The travel of an iPhone

Ineluctable Connectivity, Networked Precarity, and Postsocialist Politics

Bibliographic Data

ID3040772
AuthorsXiao Liu (0000-0001-6365-1191, McGill University, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume24
Issue2
Pages255-270
Publication date2018-03-04
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial Identities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1350-4630 • E-ISSN: 1363-0296
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13504630.2017.1321720
OpenAlexW2612485133
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited15

This essay considers the homosocial ‘love story’ between a New York City media worker and a poor Chinese worker incidentally triggered by the iCloud connection of a lost iPhone in relation to the global chain of iPhones production, circulation and consumption. It asks how information technologies have become the loci for the global redistribution of racialized labor and the production of subjectivities across the networks. By mapping out the ineluctable connectivity and networked precarity that binds together affective and information labor with factory work and other unrecognized forms of labor in the global political economy, this essay reveals the forced severance of information work from sectors of material production that is imposed by capitalist distribution and compartmentalization of labor. In the end, I argue that the very erasure of this global connectivity of precarious labor reveals postsocialism as a global condition under which the potential formations of collectivities and sociality for political possibilities are at once conditioned and obscured by capitalist global networks

Economic geography · Economics · Erasure · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Precarity · Sociology · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · Employment and Welfare Studies · Gender Studies · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy

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