Mapping the Social Relations of Labor in Contemporary Algorithmic Society

Abstract Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory (2022) accomplishes in just under two hundred pages what many other books twice that length have struggled with: assembling a concise yet readable introductory map to the global, fragmented, and too-often hidden landscape of digitally-mediated capitalism. But the digital factory itself is an incomplete concept, almost always requiring us to look for the external and contingent labor support hidden just outside of its supposedly totalizing network of logistics, robotics and algorithms.