Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work
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Craig Gent
Publisher: Verso
Year: 2024
Format: Paperback
Size: 257 pages
ISBN: 9781839768552
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How technologies of organization are redrawing the lines of class struggle
Across the world, algorithms are changing the nature of work. Nowhere is this clearer than in the logistics and distribution sectors, where workers are instructed, tracked and monitored by increasingly dystopian management technologies.
In Cyberboss, Craig Gent takes us into workplaces where algorithms rule to excavate the politics behind the newest form of managerial power. Combining worker testimony and original research on companies such as Amazon, Uber, and Deliveroo, the cutting edge of algorithmic management technology, this book reveals the sometimes unexpected effects these new techniques have on work, workers and managers. Gent advances an alternative politics of resistance in the face of digital control.
Across the world, algorithms are changing the nature of work. Nowhere is this clearer than in the logistics and distribution sectors, where workers are instructed, tracked and monitored by increasingly dystopian management technologies.
In Cyberboss, Craig Gent takes us into workplaces where algorithms rule to excavate the politics behind the newest form of managerial power. Combining worker testimony and original research on companies such as Amazon, Uber, and Deliveroo, the cutting edge of algorithmic management technology, this book reveals the sometimes unexpected effects these new techniques have on work, workers and managers. Gent advances an alternative politics of resistance in the face of digital control.
What People Are Saying
"Craig Gent has given working people a great gift with this book. In a time of near-worship of the disembodied algorithm, he has illuminated the various ways that "cyberbosses" control - and more importantly, fail to control - today's workers. He cuts the algorithm down to size, reminding us that the most impenetrable tech is made by humans, and can be broken by humans as well. An absolutely indispensable read for anyone organizing, working, or indeed just trying to survive in the 21st century."Â Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
"Algorithms and AIs may or may not take our jobs, but they are now definitely directing and disciplining our work. This is the message of Craig Gent's highly readable, urgently argued and carefully researched study of the digital automation of management, a vital book for labour activists, cyber-scholars, and all those fighting high-tech capitalisms increasingly inhuman power."Â Nick Dyer Witheford, author of Cyber-Marx and Cyber-Proletariat, and, with Alessendra Mularoni, of The Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech and Planetary Crisis
"Algorithmic management is a growing reality of the modern workplace. Craig Gent provides an important investigation into the power and politics that drive it, and how workers can challenge the ways it's used against them."Â Paris Marx, author of Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation
"Left to its own devices, automation will not "steal our jobs" - at least not the very worst of them. Rather, it will increasingly consign humans to precarious drudgery while it takes over the role of manager. Craig Gent enriches a growing literature that punctures tech boosterism on both the left and the right by developing a political analysis of algorithmic management that makes it fundamentally into a question of power - within the workplace, of course, but above all over machines and our own lives."Â Rodrigo Nunes, University of Essex, author of Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation
"The 'algorithmic Panopticon' is already here, argues journalist Gent in this foreboding debut exploration of 'stringent' managerial practices that rely on AI. Through firsthand accounts from employees, Gent shows how AI isn’t replacing workers but monitoring and controlling them." Publishers Weekly
"A powerful and timely excavation of how new workplace technologies are in fact making workers of all stripes less free."Â Marc Kohlbry, Boundary2
"Algorithms and AIs may or may not take our jobs, but they are now definitely directing and disciplining our work. This is the message of Craig Gent's highly readable, urgently argued and carefully researched study of the digital automation of management, a vital book for labour activists, cyber-scholars, and all those fighting high-tech capitalisms increasingly inhuman power."Â Nick Dyer Witheford, author of Cyber-Marx and Cyber-Proletariat, and, with Alessendra Mularoni, of The Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech and Planetary Crisis
"Algorithmic management is a growing reality of the modern workplace. Craig Gent provides an important investigation into the power and politics that drive it, and how workers can challenge the ways it's used against them."Â Paris Marx, author of Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation
"Left to its own devices, automation will not "steal our jobs" - at least not the very worst of them. Rather, it will increasingly consign humans to precarious drudgery while it takes over the role of manager. Craig Gent enriches a growing literature that punctures tech boosterism on both the left and the right by developing a political analysis of algorithmic management that makes it fundamentally into a question of power - within the workplace, of course, but above all over machines and our own lives."Â Rodrigo Nunes, University of Essex, author of Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation
"The 'algorithmic Panopticon' is already here, argues journalist Gent in this foreboding debut exploration of 'stringent' managerial practices that rely on AI. Through firsthand accounts from employees, Gent shows how AI isn’t replacing workers but monitoring and controlling them." Publishers Weekly
"A powerful and timely excavation of how new workplace technologies are in fact making workers of all stripes less free."Â Marc Kohlbry, Boundary2
About the Author
Craig Gent is a writer, editor and researcher. He is a director at Novara Media, where he has worked for over ten years. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Warwick, and his work has been published in Jacobin, Vice and the Independent.
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