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8 THE NEXT INTERNET 105

that now dominate technology outsourcing” (Dignan 2011a). The Next
Internet also expands the range of potential outsourcing practices. It may
be an overstatement to declare, as did Forbes magazine, “We are all out-
sourcers now,” but it certainly makes feasible more kinds: “Outsourcing is
no longer simply defined by multi-million-dollar mega-deals in which IT
department operations are turned over to a third party. Rather, bits and
pieces of a lot of smaller things are gradually being turned over to outside
entities” (McKendrick 2014). Amazon is a leading force in this process
with its Mechanical Turk business that charges individuals and organiza-
tions to outsource micro-tasks to a worldwide reserve army of online piece
workers. Combined with the promise of product warehouses full of robots
to locate, pack, and ship goods and drones to deliver them, Amazon is the
leading edge of the Next Internet’s push to expand labour intensification
throughout the world. Whatever the impact on the number of jobs, the
Next Internet is already changing the labour process. Workers at a Swedish
firm can attest to this as they arrive at the office each day with RFID chips
implanted under the skin to improve productivity and management control
(Cellan-Jones 2015).
What can be done to address these problems? First and foremost, it is
essential to view them as intrinsically social and not just technological.
While technology plays a role in addressing serious policy issues, there is no
simple digital fix to solve them. It will take concerted political action to
tame the concentrated corporate power that is now making the Next
Internet a tool to expand the power and profit of a handful of digital giants.
It will also take global social movements, stronger versions of what sup-
porters called a New World Information and Communication Order in the
twentieth century, to build a digital commons for the twenty-first.
Furthermore, we need to make environmental protection and sustainability
central to all decision-making about the Next Internet. It is also important
to rethink privacy as the human right of access to the psychological space
essential to develop individual autonomy. Above all, privacy is an essential
right of citizenship and not a tradable commodity. Protection of personal,
interpersonal and autonomous space from commercial and government
surveillance must also be central to the choices made about the Next
Internet. Finally, we need social policies about employment and income
that address the state of human labour in an age when automation
threatens jobs, including now those of the white-collar workforce, and
massive invasive surveillance threatens fundamental worker rights. Does
this mean we should reopen the discussion of a guaranteed annual income?