Liquid labor, precarious lives
Creators: name: Crowell, Jessica
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2017

description: The primary purpose of this ethnographic study is to better understand the economic lives of participants in Philadelphia’s KEYSPOT project, a network of digital access and skills programs funded by the federal Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP). Created as part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) or “stimulus package,” the BTOP initiative intended to respond to the Great Recession of 2008 by supporting and expanding U.S. broadband infrastructure, particularly in distressed urban and rural communities. Implicit in this primary goal was the understanding that technological development stimulates job sector growth and can mitigate unemployment and underemployment. Yet, what job opportunities were available to the poor and working class urban Americans targeted through these technology programs? How did computer access and digital training practically shape their economic lives?    In this dissertation, I argue that there is a disconnect between the policymakers designing broadband programs and the “policytakers” to whom the programs are targeted. Borrowing from Mosco (2004), this disconnect is due in part to the “digital myth” that suggests technology is a cheap, efficient and individual-targeted solution to complex problems such as urban poverty. And whereas these programs endeavored to connect low-income Philadelphians to jobs through a focus on imparting digital access and skills, the types of formal sector jobs available to KEYSPOT job-seekers were part-time, low-skilled, low-wage and did not provide needed benefits like health insurance. Notably, these positions were particularly inflexible for working parents and located in fields like carework, domestic work or the service industries.  Given these formidable impediments to locating good jobs in the formal sector outlined above, some struggling parents with digital skills instead pursued flexible, low financial risk opportunities in the informal sector (Bauman, 2000). These informal digital labor activities ranged from offering specific services such as modeling or caricature drawing, to promoting handmade goods or digital goods online. In some cases, urban street economies are merging with digital economies in unique and unanticipated ways. Yet, while some might celebrate these new forms as “entrepreneurial,” I demonstrate that this work is a type of highly precarious, highly exploited digital labor that did not translate to increased economic stability or security. And KEYSPOT participants in both the formal and informal sectors largely continued to rely on social programs because they could not make ends meet.    I suggest that that the rise and frequency of these flexible, informalized arrangements more broadly signals a changing relationship between capital and labor in urban economies. I argue that the extant research in the digital labor field has overlooked the ways in which online tools are utilized by the working class and likewise that the dominant digital divide literature has been inattentive to the ways technology practically impacts the economic lives of the urban poor. Thus, rather than “digital labor” or “immaterial labor,” I propose “liquid labor” as a framework for understanding the emergence of these new highly precarious, mutable and flexible online practices. I suggest that this space marks a new terrain of struggle in the fight for technological development and, more importantly, economic equality and opportunity in low-income urban communities struggling in the wake of neoliberal policies of retrenchment.