Left to Our Own Devices: Coping with Insecure Work in a Digital Age

An examination of the ways that digital technologies play an increasingly important role in the lives of precarious workers, far beyond the gig economy apps like Uber and Lyft.

Over the past three decades, digital technologies like smartphones and laptops have transformed the way we work in the US. At the same time, workers at both ends of the income ladder have experienced rising levels of job insecurity and anxiety about their economic futures. In Left to Our Own Devices, Julia Ticona explores the ways that workers use their digital technologies to navigate insecure and flexible labor markets. Through 100 interviews with high and low-wage precarious workers across the US, she explores the surprisingly similar "digital hustles" they use to find work and maintain a sense of dignity and identity. Ticona then reveals how the digital hustle ultimately reproduces inequalities between workers at either end of polarized labor markets. A moving and accessible look at the intimate consequences of contemporary capitalism, Left to Our Own Devices will be of interest to sociologists, communication and media studies scholars, as well as a general audience of readers interested in digital technologies, inequality, and the future of work in the US.

Julia Ticona is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research investigates the ways that digital communication technologies shape the meaning and dignity of precarious work. Prior to joining the faculty at Penn, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the Data & Society Research Institute, and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. In 2017, she collaborated on an amicus brief on behalf of Data & Society for Carpenter vs. U.S. before the US Supreme Court. Her work appears in The New York Times, The Nation, Wired, Slate, Dissent, Jezebel, Fast Company, and NPR's All Things Considered.