Left to Our Own Devices: Coping with Insecure Work in a Digital Age

193 Pages·2022·6.205 MB·English

by  Julia Ticona

Left to Our Own Devices

Left to Our Own Devices
Coping with Insecure Work in a Digital Age
JULIA TICONA
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021044706
ISBN 978–0–19–763100–3 (pbk.)
ISBN 978– 0– 19– 069128– 8 (hbk.)
DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780190691288.001.0001
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Paperback printed by LSC Communications, United States of America
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Precarious Inclusion in the Digital Economy 1
1. The Digital Hustle 21
2. After Access: The Costs of Inclusion for Low-W age Workers 44
3. Comparative Advantages: Digital Privilege and the
Ease of High-W age Hustling 68
4. Suspending the Hustle: Diverging Strategies of Resistance 84
Conclusion: Beyond Inclusion 104
Methodological Appendix 117
Notes 127
Bibliography 145
Index 161

Preface
During high school, my friends and I would leave school in our small city and
head to low- level service jobs at fast- food restaurants and retail stores. Our
phones— which at that point were much less “smart” than they are now—
were our lifelines to break up the boredom, complain about customers, and
calculate our paychecks. Once we could drive, they gave us a sense of security
as we drove along ice- crusted roads and helped us spread the word about
after- work parties in the fields along poorly marked country roads.
After our shifts, phones were shoved in glove compartments, abandoned
in back seats, and stashed in bags. A few friends, anticipating calls from har-
ried managers or coworkers asking them to come in for early shifts, or their
parents’ annoyed inquiries about when they planned to come home, turned
their phones off. Network coverage was spotty out around the city limits,
and a bad connection would send callers straight to voicemail with minimal
ringing; conveniently, so did turning the phone off. “I swear I didn’t even see
it! No service!” was an excuse that saved my friendships with coworkers on
more than one occasion.
As I attended college, at an elite school far from my hometown, a new set
of friends secured coveted internships at investment banks and politicians’
offices in big cities, and I noticed them developing a much different relation-
ship to these same devices. Pings and buzzes pulled my friends away from
social events, woke them from sleep, and disciplined them to a new way of
working. Their jobs were stepping stones to the next opportunity, which con-
fusingly only required them to work even harder and longer than the step be-
fore. As we graduated amid the wreckage of the Great Recession, we were told
job markets were tight and that we should defensively curate every wrinkle of
our online presence. Suddenly, the sites that hosted our memories were also
the very things that could stand between us and our already precarious fu-
tures; opportunities were thin, so we obediently complied.
Back home, manufacturing plants and hospitals closed, and full-t ime
work evaporated. Juggling part-t ime school and certification programs,
my friends struggled to scrape together part- time work. While picking up a
prescription at a chain pharmacy in town, I noticed the bulky hiring kiosk,
viii Preface
where job seekers filled out online applications, was plastered with an “Out
of Order” sign that directed prospective workers to visit a website to fill out
the application instead. Having never subscribed to the slow and unreli-
able broadband service available in our area, most of the people I knew were
relying on their phones for Internet. Waiting around for my prescription to
be filled, I grabbed my phone and found the site, which was nearly unusable
with my phone. After zooming, swiping, and scrolling for about five minutes,
I managed to highlight the first field to begin typing my name.
In this same period, in anticipation of the 2012 presidential race, political
rhetoric about the “poor choices” of people still struggling to navigate postre-
cession labor markets had ramped up, and cell phones suddenly took center
stage as the newest example of “wasteful spending” by the undeserving poor.
Four years later, GOP hopefuls praised “gig” economy companies, like Uber,
for creating employment opportunities for anyone with a phone.
In the past decade, the world’s attention has been drawn to the ways that
digital technologies have become central to “on-d emand” forms of low- wage
work. But I knew that, far beyond the rise of digital labor platforms, digital
technologies had become infrastructural to new realities of precarious work
across class divides. I knew that both white-c ollar professionals and low-
wage service workers were relying on their digital devices to find work. But
I had yet to figure out how they were both a part of the same story.
For three years, I interviewed both high- and low-w age precarious workers
across the United States, as they patched together economic livelihoods.
These workers used digital technologies in surprisingly similar ways: to
find work, to maintain relationships, and to find dignity in often undigni-
fied conditions. In doing so, they used tech to solve the contradictions at the
heart of capitalism. However, these practices were done in very different
contexts, marginalizing some and privileging others, exacerbating an already
polarized labor market. This book describes these practices and analyzes the
hidden relationship between workers at both ends of our digital economy.
Acknowledgments
This book wouldn’t have happened without the interviewees who were gen-
erous and patient enough to tell me their stories. Thank you to everyone who
invited me into their lives for a few hours. I hope I got it right.
Writing this book took a more than a village; it took several. Through
graduate school, a postdoc, and beyond, this manuscript has benefitted from
generous mentors, colleagues, and institutions, as well as friends and family.
Thank you to the members of my dissertation committee at the University
of Virginia. My chair, Sarah Corse, Allison Pugh, Krishan Kumar, and Siva
Vaidhyanathan all encouraged me to be more careful with my thinking, be
more ambitious with my claims, and stand up for my ideas within sociology
and beyond.
When I was a graduate student, these ideas were improved by my fellow
grads, especially Matthew Braswell, Francesca Tripodi, Claire Maiers,
Benjamin Snyder, Christina Simko, Sarah Mosseri, and Catalina Vallejo, who
all provided critical and supportive reads and hugs throughout the many
stages of this project. The members of the Work/ Culture Working Group,
including Alison Gerber, Clayton Childress, Joe Klett, Ryan Hagan, Ryann
Manning, Sorcha Brophy, and Ekedi Mpondo- Dinka, listened to my disser-
tation ideas as they morphed into something more.
Thanks to a host of early interlocutors as the dissertation started turning
into a book. Late in my dissertation, I participated in a preconference put on
by the Association of Internet Researchers’ (AoIR) preconference on labor,
where my words got a once- over from Elizabeth Wissinger, Airi Lampinen,
Kylie Jarrett, Mary Gray, Karen Gregory, Dan Greene, Nancy Baym, and
other participants. Around this same time, Jason Farman and Ben Snyder
helped me figure out how to package the story as a proposal, and Jeff Lane
and Sarah Brayne demystified the book process.
Thank you to the faculty and staff at The Institute for Advanced Studies
in Culture (IASC) that supported me as a graduate fellow at the University
of Virginia, especially James Davidson Hunter, Murray Milner, Katya
Makarova, Garnette Cadogan, and Joe Davis. My time at IASC was bright-
ened by the amazing Jeff Guhin, Tony Lin, Chad Wellmon, and Josh Yates.