Digital Precarity: Platform Power and Posthuman Vulnerability

By Yasmin Ibrahim

Digital Precarity: Platform Power and Posthuman Vulnerability examines how precarity is reconfigured in the digital age through platform capitalism, algorithmic governance, and data extraction. It reveales digital precarity as a defining condition of contemporary mediated life.

Moving beyond conventional understandings of precarity as economic insecurity or unstable work, the author analyses how platform capitalism, algorithmic governance, data extraction and the attention economy produce new forms of vulnerability, dispossession and affective modulation. The book argues that digital precarity is not simply a by-product of technological change but a defining condition of mediated life, in which human subjectivity, labour, sociality and desire are continually captured, quantified and commodified. Through engagement with theories of precarity, postcolonial critique, racial capitalism, digital labour and posthuman capitalism, it illuminates the ways digital systems reproduce older hierarchies while generating novel forms of insecurity and dependency.

This book is essential reading for scholars and advanced students in digital culture, labour studies, media studies, sociology, political economy, and critical theory. It is particularly suited to researchers examining platform capitalism, algorithmic governance, digital labour, and the social implications of technological change, as well as those interested in postcolonial critique, racial capitalism, and critical approaches to understanding contemporary forms of inequality and vulnerability in digital societies.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1041178174
• ISBN13: 9781041178170
• Release Date: November 2026
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 180 Pages