The social production of radical space: Machinic labour struggles against digital spatial abstractions

In this article, we explore the antagonism between capital and labour from a distinctive spatial and connective perspective: by examining the tension between the production of digital abstract space in the context of machines and computational automation, and the powerful pushbacks of embodied labour struggles of gig-economy workers advancing alternative connective strategies. Our goal is to advance a spatial approach to digital labour practices capable of grasping the dialectical aspects of digital capitalism that are linked to digital and connective technologies. Contextualized within the recent debate on digital capitalism, we focus on a relational and organizational issue concerned with the logic of connection/disconnection, ambivalent connectivity, hybridization of people and technology, and machinic co-productive labour. We illustrate one of those possible alternative directions by examining the radical space generated by organized gig-economy workers. Pushing against the dematerializing force of Digitalized Management Methods, algorithmic management, and digital black boxes, we concentrate on the role played by workers in mediating principles of alternative connectivity against the general tendency of casualization of work in the gig/digital economy.