Digital Labor

While the working lives of tech entrepreneurs and delivery platform workers seem far removed, both are engaged in digital labor. What unites their experience and allows us to speak of their work under the same umbrella? Is it even possible to talk about digital labor as if it were a single form of work?

Digital Labor explores these questions and critically examines the economics, politics, and experiences of workers in these new modes of employment. Using a novel definition of the term "digital labor," Kylie Jarrett explores unpaid user activity, platform-mediated gig work, and formal employment within the digital media industries, mapping the common features of these varied practices. Applying a critical Marxian lens, the book interrogates the structures of exploitation in this sector, the organisation of the labor process, the dynamics of alienation associated with this work, and the commodification of workers'' lives. It also documents the struggle of digital laborer