Landscapes of precarious labour: on the long prehistory and contingent future of digital platforms

Digital platforms are commonly portrayed as innovative technology-driven disruptors. This paper challenges such claims of novelty by situating digital platforms within broader historical and contemporary landscapes of precarious labour. It highlights four central elements that form part of the labour model of platforms – home-based labour, piece wages, day labour, and labour intermediaries – and traces pre-digital historical moments in which these elements played a significant role. By revisiting these selected instances in the history of precarious labour, the paper aims to contribute to a critical genealogy of digital platforms. Such a genealogy situates digital platforms in a long history of contingent labour that is deeply intertwined with histories of migrant and feminized labour, where precarity and instability have historically been the norm. Overall, such a perspective sharpens our conceptual understanding of platforms and the ways in which they adapt, reconfigure, and radicalize historical techniques, structures, and practices for organizing labour. The paper concludes by outlining implications for future analyses and critiques of and regulatory approaches to platform labour.