What makes a platform worker? In her recent talk, Infrastructures and Imaginaries: Reproducing Workers in the Platform Economy, Kylie Jarrett stressed the urgency to look beyond the platform to answer this question. Drawing on Marxist feminist thought and social reproduction theory, Jarrett argues that digital labour does not just happen on platforms. To be truly understood requires a framework that also considers households, families, identities, dependencies, resources, and informal networks of support and resistance —many of which lie outside the conventional scope of digital labour analysis.
Centring the domestic sphere and broader social environments, Jarrett builds on the work of scholars like Silvia Federici to challenge the Marxian understandings of productive and unproductive labour. Reproductive labour, largely unpaid and invisibilized, is not only essential but productive. Here, Jarrett refers to the Marxist example of John Milton writing Paradise Lost as an illustration of the distinction between productive and unproductive labour. This, Jarrett points out, overlooks the productive force of unpaid domestic labour—like that of Milton’s daughter, who transcribed the entire poem.
Henry Fuseli. Milton Dictating to His Daughter,1794. The Art Institute of Chicago.
Using the context of the Irish platform economy, Jarrett illustrates how platform workers are shaped by complex external forces—immigration policy, housing precarity, and racism among them. Take the example of Brazilian delivery riders in Dublin: subject to anti-immigrant sentiment and violence, many are forming communities of support to identify unsafe neighbourhoods and also engage in multiplatform labour, supplementing their delivery income by renting their own rooms on Airbnb. These dynamics, Jarrett argues, cannot be understood through platform analysis alone. Instead, she calls for platform research that goes beyond the platform, using the broader lens of social reproduction theory to understand dynamics both inside and outside of work. This, Jarrett states, is vital to understand lived experience of digital labour.
📚 Interested in learning more? Look out for the forthcoming Sage Handbook of Digital Labour, edited by Ergin Bulut, Julie Chen, CLCF co-lead Rafael Grohmann, and Kylie Jarrett.
Biography: Kylie Jarrett is Professor in the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin. She is author of Digital Labor (2022) and Feminism, Labour, and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife (2016) and co-author of NSFW: Sex, Humor and Risk in Social Media (2019) and Google and the Culture of Search (2013). She is also editor of the new journal Dialogues in Digital Society.
CLCF Co-Director & Assistant Professor
Dr. Daphne Rena Idiz (she/her) is Assistant Professor in Film and Media Industries at York University. Her research investigates how media industries, cultural policy frameworks, and production cultures respond to and shape technological change, with a particular focus onstreaming and generative AI (GenAI).
CLCF Co-Director & Assistant Professor
Rafael Grohmann is a Co-lead and Co-Director of the Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) cluster and an Assistant Professor of Media Studies (Critical Platform Studies) at the University of Toronto. Rafael is the leader of the DigiLabour initiative and founding editor of the Platforms & Society journal.
