BOOK REVIEW / Seth Sandronsky
Cybertariat Struggles
Who is the cybertariat? Why care? Ursula Huws, author of Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age (Monthly Review Press, 2014), has answers as a class-based technology shapes our world. An historical continuity emerges in her writing. This approach casts context on the current moment.
Huws delves into the technical nuts and bolts of modern class society. Work and workplaces shift amid a dizzying pace of change. The very ground beneath our feet constantly moves as industry integrates technology to better profit via control over consumers and employees. The effects are far-reaching, and decades in the making. On this front, nothing falls from the sky.
As Huws details, there are overlapping processes of class formation and fragmentation that characterize this systemic push-and-pull. Spatial and temporal continuities drive the rise and demise of technology-driven identities and job locales. Huws develops from a left viewpoint the relevant and significant actors and factors, to paraphrase Marx, in the activity that makes us human: work…
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