Whatever one might think of the morals of executives at Uber, Amazon, and many, many companies like them, few set out to actively create such conditions for their workers. Nor is this a simple return to the robber barons and industrial tyrants of the nineteenth century. To the capitalist ideology of maximum profit has been added the possibilities of technological opacity, with which naked greed can be clothed in the inhuman logic of the machine. Both Amazon and Uber wield technological obscurity as a weapon. Behind a few pixels on Amazon’s homepage are hidden the labour of thousands of
...more
