Keywords

Digital Labor and its Limits

Much of this paper is an adaptation of a working paper of mine (Burns, 2020).

The recent “digital turn” within disciplinary geography has attended to the socio-political and economic foundations and implications of algorithms, big data, smart cities, gaming, the quantified self, predictive policing, and other digital technologies mediating everyday life. Within this arena, a robust research agenda has investigated the growing digitalization of labor (see, e.g., Scholz, 2013). The distinction between everyday life and work is gradually diminishing, as productive capacities are increasingly hard-coded into quotidian activities bearing little resemblance to colloquial understandings of “work”. By extension, the term digital labor can be conceived broadly, as encompassing work mediated by digital technologies like mobile phones and crowdsourcing or microtasking platforms (Aytes, 2012; Ettlinger, 2016); temporary, precarious, contract-based gig work (Woodcock & Graham, 2020); posting content on social media platforms (Fuchs & Sevignani, 2013; Mosco, 2017); work in the technology sector (Cockayne, 2016); online content moderation (Roberts, 2019); and many other applications (Jarrett, 2020, 2022). The form of digital labor called gig work, where workers are assigned small tasks, usually as an independent contractor, exemplifies the scale of digital labor: depending on the precise definition, some have estimated that between 2018 and 2023 the global number of gig workers will have increased from 43 million to 78 million, and that 16% of Americans have conducted gig work (Velocity Global, 2022). Increasingly, users of digital technologies are the source of productive and extractive value as institutions surreptitiously generate value from individuals and groups through smartphone applications and surveillance technologies, even without their explicit awareness of it (Couldry & Mejias, 2019; Mouton & Burns, 2021; Thatcher, O’Sullivan, & Mahmoudi, 2016; Zuboff, 2019). Everyday activities like posting on social media or reacting to others’ posts, using a transit card, or filling out a CAPTCHA are now “datafied”—coded into data and stored in databases—in order to produce value from people’s and communities’ interactions, movements, knowledges, and networks. To varying degrees, research on digital labor has spoken to each of these examples.

With some notable exceptions, though, such research has paid insufficient attention to the spaces of digital labor—where it occurs, where it is recruited, its spatial relations, what sort of spaces it produces, and so on. As I hope to show below, digital labor is currently transitioning to enroll more affective, immaterial, and attentional work, and more than previous labor regimes, digital labor occurs across traditional jurisdictions anchored on state sovereignty. Together, these two transformations underscore the importance of directly contending with digital labor‘s spatialities. More specifically, digital labor research often exemplifies one of two limitations. The first and more common limitation is that the spaces of digital labor are not considered at all. Such accounts might instead focus on the labor relations, transformations of the workplace, and shifting exchange media, but frame the processes without attention to their attendant spaces. Second, when its spatialities are indeed considered, research typically frames the “workplace” as occurring within Euclidean spaces. This abstracts from individuals and (often multinational) relations to the political boundaries of, for instance, the nation-state or sub-national regions. It also relies on a conception of digital labor that is an intentional intervention with the aim of compensation, rather than an often subconscious or immaterial productive practice. Here, I build on the productive work in these areas by directly confronting the question of how we might (re)think the spaces of digital labor.

I argue that not only are the spaces of digital labor important for understanding its relations, implications, and limits, but that they are rooted and expressed in ways not easily captured in Euclidean geometries. A relational spaces framework helps address key shortcomings of the ways digital labor’s spatialities have been conceived. Relationality can be understood as analytically prioritizing the networks and connections that produce space for particular purposes; it is to think about relations between actors rather than abstracting actors from their socio-political contexts and positionality within global systems. Despite research’s important contributions to understanding digital labor, to overlook its non-Euclidean spatialities constrains the ability of research to explain key socio-political processes. For example, legal and regulatory frameworks remain centered, for the most part, on national jurisprudence despite the diffuse (in Euclidean space) nature of digital labor; some work has been done to mobilize regulatory frameworks across national boundaries but leave unquestioned the analytical unit of the nation-state itself. A relational perspective helps us focus on networks, and to see space as produced for labor exploitation, rather than space as a container “holding” discrete acts of work.

As digital technologies are increasingly vehicles for intensifying value production and extraction, the questions with which I contend in this article are becoming progressively more imperative. Below, I first substantiate each of these claims about digital labor, in an extensive review of digital labor literature, showing that most work is either aspatialized or relies on a Euclidean geometrical framework. I then conceptualize non-Euclidean spatial thinking, by drawing on the relational-spatial thinking that has a long history in geographic scholarship. Lastly, I bring these two together by proposing a framework for thinking the relational spaces of digital labor.

Geographies of Digital Labor

Digital Labor as Strategy, Relation, Productive Process

The emergence of digital labor is part of broader institutional and political-economic reforms of workforce management, labor markets, precaritization, and firm profit strategy (Arvidsson, 2019; Huws, 2014; Zukin, 2020). The increased precarity and shortened temporal scales of digital labor is perhaps best captured by the gig economy, in which workers are assigned small tasks such as delivering food with Deliveroo or SkipTheDishes, or taxiing people with Uber or Didi Chuxing (Chen, 2018; Richardson, 2020). These workers typically have the formal status of contractors rather than employees, which relieves the hiring company of paying for benefits and job security (van Doorn, 2017; Woodcock & Graham, 2020). For Pasquale (2016, p. 314), this deregulated “gig economy is a glidepath to precarity, prone to condemn laborers to insecure and poorly paid conditions”. While these labor market transformations are not unique to digital contexts—Peck and Theodore (2012) locate such “contingent work strategies” in broader political-economic reforms related to and stemming from deepening neoliberalization since the 1970s—they have found a particular resonance and enabling mechanism in the milieu of the digital infrastructure of platforms.

Platforms are a key mediator for this digital labor. Srnicek (2017) compellingly links the rise of platform technologies to the profitability crisis of the 1970s that nearly led to global economic collapse in 2008. For Srnicek (2017, p. 42), platforms constitute “a powerful new type of firm” that is “capable of extracting and controlling immense amounts of data” (Srnicek, 2017, p. 6). Platforms enable new deregulated, contingent, precarious labor markets such as on-demand food delivery and ride-hailing services while often simultaneously serving as an instigator of new forms of work (Langley & Leyshon, 2017; Mahmoudi, Levenda, & Stehlin, 2021). They further provide a means of greater control over workers and alienation of workers from the products of their labor (Attoh, Wells, & Cullen, 2019; Iveson & Maalsen, 2018).

In these discussions there is some disagreement between those who view labor as the primary generator of value, and those who instead see value being driven by data. Srnicek, for instance, questions whether markets mediate the production of surplus value, whether there is a socially necessary labor time to produce value on platforms, and whether platforms are a boon or a parasite to capitalism: “Rather than exploiting free labour, the position taken here is that advertising platforms appropriate data as a raw material” (Srnicek, 2017, p. 56). Others are less direct with their position, and instead analytically focus on data to the relative exclusion of labor (e.g., Cohen, 2018), and still others question the analytical value of the term altogether (e.g., Gandini, 2021). At question is whether these processes of digital labor constitute Terranova’s (2014) “free labor” insofar as it is rooted in a Marxian conceptual lineage. However, as Greene and Joseph (2015, p. 225) argue, drawing heavily on Fuchs (2010), “the labour theory of value holds, even as labour is increasingly fragmented, skilled, reskilled and deskilled. . . . [V]alorization is still realized by companies like Facebook or Twitter. . . . Marx’s original conception of abstract general labour can be updated to take into account these new forms of affective labour.” Elsewhere, Fuchs and Sevignani (2013) distinguish between digital work and labor in ways that attend to previous critiques, and beyond this, we should also recognize that to produce the market-exchangeable commodity of data that is central for Srnicek requires a subject engaging in productive activities; thus I contend here that labor remains a critically important category for understanding digital practices and digital capitalism.

Thinking in terms of labor further draws our attention to how constant capital, or the machinic solidification of the production process, currently holds the potential to eclipse variable (human) capital through intensifying automation. This potential—or trend, depending on the author—has been captured with great applause by some, who, like Bastani (2019) and Srnicek and Williams (2015), see new automated digital technologies as liberating the masses from work altogether. To be sure, automation has always been recognized as a core component of capitalist economies (Benanav, 2019). However, advanced development of artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, sophisticated machine learning algorithms, and decreasing costs of computational memory and processing power have increased the degree to which tasks typically delegated to humans are instead delegated to machines (Arboleda, 2020; Egbert, 2019; Eubanks, 2018). Within these broad debates, the particular discussions of robots typically fall into “the tempting yet extreme positions of either dystopian angst or positive ‘boosterism’” (Bissell & Del Casino, 2017, p. 437). Robotics are often framed as directly replacing human workers, as companies like Tesla and DoorDash have actively promoted (Benanav, 2019; Robotics Online Marketing Team, 2019). However, even overlooking the historical precedent of automation, there are strong reasons to believe that robotics and automation will continue alongside human laborers (Spencer, 2018).

While such research has generated critically important insights into digital labor practices, relations, and distributions, it leaves under-theorized the ways in which digital labor happens in, through, and with spaces (c.f., Strauss, 2020). Indeed, extant interdisciplinary literature theorizes digital labor as both the use of digital media to create use-value (Fuchs, 2016), and the systems of labor that produce the media themselves (Fuchs, 2013)—but with space as a secondary consideration when considered at all (see Scholz, 2013). This omission persists despite tacit acknowledgement that digital technologies significantly reconfigure spaces of labor and the structures that support it (Gregg, 2011; Jarrett, 2020).

Geographic Engagements with Digital Labor

Geographers and spatially-minded scholars more directly confront the spatialities of digital labor, but typically leverage a Euclidean view of space, where spaces, demarcated by geographic measures of latitude and longitude, serve as vessels for human activity. Spaces, in this conception, are simply bounded areas where things happen. This often leads to visualizations of spatial patterns using common geographic maps: for instance, country borders might be intact, map distances might be proportional to ground distances, region names are used unproblematically, and north might point upwards. Research in this area has established that such digital labor practices vary markedly across the globe. The map of digital labor shows strong disparities in where people voluntarily produce data, where different kinds of data are collected about people, and which places around the world are represented in online platforms. Namely, online repositories like Wikipedia and Google StreetView often reflect historical patterns of colonization (Graham, Hale, & Stephens, 2011; Graham, Straumann, & Hogan, 2015). Other digital-geographic trends such as “smart city” programs, which rely on tech-savvy urban denizens to perform data analytics in “loving service” to the city, reflect unsurprising patterns, being located predominantly in the Global North, India, and East Asia (Burns & Andrucki, 2021; Macrorie, Marvin, & While, 2021). Much of the geographical analysis of digital labor is conducted using spatial units such as regional or national borders (see, e.g., Ojanperä, Graham, & Zook, 2019), or uses the traces of digital labor (e.g., social media posts, logs of edits in platforms, trajectories of movement) aggregated to such units (see, e.g., Chapple, Poorthuis, Zook, & Phillips, 2021; Rani & Furrer, 2021). At a smaller scale, the figure of the “workplace” figures strongly in these discussions as a key space of remunerated work—whether those workplaces are envisioned to be the physical working environments (Gregg, 2011; Richardson, 2018), or the platforms that enable work execution and worker management (Bucher, Fieseler, Lutz, & Buhmann, 2021; Irani, 2015). In the former, the workplace is the bounded space of work usually delimited by physical barriers such as walls and firm campus space; the latter is accessed through web browsers, smartphone apps, and dedicated software—in most cases, either anchored in physical spaces for internet connectivity, or recording one’s movement through geolocation services. This geometric conception of space informs the “proximity” debate that relies on, for example, dichotomous views of “near” and “far” (Rutten, 2017), and which describes the regional dynamics of digital industries (Dallasega, Rauch, & Linder, 2018; Losurdo et al., 2019). In each of these cases, the spatial-analytical units are rooted and made legible in Euclidean geometries.

Thus, when an analysis of digital labor does indeed mobilize a spatial lens, the research typically uses a Euclidean view of space, where spaces, demarcated by geographic measures of latitude and longitude, serve as vessels for human activity. Spaces, in this conception, are simply bounded areas where things happen. This often leads to visualizations of spatial patterns using common geographic maps: For instance, country borders might be intact, map distances might be proportional to ground distances, and north might point upwards. Insofar as Euclidean geometries focus on what Lefebvre (1991) called “real space”, it is analytically synergistic to think of labor as a discrete and intentional activity that is remunerated by an employer or sponsor (see, e.g., Bucher & Fieseler, 2017). To be clear, the relation between Euclidean geometries and discrete remunerated work is not a necessary relation, but one that finds mutual productivity. In contrast, geographers have long conceptualized space as active in the production of social relations (Coe & Jordhus-Lier, 2011; Harvey, 2009), and as more than Euclidean in orientation: they are also relational, imagined, and highly contingent (Bell & Valentine, 1995; Gregory, 1994; Lefebvre, 1991; Staeheli & Lawson, 1995). There are also strong reasons to think more broadly about labor than as discrete, intentional, and remunerated activities, to include “aesthetic or semiotic” (Scott, 1997, p. 323) economies—such as those linked to attention and libidinal energy (Stiegler, 2009/2010)—that circulate through them (Dean, 2010; Neff, 2017). While the persistence of what Terranova (2014) calls “free labor” should not be dismissed, what I am arguing here is instead that digital labor research must consider a broad range of activities beyond discrete, intentional, and remunerated work. In other words, current engagements with digital labor’s spaces move several key socio-political processes outside of the purview of research.

Scholars are increasingly aware of these limitations, calling—usually implicitly—for broader conceptual engagement in this area (Aytes, 2012; Graham & Anwar, 2019). Graham (2020), for instance, has recently offered a “conjunctural geographies” approach to the digital labor re/producing platform urbanism. For Graham, conjunctural geographies are the relational spaces that platform firms produce in order to both be influential and still unaccountable. Mahmoudi and Levenda (2016) turn relational attention toward “immaterial labor” (see also Hardt & Negri, 2004), lending insights into how planetary urbanism is increasingly transforming “rural” areas. Hoffman and Thatcher (2019) advocate for an explicitly topological approach to visualizing urban data, breaking from a Euclidean-centered analytical frame, similar to the ways in which Bergmann and Lally (2021) propose a “geographical imagination systems” that likewise highlights the value of thinking topologically. Finally, expanding research on automation raises important questions about the role of non-human animals, machines, and sociotechnical artifacts in systems of digital labor (Amoore, 2013; Bastani, 2019; Bissell & Del Casino, 2017; Srnicek & Williams, 2015). Regarding the latter, Arboleda (2020) argues that increasing automation (within his empirical context: mining), rather than leading to the end of work, instead creates new gendered, racialized, and degraded forms of precarious work; in other words, non-human laborers like automated trucks, sensors, drones, and drills produce new relations between mine workers. Across all forms of digital labor, scholars are also increasingly recognizing the important affective, and often gendered, dimensions of platform-mediated work (Bucher & Fieseler, 2017; Schwiter & Steiner, 2020; Spangler, 2020).

Despite this growing recognition of the need for expanded conceptual resources for digital labor research, its conceptions of space and the kinds of labor that may happen in/with/through them remain underdeveloped. In short, what is needed is new ways of thinking about the spaces of digital labor. We need new ways to take up the challenge of moving “beyond the geotag” (Crampton et al., 2013; Shelton, 2017) to consider the ways space is produced by, for, and alongside digital labor practices and processes. We must locate digital labor beyond just Euclidean geometries to think relationally about space as an active agent, and “labor” to include the senses mobilized by scholars like Terranova (2014), Zittrain (2008), and Stiegler (2009/2010), where “labor” is not just conscious, active, and remunerated work but is diffused across quotidian and often invisible practices such as decoding CAPTCHA and “paying attention”.

Relationality and Digital Labor

I contend that a diversity of relational thinking approaches can advance our understanding of digital labor. Here I would like to briefly review how relational spatial thinking has been taken up in geographical analysis, borrowing from developments in related social science disciplines. For several decades now, geographers have found that a Euclidean framework is unable to properly capture the contingent, dynamic, globally-connected, and often contradictory relations that characterize social processes across space. Following Elwood, Lawson, and Sheppard (2017, p. 746), I mobilize relationality as (1) a socio-spatial ontology that “conceptualiz[es] space itself as constituted through relations that extend beyond a singular place”, (2) an epistemological stance that is open to contingent and often contradictory relations, and (3) a politics of possibility that “disrupts hegemonic modes and relations of knowledge production” (Elwood et al., 2017). In this, Elwood et al. (2017) draw most clearly on Massey’s (1994) conception of local space as constantly reproduced from the nexus of global networks and flows of capital, power, knowledge, and spatial histories. Relationality prioritizes relations and contexts over individual actors and expects that actors’ strategies and activities are non-deterministic and open-ended (Bathelt & Glückler, 2005; Boggs & Rantisi, 2003; Yeung, 2005). Rather than thinking of actors as independent, ontologically stable entities, relationality conceives of actors, boundaries, and spaces as in constant flux, reiteratively co-produced, and as anti-essentialist (DeVerteuil, Power, & Trudeau, 2020).

For Amin (2004, p. 34), a relational framework:

re-cast[s cities and regions] as nodes that gather flow and juxtapose diversity, as places of overlapping—but not necessarily locally connected—relational networks, as perforated entities with connections that stretch far back in time and space, and, resulting from all of this, as spatial formations of continuously changing composition, character, and reach (Amin & Thrift, 2002). Seen in this way, cities and regions come with no automatic promise of territorial or systemic integrity, since they are made through the spatiality of flow, juxtaposition, porosity and relational connectivity.

Here, Amin (2004) draws on conceptual material that has been leveraged for a range of relational approaches. Similar to Murdoch’s (2006, p. 18) summary of relationality, spaces “should not be seen as closed and contained but as open and engaged with other spaces and places”, extending beyond political boundaries such as municipal jurisdictions, to connect distant geographies in complex networks and flows. Spaces do not exist a priori the actors and processes that produce them for particular purposes and with particular interests in mind; in other words, according to Doel (2007, p. 809), “space is continuously being made, unmade, and remade by the incessant shuffling of heterogeneous relations”. Various spatial formations such as regions and supply chains are produced for the creation and maintenance of socio-political and economic relations (Bathelt & Glückler, 2003). In this framework, subjects are likewise produced relationally: individual and collective formations tie together their relations to processes, spaces, natures, technologies, and other individuals/groups (Delfanti & Arvidsson, 2019), and indeed even the distinction between “the social” and “the natural” begins to deteriorate (Whatmore, 1999). In this, geographers draw on a long history of relational thinking in related disciplines such as sociology, where, according to Emirbayer (1997, p. 287), “[r]elational theorists reject the notion that one can posit discrete, pregiven units such as the individual or society as ultimate starting points of sociological analysis”. Jones (2009) locates the lineage of relational spatial thinking through Harvey’s (2009) spatial dialectics (see also Sheppard, 2008) back to Leibniz’s non-Euclidean philosophy; in contrast, absolute space is more characteristic of Newtonian philosophy. Quoting Callon and Law (2004, p. 6), Jones argues that thinking relationally “is an empowering perspective. It suggests that space and its orders are always open such that ‘the local is an achievement in which a place is localized by other places and accepts “localization” itself. But this means that no place is closed off”.

Relational spatial thinking troubles the ontological certainty with which digital labor is often approached. Rather than falling for “the territorial trap” (Agnew, 1994) cast in a Euclidean geometric framework that takes units such as the nation-state as the containers in which activities happen, relationality reminds us that digital labor and the digital laborer emerge as phenomena because of the non-Euclidean relations between platform capitalism, global precarity and inequality, and the intimate relationships that germinate much of social media. To insist on Euclidean boundaries of the nation-state, the city, and various mesoscales risks what Angelo and Wachsmuth (2015) call a “methodological cityism”, later taken up by Arboleda (2020) as “methodological nationalism”, in which scholarship privileges the absolute geographies of the city or nation-state, masking processes that tie those units into broader geographies – and in many cases disrupt those boundaries altogether. Euclidean geometry analyses also frequently aggregates occupants of similar absolute geographies into the same analytical unit despite at times representing different relational geographies (e.g., backgrounds, citizenship, relation to capital, social capital).

These absolute geographies, while foregrounding important spaces of policymaking, juridical enforcement of labor laws, and scalar production of labor markets, obfuscate the relational geographies that are produced in order to institute digital labor practices. While a microtasker’s physical location in Kuala Lumpur might be important for asking particular questions, their Euclidean position on the globe tells us less about the relational spaces of financial speculation and tax havens that led to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk’s prominence in digital labor markets, the political-economic precarity of Malaysian workers produced dialectically with multinational corporations’ drive to minimize labor costs by exporting particular forms of labor to the Global South, and the spaces of care and social reproduction that support that digital laborer’s work. More than previous labor regimes, digital labor transacts on a planetary scale, and regulatory frameworks have been slow to adapt beyond absolute jurisdictions like the nation-state. To think about the relational spaces of digital labor opens opportunities for (re)thinking how and where digital labor occurs, and therefore how it should be regulated. A relational-spatial approach might thus take the platform less as a website or smartphone app that one enters and exits, and more as a mediator of global political-economies, sociospatial divisions of labor, and spaces for the production of intimate feelings of belonging or marginalization.

However, the ontological certainty of Euclidean geometries also informs how digital labor researchers think about work itself. While the importance of the workplace and its remunerative tendencies should not be underestimated (even in a post-Covid world), a decade of research on attentional economies reminds us of the quotidian systems that valorize practices of scrolling, searching, and streaming (Ash, 2015; Celis Bueno, 2017; Crogan & Kinsley, 2012; Terranova, 2012). In everyday contexts, one need not be employed to produce profitable content by posting on social media, or by reporting a “speed trap” within a navigation app. Rather, a relational geographies perspective reminds us that spaces are produced by digital technologies—a web platform, an urban services app, an advertisement interrupting an online video—precisely to enroll large numbers of (usually unwitting) laborers into the value-production process. Moreover, these laborers are often enrolled by mobilizing other relational geographies, such as the affective spaces of viewing geographically-distant friends’ Facebook posts, or an ad for a political candidate. As many remind us, digital spaces like social media, advertisements, and suggested videos, are all carefully curated by algorithms that we have trained through our web browsing, email content, and clicks on links (Cheney-Lippold, 2017; Noble, 2018): As Mark Zuckerberg once responded to United States Senator Orrin Hatch’s inquiry about Facebook’s source of profit, “Senator, we run ads.” These spaces affectively compel users to produce content, without compensation beyond the privilege of using platforms’ services, and often subtend the production of new forms of social life, communities, and knowledge politics (Burns & Wark, 2020; Hine, 2000; Miller & Slater, 2000; Nagle, 2017); they are both produced spaces and productive spaces, and deeply relational. Jonathan Zittrain (2008) has likewise pointed out that Optical Character Recognition—and related machine learning algorithms designed to translate images into text—are often trained by unsuspecting users of CAPTCHA (engelia besik, 2014). In other words, everyday activities have been intensely woven into production of value such that one no longer need be in a workplace or even intentionally working to be producing highly valuable information and content. That such a broad range of labor is unremunerated has led Qiu (2016) to call such digital labor “iSlavery”.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have argued that space is under-conceptualized in digital labor research, leading to the omission of a range of important socio-political processes. When space is considered at all, research typically mobilizes absolute spaces rooted in Euclidean geometries, most immediately operationalized as geopolitical boundaries, and that it is usually concerned with discrete and intentional acts of remunerated work. Research is beginning to recognize the limited analytical purchase of these spatial underpinnings, and new conceptions of space are needed and beginning to emerge. Among other important implications, a relational thinking approach raises the need to reconsider how digital labor is regulated: perhaps instead of locating digital labor within the boundaries of a nation-state, regulators should consider the planetary scale of platforms, digital capitalism, and the workers that make and use them. A relational spatial thinking approach opens possibilities for thinking otherwise about the spaces of digital labor, as taking place in non-Euclidean spaces such as the affective spaces of social media and the spaces emerging from broader political-economic processes. In these relational spaces, labor consists of mundane, quotidian digital practices such “paying attention” and interacting with geographically-dispersed communities.

Following Elwood et al. (2017), this re-spatialization of digital labor has tremendous political implications. For one, it reminds us that people’s everyday spaces are not limited to their immediate surroundings, and that the systems of care and belonging that enroll digital participation (Dourish & Satchell, 2011) do not easily map onto Euclidean geometries. The heterogeneity within geographic units is less important than the epistemological consequences of recognizing the limitations of a Euclidean framework. Second, spatializing attentional economies draws to our attention the processes by which digital spaces actively recruit labor that goes unpaid. While scholars have long recognized the profitability of attention and digital interactions, conceiving of them as spaces gets us to think differently about their relations with a diverse set of human and non-human actors.

Looking forward, turning attention to the relational spaces of digital labor raises many fundamentally important questions and considerations. First, does digitalization offer particular inflections of the now longstanding processes of immaterial labor (Dyer-Witheford, 2001; Hardt & Negri, 2004; Lazzarato, 1996)? Does the materiality of digital infrastructures link immaterial labor with other socio-natural implications, including global climate change and continued deterioration of the commons? Second, does the digitalization of relational-spatial labor necessary lead to the proletarianization of laborers, as hypothesized by Stiegler (2009/2010) and Dyer-Witheford (2015)? Or, in the contrary, does the indeterminacy of digital technologies retain a glimmer of hope of subverting global capitalism or on a smaller scale empowering some individuals and communities? Lastly, how are new activities valorized for capitalist logics, or are post-capitalist labor regimes emerging in the spaces of digital technologies?