Left to Our Own Devices: Coping with Insecure Work in a Digital Age

Abstract

Over the past three decades, digital technologies like smartphones and laptops have transformed the way we work in the United States. Over the same period of time, workers at the top and the bottom of the income ladder have experienced rising levels of job insecurity and anxiety about their economic futures. Despite this connection, we rarely link our everyday technology problems to our economic climate. Left to Our Own Devices explores the ways that workers use their digital technologies to navigate insecure and flexible labor markets. Through one hundred interviews with high- and low-wage precarious workers across the United States, the book explores the surprisingly similar “digital hustles” they use to find work and maintain a sense of dignity and identity. However, although they shared similar practices, the digital hustle ultimately reproduces inequalities between workers at either end of polarized labor markets. The terms on which workers are included into the digital economy are marked by stark differences in power and privilege. Instead of a cognitive or individualistic approach to our “addictions” to technology, this book explains that our technologies must be understood as essential tools to cope with insecurity and manage the new risks that have emerged in the wake of the Great Recession and the crumbling social contract between employers and employees. In an economic climate characterized by unraveling social safety nets, workers use their devices to weave their own.