The Digital Working Class
The digital working class is the class-in-formation that Thompson's framework predicts will emerge from the AI transition — the workers whose labor is being directly displaced, whose working conditions are being degraded, and whose structural position in the economy is being reshaped without their participation. It includes the customer service representatives replaced by chatbots, the content moderators whose work is being automated, the translators displaced by neural machine translation, the junior professionals across every industry whose entry-level positions are being eliminated or restructured. It is the largest and least represented constituency of the AI transition. Its members do not write books about AI. They do not speak at conferences. They appear in the discourse as statistics rather than as named individuals whose specific experiences constitute the evidence any honest analysis must rest upon.
In the AI Story
The geographic dispersion of the digital working class creates specific challenges for class formation that Thompson did not encounter. The framework knitters of Nottinghamshire lived in concentrated communities where shared experience could be recognized, discussed, and organized around. The workers displaced by AI are scattered across industries, national boundaries, and employment categories ranging from full-time corporate employment to gig work to independent freelancing. The scattering makes recognition of common condition — the essential first step in class formation — extraordinarily difficult.
The ideology of individual responsibility pervading the knowledge economy obscures the class dynamics further. The worker displaced by AI is told to reskill, to adapt, to develop higher-order judgment. The advice is not wrong in content, but it is wrong in framing: it addresses a structural problem with an individual prescription, transforming a question of justice into a question of competence.
The temporal compression of the transition removes the time that previous class formations required. Thompson's industrial working class was made over decades. The digital working class is being made in years. The photographer fully employed in 2022 is struggling in 2025. The journalist on staff in 2023 is freelancing against algorithmic content in 2026. The speed leaves no time for the gradual development of shared analysis that Thompson documented in the nineteenth-century working class.
Despite these obstacles, the making has begun. The lawsuits, strikes, and petitions documented throughout the AI resistance are early signals of class formation. Online forums where displaced workers share experiences, professional associations developing AI standards, labor organizing campaigns at technology companies, emerging platform cooperative movements — each represents an early experiment in the institutional infrastructure the class will need.
Origin
The concept applies Thompson's class as happening framework to the AI-affected workforce, drawing specifically on his demonstration that class formation is an active process workers must themselves perform under the structural conditions they encounter.
Key Ideas
Largest, least represented. The digital working class is the biggest constituency of the AI transition and the smallest voice in the discourse.
Structural obstacles to formation. Geographic dispersion, occupational diversity, and ideology of individual responsibility impede recognition of common condition.
Temporal compression. The speed of AI transition leaves less time for class formation than previous technological transitions allowed.
Making in progress. Despite obstacles, early institutional experiments suggest the class is in the process of making itself.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, Power and Progress (PublicAffairs, 2023)
- Juliet Schor, After the Gig (University of California Press, 2020)
- Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Polity, 2016)