Work and the Data Economy: On Abstraction and Contempt

Abstract

The 2024 joint meeting of the Society for Economic Anthropology and the Society for the Anthropology of Work took the theme of “Work and the Data Economy.” The articles in this special issue, first presented at the meeting, explore the datafication of ethnographic settings not conventionally associated with high-tech or knowledge work. In this introduction, we argue that datafication is a key technology of abstraction that aggregates and transforms the contextual particularities of the world into countable, computationally tractable representations. These transformations are often explicitly or implicitly contemptuous of the work practices they abstract from. Reading the issue through the themes of abstraction and contempt, we highlight the emerging shifts in the organization, valuation, and control of labor that the articles collectively reveal.