ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief overview of how online crowdsourcing platforms have been used by corporations and discusses the different ways anarchists have approached the question of technology and its role in society and in social change. It identifies the concept of ‘affordances’ as useful in analyzing technologies like crowdsourcing platforms from an anarchist perspective. In popular management literature, it is commonly argued that the consequences of the technological developments are overwhelmingly positive, since they increase creativity and innovation and free the worker from tedious and strenuous labour. A flagship phenomenon of work in the ‘digital age’ is crowdsourcing. Importantly, anarchist resistance towards technology is not only an academic phenomenon. Political activists inspired by anarchist thinking have likewise been engaged in struggles against a wide variety of new technologies, such as nuclear technology, nanotechnology, surveillance technology, warfare technology, synthetic biology and artificial intelligence.
