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AbstractThis article examines the early telecommuting discourse of the 1980s and 1990s, understanding it as a pedagogical context for white plasticity, an ecological project in which racial privilege is protected through the transformation of homes and inhabitants. Rationalized initially as a crisis of adjustment, pedagogies of telecommuting were disseminated largely to upper-middle-class white professionals to build a "telecommuting personality," a subjectivity that was also meant to buffer them from the growing precarious nature of jobs. Not content to focus simply on work, however, telecommuting gurus took occasion to urge the enhancement of relationships between partners, families, and communities. The home office was core to this imaginary. Convertible, modular, ergonomic home offices that can be changed to suit the needs of the home's many inhabitants were said to yield more integrated and rounded personalities that would radiate outward, creating emotionally mature children and stronger community bonds. Emerging at a moment when "telecommuting" condensed the political stakes of digital labor, this strand of discourse reveals how working from home was appropriated to ensure the protection of white plasticity—the racialized capability of adaptation that was to be passed as inheritance from parents to progeny.

In the recent years, food delivery platforms in Southeast Asia have accepted people with disabilities as delivery workers, framing it as economic empowerment. This article examines this ambivalent bargain of economic rehabilitation in Singapore where Grab is headquartered. Drawing from historical records, it first traces the relations of "platform" to "access," demonstrating how the framework of curative intermediaries had historically shaped expectations around work. Access in the 1980s was envisioned as intermediating infrastructural connections that could provide disabled people with resources, transforming them from liabilities to productive personhoods. The second portion draws from interviews with disabled delivery workers to highlight the problems that constitute this investment in intermediaries and cure. Although accommodative platforms provide some degree of economic inclusion, these accommodations are often partial, resulting in precarity, attrition, and injury. "Curative platforms," therefore, signals the investment and twinning of cure and violence that subject the disabled to a compromised existence.

The cultural rise of "big data" in the recent years has pressured a number of occupations to make an epistemological shift toward data-driven science. Though expressed as a professional move, this article argues that the push incorporates gendered assumptions that disadvantage women. Using the human resource occupation as an example, I demonstrate how normative perceptions of feminine "soft skills" are seen as irreconcilable with the masculine "hard numbers" of a data-driven epistemology. The history of human resources reflects how assumptions of a biological fit with an occupation limit what women can convincingly describe as her skillsets. However, challenging this cannot stay within the confines of the occupation itself. To undo sexist thinking, it is necessary to understand the broader networks of patriarchal power that dictate how value is defined in corporate environments, especially within other high status professions in business.

Against the scholarly emphasis on precariousness, this article focuses on how gig work in 1970s Singapore was developed with the specific vision of enabling life for the working-class Singaporean family-man. From 1970 to 1993, the taxi company Comfort invested its operations with a powerful vision of the transformative potentials of taxi-driving labor. The gig work of taxis was made to change the work ethic of men, creating workers and fathers who could advance class mobility, nation-building, and the family, raising children who would become ideal workers of the future. Such hopes, however, still relied upon the insecurity of the gig to force the men into adherence. Entangled with patriarchy, nationalism, and familialism, this article examines the compromises exacted through the gig's capacity to make live, and analyses how Comfort's experiment has left a legacy in the ways that platformed gig work is governed today, which needs engagement and revision.

This article focuses on the concept of labor in co-creation, arguing that its definition needs to be expanded to include a process of intensity. Intensity foregrounds the different degrees in which participants involve themselves in a craft, and also the elements of time, effort, and affectivity. Using game modification as a case study, the article analyzes how automated, computerized systems of evaluations, embedded into webpages, can create grounds for a self-understanding of productive abilities. Maneuvering through the three registers of industry, websites, and game modders, it examines the discourses of evaluative systems and details how participants use these technologies to self-manage and calibrate their labor. Interviews showed that the increasingly competitive drive for optimal standards of production comes at a cost to the well-being of participants. Studies of labor therefore need to consider the "intense" aspect of participatory production, and the impact it may have on its participants.