The digital sublime and the hidden abode : deepening the dialogue between political economy of communication and labour process theory on digital labour

Slaček Brlek, Aleksander Sašo (author)

This focused reflection responds to calls to renew Vincent Mosco’s political economy by extending his insights through the broader Labour Process Theory (LPT) tradition. While LPT in communication studies is often reduced to Braverman’s deskilling thesis, this essay argues that Friedman, Edwards, Burawoy and Davies provide additional essential concepts for analysing digital labour in the era of the cloud and generative AI. Read through Mosco’s concepts of spatialisation and the digital sublime, these contributions clarify how algorithmic workplaces and platform labour are organised through segmented regimes of control, the institutional production (and breakdown) of consent and gendered and racialised hierarchies that render key forms of maintenance and data work invisible. This article therefore offers an integrated lens for understanding how contemporary infrastructures reconfigure the boundaries of the ‘factory’ at planetary scale.

• Language: English
• Keywords: Vincent Mosco, labour process theory, political economy of communication, spatialisation, digital sublime, cloud computing, algorithmic management, consent, digital labour, gender
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: FDV - Faculty of Social Sciences
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2026
• Number of pages: Str. 485-497
• Numbering: Vol. 20, no. 2
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-185096
• UDC: 316.77
• ISSN on article: 1745-6428
• DOI: 10.13169/workorgalaboglob.20.2.0022
• COBISS.SI-ID: 285730051
• Publication date in RUL: 22.07.2026

Record is a part of a proceedings

• Title: Control, survival, struggle
• COBISS.SI-ID: 285710339

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Work, organisation, labour & globalisation
• Publisher: Pluto Journals
• ISSN: 1745-6428
• COBISS.SI-ID: 526171929

Licences

• License: CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Description: This is the standard Creative Commons license that gives others maximum freedom to do what they want with the work as long as they credit the author.