Not only are workers’ conditions becoming more precarious, but their moment-to-moment activities are also becoming increasingly monitored. A large transformation underway is datafication’s role in changing how workers are managed, which entails an increasing degree of monitoring. As Larry Catá Backer argues, “Surveillance has become not only a technique of governance, but its substitute,” with assumptions and objectives beyond passive data collection. Extending beyond the workplace to all aspects of a worker’s life, this new kind of surveillance is very much a domain of the social quantification sector. Its evolution must be placed in the longer history of surveillance within capitalism, which, as Christian Fuchs points out, was already noted by Marx. Alongside the consumer surveillance, discussed more fully in chapter 3, and the mutual surveillance between competitors that is inherent to market economies, capitalist labor relations have—according to Fuchs—always been characterized by at least three types of surveillance: applicant surveillance, workplace surveillance, and workforce surveillance.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 227