"#Tech4Worse: The problem with digital labour initiatives for the Middle East", 7 December 2017

...In places like Palestine with unemployment rates of 30% (the highest in the world) and movement violently restricted by a series of checkpoints, borders and military zones, profit-making activities in the ‘placeless’ digital realm can be viewed as a way of overcoming these obstacles. The World Bank’s “m2work” project in cooperation with Nokia took precisely this approach. It was just one of a series of initiatives in the past few years led by governments or private sector actors that have identified the Arab world as a region in which microwork has “vast potential” as a means of alleviating poverty. But this rhetoric of flexibility and entrepreneurship so common to neoliberal development agendas conceals some ugly realities...Microwork is just one part of a broader spectrum of digital labour that ranges from on-demand services such as Uber to data extraction via social media such as Facebook. This continuum of unpaid, micropaid and poorly paid ‘taskified’ human activities means that work can no longer easily be distinguished from leisure time. Because of this, it’s really hard to talk about exploitation, a word usually associated with industrial labour’s sweatshop conditions, in relation to digital labour. It’s also hard to reconcile people not always feeling like these activities are work that warrants compensation with their objective creation of a great deal of economic value...