This article introduces the topic of radical care by providing a genealogy of care as a vital but underexamined praxis of radical politics that provides spaces of hope in precarious times. Following recent theoretical interventions into the importance of self-care despite its susceptibility to neoliberal co-optation, the potentialities of self-care may be expanded outward to include other forms that push back against structural disadvantage. Care contains radical promise through a grounding in autonomous direct action and nonhierarchical collective work. However, because radical care is inseparable from systemic inequality and power structures, it can also be used to coerce subjects into new forms of surveillance and unpaid labor, to make up for institutional neglect, and even to position some groups against others, determining who is worthy of care and who is not. With care reentering the zeitgeist as a reaction to today’s political climate, radical care engages histories of grassroots community action and negotiates neoliberal models for self-care. Studies of care thereby prompt us to consider how and when care becomes visible, valued, and necessary within broader social movements. To that end, the articles in this collection locate and analyze the mediated boundaries of what it means for individuals and groups to feel and provide care, survive, and even dare to thrive in environments that challenge their very existence. As the traditionally undervalued labor of caring becomes recognized as a key element of individual and community resilience, radical care provides a roadmap for envisioning an otherwise.

Vintage goods are valued for their nostalgic association with pre-digital modes of production, but their contemporary trafficking is increasingly organized by processes of platformization. The central component of what we call “listing labor in the digital vintage economy” is the online display of collectible merchandise, but listing labor also entails promoting sellers’ brands on social media and using sales platforms and other logistical media to manage inventory, process transactions, and handle shipments. Listing labor is performed by branded merchants and their employees alongside independent entrepreneurs. The digital vintage economy connects brick-and-mortar shops and resale supply chains organized around flea markets, thrift shops and charity bins, estate sales, and consigners, to online clearinghouses like eBay and Craigslist, and to social media and payment apps. In this article, we argue that listing labor in the digital vintage economy further develops the concept of “platform labor.” We focus on vintage clothes and vinyl records, dominated by women and men, respectively, to help us analyze divisions of listing labor organized by gender, race, age, and class. We draw upon 20 semi-structured interviews with shop owners and employees and on participant observation in independently owned clothing boutiques and record stores in several US cities. The digital vintage economy provides another angle for understanding how identity-based distinctions affect the opportunities associated with platform labor, and our account of listing labor highlights the need for studies of platformization that analyze its effects on specific local economies as well as on job markets and commercial sectors.

This article focuses on the role of circulated affect in crowdfunded funeral campaigns, which have attracted little scholarly attention so far. This study is based on content analysis of online campaigns (N = 50) and qualitative interviews (N = 10) with campaign supporters and initiators. Its aim is to connect crowdfunded funeral campaigns to the larger digital-sharing economy. The findings of the study suggest that in order to gather sufficient funds to cover funeral costs, individuals share emotionally evocative narratives and images with their social networks and an imagined Internet audience with the expectation of attracting compassion. The study shows that political movements, media coverage, and sharing on social media platforms are integral to the success of campaigns for socially marginal individuals. The article contributes to the growing study of crowdwork and finds persistent structural inequalities in crowdfunding campaigns, thereby contesting the ethos of the digital commons.

In order to increase efficiency, measure productivity, decrease risk, and generally maximize profits, many private enterprises monitor their employees. While “workplace surveillance,” a term used interchangeably with “employee monitoring” (Ball, 2010, p. 88) is an age-old practice, its contemporary methods in the United States have their roots in the transformation of the workforce in the mid-19th to early 21st centuries. When laborers began moving to cities to sell their time for wages, the focus of work and the workplace shifted from subsistence labor on farms to hourly and salaried work in the factories of the industrial revolution. Business in the United States turned into “big business;” at the end of the 19th century, as the railroads expanded their organizational reach, merchants with localized shops and market knowledge had to merge in order to remain competitive in a growing market. The mergers did not produce uniform organizational units automatically, and the modes of production and accounting within the combined company were often in disarray (Saval, 2014, p. 38). Once the production of goods and the methods of their transit exceeded the slower, human pace of labor, a control crisis emerged for employers who suddenly needed to process much more information to keep up with the industrial pace of production (Beniger, 1989, p. 169). The pressing question became: what structures and technologies can ensure efficiency and integrity in the organization of business and labor (Zureik, 2003, p. 48)? The innovations in information processing and communication technologies that developed to address this question were mainly directed at managing workers (Beniger, 1989, p. 169).

Employers often struggle to assess qualified applicants, particularly in contexts where they receive hundreds of applications for job openings. In an effort to increase efficiency and improve the process, many have begun employing new tools to sift through these applications, looking for signals that a candidate is "the best fit." Some companies use tools that offer algorithmic assessments of workforce data to identify the variables that lead to stronger employee performance, or to high employee attrition rates, while others turn to third party ranking services to identify the top applicants in a labor pool. Still others eschew automated systems, but rely heavily on publicly available data to assess candidates beyond their applications. For example, some HR managers turn to LinkedIn to determine if a candidate knows other employees or to identify additional information about them or their networks. Although most companies do not intentionally engage in discriminatory hiring practices (particularly on the basis of protected classes), their reliance on automated systems, algorithms, and existing networks systematically benefits some at the expense of others, often without employers even recognizing the biases of such mechanisms. The intersection of hiring practices and the Big Data phenomenon has not produced inherently new challenges. However, our current regulatory regimes may be ill-equipped to identify and address inequalities in datacentric hiring systems, amplifying existing issues.