Digital Labour in Global Marketscapes

While globalized digital labour has been happening for many decades, there is a steady ongoing shift to digital labour being performed for free by consumers worldwide, in multiple ways, that enhance the bottom lines of mega-tech companies that own social media platforms and artificial intelligence (AI) platforms. Without the benefits of capturing the uncompensated digital labour of billions of global consumers, the big tech companies would be in very serious trouble—indeed, most may collapse. We present here a brief history of digital labour, including pioneering research on digital labour that happened in the media studies field for over a decade. We then provide an overview of global technology platforms where digital labour of consumers occurs, especially in a world where technology platforms are globalizing very rapidly. We offer conceptual frames that help to understand the global-scape of digital labour at present and in the near-term emergent future, especially in the Global South.