David Golumbia

Bio

David Golumbia is Assistant Professor of Media Studies, English, and Linguistics at the University of Virginia, and holds a PhD in English (University of Pennsylvania, 1999). His teaching and research focus on issues of representation in digital media and on questions of the relationship between culture and language diversity. He has published widely on digital media and cultural studies; his first book, The Cultural Logic of Computation, was published by Harvard University Press in Spring 2009.

Abstract

The Digital Securitization of Labor

While the lines between “digital haves” and “digital have-nots” do not map precisely onto the line between the lower and middle classes, the association is close enough to raise disturbing questions. Because the system of capital and the economic exploitation on which it rests ultimately determine the stratification of society into classes, only changing that system can change class relations in any significant way. In this sense, “crossing the digital divide” for a member of the lower class is poorly understood in isolation, even if it sometimes occurs in isolation. Rather, it must be seen as a species of class mobility in capitalist societies that is characteristic of other forms of such mobility—in principle available to many, but in practice distributed very unevenly.

When industries are digitized, part of what happens is a process parallel to what Wall Street calls securitization—the conversion of a “non-derivative” asset (e.g., a share of stock that provides direct ownership in a company)—to a “derivative” asset. Typically, the part of an asset most valuable to capital is artificially separated from the less valuable part. This division profoundly distorts the nature of the assets themselves, by dividing industries like mining and agriculture even more fully than they had previously been into their “control” aspects and their “execution” assets—and labor. Here we ask how we might theorize the role for non-digital labor in a world managed by what is largely a digital elite.