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World Processor

World Processor Po l i t i c s b y O t h e r M e m e s World Processor C 3 Jacob Silverman capitalists lazing nearby—they’ll still manage to get theirs, as bankers usually do. Every city hungry to attract high-spending digital workers, from Austin to New York to Chattanooga, now lays claim to its own Silicon district, and lavishes potential corporate recruits with tax breaks and face time with the mayor. But the cyber touts in city government suffer their own version of the digital workplace’s bait and switch. In place of, say, a stream of tax revenues to revive decrepit public transport, they’ll end up with a smartphone app that links commuters with gray-market taxi drivers. At the same time, disconsolate holders of humanities degrees, who once may have caught on in a human resources, customer service, or speechwriting department, have found their jobs outsourced or automated. A glut of digital labor markets—oDesk, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, TaskRabbit—lets companies summon pliable workforces on demand (a postindustrial reserve army, you might say) and deploy them at the stroke of a cursor to perform tasks that in better days would have gone to full-time employees: checking on http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Baffler MIT Press

World Processor

Silverman, Jacob
The Baffler – Mar 1, 2014
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Publisher
MIT Press
Copyright
© 2014 Jacob Silverman
Subject
Politics by Other Memes
ISSN
1059-9789
eISSN
2164-926X
DOI
10.1162/BFLR_a_00241
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Po l i t i c s b y O t h e r M e m e s World Processor C 3 Jacob Silverman capitalists lazing nearby—they’ll still manage to get theirs, as bankers usually do. Every city hungry to attract high-spending digital workers, from Austin to New York to Chattanooga, now lays claim to its own Silicon district, and lavishes potential corporate recruits with tax breaks and face time with the mayor. But the cyber touts in city government suffer their own version of the digital workplace’s bait and switch. In place of, say, a stream of tax revenues to revive decrepit public transport, they’ll end up with a smartphone app that links commuters with gray-market taxi drivers. At the same time, disconsolate holders of humanities degrees, who once may have caught on in a human resources, customer service, or speechwriting department, have found their jobs outsourced or automated. A glut of digital labor markets—oDesk, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, TaskRabbit—lets companies summon pliable workforces on demand (a postindustrial reserve army, you might say) and deploy them at the stroke of a cursor to perform tasks that in better days would have gone to full-time employees: checking on

Journal

The Baffler – MIT Press

Published: Mar 1, 2014

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