As we noted in chapter 4, the poor are likely to be particularly disadvantaged. Digital platforms, apps, and sensors provide infrastructures for seamlessly installing data-derived performance monitoring into all aspects of work, but they are being installed most energetically in lower-status and low-wage work. Employees such as truck drivers or warehouse workers already have continuous surveillance installed as a basic feature of their lives. There may soon be no workers left in those sectors who remember what it was for their bodies and their every action to be unmonitored. In higher-status jobs, the intensity and continuity of surveillance may be limited to aspects of the recruitment process in which a candidate’s social media history is now pored over. In today’s “fissured workplace,” those in powerful positions will seek privileged control over who is surveilled (and how much) and who is not surveilled. Social power may come to mean, in part, being a net controller of the benefits and costs of surveillance, just as under industrial capitalism management power meant controlling the flow of knowledge and information that made up work.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 482