Defining digital work

Having defined the general conditions of platformization in the previous chapter, in order to understand the emergence and the various forms of these new categories of workers, it is now necessary to distinguish the specific challenges and opportunities of various types of digital labour. If the pivotal role of digital platforms as the intermediating infrastructure, able to allow a wide array of users to interact with each other with the aim of extracting data and producing various forms of value, is not questioned as an essential feature of digital labour (Srnicek, 2017; Casilli, 2020), some divergence still persists today in relation to a number of other defining features.

The main disagreement concerns the presence of an explicit economic relationship, that is, the attribution of a monetary remuneration: some scholars only identify digital labour with platform-mediated activities involving some form of remuneration (Huws et al, 2016; Wood et al, 2019; Aloisi and De Stefano, 2020), while others do not see remuneration as a fundamental feature (Fuchs, 2014; Casilli, 2020). According to the first group of scholars, digital labour is the set of paid activities, organized and controlled by online platforms (Huws et al, 2016). According to the second group, it comprises the broader set of activities whose processes of data extraction (‘datafication’) serve to develop automatic learning and train artificial intelligence (Casilli, 2020). In the latter definition, therefore, digital labour encompasses a vast array of platform-mediated activities, located on a continuum ranging from unpaid and underpaid activities to flexibly remunerated activities. For these scholars, the generated content and the generated content classification activities that users perform on social networks are, for instance, a key component of digital labour, which they define as ‘social labour on the net’ (Casilli, 2020; see also Fuchs and Sevignani, 2013 for a similar interpretation), the datafication of which generates economic value. As Casilli (2020: 80) puts it: ‘users’ creations, behaviours, and data are routed through digital technologies in value-producing activities. These activities are forms of labour inscribed in social relations, as their [economic] value derives from users’ interactions and cannot be conceived other than as a collective act’.