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News on Labor & Economy
Why simple technological solutions to complex social issues continue to appeal to politicians and professionals who should (and often do) know better. Why do we keep trying to solve poverty […]
What happens when artificial intelligence saturates political life and depletes the planet? How is AI shaping our understanding of ourselves and our societies? In this book Kate Crawford reveals how […]
The field of disinformation studies remains relatively silent about questions of identity, motivation, labor, and morality. Drawing from a one-year ethnographic study of disinformation producers employed in digital black ops […]
This paper examines the way that different types of workers deploy strategies of control in concert with and in resistance to information and communication technologies (ICTs). Existing research on the […]
On-demand labor platforms offer many in-person services, from ride-hailing to childcare. However, scholars have focused on ride-hailing, leading to a model of “Uberization” that entails the informalization of work. We […]
In an experiment on Airbnb, we find that applications from guests with distinctively African American names are 16 percent less likely to be accepted relative to identical guests with distinctively […]
While the sharing economy has been celebrated as a flexible alternative to traditional employment for those with family responsibilities, especially women, it presents challenges for gender equality. Many of the […]
How does one value something one cannot and often does not want to see? How do contemporary digital platforms and their infrastructures of connectivity, evaluation, and surveillance affect this relationship […]
In November 2005, Amazon launched Mechanical Turk (AMT), a website where “requesters” can post tasks, called “Human Intelligence Tasks” or “HITs”, for workers to complete for pay. Workers are required […]
Uber manages a large, disaggregated workforce through its ridehail platform, one that delivers a relatively standardized experience to passengers while simultaneously promoting its drivers as entrepreneurs whose work is characterized […]