Social Science Seminar - DingTalk and Digital Workplace Surveillance in Times of COVID-19

The lockdown imposed across China as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed the notion of the workplace as workers are forced to stay at home and complete their tasks remotely. Tech work, seems especially suited during this disruptive transition as much of existing labor practices are already digitally-mediated via software and platforms. Drawing from an autoethnographic and ethnographic account of my own experiences working in the tech industry in China during COVID-19, this project examines the imbrication of software and productivity tools into one’s working routines that coincided with the increasing use of digital surveillance as part of China’s COVID-19 lockdown. Specifically I am looking at the popular productivity software DingTalk that tech workers must interface in their everyday working lives. DingTalk, a product of the Chinese tech titan Alibaba, uses a mix of geolocation and time-stamping to track when and where workers should be working despite being relegated to telecommuting from home. This digitally-mediated workplace conforms to what Mark Andrejevic considers as the notion of the “digital enclosure” where all interactions with software become incorporated as forms of labor that can be monitored and commodified.  In doing so I want to dissect the various institutional and infrastructural limits imposed on productive tech labor via digital software that opens for new ways of thinking about worker agency and means of resistance. I argue that while software-mediated workplaces imposed new risks and precarity in regard to surveillance and exploitation, there are also distinct strategies and tactics employed by workers to circumvent and undermine such intrusive modes of digital oppression.