In the APSA Public Scholarship Program, graduate students in political science produce summaries of new research in the American Political Science Review. This piece, written by Ewa Nizalowska, covers the new article by Lucas G. Pinheiro, “Protocols of Production: The Absent Factories of Digital Capitalism.”
As far as the internet is concerned, the age of the factory is—on most accounts—over. Ours is a post-industrial era, characterized by unprecedented technological innovation and economic growth. The symbols of digital capitalism in affluent economies are no longer the billowing warehouse smokestacks but the sleek Silicon Valley headquarters of technology companies like Google and Amazon. The dominant sources of value, at least in much of the Global North, have shifted from the manual drudgery of the industrial assembly line to creative, digital, and information-based work. Insofar as the internet age represents a new form of society, understanding it requires a new set of theories that break with the factory model. Or so we tend to think.
In a new article in the American Political Science Review, Lucas G. Pinheiro challenges the dominant view that there has been a sharp break between the industrial age and our contemporary internet economy. Digital capitalism, Pinheiro argues, runs on the largely invisible labor of workers at data centers and microwork platforms, where the mechanisms of managerial control still look much like those of the classical factory. As Pinheiro demonstrates, what defines a factory is not heavy machinery or centralized production, as it is commonly thought, but rather the direct organization of workers under strict supervision to perform tasks that create value for their employers. Today, internet companies continue to organize digital labor through the same “protocols of production”—or formal rules intended to discipline, supervise, and isolate workers—that governed the factory system since its emergence in the eighteenth century. Rather than fading into obsolescence, the factory has adapted to the global demands of digital production, making digital workers just as, if not more, precarious than their industrial-era counterparts.
To shed light on the parallels between the industrial factory and the modern internet economy, Pinheiro’s article invites its readers into the “absent factories” of digital production, where a global digital workforce cleans, enters, transcribes, categorizes, and moderates the vast streams of data that make up the internet. While some of these workers are employed by data centers, others perform “microwork”—atomized on-demand tasks crowdsourced via platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), TaskUs, Freelancer, Upwork, or Cloud Factory. Microwork employees—or “data janitors,” as they are sometimes called in Silicon Valley—total somewhere between twenty and seventy million people, predominantly in the Global South. What users tend to experience as the seamless, automated infinite scroll of the internet is made possible by this massive workforce of largely underpaid, racialized, and precarious data workers in digital factories the world over.
“Pinheiro’s article suggests that we may have been too quick to frame our present age as “post-industrial.””A closer look at the managerial practices of technology companies like Google and Amazon brings digital capitalism’s dependence on human labor—what Pinheiro calls “the human abode of automation”—into focus. The Googleplex—Google’s massive, sleek Silicon Valley headquarters—appears to embody the digital economy’s flexible and creative management regimes. The company is known for its horizontal organizational structure and a work ethic focused on personal growth and amusement. Yet behind Googleplex’s facade as a progressive playground for knowledge workers lurks a more insidious infrastructure of labor discipline, fragmentation, and control. For instance, throughout the early 2000s, the company hired a cohort of low-wage subcontractors, known as “ScanOps,” to scan printed matter for Google Books. Unlike Google’s knowledge-based employees, who could roam the Googleplex freely, these data workers were confined to a secluded building on the headquarters’ outskirts. There, they spent ten hours a day at their scanning stations, following three monotonous directives: “press button, turn page, repeat.”
Google’s reliance on closely supervised labor illustrates the extent to which the digital economy depends on the factory’s organization of production and mechanisms of control. Ironically, for all of automation’s promise of ending the drudgery of the assembly line, new forms of automation tend to call for forms of manual labor that can be even more fragmented and repetitive than industrial manual work. Where technology falls short, underpaid data workers and “microworkers” are available to step in at a scale and speed unthinkable in the age of the industrial factory, and new forms of algorithmic management offers employers unprecedented supervisory and disciplinary power over digital workers.
Pinheiro’s article suggests that we may have been too quick to frame our present age as “post-industrial.” When we attend to how the new internet economy is organized, digital work for technology companies like Google and Amazon comes to appear as driven by the same “protocols of production” as those that governed the industrial age. Employees at data centers and microwork platforms remain disciplined, supervised, and tasked with increasingly isolating work in ways that follow the industrial factory playbook. If the internet age appears to us as seamless and automated, it is in large part because this digital janitorial work has been made invisible, much like the ease of industrial-era market transactions obscured the grueling work of the assembly line.
- Ewa Nizalowska is a PhD candidate in political theory at Cornell University with research interests in American political thought, feminist theory, and theories of political economy and empire. Her dissertation examines how early to mid-twentieth-century radicals theorized the organization of economic power in the United States and strategized for its rearrangement. Her work has been supported by, among others, the American Political Science Association, the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University, and the Yan P. Lin Centre at McGill University
- PINHEIRO, LUCAS G. 2024. “Protocols of Production: The Absent Factories of Digital Capitalism.”, American Political Science Review, 1–14.
- About the APSA Public Scholarship Program.