Communicative Capitalism and the Smartphone Cybertariat
“The world is awash in low-cost smartphones,” says one analyst of the current state of the global market for mobile devices (Restivo in El Akkad and Marlow 2013). As mobile communication technologies become increasingly ubiquitous and profit margins for manufacturers begin to narrow, so-called emerging economies are singled out as a new front in the “smartphone’s global price war,” as a Globe and Mail headline put it. The unprecedented reach of handheld connectivity is the background to one BBC business reporter’s claim that 2013 was “the year we all went mobile” (Wall 2013). Previously bullish predictions regarding the growth trends that would characterize mobile media, the BBC writer noted, had been entirely verified: “More cloud computing, services and storage. More mobile devices with more apps, more games, more browsing, more shopping and more sharing with our ‘friends’ on social media. All of which increases the demand for bandwidth, faster speed and universal coverage” (Prentice in Wall 2013).
Such commentary points to the ascendancy of what Jodi Dean (2009, 17) terms “communicative capitalism,” a twenty-first century order that is increasingly dependent upon the proliferation of “communicative access and opportunity.” Massive corporate investment in privatized telecommunications infrastructure throughout much of the world during the 1990s has inaugurated a situation in which communicative scarcity has “begun to recede” (Schiller 2007, 81). Rather than outright exclusion, the differential inclusion of populations as consumers of information technology services (Qiu 2009) has become a norm in a post-Fordist economy that extracts financial value from communication, information and knowledge.
Hardly a celebration of ubiquitous connectivity, Dean’s concept of communicative capitalism suggests that the profusion of communication has not enhanced equity or deepened democracy, as earlier generations of media scholars on the left might have anticipated. This process has, on the contrary, fueled a networked economy that is the scene of familiar class asymmetries and consolidating corporate powers. One way that the persistence of inequality in the information age can be made visible is through an examination of labor, a facet of social life that has been identified as a longstanding “blind spot” within studies of communication (McKercher and Mosco 2006, 493).
If mobile communication is, as Manuel Castells (2009, 62) wrote, the “fastest diffusing communication technology in history,” this chapter sets out to illuminate some of the manifold labors sustaining—and transformed by—this diffusion. In this task we take a cue from labor researcher Ursula Huws (2003), who introduced the figure of the “cybertariat” in an analysis of the reorganization of work through information and communication technologies. Against nineties-era New Economy narratives that proclaimed the upward spiral of worker skill, the smoothing of global space, and the weightlessness of commerce, with the category of the cybertariat, Huws advocated a critical project to “make visible the material components of this virtual world,” one that would address “human beings, in all their rounded, messy, vulnerable materiality” (Huws 2003, 127, 151).
This chapter adopts such a materialist approach for the study of mobile communications—one that surveys the typically invisible, vastly diverse and globally interlinked forms of labor set in motion by the burgeoning wireless sector. Traced out is a circuitry rarely examined in mobile communication studies, namely, the circuit of exploitation constituting one of communicative capitalism’s ideal commodities, the smartphone. Of the myriad labors of mobility animating the turbulent cycle of wireless accumulation, we touch on just six moments: extraction, where the earthly material necessary for mobile networks is mined; assembly, where the mobile device and the components inside it are manufactured within complex supply chains; design, where the applications that attract mobile subscribers are conceived and engineered by high-tech developers; mobile work, where the wireless handset functions as a platform for the performance of labor as such, both paid and unpaid; support, where mobile consumers are mediated at a distance by call center staff; and, finally, disassembly, where the ostensibly obsolete mobile device is dissected by e-waste workers for residual value, spinning off a secondary cycle of accumulation revolving around molten metal.
Mapping the assemblage of toil upon which mobile communication is built, some readers might react, is an exercise in stating the obvious. To such a criticism we reply that the banalization of exploitation is one of communicative capitalism’s greatest achievements. So while this chapter is an attempt to confront the marketing imaginaries of endless communicative expansion surrounding the mobile Internet with their profoundly material conditions of possibility, we also emphasize that the smartphone cybertariat is not identical to the circuit of exploitation. Punctuating this fragmentary portrait are hotspots where the living labors of mobility variously refuse, challenge or escape the frame within which communicative capital seeks to seclude them. The point, then, is not simply to trace out a circuit of exploitation. Our foray into the labors of mobility has also sought moments of resistance. What remains to be seen is whether a wider labor movement might once more claim the utopian impulse of social connectivity as its mobilizing imaginary.
The initial moment on the circuit of exploitation that we trace out is that of extraction. A traditional materialist definition of labor as the transformation of nature loses nothing of its relevance at the frontiers of communicative capitalism. Sparkling retail stores displaying the smartphone belie this commodity’s stubborn dependence on raw materials dug from dirt. Confronted in this first moment is the literal bedrock of the mobile device, its polished components containing resources such as gold, tungsten, tin and, most controversially, tantalum, a silicate derived from columbite-tantalite, or coltan.
Even as the mobile Internet smoothes communication for some, the case of coltan has brutally illustrated the enduring significance, scope and scourge of “geographic difference” (Harvey 2010, 149). Of the territories endowed with coltan—Australia, Brazil and Canada among them—the vastest known deposits lie in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Marlow and El Akkad 2010), an African nation whose mineral wealth is grossly juxtaposed to its rank in the 186th slot on the United Nations’ Human Development Index in 2012 (United Nations 2013). Tantalum, an element vital to capacitors, is used in countless electronic gadgets. In the early 2000s, however, “mobile phones” were singled out as having become the “main attraction” to coltan in the DRC (Pole Institute 2002, 5).
Mining in this former Belgian colony became increasingly informalized from the 1970s onward (International Alert 2010, 15). Rife with corruption, the dictatorial regime ruling what was then Zaire instructed its subjects, “fend for yourselves” (cited in Mantz 2008, 44). Big mining companies abandoned Congolese sites amid Africa’s World War (1998–2003). A notorious early-twenty-first century display of global capitalist polarity, feverish demand in the overdeveloped world for game consoles, mobile phones and other consumer electronics fed a brief coltan boom, adding incentive for competing regional militias to set up mining operations—their productivity often arising from the “barrel of a gun”—so to bankroll their contribution to an internecine conflict taking more than three million lives (Smith and Mantz 2006, 77). That war ostensibly over, one observer cautioned, “When the spider leaves, the web remains!” (Holt in International Alert 2010, 36).
While information-at-your-fingertips may be a familiar refrain in a mobile Internet milieu, anthropologists James Smith and Jeffrey Mantz (2006, 77) report that in their fieldwork in a DRC mining town they were hard-pressed to meet people aware of coltan’s eventual application. Although “[n]ature does most of the work” where the development of raw materials is concerned (Marx 1857, 179), setting their value in motion turns on the “mining proletariat” transforming them (Engels 1845). Human rights groups began documenting coltan’s labor economy (International Alert 2010; Pöyhönen et al. 2010; Pole Institute 2002). The picture that emerged was of primarily small-scale, artisanal and fleeting mines, dispersed across remote forests, where diggers—typically migrant, young and male—use rudimentary tools to variously strip land, burrow underground, crush ore or haul coltan—jobs whose growth has coincided with deteriorating agricultural skill.
Laboring in a context where sexual violence and ecological degradation are rife (International Alert 2010), this precarious mining proletariat inhabits an informal economy whose other actors have spanned from militias imposing illicit taxes on distributors, to regional exporters and smugglers, through to foreign traders. The majority of DRC coltan is reported to be shipped to Chinese smelters, after which it is inserted into the component manufacture process in an often opaque smartphone supply chain (Global Witness 2010, 15; Ma 2010, 3). The world market in tantalum-filled capacitors has an estimated worth of $2 billion (Marlow and El Akkad 2010). Diggers, meanwhile, can eke out a few dollars a day, a barely subsistent livelihood marring neoliberal visions of “mobile-led economic development” (“Mobile Marvels” 2009).
With slogans like “No blood on my mobile,” NGO efforts to malign big-brand buyers of DRC coltan augured the passage in 2010 of U.S. legislation requiring corporate disclosure of mineral sources as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Channels through which coltan circulates are, however, labyrinthine, and frequently clandestine; given the paucity of sources one journalist wagered, “there is no such thing as a ‘conflict-free’ phone” (York 2010). For the DRC’s part, a six-month mining ban was implemented in 2010 in the provinces where coltan is concentrated; rooting out mafia-controlled mining was the stated goal, though skeptics worried that this intervention risked pushing mining into even more insecure patterns and failed to stop profiteering by state military commanders themselves (Doya 2011; Hogg 2011).
Apple (2014, 16) claimed that as of 2014 the “tantalum smelters in Apple’s supply chain were verified as conflict-free by third-party auditors….” While the auditing process used in this case is itself opaque, the advocacy efforts of human rights organizations have certainly pressured smartphone makers to inch toward greater supply chain transparency, whether legislated or voluntary, the efficacy of which remains to be seen. Here we simply emphasize two points from the case of coltan that are integral to a materialist approach to mobile communication: first, that the wireless handset has been a catalyst of profoundly material transformations in the Global South, where imaginaries of expanding access coexist with realities of environmental racism; and, second, as Mantz (2008, 44) has so forcefully conveyed, that “we would not be speaking about the great promises that inexpensive digital products have for bridging communicative boundaries the world over” were it not for the background work of scores of Congolese performing grueling—but for that no less ingenious—manual labor in a setting shaped by extreme violence. This is the raw materiality of communicative capitalism.
Despite its apparent “dematerialization,” capitalism’s prevailing tendency is, Huws (2003, 131) has argued, the forward march of commodification through the mass production of tangible goods. The mobile Internet is a straightforward instance: mobile services form the attraction; accessing those services requires a physical mobile device. From smartphones to no-frills cells, more than one and a half billion handsets shipped in 2011 (IDC 2012)—the astonishingly productive output of the dexterous labor animating the second moment on the circuit of exploitation, assembly. This rote work is commonly outsourced or offshored by the biggest brands dominating the mobile industry (Wilde and de Haan 2006, 19). Much of it occurs in factories in the Global South in Special Economic Zones (SEZs), neo-liberal territories par excellence where communicative capitalism’s ongoing reliance on mass aggregation of industrial labor is manifest.
Nowhere is this more obvious than China. Of all the mobiles that were sold globally in 2012, it is estimated that half were made in that country (Custer 2013). Byzantine supply chains have generally made it difficult to locate assembly labor with precision. A glaring exception is the multinational corporation known as “the world’s biggest contract maker of mobile phones” (Lim and Culpan 2010): Taiwan-based Foxconn catapulted out of relative obscurity and onto the cover of Wired magazine (Johnson 2011) when in 2010 news spread of suicides among its young, and majority female, workforce that snaps iPhone and iPad parts into place for Apple (Barboza 2010; Wagner 2010). Other clients have included Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson. With 1.2 million employees, Foxconn’s parent corporation, Hon Hai Precision Industry, is the world’s tenth-largest employer (Alexander 2012). The greatest share of Foxconn’s labor pool is in mainland China, with about four hundred thousand employees in Shenzhen, a premiere Chinese SEZ (Chang 2013).
Foxconn’s notoriously fortified Shenzhen facility was spotlit in a report by Hong Kong’s Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (2010). Informed by undercover jobs and employee interviews, this exposé cataloged grievances that ran the gamut: wages that fall generously below the cost of living—explaining workers’ willingness to do overtime whose legal limit is habitually violated; a hyper-Taylorized labor process whose continually escalating productivity expectations heightens stress and exhaustion; a dormitory system that mixed workers from different production lines and home provinces in an attempt to forestall solidarity; and the absence of genuine collective representation, with rank-and-file workers distrustful of delegates of China’s lone official trade union federation. This portrait is corroborated by other investigative profiles of mobile manufacturing at Foxconn and other facilities in China (Chan 2013; Chan et al. 2008; Nordbrand and de Haan 2009; Wilde and de Haan 2006; Litzinger 2013; Sandoval 2013).
Neither Foxconn nor China has a monopoly on harsh labor conditions in the sector. A national challenger for mobile component manufacture and final assembly is India, where Sriperumbudur, a 210-acre SEZ specialized in telecommunications, has been touted in national policy circles as a model worthy of “replication” (Cividep 2010, 9, 13). One critical report on this SEZ, which hosts Nokia and several of its suppliers, including Foxconn, gave special attention to precarious employment: temporary work, short-term contracts, recruitment agencies, apprenticeships and other insecurity-inducing features of nonstandard work arrangements are described as the “norm” in these mobile manufacturing workplaces (Cividep 2010, 6). A government task force charged with furthering India’s telecommunications industry nominated greater employment flexibility as a policy objective, a trademark effort to attract foreign direct investment from communicative capitalists eager to attune labor supply to consumer demand (Cividep 2010, 13).
While that imperative makes a routine of skipping job to job, a qualitatively different labor of mobility familiar to the assembly workforce is migration. The boom in mobile phone manufacturing in China has as its precondition the transit of millions of workers from agricultural communities to low-wage export-processing conurbations (see Ngai 2004). When living in the cities its labor sustains, this proletarianized population is, however, excluded from social rights otherwise extended to longtime city dwellers. Internal migrants are governed by a national household registration system whose binary categories—rural or urban—were modulated to include a temporary metropolitan status so to allow SEZs like Shenzhen to meet their recruitment needs
Another facet of the “variegated citizenship” (Ong 2006) corresponding to the occupational hierarchy of high-tech is displayed in India. There too the contribution of migrants to the mobile industry has been integral. Of corporate hiring preferences, one Nokia SEZ employee offered: “They want only migrant workers….” (in Cividep 2010, 27). Access to a “reserve army of cheap labour” has been identified as a pillar of mobile phone production in the Sriperumbudur area (2010, 22), with local job seekers marginalized in favor of those from far-flung areas who are deemed less likely to “voice their concerns and risk their sole source of livelihood” (2010, 32). Rather than the frictionless mobility conjured up by wireless advertising campaigns, it is the differential capacity for human movement that is leveraged by assembly capital for optimal labor control.
Even so, if the assumption was that a disproportionately young, temporary and migrant assembly workforce would be docile, then that has proven to be a dubious managerial calculation. Nokia, for example, was beset by three strikes in a single year at its factory in Sriperumbudur in 2009–10 (Fontanella-Khan 2010). Those conflicts revolved around wages and corporate retaliation, and concluded with the replacement of a company union with an independent one (Cividep 2010, 23–26). In China, autonomous labor unrest has surged in recent years (China Labour Bulletin 2014)—and has escalated at Foxconn itself (Chan, Pun, and Selden 2013, 108–111). Not only have mobile manufacturers such as Foxconn been pressured to raise wages (Foster 2010), but the circulation of labor struggles across sectors has been attributed in part to the use of mobile devices (Barboza and Bradsher 2010)—one of the subversive practices marking China’s emerging “working-class network society” (Qiu 2009). As China Labour Bulletin (2014, 21) reports: “Workers … have proven themselves highly adept at using mobile social media tools to not just to (sic) organize protests but ensure that they come to the attention of the public, the traditional media and local government officials.”
Although China remains a “gaping hole” in labor internationalism (Ross 2006, 263), the Foxconn workers in Guadalajara, Mexico, who held a vigil in solidarity with their Chinese counterparts offer an inkling of the trans-nationally coordinated labor action necessary to confront mobile capital (Chen 2010). Labor protest, coupled with planetary wage differentials, has, however, fed the restlessness of companies in the mobile sector: inland China and Vietnam are increasingly attractive lower-wage destinations (Chan et al. 2008, 20; Barboza 2010). Less well-known is that migrant work in the assembly of information technology now reaches into the European Union, the newest frontier of such production. In Pardubice and Kutna Hora, a hundred kilometers or so from Prague, a workforce of Bulgarians, Mongolians, Romanians, Poles, Ukrainians and Vietnamese assembles electronics for Foxconn (Andrijasevic and Sacchetto 2013). It is not only in geographical but also technological fixes that communicative capital is attempting to avoid its antagonists: Foxconn announced in 2011 its plan to add tens of thousands of robots to the shop floor (Branigan 2011); by 2013, it was reported that some twenty thousand were put to work in what is now characterized by Foxconn CEO Terry Gou as a “million robot army,” installed in response to rising wages (Gou in Kan 2013). On this ever-shifting map of assembly labor at least one signal is clear: where capital goes so too does conflict.
Beyond the factory gates, the relationship between communicative capitalists and their connected global value subjects is increasingly mediated by mobile applications. The design of smartphone apps has been the most celebrated form of work along the circuit of wireless production. Reports that Apple’s App Store had dispatched royalties tallying more than $6 billion (Streitfeld 2012) doubtless feeds the self-perception among some app writers that they are “gold diggers in the Klondike of the online world” (Bergvall-Kåreborn et al. n.d.). App development has been depicted as a dream job, which, with a little training and a lot of passion, can lead to “six-figure salaries and a bright future” (Tutelian 2011). Closer inspection, however, has revealed a more ambivalent picture of app employment.
Gorged by eager streams of venture capital, promising fledgling studios are morphing into familiar hierarchical structures of corporate high-tech. Mobile application development is “no longer the domain of IT nerds knocking up games in their bedrooms,” but an “industry worth billions of pounds and employing hundreds of thousands of people worldwide” (King 2011). Fortunes of individual app developers are disproportionately shaped by the whims of companies creating operating systems for handsets. While this market was once dominated by manufacturers such as Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Siemens and Sony Ericsson, first Apple, and then Google, brought about a different production model wherein application development was crowdsourced—and risk outsourced—to a global pool of workers, the corporate titans ensconcing themselves as gatekeepers of the app portal, enabling them to win whether an app is downloaded one million times or once.
According to preliminary research on app developers’ working lives, design labor is characterized by a broad spectrum of contractual relationships, running from full-time, permanent work to a variety of flexible forms of employment, but it nonetheless tends toward “increasingly precarious employment and insecure prospects” (Bergvall-Kåreborn and Howcroft 2013, 965; see also Dyer-Witheford, forthcoming). Freelance or self-employed developers take on more risk, adopting entrepreneurial attitudes by necessity and bearing the brunt of failure as they navigate the inherent risks of the market. As one independent developer said, “[i]n the long run, working on your own products is more profitable than working on other people’s products—but only if yours become a success” (Holle-mans 2011). Indeed, app development has a lopsided income distribution profile: thousands of apps are launched every week, yet, notes the New York Times, “only a small minority of developers actually make a living by creating their own apps….” (Streitfeld 2012). Linked to this IP lottery economy are the long-hours culture and the work/life blurring reported by high-end workers elsewhere in the tech sector (Bergvall-Kåreborn and Howcroft 2011, 2013).
At the extreme end of such flexible employment, online labor brokers such as oDesk and Elance (Caraway 2010) dole out small fragments of app development work. “Any job you can possibly think of can now be outsourced online,” Freelancer.com CEO Matt Barrie boasted, adding that “[f]or the first time, small businesses can outsource projects [for] as little as $30, and have delivered roughly the equivalent of $300 of western world [labor]” (Barrie in Mello 2010). Communicative capitalism has become deft in its ability to flexibly tap the world’s digital workforces fuelling the break-neck development of the wireless frontier.
App developers are not all entrepreneurial, nor are mobile applications condemned to reinforce vested interests (de Peuter et al. 2014). Precarious freelance app developers formed the Android Developers Union and the App Developers Union to advocate for improved terms; these initiatives appear to have been short-lived, however. Where the autonomy of design labor has been more powerfully expressed is an emerging class of dissonant apps: GoodGuide allows consumers to scan barcodes to obtain environmental information on products; the U.S. Department of Labor’s Timesheet app enables workers to track their own hours in response to mounting disputes revolving around unpaid back wages and inaccurately kept employer records (Hananel 2011); the British Trades Union Congress developed a Rights for Interns app, which allows interns to assess their internship for compliance with UK labor law; and hacktivist interventions such as artist Ricardo Dominguez’s controversial Transborder Immigrant Tool was envisaged to provide tactical location-specific information to migrants seeking safe passage from Mexico to the U.S. (Dominguez 2011). Beyond the dedicated activist-oriented apps emerging is the now legendary subversive use of mobile communication—SMS, photo sharing, social networks—to catalyze, coordinate and circulate social conflict, from wage struggles among Chinese workers, to the occupations of the Arab Spring, through to Occupy Wall Street—wildly different outbreaks, to be sure, but all indicate that the genie of bottom-up, horizontal, social-movement connectivity has been let out of the bottle (Gerbaudo 2012).
Approaching the labors of mobility from a materialist perspective requires bringing into view not only the labor that produces the smartphone, but also the transformation of labor through its hybrid connection to this device. Underscoring the importance of this relationship, the media theorist Franco Berardi (Bifo) suggests that the mobile phone acts as a kind of next-generation assembly line in the dispersed production process of an economy that increasingly trades in knowledge, cultural forms, and other forms of intellectual property (Berardi, 2012). Rendering labor infinitely accessible and hence always potentially available for work, the mobile phone is a vital communicative supplement to post-Fordist just-in-time employment. Entirely normalized, for example, is the roaming labor control that allows the flexworker—whatever its location—to be promptly called to a shift, and now workers bewildered by multiple jobs or erratic schedules can download an app like Shift Worker to get a grip on the flux.
More than a means to summon a subject to a workplace or to organize an unstable work itinerary, however, the mobile phone has increasingly become a site for the performance of work as such. Distracted professionals hunched over smartphones at dinner on account of excessive workload, managerial command, or misplaced affection are the cliché example of the spatio-temporal extension of the workday via mobile telephony. But it is experiments in so-called crowdsourcing that most strikingly indicate the cybertarian possibilities emerging in the realm of mobile work.
By 2012, suggested the Economist (“Mobile Marvels” 2009, 13), there would be close to two billion people in possession of a cell phone “but no bank account.” Pay-as-you-go feature phone users in the Global South constitute a swelling consumer segment. They also form a teeming labor pool, or so proposes Jana (formerly txteagle), a Boston company founded in 2009 by an academic entrepreneur at MIT. Jana dispatches simple info-tasks via text message to what it perceives as an “untapped work force in developing countries” (Marwaha 2009). In a pilot project, Jana recruited bilingual Kenyans to use their mobiles to receive and translate words to regional dialect for a multinational telco localizing a handset interface (Bennett 2010). The company, which is present in more than fifty countries, has more recently distributed market research surveys on behalf of international brands seeking an informed incursion into otherwise opaque “frontier economies” (Eagle cited in Jidenma 2011). Helping to steer the market’s possible expansion path into the periphery, these txt-workers are, in a recursive loop, compensated in airtime, whereby access to communication itself functions as a measure of value exchanged for quantum doses of immaterial labor. While Jana’s scheme might appear farfetched, the start-up received a $15 million venture capital injection in 2013 to further its effort to leverage mobile users as mobile workers (Alspach 2013).
Digital piecework platforms distributing bite-size jobs to Web workers for micropayment proliferated in the first decade of the 2000s. An early entrant, Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk, allowed remote workers to complete small chores, like label a product’s color for an online catalog, for pennies. LivePerson brokered in expertise, with programmers, psychologists and other professionals paid by the minute for online chat. iStockphoto tapped amateur digital photography to fill an Internet archive of discount images. These and kindred “cloud labor” markets soon offered mobile applications (Leonard 2013). Other companies catered to mobile-specific tasks, such as the smartphone users hired out by uTest or Mob4Hire as app testers. Launched in 2010, Fancy Hands promises to “automate all the boring parts of your life” (in Leonard 2013) by outsourcing domestic chores to a combined workforce of Internet temps which is estimated to stand at over six million and to be at least doubling in size every year (Crowdsourcing.org in Lionbridge 2013).
The micro-work system that has perhaps best demonstrated the possibility of harnessing smartphone portability to feed content to the mobile Internet is, however, Gigwalk. The California company boasts to have retooled the iPhone as a vehicle for earning a “second paycheck” (Gigwalk 2014) by coining “mobile temp work” (Kim 2011). Using GPS to match a “job” to a nearby smartphone, Gigwalk allocates location-based data-gathering assignments, such as snapping pictures of menus for MenuPages.com, of businesses for Bing map results, and of the coordinates of Manhattan billboards for an ad agency database (Hann 2011; Kelly 2011). Motorola deployed Gigwalk for reconnaissance on its products’ placement in third-party retail stores. As technological intermediary between communicative capital and mobile labor, Gigwalk profits from itinerant temps usually earning a few dollars per job via PayPal—a bargain, the app’s developers estimate, compared to the costs conventionally associated with procuring local mapping data (Alsever 2011; Hann 2011). Piloted in a handful of major U.S. cities, in 2011 Gigwalk claimed its registered mobile workers had “travelled the equivalent of five trips to the moon and back” (Kim 2011). Since then, its workforce has grown fourfold, to over 200,000 “users” (Gorsht 2014). Rather than direct the movement of the dispersed smartphone population its software aggregates, Gigwalk encourages subscribers to merely “work gigs into their regular routines” (Alsever 2011). The implication that Gigwalk is nonintrusive is, paradoxically, only sensible at a point when metropolitan subjectivity is already so comprehensively enveloped by accumulation and commercial surveillance as to render it thoroughly banal.
Gigwalk and Jana provide a preliminary glimpse of how mobile devices might facilitate a continually refreshed visual cartography of consumer culture. But the phenomenon of mobile users doubling as pieceworkers marks a mutation in labor-capital relations as well. “The new phenomenon,” as Berardi (2005) has argued, “is not the precarious character of the job market, but the technical and cultural conditions in which info-labour is made precarious.” If the technical conditions include the mobile communication and reticular workflow software which provide a material infrastructure for the flexible deployment of labor, then the cultural conditions encompass increasingly diffuse generic competencies in basic computer use, Web navigation, and cellular interface. These techno-cultural conditions are multiplying the options available to capital for accessing immaterial labor power—while absolving itself of costly, and always potentially disruptive, employees. With “info-work,” Berardi speculated, “there is no longer a need to have bought over a person for eight hours a day indefinitely.” Mobile crowdsourcing perfectly bears out that “[c]apital no longer recruits people, but buys packets of time, separated from their interchangeable and occasional bearers” (Berardi 2005).
But if one tendency is for mobile work to be fractalized, another is for it to be unbounded, a dynamic most clearly displayed in the domain of unpaid mobile work. The smartphone is opening new portals for the continual reproduction of Web 2.0 and the shaping of purchasing flows within the broader economy by users engaging in what Tiziana Terranova (2004) called “free labour.” Here the unpaid activity that produces and reproduces the Web is harvested by emerging titans of communicative capitalism. Google, Facebook, Apple and other contenders are vying for supremacy in the development of mobile applications allowing for instant status updates, geo-locational advertising, and the construction of “walled gardens” for the assembly, striation, and sale of what Dallas Smythe (1981) called the “audience commodity.” The user-driven review site Yelp signals this trend, aggregating the helpful tips, photographic documentation and accounts of gastronomic and shopping adventures uploaded by a portion of the site’s 120 million-plus monthly visitors (Yelp 2014).
Rough indications of the potential value of this user-generated activity comes in the form of projected advertising revenues from social media, forecast to surpass $10 billion (US) by 2017 (BI Intelligence in Business Insider: “Why Social Media …” 2013). The market for services which “locate the customer in space” (Goggin 2006, 197) and triangulate this with user-generated content and individual consumer proclivities is estimated to grow from slightly over US$2 billion in 2009 to US$14 billion in 2014 (Zaledon in Manzerolle 2010). The “mobile audience commodity” (Manzerolle 2010) is a serious prize, with the acquisitions of mobile advertising firms Quattro Wireless by Apple ($275 million) and AdMob by Google ($750 million) pointing to the value of such end-user attention and activity as smartphone density increases (“Phoney War” 2010).
A fifth moment in the circuit of exploitation is support. Once a smartphone is in the customer’s hands, the telecommunications companies that charge for access to the mobile Internet offer accessibility, responsiveness and personalized attention, but such promises are expensive to deliver. Their solution, the same as that adopted in a range of industries since the 1990s, is the call center, and as a result a strikingly large and highly disciplined workforce toils in panoptic settings in order to enable the 4G “user experience.” Along with the financial sector, telecommunications firms are the largest call center employers in the world (Holman et al. 2007, 7). Working at what Huws (2009) described as the “interface” between communicative capitalism and the high-value customer segment accessing the Web through its smart-phones, call center workers address billing complaints, resolve technology failures, sell services and collect on overdue accounts.
As one of the fastest-growing jobs in the information society, such work is highly feminized, affective and precarious, offering a vivid cross-section of the composition of immaterial labor today. In the telecommunications industry, call center workers tend to occupy the bottom rung in the corporate hierarchy and make the lowest pay. Like some of the other workers animating the circuit of wireless production, their employment conditions vary widely depending on whether they work “in-house” or for an outsourcing company. The former positions are more likely to be unionized, better paid and more secure, while the latter are more disciplinary in their organization, pay close to minimum wage, and see constant and endemic high levels of employee turnover, or churn (Holman et al. 2007). Not surprisingly, this dividing line is an important generator of labor unrest.
Relations between employers and workers are full of friction in the telecommunications sector, and call center workers have been at the heart of some of the more serious conflicts (Brophy 2010). Deregulation of the telecommunications market has dealt a serious blow to organized labor in recent decades, and since wireless is the fastest-growing portion of this market, companies have acted decisively to keep their incumbent unions from organising workers in the sector (Shniad 2007; Doellgast 2012). Within this struggle, the outsourcing of call center work is common and acts as an important management stick in the face of labor resistance, contractual demands and union drives.
The terrain for these conflicts, like the circuit examined in this chapter, is global, with companies seeking to exploit state borders as they play work-forces in different countries off against each other. In one example, Canadian company Telus outsourced call center work to the Philippines during its 2004 lockout of Telecommunication Workers Union of Canada employees (Mosco and McKercher 2008, 145). Deutsche Telecom, which accommodates its unions at home in Germany, has fiercely resisted organising drives by the Communication Workers of America in the United States at its T-Mobile call centers (Gaus 2011). When global wireless company Vodafone was the target of violent criticism (and looting) during the Egyptian uprising for cutting off wireless communication at the behest of the regime, the company routed its local call center work to faraway New Zealand. The transfer of customer support functions away from the home corporation and into the highly precarious outsourced sector happens within domestic borders as well however. In 2005 Egyptian telecom entrepreneur (and former Mubarak regime insider) Naguib Sawiris bought the wireless provider Wind in Italy, and he soon outsourced its call center operations to local company Omnia, which promptly put workers on less secure contracts.
These examples suggest that call centers offer capital the perfect technological assemblage through which to achieve mobility at the flick of a switch. The growth of call center support work has, however, been paralleled by the emergence of labor resistance in a variety of forms, some of it surprising in its ferocity. Workers at the very bottom of the telecom pyramid have engaged in everything from traditional organizing drives by established unions to subterranean acts of digital sabotage, crafting small-scale innovative tactics such as flexible strikes and developing transnational organizing campaigns. Snapshots of this unrest include the ongoing series of actions engaged in by employees at the above-mentioned Omnia call center, including strikes, demonstrations and even the reported kidnapping of the company’s managing director in Milan, who was forced to answer workers’ questions regarding late wages and temporary contracts (ANSA 2009). A self-organized collective of precariously employed workers in Rome answering outsourced calls from Telecom Italia Mobile repeatedly brought Europe’s largest call center, Atesia, to its knees between 2005 and 2007 and forced changes in Italian labor law around flexible employment (Mat-toni 2012). Since 2008, the CWA has partnered with ver.di, the telecom union on the German-owned company’s home soil, forming the T-Mobile Workers Union, and in New Zealand, when Vodafone expanded its local operations in order to flee Egyptian unrest, it ran straight into the rank-and-file union Unite, which has organized workers at all three of its Auckland locations. Barriers to communicative capitalism’s own mobility should not be exaggerated.
As Moore’s Law extends its dominion over the technologies of mobile communication, the “unstated corollary” of its expansive logic is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore: our state-of-the-art machines are always on the verge of obsolescence (Carroll 2008). Communicative capitalism produces almost unthinkable technological refuse, and electronic waste is the fastest-growing toxic stream on the planet today (Basel Action Network 2012). Adding up the various sources of electronic waste, the United Nations Environment Programme suggests, could total as much as fifty million tons of refuse a year (in Grossman 2010, 15). Sales of handsets and tablet computers were estimated at 1.8 billion in 2013 (Gartner in Lomas 2014) but these technologies get old quick. When the machines through which we access the mobile Internet are disposed of they bloat the international market for e-waste disposal, adding to the mountains of discarded gadgets leeching their poisonous externalities into air, soil and groundwater. On the wrong side of this “negative abundance” (Verzola 2009) are the laboring populations forced to make a living upon, and amid, this detritus.
Attention to the international flows of e-waste reveals the “previously disconnected geographies” of IT production, consumption and disposal (Vallauri 2009). Asia is the heart of electronics assembly today, yet the e-waste phenomenon spotlights the circularity and interconnectedness of global capitalism. After tidy profits on electronic junk is made by unscrupulous international e-waste brokers, at the “end” of the cycle of wireless accumulation (most notoriously in China, India and Ghana, but increasingly in other locales across Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe) nightmarish scenarios are unfolding in which old and young have little choice but to engage in the noxious labor of e-waste disassembly, recuperating valuable metals from discarded technology by methods including burning with fire or dipping into vats of acid.
The global e-waste trade highlights the interconnections between the formal and informal economies supporting communicative capitalism. China’s black-market e-waste industry is estimated to be worth $3.75 billion (US), importing around eight million tons of discarded electronics to the country each year (Nuwer 2014). In Guiyu, southern China, the emblematic site of global e-waste processing, the water is undrinkable, lead poisoning is endemic, high levels of such endocrine-disrupting chemicals have been found in children, and workers in recycling workshops suffer from skin, respiratory and gastrointestinal ailments (Grossman 2010, 17). This digital divide snakes through the Global North as well: U.S. government contractor Unicor uses inmate labor for electronics recycling in seven federal prisons. A United States Department of Justice (2010) report described prison staff and inmates working coated in toxic dust, and trailing heavy metals back to their homes and cellblocks at the end of their shift.
The circularity of global e-waste flows is arresting. Thanks to explosive demand, metals recycled from discarded electronics find their way back into the Chinese manufacturing process, from which they begin their return overseas to haunt—and sometimes kill—Western consumers. Poisonous leaded solder of the kind used in the manufacture of electronic circuit boards has popped up in American dollar-store jewelry and children’s toys. As one of the American chemists responsible for tracing the poisons points out, “the U.S. right now is shipping large quantities of leaded materials to China, and China is the world’s major manufacturing center … It’s not all that surprising things are coming full circle and now we’re getting contaminated products back” (cited in Carroll 2008). In this way the cycle of wireless accumulation runs its course, only to be renewed at the point of design upgrade, setting it in motion once again.
Yet if surveying the “toxic reciprocity” (Cutillo 2010) of commodity flows back and forth across the digital divide might well provoke despair, it is important to remember that the current visibility of e-waste as a serious problem and the scramble on the part of electronics manufacturers to develop strategies to deal with growing public criticism is the result of decades of grassroots struggle (Smith 2009). Reaching out along the very same circuits traversed by communicative capitalism’s commodities, labor and environmental activists have linked up to hold manufacturers to account. The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, which initially emerged out of concerns over labor conditions in the Silicon Valley electronics manufacturing sector, has become part of a global network of organizations vowing to make communicative capitalism deal with its garbage, including, among others, the Electronics TakeBack Coalition in the U.S., PHASE II in Scotland, Asia Monitor Resource Centre in Hong Kong, TAVOI in Taiwan and CEREAL in Mexico (Smith 2009).
These groups are demanding extended producer responsibility, a policy which would hold manufacturers accountable for the full costs of their products at every stage in their lifecycle (a watered-down version of which has already been adopted in the European Union). But the ultimate goal of such groups is more ambitious. In 1999, just before the global justice movement erupted onto the scene, the Trans-Atlantic Network for Clean Production proposed a policy match to Moore’s Law: “Each new generation of technical improvements in electronic products should include parallel and proportional improvements in environmental, health and safety, as well as social justice attributes” (in Smith 2009). Seemingly incompatible with the priorities of communicative capitalism, the NGO call for “fair and green mobile phones” delivered to network operators (SOMO 2010) requires connection to emerging discussions envisaging radically different political-economic orders.
The smartphone is a technical centerpiece of the imaginaries, ideologies, infrastructures and industries characterizing communicative capitalism. Necessary to this system’s expansion is universalizing access to telecommunication networks, the achievement of which is touted as one of the great “mobile marvels” (“Mobile Marvels” 2009). What is left out in neoliberal narratives promoting the democratizing couplet of free markets and technological diffusion, however, are the radically unequal terms on which “global value subjects” have been integrated into the wireless frontier (Dyer-Witheford 2003).
The most prominent feature of the labors of mobility outlined in this chapter is their sheer heterogeneity: diggers use preindustrial techniques to extract ore in highly informal resource economies; proletarianized migrants perform hyper-Taylorized work in gargantuan factories where mobile devices are assembled; teams of entrepreneurial engineers design apps that are entered into the intellectual property lottery; precariously employed call center workers deploy scripted linguistic labor to manage mobile consumers; cellular subscribers do digital piecework and feed their collective intelligence and social networks into the mobile Internet economy; and e-waste workers scavenge through the debris of perpetual upgrade to eke out a subsistence livelihood on the “planet of slums” (Davis 2006).
The smartphone cybertariat is, then, an assemblage of extraordinary multiplicity. The collective workforce populating the circuit of exploitation that constitutes the mobile commodity displays the paradigmatic features of the contemporary innovation economy outlined by Paolo Virno (1996, 18–19): “a sort of ‘umbrella’ under which is replicated the entire history of labor: islands of mass workers, enclaves of professionals, swollen numbers of the self-employed, and new forms of workplace discipline and individual control. The modes of production that over time emerged one after the other are now,” Virno added, “represented synchronically, almost as if at a world’s fair.”
So although mobile technologies currently sit among the commanding heights of communicative capitalism, a labor perspective on the smartphone makes clear that this economic formation is not defined by a single form of labor or process of production but is instead an exceedingly hybrid configuration: interdependence, co-presence, and indeed “unrestrained multiplication” (Virno 2004, 105) of strikingly different modes of labor organization, are characteristic features of even the most apparently avant-garde commodities of communicative capitalism. Failure to acknowledge this “eclectic coexistence” (ibid.) is to recapitulate the worst of New Economy thinking’s blind spots.
A broad conception of communicative labor such as that presumed in this chapter poses enormous political challenges. Will the differentiation marking the smartphone cybertariat limit its resistance to easily contained outbreaks along the mobile circuit of exploitation? Or, can this variegated protagonist develop a counter-connectivity, linking across the barriers presented by distance, borders, and radically different cultures and contexts? Does the smartphone offer any organizing potential for a labor movement that has had difficulty establishing a presence in sectors identified with communicative capitalism? The mobile device is certainly an “ideal commodity” (Lee 1992; Kline et al. 2003) of communicative capitalism, crystallizing its technological, economic, cultural, and ecological dynamics. Yet the ideal-commodity concept, while a useful diagnostic tool, lacks a political correlate. By way of conclusion we gesture at the outlines of a possible mobile labor campaign which might fall under the rubric of a transnational “commodity unionism.”1
The promise of building a labor campaign around the smartphone is significant. As the outpouring of grief at the death of Steve Jobs in 2011 made clear, the mobile device is currently the unrivalled sentimental icon of communicative capitalism. As the latter is not only an economic but also an ideological formation, puncturing its neoliberal claims of democracy achieved through technology is a key goal for labor and its allies. Some of the premises for its achievement are in place. Despite claims of their cynical detachment, mobile consumers in the overdeveloped world have begun to express concern for the plight of mobile assembly workers in the South, as projects such as makeITfair suggest, and while labor-oriented economic justice campaigns led by privileged social groups from the North warrant the scrutiny they have received (see Erçel 2006), it would be foolhardy to dismiss a growing desire on the part of consumers to understand the production context (and thus confront the fetishism) of the commodities they are implicated in. As the brand sabotage pioneered by the global justice movement demonstrated so effectively, the more ubiquitous communicative capitalism’s promises are, paradoxically, the more vulnerable these become to skillfully wrought counter-information campaigns. The battle is asymmetrical, but not impossible. This much is suggested by the case of Fair-phone. Growing out of an NGO campaign around conflict minerals, the Netherlands-based Fairphone is a crowdfunded social enterprise that began small-batch producing its own “fair” smartphone in 2013. “The greater goal,” as reported in The Globe and Mail, “is to change entire economic systems and in this way the phone acts as a research project into the globalized economy” (Pett 2014).
Consumer-oriented action, brand sabotage and social enterprise, while important features of a campaign to alter the smartphone’s relations of production, cannot be set on the same plane as the self-organization of labor. The multitudinous workforce animating the cycle of wireless accumulation calls out for experimentation in the development of new organizational forms and connections between and among moments on the circuit. Along these lines one relevant model is that of the world company council, wherein union representatives from different countries associated with a single multinational (including workers employed by contractors) meet to share knowledge and strategize (see Ferus-Comelo 2008, 148). Global gatherings of this sort are a necessary starting point to confront a mobile industry engaged in planetary labor arbitrage. Transnationally coordinated labor actions could be strengthened through the support of aspiring international worker organizations (e.g. UNI Global Union) willing to take a cue from thus-far isolated demonstrations of global solidarity, such as the earlier mentioned vigil held by Mexican Foxconn workers for their Chinese counterparts.
Italian literary collective Wu Ming (2011) write:
If we are “within and against” the network, perhaps we can find a way to forge alliances with those who are exploited upstream. A global alliance between “digital activists,” cognitive workers and electronics manufacturing employees would be, for the owners of networks, the most fearful thing. The forms of this alliance, obviously, remain to be discovered. (author’s translation)
One part of exploring the possibilities of such an alliance is mapping networked labors of mobility and, in particular, identifying hot points of conflict and potential bottlenecks in the supply chain. Ultimately, however, a mobile labor campaign must be clear that communicative capitalism’s promises cannot be fulfilled within its own framework: assumptions about accessibility are compromised by the secrecy of working conditions in mobile manufacturing supply chains; the enhanced mobility promised to smartphone consumers has its condition of possibility in the restricted movement of migrant workers assembling mobiles; imaginaries of a smooth space of communication downplay the fractures and frictions within the labor force enabling the mobile Internet. Pointing out such contradictions is not difficult. If “social imaginaries” are “pragmatic templates for social practice” (Herman 2010, 190), then the greater challenge confronting the smartphone cybertariat is that of constructing oppositional social imaginaries, imaginaries that would help to convert the utopian impulse animating “whatever” connectivity (Dean 2010, 68–69) into political solidarity.
1. Our use of the term commodity unionism is distinct from that of Annunziato (1990), who uses it to refer to the commodification of collective representation.
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