The Digital Factory: The Human Labor of Automation
数字工厂：自动化中的人类劳动
Authors: Moritz Altenried（莫里茨·阿尔滕里德）
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication Year: 2022
Pages: 223
About Book:
The Digital Factory reveals the hidden human labor that supports today’s digital capitalism.
The workers of today’s digital factory include those in Amazon warehouses, delivery drivers, Chinese gaming workers, Filipino content moderators, and rural American search engine optimizers. Repetitive yet stressful, boring yet often emotionally demanding, these jobs require little formal qualification, but can demand a large degree of skills and knowledge. This work is often hidden behind the supposed magic of algorithms and thought to be automated, but it is in fact highly dependent on human labor.
The workers of today’s digital factory are not as far removed from a typical auto assembly line as we might think. Moritz Altenried takes us inside today’s digital factories, showing that they take very different forms, including gig economy platforms, video games, and Amazon warehouses. As Altenried shows, these digital factories often share surprising similarities with factories from the industrial age. As globalized capitalism and digital technology continue to transform labor around the world, Altenried offers a timely and poignant exploration of how these changes are restructuring the social division of labor and its geographies as well as the stratifications and lines of struggle.
关于书籍：
《数字工厂》揭示了支撑当今数字资本主义的隐形人类劳动。
当今数字工厂的劳动者包括亚马逊仓库的员工、外卖骑手、中国的游戏从业者、菲律宾的内容审核员，以及美国农村的搜索引擎优化人员。这些工作虽然重复却充满压力，枯燥却往往在情感上要求极高；它们几乎不需要正式的资格认证，但可能需要大量的技能和知识。这种劳动通常隐藏在所谓的算法“魔力”之后，并被认为已经自动化，但实际上它高度依赖于人类劳动。
当今数字工厂的工人与典型的汽车装配线工人的距离并不像我们想象的那么远。莫里茨·阿尔滕里德带我们走进当今的数字工厂，展示了它们采取的截然不同的形式，包括零工经济平台、电子游戏和亚马逊仓库。正如阿尔滕里德所展示的，这些数字工厂通常与工业时代的工厂有着惊人的相似之处。随着全球化资本主义和数字技术继续改变全球的劳动，阿尔滕里德对这些变化如何重塑社会分工及其地理分布，以及分层和斗争线索进行了及时而深刻的探索。
About Author：
Moritz Altenried teaches at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany.
关于作者：
莫里茨·阿尔滕里德（Moritz Altenried）任教于德国柏林洪堡大学。
编译：刘 鑫
编辑：黄广生
