow economy continues to transform itself.

DIGILABOUR: What does it mean to say that digital capitalism is not the end of the factory, but its explosion and multiplication? Or even, what does it mean to understand the platform as a factory?

ALTENRIED: For me, the factory was attractive, firstly, because it seems to be quite an untimely starting point for an analysis of contemporary capitalism. For political and social theory, the factory has long been a central site of critical analyses of capitalist societies – think of Marx, but also many others. However, for most theories of post-Fordism, cognitive capitalism, and so on the factory’s most important role is that of a counterexample against which the transformation of labor and capitalism is analyzed. So, for me, it was attractive to analyze the current transformation of capitalism from the angle of the factory, also as a counterpoint, or maybe rather as a complement, for example, to a bias in theories of immaterial or cognitive labor (that are very important in my opinion). For the book, centering the factory entailed less emphasis on the ongoing importance of industrial factories but a certain concept of the digital factory as I have already mentioned. Put very short: With this concept, I am trying to explain how digital technology allows the logic of factories to find new spatial forms, such as the platform. And this is what I mean by the explosion or multiplication of the factory.

Let’s think again about a gig economy platform like Uber or Deliveroo: Here, digital technology allows the semi-automated organization, control, and measurement of labor in granular detail. Such a level of tight but spatially distributed organization and control was unthinkable outside of the disciplinary spaces of factories before digital technology. Today, digital technology is able to take on the spatial and disciplinary functions of the traditional factory. Hereby, new forms of coordination and control work at a distance and can reach out onto streets in urban space, if we think of delivery riders or Uber drivers. Or into private homes, if we think about the remote gig economy. To me, one of the most fascinating things about crowdwork is how digital technology allows platforms like Appen or Amazon Mechanical Turk to synchronize a deeply heterogeneous and globally distributed set of home workers into a tightly organized digital production line.  That’s a prime example of the digital factory, I think.

DIGILABOUR: Less polemically than systematically, what does digital Taylorism mean?

ALTENRIED: Polemically, the term has been used often in recent years used to denounce bad and stressful conditions of digital work, which is obviously a fine use of the term. In the book, however, I am trying to develop a systematic notion of digital Taylorism. And I think there has been some scattered interest from others in recent years as well, to use it as a conceptual term. As I have mentioned earlier, I use the term to describe how a variety of forms and combinations of soft- and hardware as a whole allow for new modes of standardization, decomposition, deskilling, quantification, and surveillance of labor. Often (semi-)automated algorithmic management plays a crucial role.

Sometimes I have also doubted the term, as I don’t want to argue for a simple rebirth of Taylorism but rather seek to emphasize how digital technology allows for the rise of classical elements of Taylorism in novel and often unexpected ways. Still, it is striking to me how digital technology can almost radicalize Taylor’s concepts and allows for things Taylor could only dream of. And inversely, Taylorism’s obsession with time and motion studies, with measuring and quantifying the laboring can be understood as a form of “data mining avant la lettre” as Claus Pias has aptly described it.

Digital Taylorism, to me, seems productive as a concept to trace these genealogies and to analyze how digital technology (based on sensors, networked devices, and integrated software architectures), can move Taylorism outside the disciplinary space of the factory and the office.  And also, to see how it gives today’s digital Taylorism a cybernetic quality in the sense that it often strives for real-time management and correction of problems.

Finally, I think it is important to say, that I am not arguing for digital Taylorism as the only or sole hegemonic form of labor in digital capitalism. I think digital Taylorism is an important tendency in the contemporary world of work, but it coexists— and must coexist— with other labor regimes that show different characteristics. This goes back to the opening remarks about the heterogeneity and multiplicity of labor regimes that characterize contemporary capitalism – and probably every form of capitalism that has existed.

DIGILABOUR: I really like it when you highlight the very materiality of the work. What is the role of digital infrastructures for digital factories?

ALTENRIED: I think much of it has become clear already, as we talk about the way e.g. a platform becomes a digital factory in the sense that is an infrastructure of production, an infrastructure for the exploitation of labor. At the same time, even though these companies tend to present themselves in that way, they do not consist of a few algorithms. Only for these algorithms to work, these platforms depend on digital devices of all kinds, satellites, fiber-optic cables, data centers, and so on. Then on roads to allow the building of these data centers, ships to lay the trans-oceanic undersea cables that are the base of the global internet, systems of social reproduction to reproduce the labor power of, for example, the programmers, engineers, and security guards in these data centers, and so on… There have been many important studies underlining the very materiality of the digital. We may think of the work of Nicole Starosielski, Lisa Parks, Jennifer Gabrys, Keller Easterling, and many more. The talk of a “weightless” or “virtual” economy has been properly debunked but I think any analysis of digital capitalism has to think through its infrastructures and materiality, especially in a time of global resource and energy conflicts and a dramatic climate crisis…

DIGILABOUR: You focus especially on migration and gender. What are your understanding on virtual migration, and how does it help us understand the context of work nowadays?

ALTENRIED: The term virtual migration is an interesting one and we have been debating it a lot here in Berlin especially in my collaborative work with Manuela Bojadzijev and Mira Wallis. The term tends to provoke migration scholars but hereby it also provokes important debates in critical migration studies… It is taken from A. Aneesh’s book Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization where he theorizes the work of Indian software engineers working for foreign companies remotely while staying in India. Their labor is, as he argues, situated in cultural, spatial, and temporal contexts that do not match their physical location hence they “migrate without migration”.

This provocative notion was very productive to describe the situation of gold farmers which is a part of the gaming chapter of the book. These are professional gamers who play the game to earn in-game money – “gold” – and other items that are sold – for “real world” money – to leisure players who want to advance quickly in the game. As this practice is forbidden in most games and frowned upon by gaming cultures, gold farming has become a digital shadow economy with fascinating economic and cultural consequences. Initially, gold farmers were mostly located in China, today Venezuela has become another hotspot. In any case, the professional gamers have to enter the game servers predominantly populated by Western players as these are the most important customers. In many games, gold farmers are attacked by Western leisure players as they are perceived as destroying the game’s economy and culture. The labor of gold farming has become profoundly racialized and in the Game World of Warcraft, for example, Western players sometimes form “vigilante” groups to hunt down “Chinese farmers” and obstruct their work in the game.

So how to understand the situation and experiences of these Chinese or Venezuelan gaming workers, economically and culturally? They work hours-on-end in a digital culture, language, and sometimes time zone foreign to their own, they are addressed as illegal immigrants and foreign labor while the fruits of their labor are sold to Western players. They fear that they might be banned from the game by the game’s publisher as well as racist attacks by other players. Their economic role and legal position are in-between different geographies and in many aspects very similar to labor migrants. So their experiences are in many aspects the same experiences of “real-world” migrant workers. We might also think about call-centers workers from the Philippines doing customer service for US clients or somebody who works through a platform like a freelancer as a virtual personal assistant for a customer on the other side of the globe as more examples of such tendencies and situations.

Looking at these situations from the perspective of migration studies, it seems somewhat questionable if we can keep a definition of migration as the physical movement of a body over a border. In a time when digital technology allows for real-time and embodied communication and cooperation between workers and individuals across borders and time zones, the common matrix of either labor migration or outsourcing/offshoring seems to be in question because at many points it becomes unclear what is actually moving across borders: bodies, data, products?

DIGILABOUR: How do you relate care work / gendered division of (reproductive) labor and home-based labor on digital platforms?

ALTENRIED: In my analysis of crowdwork, cloud work, or the remote gig economy – many terms are used at the moment – it became apparent to me, that there is a large group of crowdworkers on many platforms that combine work for the platforms with reproductive labor, for example, caring for kids, elderly or sick persons. This is possible because they can work from home and put in some digital work at their computers whenever they have time to do so in between domestic tasks.

It is very interesting here, how digital platforms feed of the crises of social reproduction as they play out around different geographies. In places where there is little social and care infrastructure, you will find many workers in these situations and these are, not surprisingly predominantly women. So, it is interesting to see how unpaid labor of social reproduction interacts with new forms of platform-enabled wage labor. What we see here, is also the indexing of new labor resources to capital, as people or time of people becomes available as potential labor time that has been previously unattainable for wage labor. I am not only thinking of women combining care work with crowdwork but also, for example, of a student doing a few tasks on MTurk in-between lectures or people in areas where there are little possibilities for offline-wage labor.

And then, it is fascinating to situate home-based digital labor in the long history of home-based labor, which is already a history of predominantly female labor. In the middle of the 19th century, Marx writes about the central function and renewal of home-based labor as a reserve army constituted predominantly by women and children. He describes home-based labor as an “external department of the factory” which is a really interesting formulation for me. So, there is a long history of home-based labor that is also instructive to understand the present moment and digital platforms. For example, it is also Marx, who underlines the importance of piece wages for the early-industrial systems of home-based labor. And what we see in today’s gig economy, not only in the remote gig economy but also in platforms like Uber and Deliveroo, is a digital renaissance of piece wages. So, attention to these aspects also allows us to situate the gig economy in a long history of flexible labor, which is to a great extent also the history of female and migrant labor.