Digital Exploitation: Class-Relations in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1980

• In Event: 41021 - Student Forum Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 11: Intersectional Inequalities

Abstract

Why has it become increasingly difficult in the Bay Area for wage earners, public assistance recipients, and their dependents to gain access to basic needs like housing, food, education, etc since 1980? The digital transformation, along with other changes linked to neoliberalism, has increasingly made it difficult for wage earners, public assistance recipients, and their dependents in the Bay Area to access basic needs. While existing theories address the economic effects of the digital transformation, they often overlook how it has socially reshaped inequality. The ruling class in the Bay Area, centered around the information industry, developed digital technologies to organize human activity in new ways; they now collect profits by systematically exploiting “customers” or “users.” This new type of labor condition amounts to a digitally mediated system of in-kind rental exchange, between the ruling class and exploited class. This social system of exchange is entirely distinct from the wage, feudal, or slave system of exchange. Current scholarship does not adequately explain how the new social relations of the digital age are connected to class-based society as a distinct system for generating profit. This study explains these changes by mapping class-relations and its consequences in the Bay Area, by using census data and photoethnographic evidence. A more precise framework of class is used, that focuses on dispossession from the means of social reproduction, which applies to any class-based society. Changes in the Bay Area are important in four main ways; there are new forms of dispossession, reduced access to basic needs for wage earners, public assistance recipients, and their dependents, heightened competition in society, and increased division within each class based on diverse experiences affecting human well-being. The observations made are partly consequences of a volatile process internal to the new social system of exploitation. These findings provide an explanation for why wage earners, public assistance recipients, and their dependents struggle to gain access to basic needs, which coincides with various other crisis at this point in history. The multiple historical developments since 1980 also created promising conditions to overcome inequality entirely.

Author

• Genie Sullivan, University of California Berkeley