Is There a Global Digital Labor Culture
Digital labor designates platform based algorithm mediated tasks performed by human users of websites and apps. It concerns on demand services such as Uber, micro work portals such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, as well as data extraction via connected devices or social media such as Facebook. Digital labor studies have so far mainly focused on US and Europe. A new breed of research projects aims to correct this bias by intersecting labor, media, post colonial, and subaltern studies, and tackle developing and emerging countries where the rise of digital labor accompanies low rates of formal employment. Newly available evidence offers insights into dynamics of social exclusion and exploitation through the outsourcing of online tasks to non Western countries. The last part of the article discusses the extent to which this vast click farm economy predicated on value and data transfer from the Global South to the North can be construed as a " neocolonial " system.