Abstract
Left to our own devices: Coping with insecure work in a digital age by Julia Ticona provides a critical examination of the role of modern digital technologies in shaping the dynamics and outcomes of precarious work. Anchored in comprehensive and comparative ethnographic interviews of 100 independent workers from different wage strata across four major urban centers in the United States, it presents an incisive exploration of the everyday digital practices of both high- and low-wage workers in the gig economy. Nonetheless, Ticona’s book sheds light on the inequities experienced and constantly navigated by high- and low-wage labor workers in an increasingly digital economy.
The book charts and examines the diverse and strategic practices of workers utilizing digital technologies to access and navigate an often unstable and precarious work environment. In Chapter 1, Ticona introduces the notion of the “digital hustle”, a collective tactic employed by both high- and low-wage contingent workers. This strategy encompasses access to employment through work schedule management and self-branding. Here, Ticona underscores the digital hustle as an entry point to dive deep into how workers access paid work and obtain technical training. Unpacking the politics of the gig economy in the digital era is well captured in the succeeding two chapters. Ticona discusses the digital hustle as a tangible phenomenon that perpetuates, rather than rectifies, inequalities in an insecure labor market. For instance, she reveals how low-wage workers must navigate exploitative marketplaces and perform invisible labor to access mobile phones and Internet services (Chapter 2), while high-wage workers must mobilize their social and economic capital to ensure and sustain ubiquitous connectivity (Chapter 3). The fourth chapter identifies forms of resistance, including how low-income workers adopt a flexible absent presence to resist managerial control, while high-income workers intentionally abstain from technology usage to limit affective engagement. This differentiation from collective labor resistance, as discussed by various scholars (e.g., Morales-Muñoz & Roca, 2022; Wood et al., 2023), underscores the notion that technologies can serve as the “weapon of the weak” (p. 87), especially for contingent workers. The concluding chapter offers a critical reflection on interrogating the influences of broader institutions and sociotechnical systems on inequalities in the gig economy.
Ticona’s work is a great addition to the growing body of research on understanding the impacts of digital and emerging technologies on the “future of work.” Deploying ethnographic approaches, the book delves into the complex dynamics of entangled professional and personal lives of gig economy workers, providing rich data and critical insights on everyday practices of agency, labor, exploitation, and negotiations. Significantly, Ticona’s comparative approach contributes to advancing ways of identifying and examining the stratification of contemporary and insecure work environments in a digital age. Indeed, researchers in the fields of platform studies, media and communication studies, and sociology will find Left to our own devices: Coping with insecure work in a digital age an insightful and timely work on advancing our understanding of the formation and negotiation of technologically mediated and class-based inequalities in the gig economy.