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Protocols of Production: The Absent Factories of Digital Capitalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 September 2024

LUCAS G. PINHEIRO Open the ORCID record for LUCAS G. PINHEIRO [Opens in a new window]
LUCAS G. PINHEIRO*
Affiliation:
Bard College, United States
*
Lucas G. Pinheiro, Assistant Professor of Politics, Bard College, United States, [email protected]
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Abstract

Contrary to dominant theories of postindustrial society, this article advances an alternative account of digital capitalism that repositions the factory—so often associated with industrial manufacturing—as a defining yet largely overlooked feature of the internet economy. I pursue this claim by interpreting data centers and microwork platforms as digital embodiments of the factory system through a historical theory of the factory model that reconstructs the consistent mechanisms of control and extraction that have distinguished factories as consolidated infrastructures of production since their inception. I define these “protocols of production” as formal rules deployed by a combination of technological systems, spatial arrangements, and management regimes devised to fragment tasks, discipline workers, and supervise production. By probing the socioeconomic consequences of the factory’s algorithmic redeployment and adaptation to global data production, I contend that these absent factories have amplified alienation and precarity as structural social qualities of the digital labor process.

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Research Article
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American Political Science Review , First View , pp. 1 - 14
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Political Science Association

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