Digital Precarity Manifesto

In: Social text, Volume 37, Issue 4, p. 77-93

Abstract

Digital technologies have helped consolidate the wealth and influence of a small number of people. By taking advantage of flexible labor and by shifting accountability to individuals, sharing economy platforms have furthered insecure conditions 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 the creative class and digital producers themselves. If networked lives are always imagined as productive, virtuous, connective, and efficient, it is clear that these networks are broken. Written by Precarity Lab, a group of intergenerational, transnational feminist and people and women of color scholars, this manifesto envisions a new approach to digital studies. It argues for a new analytic for tracing how precarity unfolds across disparate geographic sites and cultural practices in the digital age.