AI, Subsumption, and the Call-Centerization of Work

Abstract

Data Frontiers and Digital Labor: AI, Subsumption, and the Call-Centerization of Work

This talk argues that the continual expansion of data frontiers and the related introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) systems into a broad range of productive and reproductive spheres is both driving and facilitated by a “call-centerisation” of work. There are two key aspects of this process. First, call centers have for several decades been the tip-of-the-spear in broader datafication of work, with work processes streamlined and workers surveilled through data-driven systems, in turn facilitating global restructurings of the division of labor. Such processes are accelerating in the current conjuncture. Second, the growth of AI applications across contexts is driving new demands for work in data annotation, content moderation, remote operations (such as of robots), and other tasks—much of which is carried out in call centers or in environments closely modeled on call centers. This, I argue, constitutes not simply automation, but rather an AI-driven real subsumption of labor across sectors like transportation, retail, and home service in which work becomes technologically and geographically reorganized through a call center model. I argue that closer attention is needed to the history of entangled technological and geographical transformations in the sector, their ongoing evolutions, and the ways they are serving as models for technological/geographical restructurings across other sectors.

This talk is part of the series "Critical Data & Surveillance Studies" organized by Professor Azadeh Akbari.

 

Date & Time

The talk will take place on June 8, 2026, at 4:30 p.m. at the Seminarhaus, room SH 1.101 (Campus Westend, Goethe University).

It is also possible to join the talk online via Zoom.

 

Photo by Lianhao Qu auf Unsplash

Bio

Casey Lynch

Casey Lynch is Ramón y Cajal Fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of Girona (Catalonia, Spain). He completed his PhD in Geography at the University of Arizona and has previously worked as an Assistant Professor at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and the University of Nevada Reno in the United States. His research broadly examines the political, economic, and cultural geographies of techno-capitalism and its alternatives. His current project, in collaboration with the Spanish labor union federation CCOO, explores the ways workers experience, navigate, and contest the introduction of AI tools and systems in work processes across sectors and geographies.