The Digital Underclass Glitch: Theorising a Digital Labour Public through Fiction

Acceleration is central to the stories told of the network. This temporal pace is upheld by a digital labour public, optimised and sustained by the material and immaterial labour of endlessly replaceable and re-programmable human and nonhuman actors (Terranova 2000). Whilst users and their labour have become protagonists in both contemporary literature and digital media theory, this sentiment is less often explored from the perspective of the members of the digital underclass who are entangled in uneven power structures. The network privileges those classified as human, at the expense of not-quite-human, globalised and diffracted bodies. This classification becomes a dominant mode of recognition for the digital underclass, functioning as a form of bio-political control necessary to the manifestations of the digital labour public, and an aesthetic violence which maintains the normative genres of class and race. In turn, digital labour has become an 'empty signifer', as Alessandro Gandini (2020) writes, that forgoes the geographies of relations within the network infrastructure. Through a reading of Little Eyes by Samantha Schweblin and The Employees by Olga Ravn, this article frames fiction as particularly suitable to conceptualise the digital labour public as an infrastructure of affect that maps uneven vectors and adjacent spaces. A mode of relationality between members of the digital underclass, and users, emerges that is centred around what I call the ‘glitch of ambivalence’.