At the turn of the 21^st century, people started using a range of new technologies to measure things about themselves. Alongside age-old measures like weight and height, personal access to new information previously reserved for privileged authorities like doctors and security forces became available – from blood sugar levels to local crime rates. But by the same token, personal data also began to be shared in ways that allowed others to see what might be considered ‘private’ activities, like our movements on the roads and even in our offices. What is at stake in this rise of ‘social quantification’? Are there things that should be left uncounted? And what does the trend toward quantification in the workplace say about the global political economy, and the conditions within which many individuals must make their living?

Digitally precarious workers

Digitally quantified workplaces are located along a continuum from a virtual platform where algorithms determine what work you have and what work will be removed from you (in competition with other workers) to the individual worker in an office whose activities are tracked, monitored, surveilled, and whose work is intensified by the automated dimensions of such technologies. These are driven by a new cadre of specialists and inventors that develop and implement technologies to measure labour, and are overseen by an increasingly invisible management, which sometimes becomes entirely mechanic.

Humans are accustomed to being tool bearers, but what happens when machines become tool bearers? Tracking and monitoring technologies appear to provide objective data on human capabilities, but this claim elides their social context. Data is treated as a neutral arbiter and judge, and can become easily prioritized over qualitative judgements in key performance indicator management systems and digitalized client-based relationships, rendering people as little more than a set of empirically-verifiable outputs and transactions. Unrealistic expectations fostered by a machine-like image of labour productivity can lead to a sense of permanent inadequacy. This is especially pernicious in a context where workers are made interchangeable and replaceable – precisely the features that characterize precarious work, and for which the technologies of quantification has been readily adopted. Human possibilities are arbitrarily closed off by the reification of measurements which are, in circular fashion, measuring the very system they constitute.

What’s at stake, and can we resist?

Computer generated data is expected to be a reliable, neutral aid. But this assumed neutrality of data is precisely what is at stake in workplace power relations, where workers are increasingly made disposable by this ‘profane’ referencing system. For instance, reputation in the online labour market has become incredibly important. Online platform work is largely reliant on the ‘big data’ that workers produce about themselves. People actively cultivate online reputations so as to attract further work. Such unpaid ‘self-promotion’ can foster pressure on workers to be (seen to be) productive all the time. Problems that arise, such as the obstruction of newcomers and difficulties of entrance, can precipitate a closed loop of client/worker relationships. The logic of algorithmic reputation acquisition further penalizes non-standard workers and leads to unequal life chances. Irregular career patterns can also result from the time out of work for reproductive domestic labour, maternity leave, physical illness and mental health issues.

Digitalized quantification of work is on the rise and researchers should be aware of the risks it poses to all workers today and the possibilities for taking a stance against these trends. Frederic Lordon’s Willing Slaves of Capital looks to the work of Spinoza and Marx to ask why people continue to serve capital and have not overcome it, given its abuses. The answer is that joy and desire have been appropriated by capital to keep people invested in the system – think in the contemporary moment of the reward provided by Facebook ‘likes’, or Instagram followers. Focusing on the resistant potential of affect (a non-conscious experience of intensity) he argues that a ‘last straw’ can trigger the multitude to revolt, whence institutional power can no longer contain people’s ‘sadness’ and a point of indignation is reached. And so Lordon posits that “the passions that work to keep individuals subordinate to institutional relations can also, at times, reconfigure themselves to work against those same relations”. It is not to the conscious mind that he looks for change, then, but to the redirection of those deeper forces wherein “collective human life reproduces itself”.