CONCEPT
Circuits of Labour
The framework Gregg developed with Jack Linchuan Qiu and Kate Crawford for tracing the full chain of human costs in the digital economy — from data labelers to content moderators to partners performing boundary labor.
The circuits of labour framework insists that digital production depends on a supply chain of human effort that extends far beyond the visible worker — data labelers in Kenya, content moderators in the Philippines, cobalt miners in the Congo, domestic partners performing the boundary labor that subsidizes professional achievement. Each circuit's invisibility is not incidental; it is structurally produced, because economic measurement systematically excludes the domestic, the extractive, and the precarious. Gregg's AI-era application of the framework reveals that the tools celebrated in builder-focused discourse rest on three concentric circuits of invisible labor: the extractive labor that produced training data and continues to maintain AI systems, the emotional labor that knowledge workers perform in their professional lives, and the boundary labor that domestic partners perform to absorb the attentional deficit the first two produce.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The framework is deliberately circuit-based rather than supply-chain-based because supply chains imply linear flow from