SCIENCE science.org 28 JANUARY 2022 • VOL 375 ISSUE 6579 389PHOTO: REUTERS/RALPH D. FRESO
ByJanine BergT
he tech industry has been successful in
making us believe that the programs,
websites, and apps we rely on work
instantly and flawlessly, with informa-
tion stored in clouds and powered by
snack-eating programmers who take
breaks to play ping-pong. Yet behind this il-
lusion lies a globe-spanning army, millions in
size, of laborers performing tasks that ensure
the smooth operation of our digital world.
Moritz Altenried’s highly readable and
eye-opening book, The Digital Factory, demys-
tifies automated technology and describes in
persuasive detail the human labor behind the
technology that drives the economy and our
daily lives. It joins a growing literature that
questions the myth, propagated by the tech
community, of a future without work.
Altenried surveys the numerous occupa-
tions that ensure the smooth functioning of
technological systems and industries and
highlights the largely precarious work behind
an array of services, from search engines and
social media sites to gaming and online shop-
ping. Most importantly, he documents how
technological systems are used to manage
the work process, resulting in what he calls
“digital Taylorism.” In doing so, he brings to
the fore the real challenge facing the world of
work: how to ensure good working conditionsLABORFrom fulfillment centers to social media sites,
human labor is essential to digital success
BOOKS et al.
The tech workforce you don’t see
and a living wage in a world of unregulated
and often cross-border digital labor.
The Digital Factory is organized around the
labor process in four areas: logistics, gaming,
crowdwork, and social media. Beginning with
logistics, Altenried describes how the ship-
ping container and its digitization propelled
globalization and reshaped work
across the world. While a wide
range of new occupations are as-
sociated with this transformation,
the chapter focuses on distribution
and delivery, including workers in
Amazon’s fulfillment centers and
those involved in last-mile deliv-
ery. At the Brieselang fulfillment
center, just outside of Berlin, we
learn that temporary workers out-
number permanent employees by
a four-to-one ratio. Every move-
ment in the distribution centers is
so highly regulated and standardized that one
manager in the UK describes the resulting la-
bor as “human automation.”
Similarly precarious working conditions
can be found in the gaming industry. Readers
learn about the business of gold farming, an
industry composed of upwards of 1 million
workers employed in gaming workshops
throughout China who harvest in-game items
in the World of Warcraft to sell to Western
players who prefer to purchase upgrades
that enable them to leapfrog the more tedi-
ous parts of the game. Meanwhile in Berlin,
Altenried describes the long hours, low pay,and repetitive work experienced by the city’s
game testers, many of whom are attracted to
the job because of their passion for gaming
but who quickly grow tired of clicking their
computer mouse “at least seventy thousand
times” a day. Pay in the industry is notoriously
low, with workers earning five euros an hour
prior to the introduction of the national mini-
mum wage in Germany in 2015.
Crowdwork encompasses the millions of
outsourced workers (the crowd) behind our
digital systems. It includes humans who tag
photos for artificial intelligence systems,
write descriptions for online retailers, rate
the efficacy of Google’s search engine, elim-
inate porn and violence from social media
sites (content moderation), and perform
freelancing gigs in an array of digital ser-
vices for clients across the world. While the
exact number of crowdworkers is unknown,
it easily ranges in the tens of millions, with
a presence in most countries in the world.
Crowdwork is the quintessential example of
how technology both displaces some occupa-
tions and creates new ones, and it highlights
the challenges posed for these new workers,
for whom global competition keeps pay low
and insecure.
Altenried compellingly argues that today’s
digital work is controlled and monitored at
every step and that the standardization of
such processes “curiously resembl[es] those
of Taylorist factories in the early twentieth
century even if they look com-
pletely different.” His analogy is
apt, but he stops short of discuss-
ing how industrial work, while al-
ienating, was nonetheless a source
of good jobs in many Western
countries after World War II as
a result of collective efforts to
organize and regulate work. In
Altenried’s digital production
line, there are hints of collective
action at Amazon warehouses, in
the gaming industry, and even in
crowdwork but scant discussion
of the institutions and efforts needed to turn
these precarious jobs into good jobs.
The digital work described in this book is
being performed for the richest companies
of our times that pay little in taxes and that
outsource large swathes of their workforce,
despite tremendous profits. Such a world of
work is not inevitable.
The Digital Factory is an important contri-
bution to the discussion of digital labor. But
it also makes clear that researchers must now
address the next task at hand: how to turn
these bad jobs into good jobs. j
10.1126/science.abn1041A worker gathers items at an Amazon distribution
center in Phoenix, Arizona, in November 2013.The reviewer is at the Research Department, International
Labour Office, Geneva, Switzerland. Email: [email protected]The Digital Factory:
The Human Labor
of Automation
Moritz Altenried
University of Chicago
Press, 2022. 216 pp.