Platforms and the New Division of Labor Between Humans and Machines

The emergence of platforms as key architectures of the new economy has not only shifted the space of technical innovation and economic activity; it is also giving rise to a new political economy. This chapter is an attempt to outline the contours of this political economy. With a focus on heteromation as the division of labor between humans and machines, we introduce “decomposition” of tasks as a key mechanism that allows platforms to extract value from users and gig workers in expansive and often invisible ways. The continuities as well as novelties of the decompositional approach compared to earlier organizations of work (the workshop and the factory) are explored, and the implications for the future of work are examined, allowing us to steer away from the dominant substitution-complementation debate.