Work Without the Worker

Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism

By: Phil Jones

Narrated by: David Vickery

An accessible analysis of the new forms of work whose seismic changes will increasingly determine the future of capitalism.

Automation and the decline in industrial employment have led to rising fears of a workless future. But what happens when your work itself is the thing that will make your job obsolete?

In the past few years, online crowdworking platforms - like Amazon's Mechanical Turk and Clickworker - have become an increasingly important source of work, particularly for those in the Global South. Here, small tasks are assigned to people online, and are often used to train algorithms to spot patterns, patterns through machine learning those same algorithms will then be able to spot more effectively than humans. Used for everything from the mechanics of self-driving cars to Google image search, this is an increasingly powerful part of the digital economy. But what happens to work when it makes itself obsolete. In this stimulating work that blends political economy, studies of contemporary work, and speculations on the future of capitalism, Phil Jones looks at what this often murky and hidden form of labor looks like, and what it says about the state of global capitalism.

©2021 Phil Jones (P)2021 Kalorama

Chilling Future Explained Simply

While the subject matter is a scary one, this author does a good job of laying out high level concepts of concern.