Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture

Race and DigitalCapitalism

An Online Research Resource

Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture

The University of Chicago

Lucas G. Pinheiro, PhD Student

Department of Political Science

University of Chicago

OVERVIEW

This is an online resource for researchersin the social sciences, humanities, and fine arts interested in the relationship between contemporary regimes of raceand digital capitalism. While the scholarly literature on the historical intersection of capitalism and race is vast (fromracialized slavery in monopoly capitalism to modern racial formations in industrial capitalism to the racial politics of neoliberalism), less attentionhas been given to the ways in which race, racism, and racialization—especially in the United States—actively reorganized the social relations of production that culminated in capital’s “digital turn” of the last two decades. Digital capitalism (also known as communicative, informational, and high-tech capitalism)refers to the latest transformations in the capitalist mode of production: the onset of late capital’s productive rearrangementsinduced by the advent of networked technologies (the World Wide Web in 1992 and Web 2.0 in the early 2000s), the postwar surge in finance capital, and widespread political and social developments in Western societies, including neoliberal juridical reforms in corporate taxation, financial deregulation, and labor legislation. Broadly, the combination of these social, economic, technological, and political circumstancesveered the American economy in a path ofsustained growth in the high-tech sector propelled bythe emergence of new firms specializednot only in electronic hardware but also, and most critically, in new online services—companies such as Amazon,Google, Facebook, Twitter, Uber, and Etsy, to name a few.That the economic effects of these developments have reverberated across all levels ofcontemporary American society is all but unmistakable. Yet, whilemuch has been written aboutthese changes from a diverse scope of social, economic, and political perspectives, sustained engagements with the racial discoursesundergirding capital’s digital turnremain rare. Read as an initial attempt to address this lacuna, thisonline resource brings together a selection of critical worksthat foreground the consortium between racialization and digital capitalism. Importantly, this resource does not aim to be exhaustive; it is rather a selective illustration of certain thematic and methodological patterns to have emerged in the literature on race and digital capitalism in recent years. The resource is divided in three sections: (I) “Critiques of Postindustrial and Digital Capitalism,” (II) “Racialized Labor and Digital Capitalism,” and (III) “Race, Capitalism, and Silicon Valley.” An appendix on digital artworks reflecting on the intersection of race and digital capitalism is provided at the end.

I. Critiques of Postindustrial and Digital Capitalism

This bibliography is composed of worksfrom a wide range of disciplines in the socialsciences and humanities whose shared concern is the transformation in the social relations of production in capitalist economies from the end of the Second World War to the present. For the most part,this literature addresses the latest movement in Western capitalism, from postindustrial capitalism to digital capitalism. These works touch on a broad range of aspects concerninglate capitalism, including the capital-labor relation, profits, wages, technological innovation, markets, and—overall—the social, economic,and political reorganization Western capitalism over the last two decades. As such, this bibliography provides an overview of the emergence and development of digital capitalism from the standpoint of critical political economy.

Selected Bibliography

Benner, Chris. Work in the New Economy: Flexible Labor Markets in Silicon Valley (London, UK: Blackwell, 2002)

Boltanski, Luc and Chiapello, Ève. The New Spirit of Capitalism (London, UK: Verso, 2007)

Burawoy, Michael. The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes Under Capitalism and Socialism (London, UK: Verso, 1985)

Carnoy, Martin; Castells, Manuel; and Benner, Chris. “Labour markets and employment practices in the age of flexibility: A case study of Silicon Valley,” in The International Labour Review, 136:1 (1997), pp. 27-48

Capuzzo, Paolo and Mezzadra, Sandro. “Provincializing the Italian Reading of Gramsci,” in The Postcolonial Gramsci, eds. Neelan Srivastava and Baidik Bhattacharya (New York, NY: Taylor and Francis, 2012), pp. 34-54

Colin Cremin and John Michael Roberts, “Postmodern Left Liberalism: Hardt and Negri and the Disavowal of Critique,” in Critical Sociology, 37:2 (2011), pp. 179-197

Dawson, Michael and Foster, John Bellamy. “Virtual Capitalism: The Political Economy of the Information Highway,” in Capitalism and the Information Age: The Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution, eds. Robert W. McChesney, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and John Bellamy Foster (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1996), pp. 40-58

Dyer-Witherford, Nick. Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois, 1999)

Desai, Radhika. “The New Communists of the Commons: Twenty-First-Century Proudhonists,” in International Critical Thought 1:2 (2011), pp. 204-223

Fuchs, Christian. Digital Labour and Karl Marx (New York and London: Routledge, 2014)

Gill, Rosalind and Pratt, Andy. “In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labor, Precariousness, and Cultural Work,” in Theory, Culture & Society 25:7-8 (2008), pp. 1-30

Hardt, Michael. “Introduction: Laboratory Italy,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, eds. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota, 1996), pp. 1-10

Hardt, Michael. “Affective Labor,” in Boundary 2 26:2 (1999), pp. 89-100

Hardt, Michael. “Into the Factory: Negri’s Lenin and the Subjective Caesura (1968-73),” in The Philosophy of Antonio Negri: Resistance in Practice, eds. Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha (London, UK: Pluto Press, 2005), pp. 7-37

Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2000)

Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2004)

Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009)

Jameson, Frederic. “Culture and Finance Capital,” in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998 (New York, NY: Verso, 2009), pp. 136-161

Kologlugil, Serhat. “Digitizing Karl Marx: The New Political Economy of General Intellect and Immaterial Labor,” in Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 27:1 (2015), pp. 123-137

Lazzarato, Maurizio. “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, eds. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota, 1996), pp. 133-147

Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2011)

Mason, Paul. Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015)

Negri, Antonio. The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1989)

Neilson, David. “Formal and Real Subordination and the Contemporary Proletariat: Re-coupling Marxist Class Theory and Labour-Process Analysis,” in Capital & Class 91 (2007), pp. 89-123

Pasquinelli, Mateo. “Google’s PageRank Algorithm: A Diagram of the Cognitive Capitalism and the Rentier of the Common Intellect,” in Deep Search: The Politics of Search Beyond Google, eds. Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder (London, UK: Transaction, 2009)

Ross, Andrew. No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University, 2003)

Schiller, Dan. Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1999)

Srnicek, Nick and Williams, Alex. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London and New York: Verso, 2015)

Suchman, Lucy. Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 2006)

Terranova, Tiziana. “Free Labor,” in Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, ed. Trebor Scholz (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), pp. 33-57

Thompson, Paul. “Foundation and Empire: A Critique of Hardt and Negri,” in Capital & Class 86 (2005), pp. 73-98

Toscano, Alberto. “From Pin Factories to Gold Farmers: Editorial Introduction to a Research Stream on Cognitive Capitalism, Immaterial Labour, and the General Intellect, Historical Materialism 15 (2007), pp. 3-11

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2012)

Vercellone, Carlo. “From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism,” in Historical Materialism 15 (2007), pp. 13-36

Vercellone, Carlo. “Wages, Rent and Profit: The New Articulation of Wages, Rent and Profit in Cognitive Capitalism,” trans. Arianna Bove, in generation-online.org (2008). Available from:

Virno, Paolo “General Intellect,” Historical Materialism 15 (2007), pp. 3-8

Virno, Paolo. “Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, eds. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota, 1996), pp. 189-212

Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude (New York, NY: Semiotext(e), 2004)

Webster, Juliet. “Doing Research, Doing Politics: ICT Research as a Form of Activism,” in triple: Communication, Capitalism & Critique – Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, 9:1 (2011), pp. 1-10

Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2011)

II. Racialized Labor and Digital Capitalism

Everyday over 100,000 workers worldwide are employed in moderating endless torrents of user-generated content uploaded to social media websites around the clock. Their labor is to sanitize the mainstream web.These online content moderators are members of an invisible yet indispensable class of postindustrial workers known in Silicon Valley as “data janitors.” This racially-marked moniker conveys some of the material and social conditions that characterize this type of digital work today, which is best described as thelabor of cleansing our digital culture. To this end, so-called “data janitors” perform the labor of clearing and cleaning cyberspace in order to facilitate the skilled work of programmers and software engineers, and, moreover, so that social media users may easily navigate the Web as a sanitized cyberspace, purged from gruesome and graphic content. As the works collected here show, this growing digital workforce consists mostly of delocalized and subcontracted cultural workers who are also predominantly nonwhite, underpaid, and overworked. Overall, this bibliography indexes the emergence ofa new class of racialized wage-labor largely employed in unskilled data work.

Selected Bibliography

Abreu, Manuel Arturo. “Online Imagined Black English,” in Arachne, (Winter 2015), available from:

Dyer-Witheford, Nick. Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex (London, UK: Pluto Press, 2014)

Dyer-Witheford, Nick. “Empire, Immaterial Labor, the New Combinations, and the Global Worker,” in Rethinking Marxism, 13:3/4 (Fall/Winter 2001), pp. 73-98

Harney, Stefano and Moten, Fred. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York, NY: Minor Compositions, 2013)

Kamat, Sangeeta; Mir, Ali; and Biju, Matthew. “Producing Hi-Tech: Globalization, the State and Migrant Subjects,” in Globalisation, Societies and Education, 2:1 (2004), pp. 1-39

Madrigal, Alexis C. “Almost Human: The Surreal, Cyborg Future of Telemarketing,” in The Atlantic, (December 20, 2013), available from:

Martín-Cabrera, Luis. “The Potentiality of the Commons: A Materialist Critique of Cognitive Capitalism From the Cyberbraceros to the Ley Sinde,” in Hispanic Review (Fall 2012), pp. 583-605

McPherson, Tara. “U.S. Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX,” in Race After the Internet, eds. Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012), pp. 21-37

McPherson, Tara. “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White?” in Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2012), from

Mezzadra, Sandro and Neilson, Brett. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2013)

Nakamura, Lisa. “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft,” in Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, ed. Trebor Scholz (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), pp. 187-204

Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2008)

Nakamura, Lisa and Chow-White, Peter A. “Introduction—Race and Digital Technology: Code, the Color Line, and the Information Society,” in Race After the Internet, eds. Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012), pp. 1-18

Oni, Michael and Winant, Howard. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York, NY: Routledge, 1986)

Radhika, Gajjala. “Digital Media, Race, Gender, Affect, and Labor: Introduction to Special Section,” in Television & New Media, 15:3 (2014), pp. 179-250

Robinson, Paulette. “Equity and Access to Computer Technology for Grades K-12,” in Cyberghetto or Cybertopia?: Race, Class, and Gender on the Internet, ed. Bosah Ebo (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), pp. 137-151

Sandvig, Christian. “Connection at Ewiiaapaayp Mountain: Indigenous Internet Infrastructure,” in Race After the Internet, eds. Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012), pp. 168-200

Sterne, Jonathan. “The Computer Race Goes to Class,” How Computers in Schools Helped Shape the Racial Topography of the Internet,” in Race in Cyberspace, eds. Beth E. Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert B. Rodman (New York, NY: Routledge, 2000), pp. 191-212

Wilson, William Julius. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, 2nd Ed.(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 2012)

III.Race, Capitalism, and Silicon Valley

Ever since the 1970s when a burgeoning ICT (information and communications technologies) industry overtook agriculture in Silicon Valley, scholars have looked to the region as a case study in postindustrial production cycles, the rise of independent contracting, post-Fordist regimes of labor control, and the advent of a renewed work ethic centered on the principles of flexibility and leisure. The financial prosperity of high-tech firms in Silicon Valley resulted in a widespread transformation in the local economy beginning in the 1970s. Traditionally,most familiar readingsof Silicon Valley’s political economy tend to figure therise of high-tech capital in the region as a stimulus for a culture of innovation and entrepreneurialism as a mark of liberal Western progress. For the most part, standard narratives of digital capitalism in Silicon Valley build on conventional interpretations of postindustrial and finance capital championed by classical economists. This selected bibliography brings together a cluster of recent critical works on race, digital capitalism, and Silicon Valley that fundamentally challenge celebratoryrenderings of the region as a metonym for “digital modernity.” In different ways, the works collected here point to the significant and disquieting political corollaries of the veiled racialization of unskilled labor in the region.

Selected Bibliography

Andrejevic, Mark. “Estranged Free Labor,” in in Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, ed. Trebor Scholz (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), pp. 149-164

Aytes, Ayhan. “Return of the Crowds: Mechanical Turk and Neoliberal States of Exception,” in in Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, ed. Trebor Scholz (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), pp. 79-97

Benner, Chris. Work in the New Economy: Flexible Labor Markets in Silicon Valley (London, UK: Blackwell, 2002)

Carnoy, Martin; Castells, Manuel; and Benner, Chris. “Labour markets and employment practices in the age of flexibility: A case study of Silicon Valley,” in The International Labour Review, 136:1 (1997), pp. 27-48

Chen, Adrian. “The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed,” in Wired, (October 23, 2014), available from:

Ekbia, Hamid and Nardi, Bonnie. “Heteromation and its (dis)contents: The invisible division of labor between humans and machines,” in First Monday 19:6 (June 2014). Available from:

Fairchild, Caroline. “Why Google Voluntarily Released Dismal Diversity Numbers,” in Fortune, (May 29, 2014). Available from:

Green, Susan S. “Silicon Valley’s Women Workers: A Theoretical Analysis of Sex Segregation in the Electronics Industry Labor Market,” in Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor, eds. June Nash & María P. Fernández-Kelly (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1983), pp. 273-331

Irani, Lilly. “Justice for ‘Data Janitors’” in Public Books, (January 15, 2015). Available from:

Irani, Lilly. “The Cultural Work of Microwork,” in New Media & Society 20:1 (2013), pp. 1-20

Kologlugil, Serhat. “Digitizing Karl Marx: The New Political Economy of General Intellect and Immaterial Labor,” in Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 27:1 (2015), pp. 123-137

Lohr, Mateo. “For Big-Data Scientists, ‘Janitor Work’ is Key Hurdle to Insights,” The New York Times, (August 17, 2014). Available from:

Marez, Curtis. “Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers, and the History of Star Wars,” in Race After the Internet, eds. Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White (New York, NY: 2012), pp. 85-108

Miller, Claire Cain. “Google Releases Employee Data, Illustrating Tech’s Diversity Challenge,” in bits.blogs.nytimes.com (May 28, 2014). Available from:

Pellow, David Naguib and Park, Lisa Sun-Hee. The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and High-Tech Global Economy (New York, NY: New York University, 2002)

Wen, Shawn. “The Ladies Vanish,” The New Inquiry, (November 11, 2014), available from:

Wilson, Andrew Norman. “Conversation with Laurel Ptak,” in Aperture 210 (Spring 2013), pp. 126-133

Wong, Bernard P. The Chinese in Silicon Valley: Globalization, Social Networks, and Ethnic Identity (New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006)

Zlolniski, Christian. “Labor Control and Resistance of Mexican Immigrant Janitors in Silicon Valley,” in Human Organization, 62:1 (2003), pp. 39-49

Zlolniski, Christian. “The Informal Economy in an Advanced Industrialized Society: Mexican Immigrant Labor in Silicon Valley,” in The Yale Law Journal, 103:8 (1994), pp. 2305-2335

IV. Appendix: Artworks on Race, Politicized Identity, and Digital Capitalism

Blas, Zach.Contra-Internet Practice #1: Constituting an Outside (Utopian Plagiarism) (2015), available from:

Blas, Zach. Facial Weaponization Suite (2011-14), available from:

Coburn, Tyler. I’m that Angel (2011—), available from: and

Crespo, Andrea. Virocrypsis at Swiss Institute of Contemporary Art (New York, 2015), available from:

Enxuto, João and Love, Erica. Waiting for the Internet (2015), available from:

Jane, E. That Time I Sold My Dreads Online (2015), available from:

Kenny, Devin and Pinheiro, Lucas G. Real Live Online at The New Museum of Contemporary Art and Rhizome.org (New York, 2015), available from:

Loaf, Nandy. “Untitled Instagram Performance” (2013—), available from:

Wilson, Andrew Norman. ScanOps (2012-ongoing), available from:

Wilson, Andrew Norman. Workers Leaving the Googleplex (2009-2011), available from:

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