Lab Precarity Bücher

This work advances a new analytic for understanding how precarity manifests across various geographical locations and cultural practices in the digital era. Digital technologies, such as apps like Uber and platforms like Airbnb, have facilitated the concentration of wealth and power among a select few while worsening insecure conditions for marginalized groups, including racial and ethnic minorities, women, indigenous populations, migrants, and those in the global south. Precarity has also become more widespread, affecting even the creative class and digital producers. This collaboratively authored multigraph examines how digital technology contributes to the proliferation of precarity. The authors define precarity as the state of those disproportionately impacted by the inequalities and insecurities generated by digital technologies, despite the opportunities they may present. The book explores a diverse array of digital precarity, from the installation of Palestinian Internet cables to the production of electronics by Navajo women, and from drone use along the U.S.-Mexico border to the technocultural outputs of Chinese makers. This project adds to and connects ongoing discussions about precarity and digital networks across critical computing, postcolonial studies, visual culture, and information sciences.