Rethinking Labor & Caste with the Algorithmic Turn

Abstract

My dissertation research seeks to examine how the specter of caste and (un)touchability shapes, and is shaped by continuously changing/ evolving, algorithmic control infrastructures in the context of beauty gig work in India, with a focus on the gig platform, UrbanCompany.
While sociological studies of the ambiguous/ complex intimacies between caste and capitalist relations have revealed the relative compatibility between the logics of caste and capital, such studies have primarily been based on industrial and agricultural labor. As such, they have emphasized the ways in which the direct, bureaucratic control of labor, enforced by human managers, succumbs to the hierarchical, discriminatory logics of caste. Neither the sociology of caste, nor labor/ capitalism studies have adequately theorized the relationship between market driven, algorithmic control of labor and the system of caste1, especially in the context of the amorphous gig economy. Against this backdrop, I ask, how do seemingly impersonal dynamics of labor management through indirect algorithmic control intersect with pre capitalist forms of social, intimate domination such as caste?