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Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance - Hardcover | Diverse Reads

Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance

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A behind-the-scenes look at how digital surveillance is affecting the trucking way of life

Long-haul truckers are the backbone of the American economy, transporting goods under grueling conditions and immense economic pressure. Truckers have long valued the day-to-day independence of their work, sharing a strong occupational identity rooted in a tradition of autonomy. Yet these workers increasingly find themselves under many watchful eyes. Data Driven examines how digital surveillance is upending life and work on the open road, and raises crucial questions about the role of data collection in broader systems of social control.

Karen Levy takes readers inside a world few ever see, painting a bracing portrait of one of the last great American frontiers. Federal regulations now require truckers to buy and install digital monitors that capture data about their locations and behaviors. Intended to address the pervasive problem of trucker fatigue by regulating the number of hours driven each day, these devices support additional surveillance by trucking firms and other companies. Traveling from industry trade shows to law offices and truck-stop bars, Levy reveals how these invasive technologies are reconfiguring industry relationships and providing new tools for managerial and legal control—and how truckers are challenging and resisting them.

Data Driven contributes to an emerging conversation about how technology affects our work, institutions, and personal lives, and helps to guide our thinking about how to protect public interests and safeguard human dignity in the digital age.

ISBN-13: 9780691175300

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Publication Date: 12-06-2022

Pages: 240

Product Dimensions: 6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

Karen Levy is a faculty member in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University and associated faculty at Cornell Law School. She is a New America Fellow.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Leveraging compelling ethnographic fieldwork into the dynamics at play in the trucking sector, Levy brilliantly reveals how our collective fantasies about the future of automation are naive. This book invites readers to grapple with how technology and surveillance reconfigure work in subtle and profound ways. Data Driven is a must-read for both those who think AI is our salvation and those who see automation as the devil.”—danah boyd, author of It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens

“Truckers were the first to experience working for an algorithm rather than a human boss. With grace and insight, Karen Levy chronicles their struggles to maintain dignity in the face of constant surveillance while reminding us of the algorithmic future that is coming for all of us.”—Julia Angwin, author of Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance

“Data Driven is both a thorough and thoughtful examination of surveillance and an entertaining page-turner. Based on years of interviews and analysis, this book is a remarkable interdisciplinary achievement by a uniquely talented and humane researcher.”—Frank Pasquale, author of The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information

Table of Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 If the Wheel Ain't Turnin', You Ain't Earnin': Trucker Politics, Economics, and Culture 16

3 Tired Truckers and the Rise of Electronic Surveillance 35

4 The Business of Trucker Surveillance 52

5 Computers in the Coop 77

6 Beating the Box: How Truckers Resist Being Monitored 92

7 RoboTruckers: The Double Threat of AI for Low-Wage Work 119

8 Technology, Enforcement, and Apparent Order 152

Appendix A Studying Surveillance 159

Appendix B Notes on the Organization of the Trucking Industry 169

Acknowledgments 171

Notes 175

Bibliography 201

Index 221