“Craig Gent has given working people a great gift with this book. In a time of near-worship of the disembodied algorithm, he has illuminated the various ways that “cyberbosses” control – and more importantly, fail to control – today’s workers. He cuts the algorithm down to size, reminding us that the most impenetrable tech is made by humans, and can be broken by humans as well. An absolutely indispensable read for anyone organizing, working, or indeed just trying to survive in the 21st century.”
—Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
“Algorithms and AIs may or may not take our jobs, but they are now definitely directing and disciplining our work. This is the message of Craig Gent’s highly readable, urgently argued and carefully researched study of the digital automation of management, a vital book for labour activists, cyber-scholars, and all those fighting high-tech capitalisms increasingly inhuman power.”
—Nick Dyer Witheford, author of Cyber-Marx and Cyber-Proletariat, and, with Alessendra Mularoni, of The Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech and Planetary Crisis
“Algorithmic management is a growing reality of the modern workplace. Craig Gent provides an important investigation into the power and politics that drive it, and how workers can challenge the ways it’s used against them.”
—Paris Marx, author of Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation
“Left to its own devices, automation will not “steal our jobs” – at least not the very worst of them. Rather, it will increasingly consign humans to precarious drudgery while it takes over the role of manager. Craig Gent enriches a growing literature that punctures tech boosterism on both the left and the right by developing a political analysis of algorithmic management that makes it fundamentally into a question of power – within the workplace, of course, but above all over machines and our own lives.”
—Rodrigo Nunes, University of Essex, author of Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation
“The ‘algorithmic Panopticon’ is already here, argues journalist Gent in this foreboding debut exploration of ‘stringent’ managerial practices that rely on AI. Through firsthand accounts from employees, Gent shows how AI isn’t replacing workers but monitoring and controlling them.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A powerful and timely excavation of how new workplace technologies are in fact making workers of all stripes less free.”
—Marc Kohlbry, Boundary2
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