The rise of neoliberalism as a dominant political paradigm in the 1970s and the emergence of platform capitalism in the 21st century resulted in new areas of employment and a decrease in the relative numbers of workers employed in traditional working-class jobs. Data work, that is, the labor that goes into producing data for so-called “intelligent” systems, not only brings with it unprecedented forms of exploitation but, crucially, possibilities for organization and resistance in globally networked economies.
The Data Workers’ Inquiry is a community-based research project in which data workers join us as community researchers to lead their own inquiry in their respective workplaces. The community researchers guide the direction of the research, such that it is oriented towards their needs and goals of building workplace power but supported by formally trained qualitative researchers.
We adapt Marx’s 1880 Workers’ Inquiry to the phenomenon of data workers who are both essential for contemporary AI applications yet precariously employed—if at all—and politically dispersed.
