“Meat Drones”

imperialistic war as a laboratory for labor and the militaristic genealogy of work platformization

Abstract

This article proposes a military genealogy of the platformization of labor, arguing that the political economy of imperialist war operates on the battlefield not only as a laboratory of digital technologies, but of the sociotechnical relations of command, control, and restriction of collective resistance that govern contemporary platform work. Tracing three constitutive moments — Wiener's cybernetics, Zworykin's remote warfare, and the DARPA networks — the article analyzes how the martial logic of discipline and mutiny prevention migrated into class conflict, inscribing in the sociotechnical design of platforms the systematic preemption of workers' collective organization.