Technoprecarious

Precarity Lab. 2020. Technoprecarious. London: Goldsmiths Press. ISBN 9781912685981 [Book]

[img]
Preview
Text
9781912685981_Technoprecarious text.pdf - Published Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives.

Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract or Description

Technoprecarious advances a new analytic for tracing how precarity unfolds across disparate geographical sites and cultural practices in the digital age. Digital technologies—whether apps like Uber, built on flexible labor, or platforms like Airbnb that shift accountability to users—have assisted in consolidating the wealth and influence of a small number of players. These platforms have also exacerbated increasingly insecure conditions of work and life for racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities; women; indigenous people; migrants; and peoples in the global south. At the same time, precarity has become increasingly generalized, expanding to include even the creative class and digital producers themselves.

This collaboratively authored multigraph analyzes the role of digital technology in multiplying precarity. The authors use the term precarity to characterize those populations disproportionately affected by the forms of inequality and insecurity that digital technologies have generated despite the new affordances and possibilities they offer. The book maps a broad range of digital precarity—from the placement of Palestinian Internet cables to the manufacture of electronics by Navajo women and from the production and deployment of drones on the U.S.–Mexico border to the technocultural productions of Chinese makers. This project contributes to, and helps bridge, ongoing debates on precarity and digital networks in the fields of critical computing, postcolonial studies, visual culture, and information sciences.

Item Type:

Book

Related URLs:

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Goldsmiths Press

Date:

24 November 2020

Item ID:

33228

Date Deposited:

28 Feb 2023 12:15

Last Modified:

28 Feb 2023 15:02

URI:

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/33228

View statistics for this item...

Edit Record Edit Record (login required)