¡°I¡¯ve been working until 1:00 am or later, then getting up at 8:00 am to continue working this week, but my mentor still pointed out a lot of problems that need to be reworked. But there¡¯s no space to escape, if I don¡¯t work harder, I would be laid off in the next quarter. I couldn¡¯t imagine if I lost this job, either I had a rich family to rely on or had some indispensable skills. Now there¡¯s massive laid-off everywhere due to the economic downturn, and it would be extremely hard to find another job if I¡¯m being dismissed. The most probable result of my life would be nothing.¡±
– Linda, a 26-year-old operation specialist in Tiktok, Shanghai

In China’s bustling urban centers, a significant number of young individuals are employed in Internet firms, driven by the desire for a more promising future characterized by secure employment and affordable housing. Linda¡¯s experienced colleagues at Tiktok, who worked diligently like her, underwent a transformation in their lives. Originating as diligent students from rural or small-town backgrounds as Linda, known as “,”(¡°Ð¡Õò×öÌâ¼Ò¡±) they excelled academically, performing well in entrance exams and securing places in top universities. While they lacked broader perspectives and social networks, they nonetheless successfully transitioned into urban elites with competitive salaries, stock shares and options from China¡¯s most valuable company in the early years, becoming firmly established in first-tier cities.

However, this once cherished aspiration has been shattered due to the end of rapid growth and the impossibility of significant salary advancements. The soaring property prices in China, especially in big cities, make it impractical for most people to purchase an apartment in such a metropolis, diminishing the chances of achieving such an exciting miracle. Returning to their smaller hometowns or cities is a challenging prospect for these individuals, primarily due to the limited Internet-related job opportunities outside major urban hubs such as Beijing and Shanghai. Furthermore, young individuals like Linda, who often belong to the first generation of college graduates in their families, face immense expectations of securing respectable employment and surpassing their parents’ financial achievements. These young people are swashed down by hopelessness.

Overtime pressure still grows under hopelessness. According to Chinese labor law, workers should not work more than eight hours a day or 40 hours a week, and overtime is restricted to 36 hours a month. However, staff in the Internet sector, especially at big tech firms, face unpaid compulsory overtime, . The pervasive in Chinese internet companies is exemplified by the widespread adoption of the (working from 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week) and the (work six days a week, every other week).  Despite the alarming occurrences of sudden due to long working hours, which serve as a warning to society, the common issue of excessive overtime work remains largely unchanged.

During my 2022 fieldwork conducted in Shanghai and Beijing, the two biggest and most developed cities in China, I encountered a significant number of young people working in Internet companies with different positions and salaries, who were all enduring excessive workloads, resulting in losing hope and an escalating level of pressure. This blog outlines how and why some young people who worked in Internet giants in China commonly with extremely long working hours, felt pressure under hopelessness. By analyzing the social and economic context of the post-COVID downturn in China, the findings illustrate how this pressure was connected to the fear of unemployment, the burden of maintaining high objectives after rapid growth, and the drive to maximize human resources, resulting in a hollow pressure amidst prevailing hopelessness.

¡°Frightened Birds¡± in Chinese Internet Companies

During the summer of 2021, Linda achieved success in the highly competitive job market after completing a master’s degree at a prestigious university in China. With a remarkable academic background and extensive internships in renowned internet companies, she excelled in multiple rounds of job interviews. Linda’s triumph came in the form of a job offer from Chinese Tiktok, a widely recognized internet firm and one of the top 5 companies in China. Moreover, Linda’s accomplishment was further highlighted by being offered a “special package,” indicating her exceptional qualifications and the provision of a higher salary in comparison to other graduates.

However, under the prestigious surface, Linda has been grappling with immense pressure ¨C ranging from performance pressure, long working hours pressure, to future development pressure, particularly since 2022. Shanghai, known as China¡¯s economic center and a global trade hub with endless opportunities, was deeply hurt by an unprecedented that lasted more than two months, resulting in a shrinking economy. The relentless demands of long working hours, challenging targets, a disheartening work environment, and stagnant wages have gradually drained her energy. Despite being allergic to cat hair, she recently purchased two cats, necessitating the rental of a larger apartment where she can establish a “human-cat separation” to alleviate her allergies. However, this also means higher rental costs. She reflects on how people used to say that Tiktok was the ultimate destination for individuals in the Internet industry; she has arrived at this ¡°destination¡± early. Finding a new job has become incredibly difficult, and she feels the pressure of paying for the new apartment, making the prospect of unpaid unemployment unaffordable. Young workers like Linda find themselves trapped in a cycle of working overtime, not driven by their own ambitions, but rather out of fear of being laid off. The prevailing stressful atmosphere compels everyone to endure excessive workloads.

Contrary to expectations, the post-lockdown period and the removal of China’s “dynamic zero-COVID” policy did not bring about the anticipated economic resurgence. Instead, numerous rounds of widespread at China¡¯s Internet Giants instilled fear in people, creating an atmosphere where job security became increasingly uncertain. In the internet sector, there is a popular adage known as “Golden March, Silver April” and “Golden September, Silver October,” signifying the optimal months for job transitions due to the active job market during these periods. However, since 2022, this notion has lost its effectiveness as the entire economic environment resembles stagnant water, discouraging individuals from daring to switch jobs. Linda expressed her powerlessness to me, sighing at the prevailing circumstances. White-collar employees like Linda, who work in prominent internet companies, frequently engage in both online and offline communication with their peers to exchange industry information. They are well aware of the deteriorating market conditions characterized by limited job opportunities, widespread layoffs, prevalent salary reductions, and flagrant violations of labor laws. Despite their dissatisfaction, they reluctantly and intimately commit to overwhelming workloads for fear of being dismissed.

Linda once described her experience to me. Filled with trepidation, she would typically leave the office at 10 pm each day, often being the first to depart among her team members. She recounted how the office atmosphere felt stifling, leaving her to quietly exit the still busy but silent workspace without bidding farewell to her colleagues. She doesn’t want to draw too much attention to her “early” departure, as nobody bothered to lift their heads from their laptops, occasionally giving her a fleeting glance. She stepped into the vibrant neon-lit nights of Shanghai.

Linda and Yubo, an agency worker employed by a labor recruitment agency but dispatched to a prominent Internet company, exemplify two distinct ends of the spectrum of employment in the Internet sector in China. Linda secured a coveted position at Tiktok through the highly competitive graduate entry program, reserved for exceptionally talented graduates from prestigious universities. This prestigious role comes with generous compensation and superior welfare benefits. Linda earned a monthly salary of approximately $3,700 before taxes, in addition to a year-end bonus equivalent to three months’ wages. The average was approximately $855. Conversely, Yubo worked as a front-end developer, earning around $2,100 per month. However, Linda¡¯s experience of working overtime resonates with Yubo¡¯s and thousands of other workers in similar situations. Yubo revealed that he had to work until midnight for an entire week, resulting in heart palpitations and forcing him to reluctantly request half a day off for rest.

    ¡°This level of hard work is not driven by ambition. Instead, it stems from a collective sense of fear and insecurity, as if we are all ‘frightened birds’ constantly dreading the possibility of being dismissed. Reluctantly, we push ourselves to keep up with the pace set by others. In the past, we used to believe that a better life could be achieved by reaching certain milestones, with the expectation that our quality of life would improve. However, it becomes ¡®from one pit to another¡¯ now. Even if we reach the goals we had set for ourselves, there is no relief from the burden, like even if I had more work experience, the possibility of job hopping for a significantly higher salary remains tough; even if I find a better job someday, I still have to worry about midlife unemployment; even if I work in Beijing now, I couldn¡¯t imagine buying an apartment. There is a lack of interest or ambition to create something meaningful; our primary focus is simply to survive.¡± (Yubo, a 24-year-old front developer as an agency worker, Beijing)

Linda also describes the experience of moving “from one pit to another.” Transitioning to a new job not only entails the difficulties posed by a shrinking job market but also brings about overwhelming uncertainty. The same set of issues, such as excessive overtime, burdensome work arrangements, unqualified yet harsh supervisors, the looming threat of downsizing and layoffs, are pervasive across nearly all internet companies. In smaller private companies, the situation is even worse as they often disregard labor laws. “While big companies may superficially comply with regulations to some extent, small companies treat us as ‘new slaves’ with complete disregard for the law,” Linda explained, shedding light on why she feels unable to resist or change her circumstances.

The Era of High Growth Faded Away as Bubbles Remained

Linda and Yubo are just two among the thousands of workers facing similar situations. Working in prestigious and well-paying Internet companies used to be their source of hope, offering opportunities to fulfill their expectations for a better life. In the past, those expectations seemed within reach. The rapid expansion of the internet sector, particularly the mobile internet, led to a significant increase in users over the past few decades. Linda has a friend who worked as a user growth operator in PDD Holdings four years ago, holding a similar position to hers. The friend described how easily they achieved user growth goals at that time, with even the natural growth of users occurring at an astonishing pace. Linda admired those golden days but recognized that hoping for their return seemed unrealistic¡ªthe high-speed train had already departed. According to the “51st Statistical Report on China’s Internet Development” released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), as of December 2022, the number of Internet users in China had reached 1.067 billion, with an internet penetration rate of 75.6%, a 2.6% increase from December 2021. Furthermore, 99.8% of internet users accessed the internet through mobile phones, indicating that the era of rapid growth in the internet industry had come to an end, forever.

The era of rapid growth comes to a standstill, it is leaving behind a bubble of inflated expectations. In many internet companies, employee performance is evaluated through the Objective and Key Results (OKR) framework, with each team leader setting objectives that are reviewed on a monthly and quarterly basis. In the past, these objectives were more attainable, representing ambitious yet realistic figures based on industry development. However, the dynamics have shifted. Everyone, especially experienced team leaders, is aware that achieving high growth is now difficult, yet they continue to set high objectives that are challenging to realize. It’s like gambling. These leaders also fear for their own survival, as they must triumph in the increasingly fierce competition with other departments or teams. If they manage to achieve the high objective, it can be credited to their effective management and organization, securing their position and even leading to promotions. Conversely, if they fail, they can conveniently find someone within their team to blame and hold accountable, known as the “blamer” (referred to as “±³¹øÏÀ” in Chinese). However, if they were to set lower and more practical objectives that are easily achievable, they would fail to demonstrate the value of their department or team compared to others.

In the quest to prove themselves, people have embarked on a kind of enterprise-level . Faced with the pressures of survival within the company, leaders set unrealistically high objectives and then pass on the burden to their team members. These team members have no choice but to work harder, striving to meet the demanding goals in order to prove their worth and avoid being dismissed. Even if someone is dismissed as a ¡°blamer¡±, it is not a significant concern. It presents an opportunity for the leader to replace the fired individual with someone who is more compliant or favored, creating a more “integrated” team. Linda, with a hint of despair in her voice, shared, “My mentor told me that I didn’t meet her expectations, which is usually an ambiguous yet nonspoken precursor to dismissal.” She continued, “Only those who maintain a good relationship with the leader and are available around the clock without any complaints can temporarily secure their position.”

Striving to Function as an Effective Component

During the previous flourishing era, the Internet industry experienced rapid development by pursuing a strategy of expanding its market share through substantial investments in both human resources and financial resources, with little consideration for returns. However, as the period of fast growth came to an end, management shifted its focus toward enhancing human resource efficiency. In order to achieve this, two approaches have emerged: extensive layoffs and the utilization of external .

To make the best of human resources, Tiktok has established numerous small teams consisting of a product manager, an operator, and only a handful of developers and testers. Their aim is to develop new apps or attract more users. However, due to the inherent challenges associated with these projects, it is highly unlikely that these teams will replicate the successful miracle of Tiktok. Despite facing immense pressure and working overtime under the watchful eye of her mentor, Linda is determined not to lose her job, at least not for now. Therefore, she is compelled to work even harder to prove her worth. Nonetheless, she is aware that regardless of her dedication and hard work, the most favorable outcome she can hope for is delayed dismissal, as there is a constant supply of younger, cheaper, healthier, and more compliant eagerly waiting to take her place. China’s labor market is already inundated with a substantial number of unsuccessful job seekers who completed their college education amidst the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic. However, this summer, they will be joined by an additional 11.58 million new graduates, representing an increase of approximately 820,000 compared to the previous year. Alarmingly, the unemployment rate for individuals between the ages of 16 to 24 currently exceeds 18%. Employees within the organization are consumed at an accelerated pace and discarded when their value diminishes, or to put it more professionally, when their human resource efficiency declines.

Another approach to enhance human resource efficiency is the utilization of external staff provided by labor recruitment agencies like Yubo. These agency workers are not considered part of the Internet companies’ internal workforce but are rather viewed as “services” acquired from external sources. They are assigned various work arrangements under the control of the Internet company and can be easily disposed of when their services are no longer required, as their labor contracts are with the labor recruitment agency. Yubo, for example, is not recognized as an employee, yet he diligently works towards achieving his mentor’s goals. He fully understands the situation, stating, “We are treated as commodities. The Internet company sources workers from the agency and releases them when they no longer meet the requirements.” However, Yubo has no other choice as he lacks a competitive educational background and other suitable job opportunities are in smaller cities, where wages are significantly lower, less than half of his monthly wage now. Yubo’s manager is aware of his long working hours, which can be monitored through the online system, and reminds him to “take care” as the excessive hours pose a risk of sudden death. Yubo’s manager showed little concern for him. Although the manager acknowledged Yubo’s excessive workload, there was no effort to address it. The manager’s only intention seemed to be preventing Yubo from sudden death, for which the company should take responsibility.

Both Linda and Yubo dedicate more than 60 hours per week to their work, particularly during the demanding “big week” when they are required to work six days continuously. The demanding workload burns them out. During her precious days off, Linda prefers to spend time lying in bed and enjoying the company of her cats. She seldom cooks for herself and instead opts for ordering takeout meals online.

The feeling of hopelessness is a recurring theme in our conversations. Yubo, with only a junior colledge education, is currently enrolled in a self-taught undergraduate degree program. He values the improved qualifications but acknowledges that they may not significantly enhance his prospects when searching for another job. He contemplates pursuing a master’s degree in the future but remains uncertain about the potential for a hopeful outcome. Yubo expressed his despondency, saying, “There are very few people I can share my thoughts with in life. It’s impossible to separate work and life; work has become my entire life.”

Linda, who used to possess a vibrant and optimistic personality, has become more withdrawn since starting work. During her master’s degree, she had a brief stint as an intern in the local government, however she quit after just two weeks, finding it monotonous and lacking significance. In her pursuit of securing a higher-paying and more challenging job, she undertook multiple internships to accumulate experience and abandoned her aspirations of taking . There are moments when she blames herself, reflecting on how foolish she was to despise the very job she now desires. She purchased a series of exam reference books and intends to study diligently but finds herself unable to spare any time for preparation. The dusty stack of reference books sitting in a corner represents her only, albeit faint, glimmer of hope.

Yun Xiong is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Peking University. She’s currently a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Department ‘Anthropology of Economic Experimentation’. 

There is growing interest in ¡®embedded experiments¡¯, conducted by researchers and policymakers as a team. Aside from their potential scale, the main attraction of these experiments is that they seem to facilitate speedy translation of research into policy. Discussing a case study from Bihar, Jean Dr¨¨ze argues that this approach carries a danger of distorting both policy and research. 

Evidence-based policy is the rage, to the extent that even village folk in Jharkhand (where I live) sometimes hold forth about the importance of ¡®ebhidens¡¯, as they call it. No one, of course, would deny the value of bringing evidence to bear on public policy, as long as evidence is understood in a broad sense and does not become the sole arbiter of decision-making. However, sometimes evidence-based policy gets reduced to an odd method that consists of using randomised controlled trials (RCTs) to find out ¡®what works¡¯, and then ¡®scale up¡¯ whatever works. That makes short shrift of the long bridge that separates evidence from policy. Sound policy requires not only evidence ¨C broadly understood ¨C but also a good understanding of the issues, considered value judgements, and inclusive deliberation (, 2020a).

Enormous energy has been spent on the quest for rigorous evidence, much less on the integrity of the process that leads from evidence to policy. As illustrated in an earlier contribution to Ideas for India (), it is not uncommon for the scientific findings of an RCT to be embellished in the process. This follow-up post presents another case study that may help to convey the problem. It also illustrates a related danger ¨C casual jumps from evidence to policy advice. The risk of a short-circuit is particularly serious in ¡®embedded experiments¡¯, where the research team works ¡®from within¡¯ a partner government in direct collaboration with policymakers.

The case study pertains to an experiment conducted in Bihar in 2012-2013 and reported in Banerjee, Duflo, Imbert, Mathew and Pande (2020)¹. This is a large-scale, influential experiment by some of the leading lights of the RCT movement ¨C indeed, a formidable quartet of first-rate economists reinforced by one of India¡¯s brightest civil servants, Santhosh Mathew. The high technical standards of the study are not in doubt, and nor is the integrity of the authors. And yet, I would argue that something is amiss in their accounts of the findings and policy implications of this study.

An experiment backfires

Briefly, the said experiment consists of testing a new financial management system for India¡¯s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA)², optimistically called ¡®just-in-time¡¯ financing. In the old system, gram panchayats (village councils) received advance funds from the state government for MNREGA work, replenished as per requests routed via block and district offices. In the new system, work comes first, and then the requisite funds are transferred (from the state government to gram panchayat, as before) in response to direct electronic invoices³. This innovation is presented as an application of ¡®e-governance¡¯. Henceforth, I shall refer to it as the ¡®Bihar experimental transfer system¡¯ (BETS or BET system, interchangeably).

The stated purpose of this new system was to boost MNREGA spending in Bihar, where baseline expenditure was very low. As the abstract of the  puts it: ¡°This project evaluates an innovative policy intervention which aims at enhancing supply of public employment in Bihar¡­If the intervention successfully increases spending⁴, we will use it as a way to evaluate the impact of NREGA on people’s lives¡±⁵. The intervention, however, had the opposite effect: MNREGA spending declined by 24% in the ¡®treatment¡¯ areas (subject to intervention), compared with ¡®control¡¯ areas (no intervention). It also led to much longer delays in wage payments: an extra 47 days in treatment areas during the intervention period, in addition to the 64 days in control areas (Banerjee et al. 2020, Table 5)⁶. One hundred and eleven days must feel like an eternity to people who have no other means of subsistence than their meagre wages.

The project ran into rough weather from the word go⁷. The two-month ¡®setup period¡¯ was a little chaotic, as anyone familiar with the ways of the Bihar government would expect. For the first four months of the ¡°intervention period¡± (September-December 2012), there was virtually no treatment ¨C the BET system was more or less idle, because of a central-government freeze on the release of MNREGA funds to Bihar. After that, the treatment kicked in, but hurdles persisted. The district coordinators were ¡°often ineffective¡±. A critical software patch did not materialise (due to ¡°lack of coordination¡± between two ministries), forcing BETS to fall back on a cumbersome system of double data entry. Banks ¡°could not keep pace¡± with BETS¡¯ equally cumbersome system of piecemeal payment advices. There were ¡°repeated complaints from district officials about the delays caused by the new financial system¡±. The experiment was called off by the Bihar government after just three months of active treatment (January-March 2013) ¨C a minuscule window to evaluate this sort of intervention⁸. 

This experiment is best seen in the context of the history of MNREGA wage payments, and also of the recent drive towards e-governance of social programmes in India.

The quest for timely payments

The history of MNREGA wage payments is a sad song. MNREGA workers have a legal right to payment within 15 days, but in practice, wages are routinely delayed for weeks or months. This has been the bane of the programme for more than 10 years ¨C ever since cash payments were replaced with bank payments to ·É´Ç°ù°ì±ð°ù²õ¡¯ accounts. Aside from causing serious hardships to MNREGA workers, payment delays have a destructive effect on the entire programme, because they sap ·É´Ç°ù°ì±ð°ù²õ¡¯ interest in it. The good health of MNREGA rests on the active participation of workers at every stage ¨C project selection, work applications, asset creation, social audits, and more. When workers lose interest, MNREGA loses its sharp edge.

One state that had been relatively successful, by 2012, in ensuring timely wage payments was Andhra Pradesh (AP)⁹. The state had fixed timelines for every step of the payment process, and the delays were tightly monitored. In this as in many other domains, AP had also been at the forefront of e-governance initiatives. From 2009 onwards, it started deploying a payment system called ¡°electronic fund management system¡± (e-FMS). This was done step by step over a period of time ¨C according to one knowledgeable observer, ¡°it took nearly two years for AP to streamline the e-FMS¡±. By 2012, the e-FMS was considered a success and steps to extend the system to the whole of India had been initiated by the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) at the Centre. The e-FMS was a more advanced system than BETS ¨C it involved direct payments to ·É´Ç°ù°ì±ð°ù²õ¡¯ accounts (not gram panchayat accounts), avoided BETS¡¯ onerous ¡®double data-entry¡¯ burden, and covered material as well as labour expenses.

We shall return to the significance of AP¡¯s experience. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that while the deployment of the e-FMS in AP can probably be regarded as a case of successful e-governance, the recent history of e-governance and digital payments in India also includes many problematic or even counter-productive initiatives¹⁰. A lot depends on the context, including the level of digital preparedness ¨C that is where AP had a big head-start.

All this is better understood today than it was in 2012, when the BETS experiment began. But enough was already known at that time to anticipate that unrolling this new system in a tearing hurry in a poorly prepared state like Bihar (with a set-up period of just two months) might lead to a jam in wage payments. Indeed, the additional delays were huge, whether one looks at data from MNREGA¡¯s ¡°management and information system¡± (MIS) or from the authors¡¯ household survey (Banerjee et al. 2020, Tables 4 and 5). In terms of statistical significance, too, delays in wage payments dwarfed other treatment effects throughout the intervention period. This was a veritable elephant in the room.

Reduced leakages?

The authors, however, pay sporadic attention to this elephant. To their credit, they are upfront about the payment delays, but they do not pursue the matter very far, nor do they mention that workers have a legal right to payment within 15 days. Instead, they follow a different trail ¨C the reduction of MNREGA expenditure in treatment areas, they argue, reflects a reduction in ¡°leakages¡±. From this point of view, it may seem, the intervention did quite well.

The authors invoke three smoking guns in favour of the ¡°reduced leakages¡± hypothesis. As the abstract of the paper succinctly puts it: ¡°program expenditures dropped by 24 percent, while employment slightly increased; there were fewer fake households in the official database; and program officials¡¯ personal wealth fell by 10 percent¡±. Three smoking guns is certainly a lot of smoke, if not quite enough perhaps to claim that ¡°[w]e looked for evidence of a reduction in corruption, and we found plenty¡± (, page 6).

I believe that there are other possible explanations for the reduction of MNREGA expenditure in treatment areas (including ¨C yes ¨C delays in wage payments) but let us leave that aside. More importantly, it seems to me that even if there was some reduction in leakages during the intervention period, it may or may not be due to the treatment. Indeed, as mentioned earlier, there was virtually no treatment during the first four months of the seven-month ¡°intervention period¡±¹¹. Interestingly, the estimated effects of the intervention were very similar in both phases ¨C before and after the treatment really kicked in (Banerjee et al. 2020, Figure 2 and Tables 2-5). Much was happening in the treatment areas other than the treatment: training, monitoring, field visits, damage control, and a major investment in material and human resources (¡°including computers, data entry operators, generators to ensure power supply, internet access, scanners, and printers¡± down to the gram panchayat level)¹². Differences in outcomes between control and treatment areas reflect all aspects of the intervention, but it is the treatment ¨C the BET system ¨C that gets credit for them. To be more specific, it is quite possible that the ¡®buzz¡¯ created by the intervention in treatment areas had a chilling effect on the crooks, unrelated to the new payment system. That would explain all the smoking guns, and the fact that the intervention had similar effects with and without the treatment.

Having said this, it is possible that the BET system did help to reduce corruption. Let us assume that this diagnosis is correct. A plausible conclusion would be as follows: ¡°The study produced some evidence of a reduction in leakages in the intervention period. However, the new system also led to large delays in wage payments. Bihar, it appears, is not ready for it, and the system should not be scaled up until the payment issues are resolved. Meanwhile, workers should be compensated for the delays, as prescribed under the law.¡± Instead, the apparent decline in leakages became the main focus and message of the paper.

Perhaps the problem of enhanced delays would have faded away over time, as the BET system improved. We shall never know, since the experiment was discontinued after just three months of active treatment. There was no support for it, as the BET system had ¡°failed to create any winners¡± (Banerjee et al. 2020, page 66), except possibly the central government in so far as it saved money. Block and district officials actively opposed the new system, arguing that it was ¡°destroying¡± MNREGA (page 42). According to the authors, this opposition was self-serving: the said officials ¡°had obvious reasons to resent the program¡± (page 42), that is, they were corrupt functionaries trying to protect their gravy. Could it be, however, that some of them ¨C corrupt or not ¨C actually had a point? MNREGA functionaries in India, even the corrupt ones, have invaluable knowledge of the nuts and bolts of the programme. There is no indication that they received a fair hearing in this situation. 

The dissemination accounts

So far, I have focussed on the academic account of the experiment (Banerjee et al. 2020). That account is very thorough, precise, and nuanced. However, troubling issues arise when we consider summary accounts of the findings presented in various forums for dissemination purposes ¨C let us call them ¡°dissemination accounts¡±. In many of these accounts, the delays in wage payments are not mentioned. This is the case, for instance, with Esther Duflo¡¯s glowing account of the experiment in her influential Richard T. Ely lecture (, pages 5-7) as well as with Abhijit Banerjee¡¯s  of it at the Center for Global Development (CGD) on 6 December 2016, posted on the J-PAL (Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab) website¹³. Santhosh Mathew¡¯s follow-up remarks at the same event, and his own summary of the experiment (in Mathew and Goswami 2016), are also silent on payment delays. So is Cl¨¦ment Imbert¡¯s three-minute digest of the study on YouTube, modestly called ¡°¡±.

The  on the J-PAL website is also misleading. It says: ¡°After a year under the new system [!], the evaluation found significant impacts along two key dimensions¡± ¨C these are ¡°reduced corruption¡± and ¡°more efficient fund distribution¡±¹⁴. Based on this, the reform is applauded as a ¡°success¡± [sic]. Only those who care to click on a follow-up link for ¡°more details¡± get to learn, way down, about the payment delays. When delays are finally mentioned, an impression is created that it was a temporary problem ¡°during initial implementation stages¡± ¨C in fact, it persisted throughout the intervention period. Another gushing J-PAL summary of the experiment () is completely silent on payment delays.

From evidence to policy

In some dissemination accounts of the BETS experiment, it is also stated that the treatment was smoothly ¡°scaled up¡± at the national level. As the : ¡°Influenced by the Bihar study, the Government of India asked all states to shift to a similar fund-flow system for MGNREGS wage payments.¡±

This statement is intriguing at first. As correctly noted in Banerjee et al. (2020), it is the e-FMS, not BETS, that was gradually extended across the country between 2012 and 2015¹⁵.  Remember, e-FMS had been patiently tested in AP from 2009 onwards, and active steps for the national deployment had already been taken by mid-2012, before the Bihar experiment began.

On closer examination, the basis of the scale-up statement is the fact that the BETS study was cited in a MoRD note to the Cabinet, dated June 2015, where the Ministry proposes a new payment system for MNREGA (, footnote 9; Banerjee et al. 2020, page 42). This new payment system is based on a more centralised e-FMS platform (known as National e-FMS or Ne-FMS) and the so-called direct benefit transfer (DBT) protocol¹⁶. Interestingly, the main argument of the Cabinet Note for this new system is that it will help to ensure timely wage payments. But the note also refers to other possible benefits of ¡°e-governance based fund flows¡±, including reduced leakages, and it does cite the BETS study in that context. Assuming that the Ne-FMS-cum-DBT system can be regarded as a scale-up of the BET system in some sense, one might accept that ¡°the experiment was actually instrumental in getting this program scaled up across all states¡± (, page 7)¹⁷.

This view, however, raises an interesting question. Why would the scale-up of BETS be a good thing, as Duflo implies, let alone a ¡°policy success¡±, as the J-PAL website puts it? Even if we accept that BETS helped to reduce corruption, the fact remains that it also led to longer delays in wage payments. There is a bit of a trade-off here. Perhaps the assumption is that the delays were just a kind of ¡®teething problem¡¯, but the study provides no evidence of that. This is a good example of casual jump from evidence to policy advice ().

J-PAL is explicitly committed to this sort of long jump, or ¡®research translation efforts¡¯ as the website puts it (). In this case, we are told, these efforts included posting and paying a full-time ¡°Policy Consultant¡± in the Ministry of Rural Development (). The  ¡°writing policy memos and coordinating meetings to generate buy-in for the scale-up¡±. One really wonders how this consultant ¡®translated¡¯ the factual evidence presented in the BETS study into policy prescriptions.

As it turned out, the transition to Ne-FMS-cum-DBT from 2015 onwards caused enormous confusion for years and led to a new generation of payment problems ¨C not just continued delays but also rejected payments, diverted payments, and blocked payments¹⁸. Rejected payments alone added up to a staggering 16% of MNREGA wage payments in 2016-2017, according to the MoRD itself¹⁹. In the last few years, many MNREGA workers did not receive their wages at all due to technical complications. Some of the glitches are truly bizarre, like MNREGA wages being redirected to Airtel wallets that workers know nothing about (). New forms of corruption ¨C what might be called ¡®e-corruption¡¯ ¨C have also flourished in this period. All this may (or may not) get sorted out in due course, but as of now, there is little reason to celebrate the scale-up of the BET system, if it happened at all.

A missed opportunity

None of this is to deny that there is much to learn from the BETS study. Serious attention to the payment delays, however, would have made it even more enlightening. Indeed, the experiment was an opportunity to draw attention to the dangers of hasty rollout of new technologies in fragile settings. That would have been a very salutary warning, around the beginning of a long period of repeated rejigging of MNREGA payment technologies at the cost of MNREGA workers. MNREGA wage payments have gone through a whole series of new systems over the years, but the government is still unequal to the simple task of ensuring payment within 15 days, as prescribed under the Act. The latest innovations, notably the Aadhaar Payment Bridge System, have led to some improvements, but also to many new problems²⁰. The problems may be temporary, but as each new system creates its own temporary problems, lasting for years in many cases, MNREGA ·É´Ç°ù°ì±ð°ù²õ¡¯ right to timely payment ends up being persistently denied.

Concluding remarks

The picture that emerges from this case study is a little unsettling. A counter-productive experiment, aborted within a few months, ended up being perceived as a model exercise in evidence-based policy.

Let me end with some general remarks, drawing not only on this case study but also on the companion study (). If you had the patience to read both, perhaps you noticed some parallels between the two focus experiments ¨C one on the public distribution system (PDS) in Jharkhand (), the other on MNREGA in Bihar (Banerjee et al. 2020). In both cases, the study is very thorough, but the findings were misrepresented in some of the dissemination accounts. And in both cases, the dissemination accounts lean in the same direction: playing up the anti-corruption effects of the treatment and underplaying the adverse effects on the intended beneficiaries ¨C PDS cardholders in one case, and MNREGA workers on the other.

¡®Do no harm¡¯ is often (not always) considered as an important ethical principle of RCTs. Both experiments adversely affected a significant number of poor people. In the BETS experiment, the harm was fairly predictable: the authors themselves explain why one might expect the new system to lead to longer payment delays (Banerjee et al. 2020, page 47), and an average MNREGA worker would have seen it coming too. One possible defence of these experiments is that the respective governments were planning the intervention anyway, and that the research team was just evaluating it. If an intervention has harmful effects, we might as well get to know about it. This defence, however, assumes a clear separation of responsibilities between the government and the research team. In at least one case (the Bihar RCT), the distinction was more than a little blurred²¹.

Both experiments belong to a genre of RCTs that may be called ¡®embedded experiments¡¯ ¨C at-scale experiments conducted by a research team that attaches itself to a government department. Without denying their possible value, it seems to me that these experiments are fraught with dangers. These include imbibing the perspective of the partner government, distorting its priorities, diverting senior officials from their primary responsibilities, conceding some control over research findings, exercising power without accountability, overestimating government capacity, underestimating State oppression, inappropriate randomisation, violation of consent norms, misuse of privileged access, conflicts of interest, revolving-door effects, distracting incentives, and contamination. It would be good to see more engagement with these issues in the slim literature on the ethics of RCTs in development economics²².

Just to pursue one of these issues briefly, informed consent is obviously hard to ensure in embedded experiments at scale. The registration document of the Bihar RCT asserts that ¡°informed consent will be ensured in all cases¡±, but that presumably referred (implicitly) to the small minority of households being surveyed, not to all those affected by the BET system. Informed consent was impractical in this case, but then it is all the more important to be confident that the treatment will do no harm. Randomising a variable (like a wage payment system) that has the potential to disrupt people¡¯s livelihood or well-being, if it can be justified at all, requires the strongest possible safeguards.

The perils of embedded experiments are particularly serious when the research team is dealing with corruption-ridden governments like those of Bihar and Jharkhand. No doubt senior officials of these governments know how to make a good impression on visiting researchers, and some of them (including Santhosh Mathew) have a genuine commitment to better governance. But the general attitude of government officials in Bihar and Jharkhand is not particularly kind to the underprivileged. This amplifies the hazards of embedded experiments, including the risk of doing harm.

Embedded experiments also blur the distinction between evidence and policy (one a scientific matter, the other a political issue). When a research team attaches itself to a government department, it is likely to be involved in or at least consulted on policy matters from time to time. That may seem like a good thing to someone who believes that economists are well placed to fix public policies across the table with friendly bureaucrats ¡°before political constituencies have calcified around them¡± (). Policy advice, however, is a very different game from economic research, and economists have no obvious gift for it on their own.

Embedded experiments, and embedded research in general, are likely to proliferate in the near future. On one side, researchers are under growing pressure from funding agencies to demonstrate ¡®policy impact¡¯ (not a very health trend in my view). On the other, policymakers have their own reasons to welcome resourceful research teams and feel increasingly free to do so. The bells are ringing for a fertile marriage of convenience. This does not preclude constructive partnerships, but it does call for some hard thinking about possible safeguards for embedded experiments.

As a starter, let me propose a few basic safeguards. First, an embedded experiment should not involve any personal rewards for civil servants who participate in it. Second, the findings of an embedded experiment that fails to run its full course should be taken with a pinch of salt. Third, at-scale experiments should be preceded with some sort of safety trial. Fourth, responsibility for compensation in the event of harm being done should be clarified in advance. Finally, the findings of an embedded experiment should not be translated into policy without inclusive consultation.

Now let me rest my case and invite the authors ¨C all friends of mine ¨C to fortify the principles of this approach. If I have missed something, I shall be happy to stand corrected. Hopefully, these case studies will help to pose useful questions at least ¨C some of these issues have been left unattended for too long.

Notes:

1. Earlier versions of that paper have been in the public domain since 2014 if not earlier. This case study is based on the final version, leaving out details that are not essential for my purpose.
2. MNREGA provides a guarantee of employment on local public works to any adult in rural areas who is willing to do manual work at the prescribed wage, up to 100 days per household per year.
3. For further details, see Banerjee et al. (2020), pages 44-46. Strictly speaking, all this applies to the wage component of MNREGA expenditure. The material component is of no interest in this case study.
4. Italics added.
5. Further on, the abstract mentions that ¡°the intervention could also reduce corruption¡± and that the authors propose to study its ¡°potential impacts on ghost workers and other measures of corruption¡±.
6. The figures are from household survey data. The corresponding figures from MNREGA¡¯s public data portal are 20 days and 53 days. The portal, however, understates payment delays ().
7. The facts and quotes in this paragraph are from Banerjee et al. (2015), pages 16-19.
8. According to the project¡¯s registration document, the ¡°trial¡± (possibly meaning the entire project) was initially due to continue until June 2014.
9. See for example, . The authors find that in the first six months of 2012, 85% of MNREGA wage payments in AP were made within 14 days ¨C a timeline that would be considered fabulous today.
10.  For some examples, see Dutta (, ), Aggarwal (2017b), ¶Ù°ù¨¨³ú±ð&²Ô²ú²õ±è;et al. (2017), J-PAL (2017), Malhotra and Somanchi (2018), , , , and LibTech India (, ).
11. To be more precise: By the end of that four-month period, only 20% of the gram panchayats in treatment areas had made any use of the BET system (Banerjee et al. 2020, page 51). The authors themselves consider that, for practical purposes, ¡°the intervention was not implemented in its initial phase¡± (, page 17).
12. Banerjee et al. (2020), p. 50; see also Banerjee et al. (2015), pages 16-19.
13. All the authors except Santhosh Mathew are J-PAL affiliates.
14. The expression ¡°a year under the new system¡± is baffling. Perhaps it refers to the entire project period, including setup (July-August 2012) and post-intervention survey (April-June 2013).
15. Banerjee et al. (2020), pages 66-67. By June 2015, 92% of gram panchayats in the country were covered by e-FMS (Government of India, 2015).
16. For an outline of this extraordinarily complicated system, see .
17.  rejected that assumption in its evaluation of a J-PAL multi-million-dollar grant application that presents the Bihar RCT as a success story and the Cabinet Note as evidence of its policy impact. Unconvinced, GiveWell advised restricting the grant to one million dollars.
18. See Dr¨¨ze (, ); also Aggarwal (2017a, 2017b), Dhorajiwala et al. (2019), , , , and , among others.
19. Press release, 13 July 2018 (see also ). The proportion of rejected payments declined later on, but it remains a major problem to this day; see for instance, .
20.  See the literature cited earlier (note 18); and also Dr¨¨ze and Khera (2021) and further reports cited there.
21. The symbiotic relationship between the government and the research team was well-conveyed by Santhosh Mathew in his , mentioned earlier: ¡°¡­ they [J-PAL] have a dedicated team whose only job is to help people like me to push ¨C so when we need a new document, it¡¯s redone, when I need to make a presentation, it¡¯s they who do it for me, when I need to come and talk to you, they are the ones who prime me as to which way I should spin the ball¡±. Santhosh Mathew was Principal Secretary in Bihar¡¯s Department of Rural Development when the BETS experiment began, and Joint Secretary in the MoRD at the Centre at the time of J-PAL¡¯s ¡®research translation efforts¡¯.
22.  Some of these issues are discussed (without specific reference to embedded experiments) in B¨¦d¨¦carrats et al. (2020), Deaton (2020), Khera (2021) and the World Development ¡°Symposium on Experimental Approaches in Development and Poverty Alleviation¡±, March 2020.

Further Reading

• Aggarwal, A (2017a), ¡°¡±,&²Ô²ú²õ±è;Economic and Political Weekly, 52(44).
• Aggarwal, Ankita (2017b), ¡°Tyranny of MGNREGA¡¯s Monitoring System¡±,&²Ô²ú²õ±è;Economic and Political Weekly, 52(37).
• Banerjee, A, E Duflo, C Imbert, S Mathew and R Pande (2015), ¡®Can e-governance Reduce Capture of Public Programs? Experimental Evidence from India¡¯s Employment Guarantee¡¯, 3ie Grantee Final Report. Available . 
• Banerjee, Abhijit, Esther Duflo, Cl¨¦ment Imbert, Santhosh Mathew and Rohini Pande (2020), ¡°E-governance, Accountability, and Leakage in Public Programs: Experimental Evidence from a Financial Management Reform in India”, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 12(4): 39-72
• B¨¦d¨¦carrats, F, I Gu¨¦rin and F Roubaud (2020), Randomized Control Trials in the Field of Development: A Critical Perspective, Oxford University Press.
• Chopra, S and R Khera (2012), ¡®¡¯, Ideas for India, 10 October.
• Deaton, A (2020), ¡®Introduction: Randomization in the Tropics Revisited, a Theme and Eleven Variations¡¯, in F B¨¦d¨¦carrats, I Guerin and F Roubaud (eds.), Randomized Control Trials in the Field of Development: A Critical Perspective.
• Dhorajiwala, S, J Dr¨¨ze and N Wagner (2019), ¡®¡¯,&²Ô²ú²õ±è;The Hindu, 17 March.
• Dr¨¨ze, J (2018a), ¡®¡¯, Ideas for India, 3 August.
• Dr¨¨ze, J (2018b), ¡®¡¯,&²Ô²ú²õ±è;Indian Express, 13 July.
• Dr¨¨ze, J (2018c), ¡®¡¯,&²Ô²ú²õ±è;The Telegraph, 3 August.
• Dr¨¨ze, J (2018d), ¡®¡¯, The Wire, 15 July.
• Dr¨¨ze, Jean (2020a), ¡°Policy beyond Evidence¡±,&²Ô²ú²õ±è;World Development, 127.
• Dr¨¨ze, Jean (2020b), ¡®¡¯, Bloomberg/Quint, 17 January.
• Dr¨¨ze, Jean, Nazar Khalid, Reetika Khera and Anmol Somanchi (2017), ¡°Aadhaar and Food Security in Jharkhand: Pain without Gain?¡±,&²Ô²ú²õ±è;Economic and Political Weekly, 52(50).
• Dr¨¨ze, J and R Khera (2021), ¡®Aadhaar: A Plea for Damage Control¡¯, submission to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology; partly published in , 2 January 2022.
• Dr¨¨ze, J, R Khera and A Somanchi (2020), ¡®¡¯, Ideas for India, 28 September.
• Duflo, Esther (2017), ¡°¡±,&²Ô²ú²õ±è;American Economic Review, 107(5): 1-26.
• Dutta, S (2016), ¡®¡¯, The Wire, 22 November.
• Dutta, S (2018), ¡®¡¯,&²Ô²ú²õ±è;Business Standard, 30 April.
• Dutta, S (2019), ¡®¡¯,&²Ô²ú²õ±è;Business Standard, 12 January.
• GiveWell (2019), ¡®¡¯, Grant Evaluation.
• Government of India (2015), ¡®Note for the Cabinet¡¯, Ministry of Rural Development, 17 June and 20 July.
• Government of India (2017), ¡®¡¯, Ministry of Rural Development.
• Johri, A (2019), ¡®¡¯, Scroll, 5 February.
• J-PAL (2017), ¡®Process Monitoring of Direct Benefit Transfer in the PDS: Final Report (Findings from Chandigarh, Dadra Nagar Haveli & Puducherry)¡¯, Report to NITI Aayog.
• J-PAL (2018), ¡®¡¯, Case study. 
• J-PAL (2021), ¡®¡¯, Initiative project.
• Khera, R (2021), ¡®¡¯, Working Paper.
• LibTech India (2020), ¡®¡¯, Report, Azim Premji University.
• LibTech India (2021), ¡®¡¯, Report, Azim Premji University.
• Malhotra, Rishabh and Anmol Somanchi (2018), ¡°Pension Tension: Aadhaar and Social Assistance in Jharkhand¡±,&²Ô²ú²õ±è;Economic and Political Weekly, 53(36).
• Mathew, Santhosh and Dwijo Goswami (2016), ¡°Doing More with Less: Developing JAM+ to Reform Public Finance Management in India¡±,&²Ô²ú²õ±è;Economic and Political Weekly, 51(17). 
• Mohan, R (2018), ¡®¡¯,&²Ô²ú²õ±è;The Hindu, 10 March.
• Muralidharan, Karthik, and Paul Niehaus (2017), ¡°¡±,&²Ô²ú²õ±è;Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31(4): 103-124.
• Muralidharan, K, P Niehaus and S Sukhtankar (2020), ¡®¡¯, NBER Working Paper No. 26744.
• Narayanan, Rajendran, Sakina Dhorajiwala and Rajesh Golani (2019), ¡°¡±,&²Ô²ú²õ±è;Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 62: 113-133.
• Walsh, C and S Carter (2018), ¡®¡¯, J-PAL blog, 16 January.

Jean Dr¨¨ze is currently Visiting Professor at Ranchi University as well as Honorary Professor at the Delhi School of Economics.

The author is grateful to Cl¨¦ment Imbert for detailed clarifications, and to Harold Alderman, Amit Basole, Christopher Barrett, Diane Coffey, Angus Deaton, Nikhil Dey, Swati Dhingra, Reetika Khera, Ashok Kotwal, J.V. Meenakshi, K. Raju, Martin Ravallion, Anmol Somanchi, and Ankur Sarin for helpful advice.

Photo: Dalit Women in Uttar Pradesh, displaying their job cards, as a part of the guaranteed wage employment under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), 2005. .

This post was first published on .

Working as a product designer in media for the past five years, I¡¯ve witnessed the topic of ¡°¡± raised at industry conferences, presentations, and meetups. Yet I¡¯ve noticed that in our discussions, designers rarely mention the economic context within which we design. We hold up examples like and and we ask: how might we design better? Conventional discourse presents these unintended consequences of our work as technical problems: how might we design and code ethically, while maintaining profitability and growth? (Perhaps the most well-known example of this framing is The Center for Humane Technology¡¯s ¡°The Social Dilemma,¡± which confuses correlation with causation by attributing negative mental health and political trends to technology, with no mention of technology¡¯s place in capitalism.)

We will not solve problems of authoritarianism, racism and xenophobia, misinformation and addictive technology, mental health and public health, or climate change with design ethics. While designers should thoroughly consider the consequences of our work, the problems facing the design and technology industry are not ones of individual bad actors (though some exist). Rather, we must acknowledge that design decisions are economic decisions¨C¨Cand in our current economic system, the economic interests of individuals often conflict with their social consequences. Technology firms are not cultural or ideological actors, but ¡°economic actors within a capitalist mode of production…compelled to seek out profits in order to fend off competition¡± (Srnicek 2017, 3). If we truly want to design ethically, we must first consider how technology is embedded in capitalism. Our ability to make technology work better for society as a whole depends upon our willingness to reorder our priorities and redefine value as more than profit maximization.

Use-value and exchange-value in design

In order to understand technology firms as economic actors, we must first look to economic history. The classical political economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo¨C¨Cand later Karl Marx¨C¨Cdivided the concept of value into two parts: ¡°use-value¡± (a commodity¡¯s physical and social qualities) and ¡°exchange-value¡± (commonly understood as market price). Neoclassical economists collapsed this distinction in the 1870s, developing the idea of ¡°utility¡± to describe both a commodity¡¯s price and the pleasure it brings to its consumer. This concept of utility continues to allow modern economists to define value as personal utility (pleasure, satisfaction) and to conceptualize individuals as rational actors maximizing utility (¡°optimization¡±). Following a renewed conviction in the 1970s¨C¨Cresulting from a crisis of stagflation and unemployment in advanced capitalist economies during that time¨C¨Cthese early neoclassical ideas still underpin the discipline of economics.

Today, designers continue to conflate the two concepts: we champion use-value (without using the term), while assuming that our efforts will translate into our company¡¯s or client¡¯s bottom line (exchange-value). Yet despite our job descriptions¡¯ emphasis on creating value for users (use-value), our true goal¨C¨Cthat for which we get promoted, and that which determines what engineers actually build¨C¨Cis to design for profitability and growth (exchange-value). This should not surprise us: the pursuit of profit drives capital accumulation. Any technology firm¡¯s business model lives within this context.

It¡¯s true that many design decisions can align with both use-value and exchange-value. Concretely, a dating app that serves a more diverse audience also expands its customer base. We¡¯ve witnessed this approach more broadly too: strive to both generate profit and improve society, and members of the to prioritize stakeholder return in addition to shareholder return. However, these movements tend to assume that socially-just or ¡°green¡± practices coincide with higher profits in the long-run¨C¨Can assumption that will not always hold. For example, how might a social media app funded by advertising increase profits by making its platform less addictive? Or, how might a fossil fuel corporation increase profits in a transition to renewable energy sources? Not all ethical interventions are created equal: ¡°Where technology is concerned, capitalism is far from neutral. It invariably favors those particular technologies that enlarge profits, accumulation, and economic growth¡± (Magdoff and Foster 2011, 33).

Libertarianism and interventionism

This path of inquiry arrives at perhaps the most fundamental question of design ethics: what constitutes an ¡°ethical¡± design decision? I have defined the concept of use-value as a proxy for ethical design, but can a designer qualitatively understand a use-value? At a previous company, I advocated for a finite news experience with a start and an end (a focusing on the most important news of the day, rather than an infinite scroll). A handful of my coworkers pushed back: how can we believe that maximizing a user¡¯s time spent on our news site (thereby improving advertisement views) conflicts with a user¡¯s best interest (ethical design)? 

In response to this fundamental issue, some design leaders have advised designing for or (as opposed to designing for user goals or ¡°jobs to be done,¡± in the traditional approach). Yet the question posed by my colleagues represents an older one common to the design of any product or service¨C¨Cthat of libertarianism (i.e. tacit and local knowledge exists, and no one else can know what¡¯s good for me) vs. interventionism (i.e. universal basic needs and social concerns exist, and a central planner should address them). If we view the role of a designer as similar to that of a central planner, we see that the same question of ethics imbues the realm of public policy and economics: for example, should a government impose a mask mandate during a pandemic (interventionism), or allow each individual to decide for himself (libertarianism)?

To design any kind of intervention requires prioritization among competing values. influences an estimated $350 billion of purchases every year, fuels consumption, and builds brand loyalty among future customers. But it also promotes unhealthy eating, drinking, and smoking to children. If we limit advertising to children (as some countries have), we prioritize children¡¯s health and future financial wellbeing over corporate profit. Similarly, the (black-market drugs, prescription drugs, alcohol, tobacco, caffeine and other stimulants) accounts for at least 4% of world GDP and boosts worker productivity. But it also mollifies the working class and mitigates social unrest in times of economic crisis, thereby maintaining the status quo. If we strive to disentangle capitalism from the drug industry, we prioritize ·É´Ç°ù°ì±ð°ù²õ¡¯ physical and mental health over corporate profit. As already noted, we cannot assume that profit will always align with other societal values.

Every discipline rests on a philosophical foundation; utilitarianism sustains neoclassical economics, and therefore also corporate and civic design acting within this economic system. But the concept of design ethics implies a different philosophical position¨C¨Cthat is, it rests on a definition of ¡°value¡± that differs from personal utility maximization and profit, and it assumes that we can agree on a universal ¡°ethics.¡±

What is ¡°good¡±?

In the final season of ¡°,¡± the popular sitcom about a group of people traversing the afterlife, the main characters need to design a purgatory that enables its inhabitants to develop certain virtues (in order to enter heaven). This task requires the new designers to reach a definition of ¡°goodness¡±¨C¨Cwhat are those virtues that the experience must cultivate? They, like countless religions and philosophers of the past, struggle with this question of goodness. It takes four seasons of seemingly futile attempts, but in the end the show posits that our social relationships will define and grow these virtues. (The book ¡°What We Owe to Each Other¡± pops up throughout.) This is the best analogy I¡¯ve found for our predicament of design ethics.

Ultimately, conversations of design ethics and frameworks for individual designers leave out discussions of the political economy of design. From this perspective, design ethics becomes a social, not technical, problem: how might we design an economic system that allows us to prioritize use-value over capital accumulation? Changing the way we design requires returning to age-old questions in order to create an economic alternative. If we want to design ethically, we must move past designing at the margins; we need to focus on the design of our policies, institutions, and economies. ¡°Design¡± in its broadest sense is a political and philosophical question.

Sources

Anderson, Sam. ¡°The Ultimate Sitcom.¡± The New York Times Magazine. October 14, 2018. .

Bush, Sasha Breger. ¡°Drugs and Global Capitalism.¡± In Real World Micro, edited by Rob Larson, Bryan Snyder, Chris Sturr, and the Dollars & Sense collective, 59-66. Portsmouth: Economic Affairs Bureau, Inc., 2020.

Firdausi, Aabid. ¡°The Social (Relations) Dilemma.¡± ºÚÁÏÉçÇø (blog). October 19, 2020.

Foley, Duncan. Understanding Capital: Marx¡¯s Economic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Hunt, E.K., and Mark Lautzeheiser. History of Economic Thought: A Critical Perspective. New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2011.

Magdoff, Fred, and John Bellamy Foster. What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism: A Citizen¡¯s Guide to Capitalism and the Environment. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011.

Marx, Karl. Capital. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Vols. 1 & 3. London: Penguin Classics, 1990.

Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2019.

Scharber, Helen. ¡°The 800-Pound Ronald McDonald in the Room.¡± In Real World Micro, edited by Rob Larson, Bryan Snyder, Chris Sturr, and the Dollars & Sense collective, 78-79. Portsmouth: Economic Affairs Bureau, Inc., 2020.

Srnicek, Nick. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017.

Victoria Sgarro is a senior product designer at The Atlantic and a master¡¯s student in economics at The New School for Social Research.

By Ali Bhagat and

A recent article in the takes aim at ¡®How Big Tech Won the Pandemic¡¯, highlighting how in the last year alone, Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook posted a combined revenue of more than $1.2 trillion. While the pandemic has resulted in the loss of both work and life the world over, companies like Amazon have managed to expand their warehouses and their cloud computing infrastructure¡ªand reaped unprecedented profits in the process. As the Times put it, ¡®the pandemic created a peculiar economy that benefited some people and industries, including in technology, even as it battered others.¡¯ 

But as many commentators have pointed out, the explosive growth of the tech giants must also be understood in relation to more overtly political conditions. It may be true that the technology industry has maintained a liberal, progressive, and socially equitable visage throughout the pandemic, even as it has subtly extended its multi-tentacled reach into new physical and digital spaces. Indeed, we know by now, that and this is a dominant reading within critical political economy which has been at pains to point out how laissez-faire regulatory environments¡ªparticularly in the United States¡ªhave allowed the tech industry to sniff out and exploit new sources of profit, including those that have arisen as a result of the COVID-19 crisis.  

In this literature, then, the tendency is to assume that it is an absence of state intervention that has underpinned the technology industry¡¯s growing economic (and political) power. With our conception of techfare, however, we aim to push beyond these explorations of how Big Tech evades state control. Instead of focusing on state absences, we set out to highlight an equally significant dynamic: how the technology industry has become deeply entwined with the activities of the neoliberal state. 

Our research agenda is centred on one key question: how has the dramatic post-2008 growth of the American technology industry interacted with¡ªand been shaped by¡ªthe neoliberal regulatory projects that have prevailed during this time? In pursuing this question, we focus on one pivotal arena of neoliberal statecraft in which Big Tech companies increasingly participate, but where their presence has gone largely unnoticed: the disciplining of the , particularly through consumer debt, policing, and imprisonment. 

As is well known, neoliberalism has yielded specific forms of state intervention to discipline and normalize the surplus population and to regulate social insecurity. Filling the void left by the retrenchment of social and welfare spending, these forms include Jamie Peck¡¯s workfare, Susanne Soederberg¡¯s debtfare, and Lo?c Wacquant¡¯s prisonfare. As the technology industry has inserted itself more deeply into consumer credit markets and surveillance activities, it has augmented both debtfare (which normalizes and encourages reliance on private sources of credit to augment wages and regulate social insecurity) and prisonfare (which criminalizes poverty through policies that extend the reach of the police, courts, jails, and prisons). And, as the two vignettes below show, it has done so in ways that not only support the ongoing efforts of the neoliberal state, but that also underpin the growth and profitability of Big Tech itself. 

Techfare and the Business of Consumer Finance

The penetration of Big Tech into the realm of consumer finance has clear parallels with what Gabor and Brooks (2017) call the . Gabor and Brooks argue that fintech has accelerated the financial inclusion of the poor and enhanced financial institutions¡¯ ability ¡®. Big Tech, too, is adopting these logics of financial inclusion: the technology giants have vast stores of user data and trusting consumer bases that have allowed them to extend financial services globally. For instance, the total alternative credit model¡ªa combination of fintech and lending by Big Tech companies¡ª. In Asia, Africa, and Latin America the presence of Big Tech credit grew rapidly, coinciding with the decline of fintech credit volumes due to market regulation in China. 

Amazon, Apple, and Uber are all venturing into the business of consumer finance¡ªand they are set to be major players in the field. A report by , for example, estimates that a formalized Bank of Amazon would cause U.S. banks to lose approximately $100 billion, with a potential customer base of 70 million, rivalling major banking giants like Wells Fargo. Apple has launched a credit card with Goldman Sachs that targets consumers with lower spending power. A forecast estimates that 15% of the 900 million iPhone users will sign up to the Apple Card by 2022, supplying Apple with a new revenue stream in the face of declining iPhone sales globally. Similarly, Uber recently unveiled Uber Money¡ªan offering whose initial targets are Uber drivers themselves¡ªwhich includes a debit account, wallet, and Visa credit card that encourages spending on Uber¡¯s products, including rides, food delivery, and electronic vehicles. As these brief examples show, Big Tech is encroaching upon the spaces of traditional consumer credit, offering alternatives to traditional lending practices¡ªsometimes in conjunction with, but also separately from, big banks.  In the financial sector, techfarism disproportionately targets young and low-waged people. This is due in part to the low barriers to entry, lack of transaction fees, and a commitment to greater transparency than traditional banks. Big Tech¡¯s foray into finance is yet in its early days and remains shrouded in secrecy. But the financial data procured from users in these various ventures will undoubtedly contribute to the profit-generating arsenal of these companies that are in constant search for new revenue streams.

Techfare and the Business of Surveillance

For the past several years, neoliberal states and Big Tech companies have been working hand-in-hand to produce new forms of surveillance and criminalization. One of the highest profile examples of this is the proliferation of facial recognition technology¡ªan arena where racial capitalism and inequality dovetail with ongoing issues surrounding policing, incarceration, and the targeting of Black and brown people in the United States. For instance,  Amazon¡¯s foray into facial recognition and Clearview AI¡¯s entanglements with various security-related departments in the U.S reveals a clear link between the state¡¯s security apparatus and Big Tech.

Here, however, we want to focus on Amazon’s $1 billion acquisition of Ring¡ªa smart doorbell maker¡ªwhich has allowed Amazon to expand into home security services, and provides a useful tie-in to the retailer¡¯s staple source of revenue (home deliveries). Ring primarily acts as a video doorbell that allows residents to watch their front door for packages and packages, and also monitor the safety of their home. More insidiously, however, Ring has recently launched its Neighbours app, which has been branded as a community safety tool that lets residents view real-time information on crime, fires, and other indices through various video capturing from Ring doorbells in their community. In 2019, posted by Ring¡¯s founder, Jamie Siminoff, revealed that Ring works with over 405 law enforcement agencies who have access to the footage of all Ring cameras through the neighbour portal app. In effect, the Neighbours app has helped to expand law enforcement¡¯s surveillance capability, and it is a potent example of the society-led surveillance of criminality that invariably targets the racialized poor.

Conclusion

Our snapshots surrounding consumer finance and surveillance act as central examples of arenas where techfare augments extant modes of neoliberal regulation in the face of social insecurity. In aligning with debtfare, we are interested in how the vacuum left by welfare retrenchment and the decline of traditional financial actors has paved the way for Big Tech to become a player in consumer finance through new , credit cards, and other lending services that explicitly target low-income earners. In relation to prisonfare, we also highlight how Big Tech profits off of surveillance by extending the carceral state to the level of the neighbourhood and the household. Facial recognition is often seen as a public safety tool. But its potential to erode privacy and criminalize vast numbers of people while generating both revenue and data for Big Tech is an important direction for future research.

Ali Bhagat is a Lecturer in the Department of Politics, University of Manchester. He tweets at @.

is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography, University of British Columbia

Photo by the .

Land has served as a central means of sustenance, but also as a nexus of wealth and power for people throughout the ages. The has estimated that more than seventy percent of the world¡¯s population lack access to legally registered land titles. Existing land registries are centralized databases, vulnerable to corruption and destruction. There is an increasing turn towards emerging technologies such as blockchain for recording the relationships between people and land, coordinating and synchronizing that data for efficient governance, and making the information publicly available.

This essay explores the abstraction of blockchain as employed for formalizing land rights in emerging economies. Behind the seemingly neutral fa?ade of the technology, diverse aspirational claims and narratives guide its implementation in different societies, shaped by particular histories and socio-political contexts. This highlights the need to explore blockchain-based land registries as distributed knowledge infrastructures, uncovering their broader embeddedness in older, non-digital modalities, and the ¡°peopled infrastructures¡± of informal networks with their histories and cultural repertoires. As digital technologies can facilitate an illusion of enhanced visibility of some elements while obscuring others, I argue that more attention is needed to the role of broader colonial legacies and enduring North-South inequalities that frequently remain backgrounded in the adoption of such technologies.

An increasing number of governments are investigating the prospects of transferring their land registries to blockchain (). Blockchain applications are explored as enabling the formalization of property rights in the countries of the Global South, as well as providing more efficient coordination of real property markets in the Global North. Blockchain registries have several advantages as compared to centralized digital or paper-based databases. Records on blockchain are distributed and verified by a multitude of nodes in a peer-to-peer digital network, affording them more transparency and resilience. As new additions to the chain of blocks are cryptographically time-stamped, this makes tampering or accidental data loss less likely. Auto-executing ¡°smart contracts¡± that transform legal agreements into code could mediate contracts ().

Legacies of dispossession

Blockchain technology, the design of which was originally seen as facilitating an egalitarian, peer-to-peer sharing economy, is not necessarily neutral and apolitical. Digital ledgers are part of the new digital modes of record-keeping that have emerged alongside increasing financialization of real property markets. Enabling aggregation and appropriation of large amounts of commercial data, such technologies can serve as a globalizing and economizing medium and reinforce ¡°economic-like accountability¡± in human exchange (). As Garrod () suggests, there is a need for more empirical insights into the ways how blockchain-based property relations create new territories of accumulation and resistance, and intersect with existing legal and political systems.

Recent critical accounts of the infrastructures of the internet have called our attention at the ongoing production of layered invisibilities that are intrinsically embedded in colonial and imperial legacies. The fiber-optic cables enabling global internet connections were often laid over the routes of earlier telegraph and railroad lines (). Marked by violence towards indigenous populations and racial labor regimes, infrastructures such as colonial rail networks in North America served as a ¡°vehicle of domination¡± (). The layering of digital networks amidst imperial legacies is also visible in the rapidly expanding digital data storage centers¡ªoften located in colder parts of the world to cut energy costs. Johnson () has shown how the data centers in Iceland render local communities marginalized ¡°infrastructural in-betweens.¡± Such connective nodes are not ¡°neutral relays¡± in the flows of global connectivity, but reproduce territories of fragmented power and uneven participation. To bring more visibility to these processes, Amoore (2018) highlights the need to study how data is mobilized for control and surveillance by new technologies such as cloud-computing, which through its correlative calculus, is rendering political uncertainty seemingly tractable and actionable.

I suggest that blockchain-based digitalization of land records should be viewed within a broader framework of land tenure formalization in the Global South, where land titling has been advocated as enabling economic development by turning land into tradable asset and a source of credit. Contrary to the expectations of the proponents of neoliberal land reforms, recent land titling initiatives in Africa and Latin America have fueled speculative investment and land concentration. Many communities in the Global South follow local, alternative rules of property, where land is held under customary tenure and managed as part of a complex system of obligations and debts within a broader kin or territorial group. Reforms that introduce exclusive land rights may exacerbate political conflicts especially in unstable and transitional settings (). Instead of viewing the mobility of assets in the economy as a function of the degree of abstraction as assumed by proponents of private land titles, more attention should be on the techniques that are used to manage these at a distance, which often favor the more powerful, suggests Mitchell ().

¡°Recombinant¡± infrastructures

The growing dislocation of land from the social and temporal embeddedness of its everyday uses has been part of the historical evolvement of land title qualification procedures (see ). The abstraction of human-land relationship has become even more pronounced with the rise of digital land registries. High-tech title registries render more visible the gap between registry records and lived experience, and transfers from paper-based ledgers to digital ones often highlight the need for human mediators with local knowledge (). Even after the transfer, intermediaries are likely to remain an important part of the new infrastructures. Blockchain-based land recordation has been explored in Ghana¡ªa country that could become illustrative of such dynamic. Much of the rural land in Ghana is unrecorded and many city dwellers live in informal settlements. Title registration is slow and costly, hampered by the lack of written title documents to solve overlapping ownership claims. Existing documentation about landholdings remains fractured and uneven, with many holdings governed by oral agreements. The processes of land allocation in many areas of the country remain governed by local authorities¡ªchiefs¡ªwhose role has only grown through intricate partnerships with the formal administrative sector. Despite the decentralization reforms of the 1980s, ¡°modern¡± and ¡°traditional¡± forms of governance continue to intermingle, with land serving as a source for political power for local administrators (). Ghanaian chiefs provided inspiration for the World Bank in the revival movement of the ¡°traditional authorities¡± in Africa¡¯s governance during the structural adjustment era of the 1980s-90s. Through pursuing a dual agenda of promoting economic development and strengthening traditional authority, the chiefs blurred the boundaries between private entrepreneurs, customary office holders, and representatives of the state.

Digital registry platforms could deepen inequalities by introducing new layers of intermediation and creating parallel institutions. The new digital infrastructures in Ghana would incorporate elements from other infrastructural modalities and temporalities¡ªdefined by the histories and regional variety of the country¡¯s land tenure institutions and colonial as well as neoliberal policy initiatives. This highlights the importance of viewing blockchain registries as part of a broader infrastructural configuration that brings into contact the electronic and digital with paper deed registries, oral use claims and narratives about land ownership, and the ¡°peopled infrastructures¡± of customary authorities overseeing land allocation.

Another case of transitioning to blockchain registry is post-socialist Georgia, where a somewhat different picture emerges. Blockchain-based registry can be there, as well, viewed as part of longer-standing land governance reforms. In this former Soviet republic, large-scale collective and state-owned farms prevailed during the socialist period. Land privatization took place in the 1990s, with a digital registry established with support from the World Bank and other development actors. To enhance transparency and resilience of the database, Georgia¡¯s government turned to the blockchain technology, developing the first national blockchain-based land titling initiative globally. The ¡°blockchain layer¡± was thus added to an already existing IT infrastructure of the database (). Strong popular sentiments about the need to address the post-socialist environments of normative confusion may have contributed to the demand for novel technological solutions. Georgia¡¯s centuries-long history of foreign invasions had undermined public trust in government institutions, and deepened external security concerns.

In these two cases, blockchain narratives convey different aspirational promises. In Ghana, the main goals of the planned blockchain registry are eliminating the pervasive informality of land rights and improving the functioning of land markets under growing land scarcity and rural commercialization. This would also entail the conversion of customary rights¡ªfrequently unrecorded and with important group-based entitlements¡ªinto formal, private land rights. It is not clear, however, that this promise of land tenure formalization through blockchain technology would resonate with most of the population, as it would entail transformations in existing patterns of property access. Blockchain land registry in Georgia aims to empower a new post-socialist collectivity and restore public trust in the government after a regime transition that has upended existing property rights and land use patterns. Land restitution and distribution reforms have fueled normative ambiguities in the countryside. The promise of blockchain is focused on restoring public trust after transition-era upheavals and external security concerns.

In Ghana as well as post-socialist Georgia, the new technologies operate in an environment where land access has been shaped by the legacies of colonial extraction. In such settings, landholdings may feature as ¡°recombinant property¡± that is defined and accessed by more than one set of standards and combines elements of public and private property (; Dorondel, Rodima-Taylor and Rusu, forthcoming). Blockchain-based land management in such contexts can be guided by a formalistic and top-down view of land tenure, without enough attention to the actual complexities of formalizing and digitalizing land rights. Blockchain is an emerging technology that can create an illusion of enhanced participation and transparency, while also potentially leading to a growing convergence of plural ownership and use rights, and centralized management of land in conditions where statutory law does not adequately represent many of the land users.

Ambiguous futurities

While the role of the government remains central in these initiatives, novel synergies emerge with the private sector. Drawing on platform intermediation, the developing oligopolies in the emerging technology space can intensify concerns around data privacy and ownership, and reinforce exclusions and divides (see ). New digital technologies operate in complex infrastructural environments where they interact with diverse human, material and normative elements (). Particularly in the Global South, gaps in physical infrastructures are often bridged by the peopled element of social networks and a variety of local gatekeepers. Many of such intermediaries, as well as much of the rural population in countries like Ghana, may lack access to the technology or steady electricity supply to be able to meaningfully participate in such systems ¨C further expanding the digital divide.

Illuminating the intermingling of the human and the material, political and aesthetic, infrastructures present a promising site for empirical research of contemporary capitalisms, contend Anand, Gupta and Appel (). Infrastructures have originally emerged as a technology of the developmental state, and the modernist depolitization has heightened their role in fostering social exclusion and subjugation. can be simultaneously embedded in different temporalities, however, defined by local histories and the heterogeneous rhythms of contemporary global capital (Ibid.). Blockchain databases are laid on top of existing knowledge and material networks, involving newer and older record-keeping devices and stakeholders from formal and informal sectors. The abstraction of blockchain as advanced in its promissory narratives may obscure the deeply complex layering of formal and informal, institutionalized and grassroots texture of property rights. As the country cases indicated, instead of serving as a panacea for fuzzy title registries, blockchain links into existing dilemmas of property rights and tensions between their individual and collective dimensions.

Reminding us that technologies are metaphors as well as technical objects, Larkin () calls attention to the ways that the aesthetics of infrastructures bring forth a political force and enable people to contest authority. Infrastructures can evoke and make visible ideas that are of central ethical concern at a particular moment¡ªsuch as the transparency and immutability of blockchain registries in the environments of normative plurality, confusion and insecurity. The aesthetic form of the blockchain registry may signify a desire to ¡°lock away¡± debates and contestations over property claims through the production of a ¡°trustless¡± transparency¡ªwhile at the same time, paradoxically, rendering the infrastructures available to broader political debate around their incomplete or unrealizable materializations.

is a social anthropologist, and researcher and lecturer at the African Studies Center of Boston University. Her research interests include financial inclusion, human economies, infrastructures, and land.? You can read more on these topics in her recent ¡°Digitalizing Land Administration¡± that was published in Geoforum. She tweets at .

Photo: Farm plot in Tanzania, East Africa. By Daivi Rodima-Taylor.

The Social Dilemma that is currently streaming on Netflix has garnered much attention by raising a single question ¨C how have we come to accept as normal the fact that a few hundred tech-enthusiasts in Silicon Valley has had an unprecedented impact on billions of lives around the world? Directed by Jeff Orlowski, the Social Dilemma features tech industry insiders raising ethical concerns about business models that shape our everyday digital experience. 

Though the docudrama has topped charts, the narrative on reckoning with this digital Frankenstein moment is not new. For example, Black Mirror is a popular show streaming on Netflix that speculates on how unchecked tech developments can result in a dystopian world. What makes Social Dilemma unique is perhaps because it features an array of ¨C usually white males who got rich working for big tech, but then got disillusioned and subsequently achieved ¡°enlightenment¡±. 

The tech-bros point out that most platforms were started with good intentions to improve the quality of human lives. However, due to the advancements in AI, coupled with a shareholder model of revenue maximization, these platforms have become weaponized by those with nefarious interests. This has threatened liberal democracies, leading to political polarization. We are warned that a civil war is on the horizon, ironically triggered by social networks apparently aimed at bringing people together.

However, this oversimplified techno-determinist presentation of a social problem misses the wood for the trees. Can right-wing authoritarianism, xenophobia, fake news and mental health issues be boiled down to the business models of web-based platforms? Once we examine this basic premise, it becomes immediately clear that a lack of sociological nuance sends wrong messages. Apart from triggering moral panic ¨C exemplified in that talk about wanting to throw away your mobile phone into the garbage bin – the documentary eschews a patient and critical examination of contemporary capitalism, which unarguably shapes the operations of digital media. To grasp things by the root, we need to understand what is actually social about the social dilemma.

What¡¯s left unsaid?

The first major silence in the documentary is on the political economy of contemporary capitalism. Without such an understanding, the Social Dilemma gravely confuses correlation with causality ¨C in at least two fields, viz. mental health and political trends. Jonathan Haidt, who is a prominent social psychologist, briefly appears to flag concerns about the ¡°gigantic increase¡± in depression and anxiety among American teens, ostensibly due to social media. However, reducing a social phenomenon to a single factor is not particularly helpful.  The evidence is also , as a similar upsurge in suicide rates cannot be seen in several European countries despite high prevalence of phone usage.

The documentary also talks about young women facing ¡°Snapchat Dysmorphia¡±, as they pursue unrealistic feminine beauty standards in their pursuit for validation. Here again, instead of questioning the patriarchal male gaze that has existed for decades, we are left with blaming the tools that make it possible. While cyberbullying has certainly become a cause of worry, we often forget that social media is also an effective tool for mobilizing and organizing resistance ¨C as seen from Tahrir Square to the recent Pride Marches amidst the pandemic. 

The tech-bros express concern over society becoming more divided than ever. In India, commentators often speak as if ¡°WhatsApp universities¡± are the primary cause of political polarization. We are constantly reminded that the political sphere is a battlefield of ideas. However, this obfuscates the material structures that have fostered such anxieties in the first place. The pitfalls of liberalism lies in their ignorance ¨C often deliberate ¨C of the social structures that has enabled the normalization of unreason around the world.  

The last few decades have witnessed profound shifts in the balance of class forces through the dismantling of the welfare state, union-busting, liberalization of private capital, deregulation in the name of easing business and the financialisation of the economy. The decline of stable jobs, accompanied by the rise of what the late David Graeber called has created deep resentment among the working classes. Right-wing exclusionary ideologies prey on such economic anxieties to put the blame on minorities. We need to be clear that social media is not the cause for this, but certainly becomes a platform to project these economic insecurities as cultural anxieties.

The second major silence is on how technologies are produced in any society. We often turn a blind eye to the massive state involvement in producing several technologies from the touch screen to Google¡¯s search engine algorithm, as has pointed out.  These same tech companies (including Netflix) are notoriously involved in , which has among other things fueled austerity policies that has hurt the working class. This brute fact not only busts the libertarian myths around private initiative, but also raises questions about the obscene wealth made by Silicon Valley executives. In the tech-bro narrative, technology appears to arise out of vacuum due to the brilliance of a few programmers. In reality, technology is socially produced.

More importantly, we often ignore the unpaid labour time that is involved in the production, consumption and distribution of information that is central to the everyday existence of web-based platforms. The documentary points out how targeted advertising has manipulated our psychological vulnerabilities. But what is left unsaid is how our seemingly mundane activities actually constitute ¡®unpaid labour¡¯ (called ), as advertising revenues constitute a primary source of profit for most web-based platforms.  Statements like ¡°if you are not selling something, then you are the product¡± should be reinterpreted taking into account this unpaid labour. 

Society at crossroads

These two silences ¨C on political economy as well as the social production of technologies ¨C make The Social Dilemma analytically and politically impotent. Accumulation is inherent to the logic of capitalism ¨C the business models simply reflect what is possible for capital at any given point of time. Seeing capitalism as an expansionary system for the pursuit of profit warns us against the futility of proposals that call for ¡®breaking up big tech¡¯ ¨C there is no reason why smaller facebooks or googles would treat data differently. The rampant trend of acquisitions by big tech only confirms the general tendency towards centralization in capitalism. 

That labour not only creates value, but also has the potential to shape and transform the world, is what makes the insights of Marx so relevant. This is true of cyberspace as well ¨C which is merely a manifestation of a historically specific mode of organising production. This leads to more important questions. How can we strengthen alternatives to corporate social media that do not pursue profit from unpaid ¡®leisure¡¯ time? How do we organize a truly democratic cyberspace based on collective ownership? More importantly, is this possible without radical challenges to the capitalist society we live in? It is high time we face the real dilemma that confronts us – which is social, not technological – lest we regress to barbarism. 

Aabid Firdausi MS is a research student at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. He is interested in studying the social and spatial dynamics of contemporary capitalism.??He tweets at

By Callum Cant, Sai Englert and Jamie Woodcock

The so-called platform economy ¨C the distribution of, and access to work through websites and apps ¨C continues to grab headlines and the imagination of policy makers, researchers, and journalists the world over. Much attention is given to its rapid expansion, its potential for further growth, and the large amounts of wealth generated through it.

Amongst many others, published a much-quoted study, if not always critically, which projected global revenues of $335 billion in 2025. If those numbers are potentially inflated, different valuations do point to a significant financial importance. For example, ¡®17 companies operating in the platform economy were valued at over $1 billion. Of these 17, 12 were based in the US, one in India (Olacabs), one in China (Kuaidi Dache), one in Australia (Freelancer), one in New Zealand (Trademe) and one in the UK (TransferWise)¡¯.

Alongside these macro observations, an equally large amount of ink continues to be spilt about the liberating nature of the platform for the worker (for a particularly excited account see). The gig worker, we are told, is entering a new reality free of the constraints of oppressive 9-5 employment, far away from the controlling gaze of their manager, able to choose when to work, set their own wages, and whom to work for. A new dawn of democratised entrepreneurialism is supposedly upon us.

Yet the actual evidence is ¨C perhaps unsurprisingly ¨C less rosy. Across the world, platform workers are confronted with the fact that, far from liberating them (or replacing them), new technologies play a disciplining role, deepening many of the characteristics of working conditions in a neoliberal economy: ranging from insecure and precarious employment relations, to greater managerial oversight and debt control. Callum Cant has masterfully documented some of these processes in his recent book on, as Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham have done in their .?

Attendants at last week¡¯s in London got another taste of this reality for workers. Drivers often get into debt in order to lease a car. They then discover that far from choosing their working hours, they are pushed by necessity to work at peak times and accept the most degrading behaviour from passengers in the hope of receiving the much needed five-star reviews. In addition, repairs, petrol, sick leave and other expenses are shouldered by the drivers alone, while the company can unilaterally extract ever increasing percentages from every ride. Those who complain are simply deactivated with little ability to challenge the platform¡¯s decision.

In face of these realities, another form of techno-determinism, mirroring that of the techno-optimists described above, has set in. Platform workers are ¨C we are told ¨C too difficult to organise, or at least not in a cost-effective way. Their atomisation, their rapid movement between jobs, and the speed with which they join and leave different apps means that their unionisation is too difficult. In addition, their status as self-employed workers and the downward pressure of app work on existing industries has led most existing unions to either ignore platform workers, or worse campaign for the closing of the platforms all together. This last approach has become ubiquitous in the Taxi industry across the world, where established Taxi unions and associations prefer to campaign for the closing down of Uber-like companies rather than the improvement of pay and conditions for their fellow workers.

Rejecting these approaches, we argue in a that the self-activity of workers in the platform economy should remain at the centre of our analysis and, crucially, our organising efforts. Away from idyllic or defeatist approaches, and side-stepping initiatives which aim to deliver better conditions ¡®from above¡¯ through policy and standard setting exercises, we return to the Marxist tradition that favours self-organisation and liberation from below. Emancipation can only ever be self-emancipation. We argue that platform work is no different and that organisers and academics should take ·É´Ç°ù°ì±ð°ù²õ¡¯ lives, experiences, and resistance more seriously.

In fact, this is plain for anyone to see, providing that they take the time to look. Around the world platform workers are getting organised and fighting back ¨C often using the very tools of the industry against it. From mass whatsapp groups and the worker-led feedback mechanisms such as to the more ¡®traditional¡¯ work stoppages and labour court cases, the initiatives and tactics used by platform workers are varied. They are strikingly international in character, reflecting the nature of their work and the tools they use. Marx already pointed out in the Communist Manifesto that the internationalisation of capital, and its concomitant development of technology and acceleration of circulation, would simultaneously lay down the basis for the internationalisation of resistance. Platform workers across the globe are once more demonstrating this to be true.

What we call Digital Socialism then, is nothing more than an old-new song. The demand to take workers and the process of production in the platform economy seriously ¨C rather than fanciful technologically deterministic approaches, whether optimistic or pessimistic in nature ¨C not only to interpret the world, but to change it.?

Callum Cant is the author of Riding for Deliveroo and a PhD student at the University of West London. Sai Englert is a lecturer at Leiden University. Jamie Woodcock is a Senior Lecturer at the Open University.

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