The Economy of Influence
A conversation with Emily Hund, the author of The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media.
Winter 2024
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The Desert of the Virtual
The metaverse heralds an age in which hardly anyone still believes that tech firms can actually solve our problems.
Build a Better Internet
An interview with Ben Tarnoff, the author of Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future.
Belabored: Game Workers Unite and Win, with Emma Kinema
Workers at a division of games conglomerate Activision Blizzard shocked the industry by becoming one of the first collective bargaining units in U.S. gaming.
Tech Workers Lie Flat
Why is China’s internet industry putting an end to the grueling schedules that have fueled so much of its growth?
A Democratic Vision for Antitrust
The antitrust reform project wants to contain domination and expand autonomy—key principles of a left political project.
Can We Democratize AI?
Artificial intelligence has often been adopted in ways that reinforce exploitation and domination. But that doesn’t mean we should greet all new AI tools with refusal.
All Work and No Play
Video games, like any creative product, reflect and refract the conditions of their production. Today, what they most resemble is twenty-first-century work.
Dreams and Defiance in Foxconn City: An Interview with Jenny Chan
China’s rapid economic growth is built on a factory system that relies on hundreds of millions of exploited workers. In the face of repression, those workers have found creative ways to resist.
The Workers Who Sued Uber and Won
The UK Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Uber drivers, declaring them workers and not independent contractors. But to beat the platform capitalists, it is urgent that we start to treat digital rights as worker rights.
Belabored: Going Union at Google
Alphabet Workers Union member Alex Hanna talks about Google’s labor politics, how a minority union can mobilize through direct action, and the future of organizing in the tech industry.
A World Without Work?
Contemporary automation discourse responds to a real, global trend: there are too few jobs for too many people. But it ignores the actual sources of this trend: deindustrialization, depressed investment, and ultra-wealthy elites who stand in the way of a post-scarcity society.
Digital Piecework
Homework and piece pay in the garment industry were largely abolished by the global labor struggles that preceded the New Deal. Silicon Valley capitalists have brought the model back.
The Hustle Economy
Today, inequality—especially racial inequality—is not only produced through the job market but through people’s ability to hustle.
When Polaroid Workers Fought Apartheid
Fifty years ago, a group of Polaroid employees launched the first anti-apartheid boycott of a U.S. corporation. Their activism mirrors the burgeoning organizing efforts of tech workers today.
