Description: In recent decades digital devices have reshaped daily life, while tech companies' stock prices have thrust them to the forefront of the business world. In this rapid, global development, the promise of a new machine age has been accompanied by worries about accelerated joblessness thanks to new forms of automation. Jason E. Smith looks behind the techno-hype to lay out the realities of a period of economic slowdown and expanding debt: low growth rates and an increase of labor-intensive jobs at the bottom of the service sector. He shows how increasing inequality and poor working conditions have led to new forms of workers' struggles. Ours is less an age of automation, Smith contends, than one in which stagnation is intertwined with class conflict.
Brief description: Jason E. Smith lives in Los Angeles. He has written extensively on contemporary politics and political economy in journals including Artforum, Brooklyn Rail, Commune, Critical Inquiry, and Radical Philosophy.
Review Quotes: "In his book Smart Machines and Service Work, Smith offers a reality check to the effects of automation in an age of stagnated production and wages. . . . Workers usurped from administrative as well as industrial roles have recomposed themselves on behalf of service industries as a massively expanded, desiccated and low-paid servant class, the new 'precariat.' . . . Smith dials up his Marx to probe several fascinating and troubling effects of this current dynamic."-- "Morning Star"