Relational Spaces of Digital Labor

The distinction between everyday life and work is gradually diminishing, as productive capacities are increasingly hard-coded into quotidian activities bearing little resemblance to colloquial understandings of “work”. Digital labor research has made important contributions to our understanding of these processes and their attendant relations, inequalities, and implications. However, this body of research has insufficiently attended to the spaces through which this labor takes place. On the one hand, most research foregoes the spatial forms and relations through which the labor occurs. On the other hand, when the spaces of digital labor are considered, it is usually done through its “absolute” spaces that rely on Euclidean geometries. In this chapter, I argue that a relational spaces framework is needed to advance understanding of digital labor. A relational framework conceives of actors and practices as constituted through networks and connections, and space as produced for phenomena like digital labor. With relationality, digital labor is not confined by nation-state boundaries nor as occurring only at a simple location on the globe, but instead as constituted by intertwined positionalities that span the globe. A relational spatial framework also enables an analysis of digital labor as immaterial, cognitive, attentional, and symbolic labor, rather than as a discrete, remunerated act.