Caring Technologies: Confronting Invisible Work in Digital Capitalism

ABSTRACT In recent years, critical studies on digital platforms have emphasized that contemporary capitalism increasingly exploits the relational and cognitive faculties of human beings as sources of value. At the same time, activist projects are emerging in order to challenge the logics of commodification, individualization and accumulation that govern digital capitalism, being grounded in values that aim to promote visibility of labor and cooperation. This article contributes the notion of “caring technologies” where care is employed as a critical lens able to uncover the kinds of productive work made invisible by capitalist logics governing mainstream digital platforms and as a value for designing digital technologies aiming at challenging these very logics. By drawing on feminist theories about domestic work, we stress the analytical and interventionist character of care insofar as it sheds light on the forms of invisible work that allows the productive system to function and a politics that values social and economic relations usually neglected in the capitalist system. Ultimately, the article elaborates on a politics of caring to confront digital capitalism, transforming care into a logic that informs activist interventions which value agential and inalienable aspects characterizing the diverse forms of labor mediated by digital technologies.