ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the labor associated with the production of digital platforms, the labor associated with their use as “machinery,” and the data on whose circulation this work depends, are all quite material. It highlights how the high-value work of the “tech” economy and the precarious work of the gig economy are digitally interlinked, not just through an app but also an entire apparatus of energy-intensive data transmission and storage stretching far beyond the “city”. The chapter builds from digital political ecology to understand the physical infrastructures and digital components of platform urbanism. It also examines the infrastructures that undergird platform urbanism, with a focus on data centers in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, to understand how a new division of labor (re)inscribes social disparities in the uneven geographies of the city and landscapes beyond.
