Undead Labor and Instruments of Production: Zombies, Foxconn, and the Gig Economy

Abstract:The zombie has often been used as a metaphor for industrial production and mass consumption, but older interpretations of zombies as industrial workers or ideologically duped consumers do not adequately explain why the zombie apocalypse has captured our imagination today. This essay analyzes modes of production and forms of labor that emerged over the last decade in China and the United States. Specifically, it discusses the form of production Foxconn developed to produce modern electronics, and application-based labor such as Uber/Lyft, in order to provide a foil for an analysis of our contemporary economic anxieties. I argue that the "dead" labor Marx locates in industrial production has not simply been "outsourced" over the last forty years: it has been transformed into "undead" labor and has returned in a new, spectral form.