cybertariat

English

Etymology

Blend of cyber- +‎ proletariat. Coined by researcher Ursula Huws in a 2000 essay (see quotation below).

Noun

cybertariat (singular only)

(Marxism, neologism) A proletarian class who perform repetitive, unskilled, and low-paid digital labour (such as moderating online platforms or click farming).
- 2000, Ursula Huws, “The Making of a Cybertariat? Virtual Work in a Real World”, in Leo Panitch, Colin Leys, editors, Socialist Register, Working Classes, Global Realities, London: The Merlin Press, →ISBN, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 20:
  It is apparent that a new cybertariat is in the making. Whether it will perceive itself as such is another matter.
- [2014 May 2, Jordan Pearson, “Not Even Radical Communist Literature Is Immune to Copyright Battles”, in VICE‎^[1], archived from the original on 2023-11-06:
  On the eve of May Day, also known as International Workers' Day, all 50 volumes of the Marx and Engels Collected Works (MECW) were removed from the Marxists Internet Archive at Marxists.org at the request of the publisher, Lawrence & Wishart, igniting the cybertariat's fury.
  A jocular use.]
- 2021 May 27, Jenna Burrell, Marion Fourcade, “The Society of Algorithms”, in Annual Review of Sociology, volume 47, San Mateo, C.A.: Annual Reviews, →DOI, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 219:
  The work of matching drivers to ride requests on ridesharing apps, scoring web pages for quality, correcting digital maps, tagging and annotating videos, double-checking virtual assistants' responses, correcting biases, and moderating social media postings all demands, to this day, a multitude of real humans in the loop. What stands beneath the fetish of AI is a global digital assembly line of silent, invisible men and women, often laboring in precarious conditions, many in postcolonies of the Global South. A new class of workers stands opposite the coding elite: the cybertariat.

Related terms

cybertarian

Translations

French: cybertariat m
Polish: cybertariat (pl) m