Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the role of intimacy in digital labour on crowdwork platforms. It asks whether this concept can help us to understand the spatio-temporal reconfiguration of labour through digital platforms and its effects on daily working life and the private home as a workplace.

Paper long abstract:

Contrary to location-dependent platform work such as cleaning services, crowdworkers work remotely, mostly from their private homes and do not have to interact with their clients in person.

The paper explores how intimacy nevertheless plays a crucial role in this form of digital labour. Based on research on two different types of crowdwork platforms - one that involves direct contact between clients and workers (e.g. Upwork) and one where the latter are mostly invisible (e.g. Appen) - I aim to understand different dimensions of "intimacy at work" (Broadbent). In the first case, I look at how online freelancers who are working as virtual assistants, ghostwriters or recruiters maintain relationships with their clients while navigating different levels of intimacy. In the second case, I analyse how intimacy becomes commodified on platforms hiring crowdworkers to record videos or speech of themselves and their surroundings as well as to evaluate intimate content of other workers for the purpose of improving training data for AI.

Building upon research on the invasion of work into the home (Gregg), new digital intimacies (Dobson) and social reproduction theory, I ask whether the concept of intimacy can help us to understand the spatio-temporal reconfiguration of labour through crowdwork platforms and its effects on daily working life and the private home as a workplace. How is the platform mediating and regulating intimacy? And how are workers navigating different levels of intimacy in digital working cultures?