Technoprecarious

by Precarity Lab

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.

Genres: Technology, Nonfiction

132 pages, Paperback

First published November 24, 2020

About the author

Precarity Lab brings together an intergenerational network of scholars and activists at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, to explore how digital cultures produce, reproduce, and intervene in precarity. Anna Watkins Fisher, Silvia Lindtner, Ivan Chaar-Lopez, Cengiz Salman, McKenzie Wark, Kalindi Vora, Jackie Wang, Cass Adair, Lisa Nakamura, Cindy Lin, with Meryem Kamil.

Reviews

[anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A manifesto that details the ways technology, as currently constituted, expands and deepens precarity, and the possibilities for creating generative spaces of mutual aid, beauty, and resistance within and beyond these binds. Reflective, critical, playful, mournful, thought provoking, necessarily partial, welcoming further connections and interventions.

[Sarah Cavar]

This is a very ambitious text, in that it attempts to gloss several decades of theory across and between disciplines in quite a small space, in terms understandable to the non-specialist reader. In the process, it builds quite an impressive bibliography, though the one-or-two-sentence summaries of massive concepts like "slow death" and "feeling brown" leave me wanting. On a practical level, I'd bring this book into a space already somehow engaged in anticapitalist organizing (particularly in the areas of science and technology), and/or as a very introductory text for a high school- or freshman-undergrad level class that would later be addressing themes of disability, critical ethnic, and queer/trans/gender studies.

So, not a bad book, but an *extremely* simple/simplified one that I'm really not the target audience for. That said, if I'd read this at 16, it would have blown my mind, and I do recommend it as an intro text for someone who wants an easier entrypoint into heavier-hitting work.

[Austin Kocher · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not that I disagree with the string of conjectures and statements throughout the book, but the book is largely vague and pointless, and includes several factual inaccuracies that raise questions about the seriousness of the text.