This article develops friction as a methodological lens and mobilizes it to examine an unusual data labor arrangement in Finnish prisons. The concept of friction highlights how penal policies in a Nordic welfare state both support and intervene in tendencies to view data labor as a uniform future development. While the friction lens draws attention to infrastructural arrangements and institutional forces, it also foregrounds human involvement, imaginaries, and aspirations. Translating aspirations into institutionally rooted practices requires effort and resourcefulness, ultimately producing a “homegrown” version of data labor. The prison offers pushback against how the global data labor infrastructure attempts to reconfigure the human. We demonstrate that the friction lens provides a novel way to analyze data-based automation from a critical perspective, without collapsing differences or overlooking the potential for hopeful pathways. This turns friction into a future-oriented concept that opens multiple views on how things might evolve.
Ruckenstein et al. (2025) studied this question.