996, moyu, and involution: tech work in the age of platform monopoly

Abstract

Over the past decade, consumer internet companies such as Google, Facebook, Tencent, and Alibaba have come to symbolize a new era marked by dynamism, entrepreneurialism, and innovation. This has led us to believe that these internet companies play an outsized role in the creation of economic value today, which given their profits, may come as no surprise. However, in this present iteration of capitalist production, value is seldom thought about in terms of labor. How can we incorporate workers—and the labor they perform—into our economic analysis of consumer internet platforms? And what can a labor theory of value reveal about how value is created among these platforms? My research looks at the labor process of China’s increasingly disgruntled tech workers between the years of 2019 and 2022, the years of China’s so-called “internet winter.” Against popular conceptions of China’s elite tech workers—smart, hardworking, and entrepreneurial—my research shows that the labor process of tech work in China during these years is rife with contradiction. Workers stay long hours at the office when there’s no work to do, spend hours writing reports for managers who never read them, and compete ruthlessly against each other when there’s nothing to gain. In other words, they seem to be doing, what the late David Graeber famously called, a bullshit job. By looking at its labor process, my research tells a different story of the consumer internet. Rather than being about dynamism, entrepreneurialism, and innovation, my thesis looks at the bullshitization of tech work and explores why the consumer internet has become bloated with nonsense activity.