Next to Marx’s understanding of exploitation that is popularly known, a new form of exploitation comes with algorithms.

Neither traditional nor algorithmic exploitation has much to do with working hard and suffering. Instead, exploitation is an inevitable part of doing business, by companies, and, ultimately by capitalism. It simply means extracting surplus-value from workers to create (more) profits.

To put it rather crudely, a profit is the difference between the amount raised through a sale of a product and the amount it costs to manufacture this product.

As long as this cost is lower than the price of a product or service, profits are made. In this zero-sum game of “I win, you lose”, companies are forced to push for low wages as this lowers the costs and thereby, increases profits.

This is the raison d’etre of capitalism – simple but ingenious. Algorithmic exploitation assists management by turbo-charging profits through lowering the cost of doing business. This drives the introduction and use of algorithmic systems and ultimately the setting up of algorithmic management. It promises higher profits.

Much of this also comes as a process of labor invisibilization. This also occurs, perhaps even more so, inside the so-called platform economy. Invisibilization makes workers invisible, unseen, and unrecognized. Workers are simply made to vanish – never to be seen again.

Corporate mass media uses Invisibilization heavily when for example, talking about the Roman Empire. No slaves are seen or mentioned even though slaves were the economic foundations of the Empire and were those who had to build the Roman monuments still standing today. They remain unmentioned and invisible.

Similarly, the Industrialization seem to have happened without the exploitation of labor, without child labor, without rampant poverty, and widespread starvation. Made invisible is also the repulsive misery of the working class.

Invisibilization focuses on monuments, the so-called captains of industry, technical achievements, etc. The motto is: “everything under the sun” except those who made all this possible: labor. This is Invisibilization. Just like the slaves, labor is also made invisible.

At least since the advent of the so-called Industrial Revolution that, in fact, took many decades, capitalism as a mode of production remains inextricably linked to the exploitation of labor. Yet, corporate mass media and the apostles of Managerialism like to obscure workers’ contribution to profits.

So again, this also makes workers – invisible. Yet, the process of the invisibilization of labor is relevant for the extraction of surplus-value and for profit-making – even in today’s platform economy.

Making the capital-vs.-labor opposition invisible even operates in one of the newest sectors of the economy, engaged in platform work.

In platform work, a system of time-based control engineered via algorithms has been established which contributes significantly to the exploitation of workers, often via underpaid and unpaid labor time.

Most explicitly, exploitation via platform work occurs through the way in which algorithms allocate work tasks and monitors platform workers.

Additionally, algorithmic management links this to the expansion of non-remunerated labor time. Yet, this time remains, nonetheless, imperative. Unpaid labor time starts from accessing and then completing the work tasks for which platforms “employ” workers.

Meanwhile, the process of labor invisibilization – making workers invisible – captures unpaid labor time that these workers are forced to undertake. Workers are required to provide platforms with free labor to carry out the platform’s work. In short, platform labor is an omnipresent and effective arrangement that turbo-charges workforce exploitation.

In the history of capitalism, capturing and exploiting unpaid time is not new. Instead, it might be as old as capitalism itself. Ever since, the struggle of workers over the capture and exploitation of work time remains vital to workers and how capital relates to labor.

Historically, the struggle over working time also involved the disciplining of workers that came with the usual trimmings (read: brutalities) meted out by management. Factory discipline was enforced using whips, ropes, sticks, batons, etc.

This is capitalism’s and management’s hidden histories of exploitation and adjacent brutalities that, if made visible, would get in the way when the apostles of Managerialism sell management as a benevolent, caring, well-meaning, and a compassionate institution.

In reality, the exploitation of labor and preferably the use of un- and under-paid working time remains rather undoubtably key aspects of capitalist production and corporate profits.

Worse, this even applies to online platform that operate on the premise of non-geographical mobilization labor that is now moved onto online platforms. Under algorithmic management, the standard working time of 9-to-5 simply disappears.

Meanwhile, invisibilization under platform work manifests itself in the expansion of the quota of unpaid labor time that workers are forced to do. In the meantime, the neoliberal ideology claims that they contribute “freely” to a company. Living on welfare in the neo-liberal state is so much fun.

The entire process shows the highly effective character of managerial invisibilization that takes place in platform work. Worse, it occurs via the remote control of algorithms as applied by algorithmic management.

In all that, algorithmic management can be seen as a despotic work regime in which workers are pressed into a relation of socio-economic dependency towards the platform with which a worker collaborates.

Beyond that, such platforms have a middle function between workers and their clients. The main distinction is between two kinds of platform work. Those that:

• deliver their work online (crowd work through, for example, Amazon’s Turk), and
• those who deliver onsite (work on-demand via apps).

Workers at Amazon Mechanical Turk do crowd work while food delivery couriers work for on-demand systems via apps. Both do unpaid work.

Yet, unpaid labor generally consists of unremunerated but work-related activities, such as, for example, time spent waiting or searching for work tasks or orders, for travelling between orders. All of them are performed by workers alongside their paid tasks.

Worse, all algorithmic platform architectures rely on the execution of these unpaid activities that allow workers to access the part of work that is paid.

The exploitation of un- and under-paid platform labor is directly and inextricably linked to the incorporation of digital-algorithmic mediation technologies that run the labor platform’s process of exploitation.

Algorithmic systems in the hands of algorithmic management allow for new and turbo-charged ways of hyper-standardization, dehumanization, work-intensification, algorithmic quantification, and the Orwellian Uber-surveillance of labor.

To guide much of this “for” algorithmic management, the singly most cutting-edge invention in the world of online platform work is used: the algorithm. Put simply, it is a mathematically-based mode of work control leading to so-called “optimization mechanisms” (read: Uber-control) and performance ratings that can be, and usually are, used against workers.

Algorithmic control systems heighten worker-control process through analyzing and using workers’ performance ratings, metrics, and data collected from clients and users to reach managerial decisions on the allocation of work tasks and the disciplining of workers.

The introduction of these algorithmic control systems has provided platforms with two key rewards that were unavailable to traditional management in the past:

1. Managerial Control: The vertical control of the workforce can now be mechanized, automated and that, in turn, strengthens algorithmic management while shrinking or eliminating middle-management.
2. Managerial Obligations: A perceived absence of many workplace obligations that can also be used against workers. This renders workers to be a tool, a resource, and an implement. The removal of obligations allows algorithmic management, even more than under traditional management, to cast workers to be used and disposed of, at will, by algorithmic management.

This is made worse by the standardization of the (mis)treatment of workers by algorithmic management. The combination of algorithmic control of workers with the possibility of logging onto the platform from any place with a stable internet connection allows the inclusion (and: exclusion!) of a broad range of highly flexible workers. This is the key to flexible despotism.

Workers can access platforms from their homes, internet cafés, and even from their mobile phones on a rainy corner during mid-winter. Yet, they can also be denied access by management – remotely.

For profit-seeking algorithmic management, the promise of flexibility unlocks new pools of workers to be exploited in an entirely new way.

For the invisibilization of workers as engineered by the corporate bosses of for-profit platforms, these workers are largely made invisible. At best, they are a function in a mathematical equation run by an algorithm as directed by management.

Worse, platform bosses insinuate only to operate a database via which “supply and demand” is organized. This too, smokescreens the existence of despotic algorithmic management.

Even worse, algorithmic managers are able to crank up and tighten control over the users (read: workers). Simultaneously, corporate bosses like to present platform workers as seemingly “self-employed”.

Online platforms aid the managerial hallucination that there is no formal dependency between a company and its workers.

In a second step, managerial platform apparatchiks imply that these workers are without the protections of health and safety and workplace rights of various kinds. This also excludes paid leave and employer contributions to pensions and social insurance.

In short, the combination of informal platform work with managerially driven algorithmic Uber-control not just leads to techno-stress but also to algorithmic-managerial despotism, and the exploitation of both un- and under-paid labor.

Algorithmic platforms also achieve additional network effects as they produce higher volumes of business transactions than their non-algorithmic competitors.

Put simply, the higher the number of requests and the higher platform participation, are, the higher the chances of workers obtaining work.

Simultaneously, the higher the growth in the numbers of workers, the more profitable a platform company becomes. Making platform profits works in two ways:

1. the higher the number of online transactions on which companies charge their fees, the more profits can be made; and worse,
2. this, in turn, increases the ability of platform firms to “decrease” the fees awarded to its online workers for each transaction. As a result: profits go up.

As a not unwelcomed side-effect of algorithmic management, this also increases the reserved army of workers looking for access to online platforms.

In the end, capitalism remains a rather stable mode of production based on the extraction of surplus-labor to achieve profits. For decades, capitalism has shown to be rather inventive.

Still, one of the most important inventions are algorithmic systems that substantially increase the profits of online platform firms. Algorithmic systems crank up exploitation and heighten profit-making.

On the labor side of the equation, algorithmic unfreedom and exploitation are experienced in the complex world of algorithmic management.

Online platform corporations run by algorithmic management still rely on unfree labor. In addition, under online platforms, labor is no longer asphyxiated in a defined and worse, a confined workspace like a factory or office.

Yet, labor and the exploitation thereof remain embedded in capitalism’s global political economy that is ideologically flanked by neo-liberalism’s hallucination that workers do this out of their free will. Today, many philosophers agree that there is no such thing as a “free will”.

Under the neoliberal ideology, labor is framed as being totally free in seeking or not seeking employment. This is a rather common myth that ideologically stabilizes capitalism. Yet, alternatives like suffering on meager welfare rations, being homeless, and being abused as a slacker and scrounger, etc., forces people into work.

Under algorithmic systems, workers are denigrated to being merely a customer to an App that is run by an algorithm.

Even under algorithmic management and multinational online platform corporations, capitalism still exploits under- and un-paid (read: coerced) labor.

Algorithmic capitalism has merely turbo-charged the exploitation of workers by framing workers as independent customer of online Apps and by reducing wage costs and managerial overheads.

As so often, this creates the raison d’etre of algorithmic management which ultimately aims to be management without middle-management. Top-management alone runs the exploitation of workers – aided by algorithmic systems.

---

Born on the foothills of Castle Frankenstein, Thomas Klikauer (PhD) is the author of 1,000 publications, and a book on Managerialism and The Language of Managerialism.

---