Byte Back: Notes Towards a Digital Worker's Inquiry

A theory-driven account of the stakes and knowledge-building practices of the resurgent labor movement from organizers across the gig economy and tech industry. As tech billionaires align with Trump, they are also launching a renewed political and technological assault on labor. But it still takes workers to make fortunes for the bosses, and collective action is again on the rise. The rank and file are coming from the precarious new “gig jobs” and drawing strength from a new class of worker who does the jobs that computers still cannot. Previously thought to be “unorganizable,” these workers are part of a North American collective movement that is reaffirming faith in collective revolutionary action with new forms of organizing, new ways of association, and new ways of thinking and recombining labor organizing and research.  To capture this growing class consciousness as it happens, the Capacitor Collective has conducted ten illuminating interviews with platform workers who are also organizers committed to connecting old motivations and new tactics in a text that shakes up the worker inquiry tradition to imagine new ways to produce knowledge with and for workers.