Tech labor

Abstract

effects of a long history of large tech companies taking up increasing space on the geopolitical stage. Indeed, the current era suggests that techno-empires built on a legacy of colonial expansion and racial capitalism [2] cannot be viewed separately from techno-nationalism, typified by the U.S.-China spat over Huawei and TikTok. What does national sovereignty even mean when private entities like Alibaba, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Huawei, and Tencent base their business models on the collection and exploitation of unprecedented citizen and consumer data across the globe? Moreover, what does the rise of such techno-empires mean for the millions of people around the world whose labor sustains our collective digitally dependent cultures, but who often do not benefit from their profits? What kind of future do these shifts portend for tech labor?When we speak of "tech labor," we are not simply referring to white-collar workers in the headquarters of the largest global firms. We are talking about all who work within the supply chain of technological productionfrom the "creusers" in the Congo [3] who descend into the