Goodbye, iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition

Abstract

Between the time I received Jack Linchuan Qiu’s newest book and the time I started writing this review, a series of hardware hiccups confirmed the book’s assertion that we are all increasingly enmeshed within systems powered by “AppConn,” Qiu’s term for the global system of gadgets and platforms that drive the IT industry. When my laptop broke, I attempted to cut down on screen time by setting up a mini-desktop for my office, ultimately purchasing and returning two faulty systems. I then ordered a new laptop, which arrived with damaged hardware and was quickly replaced. In lieu of a functioning computer, and desperately needing to connect to my social networks, I spent months tethered to my smartphone by a “wireless leash” that, in Qiu’s description of AppConn’s reach, represents the global network society’s dependency on the factory workers who have slaved to enable high-tech consumption. Focusing on the abuse of those workers in Guangdong factories, Goodbye, iSlave situates my troubles as a techno-dependent user within a worldwide structure of exploitation which he terms “iSlavery.” Building from his previous work (Qiu, 2009), in which he underscored the ways rapid social, economic, and cultural transformations in China simultaneously limited and expanded factory workers' agency as they entered into the digital network society, Qiu expands geographically while taking a broader historical view to show how Far East factory workers and Western communications technology consumers are co-implicated in the same political economy. In the era of the global network society with its culture of smartphones, laptops, and gadgets, this book presents historic slavery as a backdrop to iSlavery’s dual forms of subjugation: first, the factory’s “manufacturing iSlave” and, second, the tech industry’s “manufactured iSlave.” Qiu’s evaluation of the network society departs from Castells' (1996) classic theorization by locating forced labor performed by manufacturing and manufactured iSlaves at every node in the network. iSlavery is a heuristic to identify the costs of a global system that molds political and economic structures to ensure profit, but also to recognize the need for transnational organizing to abolish this slavery on a global scale.

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