African digital labour and contemporary global capitalism

Posted on by Phil Howard

In discussions about the locations that make up the key productive nodes of the global digital economy, African workers rarely get a mention. Autonomous vehicles, machine learning systems, next-generation search engines and recommendations systems: how many of these technologies are ‘made in Africa’? The answer is actually ‘all of them.’

In our new paper, we make visible the invisible and bring light to the role African workers are playing in developing key emergent and everyday digital technologies such as autonomous vehicles, machine learning systems, next-generation search engines and recommendation systems.

We show in this paper, how African workers are making possible key technologies that underpin, or soon will underpin, the enormous profits made by large technology companies based in the Global North. In the context of hyperbolic claims about automation and robotisation and the impending technological unemployment they are predicted to bring about, this article shows that human labour including African workers remain very much a part of contemporary digital capitalism.

Based on a five year study (2014-2019) we conducted in South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, and Kenya, involving in-depth interviews and group discussions with over 200 stakeholders including workers, managers of outsourcing firms, government officials, trade unions, employment agencies, private-sector associations, and industry experts, in this paper, we attempt to construct a snapshot of the key ways in which African digital labour has been integrated into the production networks of digital products and services that are being deployed around the world.

We focus on two types of digital work: machine learning and digital decision making. It is worth noting that these activities are performed by workers employed within firms or operating as freelancers through digital work platforms (e.g. Upwork, Freelancer.com, Amazon Mechanical Turk), which act as intermediaries between employers and workers.

Our underlying objective in this paper is that once we acknowledge that many contemporary digital technologies rely on a lot of human labour to drive their interfaces, we can begin to piece together what the new global division of labour for digital work looks like and build greater socio-political responses (both at the global and local scale) to make some of these value chains more transparent, ethical, and rewarding.

The link to download this paper is below.

Anwar, M. A. and Graham, M. (Forthcoming) Digital Labour at Economic Margins: African Workers and the Global Information Economy, Review of African Political Economy.

 

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Phil Howard

Philip N. Howard is a professor and writer. He has written numerous empirical research articles, and published in a number of disciplines, on the use of digital media for both civic engagement and social control in countries around the world. He is a statutory Professor of Internet Studies at the Oxford Internet Institute and a Professorial Fellow at Balliol College at the University of Oxford. He has courtesy appointments as a professor at the University of Washington’s Department of Communication and as a Fellow at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. He has held senior academic appointments at Stanford, Princeton, and Columbia Universities, and from 2013-15 he helped design and launch a new School of Public Policy at Central European University in Budapest. Recently he received a Consolidator Award from the European Research Council for his study of algorithms and public life. His projects on digital activism, information access, and modern governance in both democracies and authoritarian regimes have been supported by the National Science Foundation, US Institutes of Peace, and Intel’s People and Practices Group. He has published eight books and over 120 academic articles, book chapters, conference papers, and commentary essays on information technology, international affairs and public life. His research spans several disciplines, and he is among a small number of scholars who have won awards from all three major academic associations for his work in political science, sociology, and communication. He is the author, most recently, of Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up. Howard’s research and commentary writing has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, and many international media outlets. His B.A. is in political science from Innis College at the University of Toronto, his M.Sc. is in economics from the London School of Economics, and his Ph.D. is in sociology from Northwestern University. His website is philhoward.org, and he tweets from @pnhoward. His PGP key can be found here.

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