Telecommuting and Surveillance Capitalism

Abstract

The confinement generated by the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020 accelerated technological change, leading governments and companies to define different types of measures, not only to attend to the health emergency, but also to continue with their activities during the isolation. Among the most important organizational changes is teleworking or working at home, boasted for its benefits both in the autonomy of the worker, flexible hours and a better balance between work and family life. The objective of this article is to analyze teleworking and its main characteristics within the framework of a surveillance capitalism that implements digital control mechanisms, exacerbating the surveillance and monitoring of workers' activities. Shoshana Zuboff (2019a, 2019b), Byung Chul Han (2014; 2013) and Michael Foucault (2002) are reviewed as theoretical supports to understand the version of Digital Capitalism that transformed the various spaces of relationship fundamentally the capital/work relationship that increased the individualization of labor, as well as the incorporation of new methods of control and surveillance. The methodology used is qualitative based on documentary review and reflective analysis in which the immersion of the researcher is sensitive in the interpretation of the social world.  Based on the analysis, it is concluded that companies and digital employees have modified the way in which workers and companies relate to each other, transforming the labor world; and that in a scenario of virus and civilization crisis, the ordering of teleworkers is sharpened with monitoring software as increasingly effective and subtle control methods.