Human resource platforms organize how workers participate in and experience work as informationalized relations and routines. The Workhuman Cloud, developed by a human resource tech firm, exemplifies how platforms and the organizations that use them work to engineer disciplined subjects. Platform studies scholars have shown processes of platformization reaching business management, labor and industrial relations, law and policy, and more. This article analyzes corporate plans and tech demonstrations for the Workhuman Cloud and industry expert reports promoting how to “make work more human.” What does it mean when platforms are enrolled to enact users as “human”? What kind of human do they constitute? We interrogate how actors deploy care and platforms in the differential management of workers. Incorporating people analytics, ideas about social recognition, gamification, and the automation of inclusion, the Workhuman Cloud is an expression of what we call “cruel optimization.” This concept names how platforms configure the persistent attachment to the belief that improving oneself through sociotechnical arrangements (i.e., algorithmic control, recognition, and rewards) instills a virtuous cycle of betterment even when such attachment works against one's well-being. Drawing from feminist and critical race STS, we scrutinize how the technopolitics of user configurations in contemporary work platforms ensconce surveillance and labor governance through the non-innocence of care.
López et al. (Thu,) studied this question.