This review by Lilly Irani has now been published in Critical AI at this link https://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-ai/article/doi/10.1215/2834703X-12096009/406201/Algorithms-of-Resistance-The-Everyday-Fight; an extract is pasted in below. If your institution lacks access to Critical AI please encourage them to subscribe. If you are an independent scholar please write to criticalai@sas.rutgers.edu.
EXCTRACT:
The story of the gig economy is often portrayed as a tale of David and Goliath—workers and platform designers—struggling over digitally mediated communication, labor, and politics.
Stories of resistance matter. Resistance reveals the fissures of systems, their emergent logics, and the political potentials among those impacted by them. However, when do acts of resistance act as a palliative, when do they challenge power structures, and when might they reinforce them?
These questions matter to me because I’ve spent fifteen years working with Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, first building and maintaining Turkopticon, a tool to share reviews of employers, and then transitioning the project into a worker-run advocacy organization. Over the years, I was asked whether helping workers review their employers really provided a means of resistance or merely served as a palliative to help workers survive bad platform working conditions. Bonini and Treré’s Algorithms of Resistance offers a theoretical way…