Title: Labor in the global digital economy : the cybertariat comes of age /
Authors: Huws, Ursula
Year: 2014
Subjects: Information technology Social aspects; Capitalism Social aspects; Work Social aspects; Marxian economics.; SOCIAL SCIENCE Sociology General.; BUSINESS & ECONOMICS Labor.; LAW Media & the Law.; Capitalism Social aspects; Information technology Social aspects; Marxian economics; Work Social aspects; Arbeitswelt; Arbeitssoziologie; Globalisierung; Sozioökonomischer Wandel; Informationstechnik
Abstract: "For every person who reads this text on the printed page, many more will read it on a computer screen or mobile device. It's a situation that we increasingly take for granted in our digital era, and while it is indicative of the novelty of twenty-first-century capitalism, it is also the key to understanding its driving force: the relentless impulse to commodify our lives in every aspect. Ursula Huws ties together disparate economic, cultural, and political phenomena of the last few decades to form a provocative narrative about the shape of the global capitalist economy at present. She examines the way that advanced information and communications technology has opened up new fields of capital accumulation: in culture and the arts, in the privatization of public services, and in the commodification of human sociality by way of mobile devices and social networking. These trends are in turn accompanied by the dramatic restructuring of work arrangements, opening the way for new contradictions and new forms of labor solidarity and struggle around the planet. Labor in the Global Digital Economy is a forceful critique of our dizzying contemporary moment, one that goes beyond notions of mere connectedness or free-flowing information to illuminate the entrenched mechanisms of exploitation and control at the core of capitalism."--
Contents: What will we do?. The destruction of occupational identities in the knowledg-based economy -- Fixed, footloose, or fractured. Work, identity, and the spatial division of labor in the twenty-first-century city -- Begging and bragging. The self and the commodification of intellectual activity -- The globalization of labor and the role of national governments. Toward a conceptual framework -- Expression and expropriation. The dialectics of autonomy and control in creative labor -- Crisis as capitalist opportunity. The new accumulation through public service commodification -- The underpinnings of class in the digital age. Living, labor and value.