Bossware| Automated Monitoring in the Workplace: The Devolution of Recognition—Afterword

Abstract

This afterword situates the phenomenon of “bossware” within the current tendency of automation to facilitate processes of “social recession.” This latter term refers to the ways in which recent developments in media technology facilitate tracking and monitoring at a distance. Remote work and the gig economy demonstrate how these technologies promise to reconfigure the firm in ways that reinforce broader logics of casualization and subcontracting that characterize “flexible” accumulation. Managing large-scale, flexible, distanced employment requires automated forms of recognition that now stand in for face-to-face relationships in the workplace. As in the case of the consumer-facing side of the online economy, social recession does not eliminate sociality but runs it through platforms that automatically collect and process interaction data. The result is what this article describes as the “devolution” of recognition—a term that is increasingly associated with automated forms of biometric identification and tracking.