The Devaluation of Care Work and Reproductive Labor; Marisol Vasquez Core Response 5 / 5

The shift to the digital economy, as Terranova contends, or the transition from the commodity to information, as Beller has argued in The World Computer, gestures towards attendant transformations in value and labor. Yet Terranova’s free labor is also informed by its ‘cultural and affective’ dimensions (Terranova 76). As the author observes, the transformation into the digital economy is “an important area of experimentation with value and free cultural/affective labor,” whose forms of production can range from “web design, multimedia production, digital services, and so on” (76). Terranova’s notion of free labor mostly centralizes the hub of activity buzzing through the digital economy, including activities not easily detectable as labor through the productive activities of chatting, sharing real-life stories, sending mailing lists, or drafting and reading amateur newsletters (76). Here, Terranova’s insistence on value emerges from the “immanent process of channeling collective labor (even as cultural labor) into monetary flows and its structuration within capitalist business practices” (77). In other words, Terranova’s interest in value is circumscribes how it is imbued through processes of free labor emerging from a culture of capitalism. Or, to put it simply, Terranova’s discussion centralizes the accretion of value through “knowledge/culture/affect” (77), but not its extraction or devaluation. 

These same activities of free labor can now be readily ‘outsourced’ on platforms like Fiverr. Thus, it would be useful to consider more how other authors have also discussed free labor, not through how these activities create value, but how such labor becomes devalued. Beller, Roberts, and Dignaz seem to mention the devaluation, and in particular through their racialized and gendered inflection. Dignaz, I believe, does an excellent job at outlining invisible labor tied to the legacy of Marxist feminist theory, such as reproductive labor, care work, emotional labor, and affective labor, all of which constitute the underpaid and unwaged activities often performed by women in support of the purported productive activities taking place in the public and social sphere of waged work. 

To consider how raced and gendered labor within the digital economy can be devalued in a hierarchy of labor, Dignaz offers a study on care work. Here, the author claims that platforms connecting flexible care workers to potential employers perpetuates a displacement of risk onto these works, which “potentially reinforces discrimination and ‘further entrenchment of unequal power relations within the traditional domestic sector’” (200). To illustrate the conclusions Dignaz lays forth, a notable example might be the long-standing legacy of Filipino care work remediated through content moderation. In a case study entitled “Circuits of Care: Filipino Content Moderation and American Infostructures of Feeling,” the authors attune “Filipino care” as part of the legacy of “Filipino intimate labor performed for American subjects, from nurse to caregiver to call center to content moderator” (Marte-Wood and Santos 116). The authors draw a clear through line connecting the capitalization and offshoring of Filipino content moderation as a “shift away from the feminized labor export” of Filipino/a workers to “Philippine participation in the twenty-first-century global ‘knowledge’ economy” (105). Thus, while Roberts interrogates the ambiguous moral and ethical thresholds of content moderation, the case study of content moderation in the Philippines can draw relationalities between invisible labor, devalued labor, and racialized and gendered labor. One particular insight I draw from the case study of Filipino content moderation involves the laboring body, weighed down the potential trauma of content moderation and inscribed through platform capitalism’s fantasy of infinitely exportable devalued labor.  

Works Cited

Alden Sajor Marte-Wood and Stephanie Dimatulac Santos. “Circuits of Care: Filipino Content Moderation and American Infostructures of Feeling.” Verge (Minneapolis, Minn.), vol. 7, no. 2, 2021, pp. 101–27, https://doi.org/10.5749/vergstudglobasia.7.2.0101.