An analysis that traces the role of digital technology in multiplying
precarity.
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.
