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Cyberboss:The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work
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How technologies of organization are redrawing the lines of class struggle
Across the world, algorithms are changing the nature of work. Nowhere is this clearer than in the logistics and distribution sectors, where workers are instructed, tracked and monitored by increasingly dystopian management technologies.
In Cyberboss, Craig Gent takes us into workplaces where algorithms rule to excavate the politics behind the newest form of managerial power. Combining worker testimony and original research on companies such as Amazon, Uber, and Deliveroo, the cutting edge of algorithmic management technology, this book reveals the sometimes unexpected effects these new techniques have on work, workers and managers. Gent advances an alternative politics of resistance in the face of digital control.
Reviews
Craig Gent has given working people a great gift with this book. In a time of near-worship of the disembodied algorithm, he has illuminated the various ways that "cyberbosses" control - and more importantly, fail to control - today's workers. He cuts the algorithm down to size, reminding us that the most impenetrable tech is made by humans, and can be broken by humans as well. An absolutely indispensable read for anyone organizing, working, or indeed just trying to survive in the 21st century.
Algorithms and AIs may or may not take our jobs, but they are now definitely directing and disciplining our work. This is the message of Craig Gent's highly readable, urgently argued and carefully researched study of the digital automation of management, a vital book for labour activists, cyber-scholars, and all those fighting high-tech capitalisms increasingly inhuman power.
Algorithmic management is a growing reality of the modern workplace. Craig Gent provides an important investigation into the power and politics that drive it, and how workers can challenge the ways it's used against them.
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Left to its own devices, automation will not "steal our jobs" - at least not the very worst of them. Rather, it will increasingly consign humans to precarious drudgery while it takes over the role of manager. Craig Gent enriches a growing literature that punctures tech boosterism on both the left and the right by developing a political analysis of algorithmic management that makes it fundamentally into a question of power - within the workplace, of course, but above all over machines and our own lives.
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The 'algorithmic Panopticon' is already here, argues journalist Gent in this foreboding debut exploration of 'stringent' managerial practices that rely on AI. Through firsthand accounts from employees, Gent shows how AI isn’t replacing workers but monitoring and controlling them.
Publishers Weekly