This article contributes to the debate on automation and justice by discussing two under-represented concerns: labour justice and equality. Since automation involves both winners and losers, and given that there is no ‘end of work’ on the horizon, it is argued that most normative views on the subject – i.e. the ‘allocative’ view of basic income, and the ‘desirability’ views of post-work and workist ethics – do not provide many resources with which to address unjustly unequal divisions of labour involved (...) in technological innovation. This article problematises these common responses reframing the problem from the perspective of labour justice. While the allocative view assumes that labour justice follows ‘spontaneously’ from income redistribution, the desirability views are chiefly interested in either defining or contesting the meanings of work for individuals, overlooking the interdependent nature of work and concerns of equality other than autonomy. Two conceptions of labour justice are thus applied to the problem: Paul Gomberg’s contributive justice, and Iris Young’s democratic division of labour. Instead of deciding between them, the normative core of ‘contributive parity’ is suggested as a critical standard for assessing unequal labour structures, and for envisaging a future in which technology can be an ally in making social cooperation fair. (shrink)

The payments industry – the business of transferring value through public and corporate infrastructures – is undergoing rapid transformation. New business models and regulatory environments disrupt more traditional fee-based strategies, and new entrants seek to displace legacy players by leveraging new mobile platforms and new sources of data. In this increasingly diversified industry landscape, start-ups and established players are attempting to embed payment in ‘social’ experience through novel technologies of accounting for trust. This imagination of the social, however, is being (...) materialized in gated platforms for payment, accounting, and exchange. This paper explores the ambiguous politics of such experiments, specifically those, like Bitcoin or the on-demand sharing economy, that delineate an economic imaginary of ‘just us’ – a closed and closely guarded community of peers operating under the illusion that there are no mediating institutions undergirding that community. This provokes questions about the intersection of payment and publics. Payment innovators’ attenuated understanding of the social may, we suggest, evacuate the nitty-gritty of politics. (shrink)

The sharing economy has transformed economic transactions, created new organizational forms, and contributed to changes in consumer culture. Started as a movement with promises of a more sustainable, democratic, and inclusive economy, the sharing economy, and its impact on issues such as privacy, discrimination, worker rights, and regulation, is now the subject of heated debate. Many of these issues root in the changes that digital technologies have brought and the unresolved moral and ethical questions emerging therefrom. This special issue contributes (...) to this ongoing debate with five articles that develop theoretical frameworks and conduct empirical investigations, providing fine-grained analyses of urgent issues in the sharing economy. In this article, we highlight these and other issues that we believe deserve further attention from business ethics scholarship. (shrink)

Based on a qualitative survey among 203 US workers active on the microwork platform Amazon Mechanical Turk, we analyze potential biases embedded in the institutional setting provided by on-demand crowdworking platforms and their effect on perceived workplace fairness. We explore the triadic relationship between employers, workers, and platform providers, focusing on the power of platform providers to design settings and processes that affect workers’ fairness perceptions. Our focus is on workers’ awareness of the new institutional setting, frames applied to the (...) mediating platform, and a differentiated analysis of distinct fairness dimensions. (shrink)

In this paper, we build upon Bruno Latour’s political writings to address the current impasse regarding algorithms in public life. We assert that the increasing difficulties at governing algorithms—be they qualified as “machine learning,” “big data,” or “artificial intelligence”—can be related to their current ontological thinness: deriving from constricted views on theoretical practices, algorithms’ standard definition as problem-solving computerized methods provides poor grips for affective dissensions. We then emphasize on the role historical and ethnographic studies of algorithms can potentially play (...) in the politicization of algorithms. By both digging into the genealogy of algorithms’ constricted definition and by making their contemporary constitutive relationships more visible, both historical and ethnographic studies can contribute to vascularizing algorithms and making them objects of enlarged disputes. We conclude by giving a flavor of the political potential of the vascularization efforts we call for, using materials from an ethnographic study conducted in a computer science laboratory. (shrink)

Computer vision aims to produce an understanding of digital image’s content and the generation or transformation of images through software. Today, a significant amount of computer vision algorithms rely on techniques of machine learning which require large amounts of data assembled in collections, or named data sets. To build these data sets a large population of precarious workers label and classify photographs around the clock at high speed. For computers to learn how to see, a scale articulates macro and micro (...) dimensions: the millions of images culled from the internet with the few milliseconds given to the workers to perform a task for which they are paid a few cents. This paper engages in details with the production of this scale and the labour it relies on: its elaboration. This elaboration does not only require hands and retinas, it also crucially zes mobilises the photographic apparatus. To understand the specific character of the scale created by computer vision scientists, the paper compares it with a previous enterprise of scaling, Malraux’sLe Musée Imaginaire, where photography was used as a device to undo the boundaries of the museum’s collection and open it to an unlimited access to the world’s visual production. Drawing on Douglas Crimp’s argument that the “musée imaginaire”, a hyperbole of the museum, relied simultaneously on the active role of the photographic apparatus for its existence and on its negation, the paper identifies a similar problem in computer vision’s understanding of photography. The double dismissal of the role played by the workers and the agency of the photographic apparatus in the elaboration of computer vision foreground the inherent fragility of the edifice of machine vision and a necessary rethinking of its scale. (shrink)

With the digitalization of the economy and society, varieties of "platform capitalism" appeared in the world. The article presents the first attempt at a critical understanding of the "gig economy" model that is taking shape in contemporary Russia. By problematizing the narratives that dominate foreign studies of platform employment, the author shows the embeddedness of platformization in the current economic system. Unlike countries with a developed market economy, labor platforms in Russia are part of giant platform ecosystems controlled by oligarchic (...) businesses and the state, which, in the course of "creeping nationalization", increases its influence through ownership and management structures. In key sectors of platform employment, quasi-monopolies are formed with the dominance of one company. In the context of geopolitical tensions, the process of "sovereignization" and the closure of the platform economy is being completed. Having successfully platformized informal labor markets in some sectors, platforms are becoming a tool for the legalization of employment in the hands of the state, driven primarily by fiscal interests. In Russia, a neoliberal model of regulation of the gig economy is being formed based on the legal introduction of the category of 'self-employed' in the absence of due attention to labor rights and the social protection of workers. With the strengthening of the authoritarian nature of the state, the possibilities of self-organization and collective defense of the interests of platform workers are blocked. The author concludes that in the Russian model of "platform capitalism", the state enters an alliance with big capital and consumers against labor: the state strengthens control over the economy and tax revenues, large platform companies use labor at lower costs, and consumers receive cheap services through convenient digital services. The author calls for an integration of the issues of platform capitalism into broader discussions about the Russian model of socio-economic development. (shrink)

How do digital platforms govern their users? Existing studies, with their focus on impersonal and procedural modes of governance, have largely neglected to examine the human labor through which platform companies attempt to elicit the consent of their users. This study describes the relationship labor that is systematically excised from many platforms’ accounts of what they do and missing from much of the scholarship on platform governance. Relationship labor is carried out by agents of platform companies who engage in interpersonal (...) communications with a platform’s users in an effort to align diverse users’ activities and preferences with the company’s interests. The authors draw on ethnographic research conducted at AllDone (a for-profit startup that built an online market for local services) and edX (a non-profit startup that partnered with institutions to offer Massive Open Online Courses). The findings leverage variation in organizational contexts to elaborate the common practices and divergent strategies of relationship labor deployed by each platform. Both platforms relied on relationship workers to engage in account management practices aimed at addressing the particular concerns of individual users through interpersonal communications. Relationship workers in each setting also engaged in community management practices that facilitated contact and collaboration among users in pursuit of shared goals. However, our findings show that the relative frequency of relationship workers’ use of account management and community management practices varies with organizational conditions. This difference in strategies also corresponded to different ways of valuing relationship workers and incorporating them into organizational processes. The article demonstrates how variation in organizational context accounts for divergent strategies for governing user participation in digital platforms and for the particular processes through which governance is accomplished and contested. (shrink)

The use of computers for simulation work can be traced back to the 1950s, and the pioneering work of Stafford Beer, KD Tocher and others at Cybor House in Sheffield, UK, the research and development (R&D) department of British steelmakers, United Steel. This innovative simulation work sought to offer an abstracted, ‘total’ environment of the steelmaking process in which different operational activities could be modeled. Critical to this work was the ability of computer simulations to perform such modelling at a (...) fraction of the cost, wasting fewer material resources, and in a considerably shorter timeframe. Such work can be understood as the earliest example of the application of industrial-scale ‘automated computation’ to a real-world industrial process. Similarly indebted to the early principles of computer simulation, Waymo engineers are also engaged in the building of so-called ‘conflict typologies’ designed to encode material properties of everyday driving interactions between road users, rather than simply road users themselves. Through ‘motion planning’, coupled with the categorization of driving interactions, Waymo engineers build instrumental understanding of their own system’s purported intelligence in navigating everyday driving situations. Functioning as ‘generative mechanisms’ rather than simply evaluative devices, engineers seek to industrialize—instrumentalize, scale up, rationalize—everyday driving knowledge. Through conflict typologies, instrumental knowledge of the actual capacities of autonomous vehicles is industrialized, materialized, and realized. (shrink)