Designing within Capitalism

Why do social computing projects aimed at alleviating social inequality fail? This paper investigates this question through a qualitative interview study with 25 individuals working to address the problem of wage theft in the United States (US) context. Our analyses uncover failures at three levels or scales of interaction: one, failures at the individual level of technology adoption; two, relational failures (i.e., the anti-labor worker/employer dynamic in the US); and three, institutional or macro-level failures. Taken together, these various failings point to larger, structural forces that negatively fate pro-labor projects' trajectories - i.e., capitalism. Capitalism's incarnations in the US play a signifcant and at times harsh grip in steering the path of social computing design projects. In this paper, we untangle the relationship between capitalism and social computing, providing an analytic framework to tease apart this complex relationship, the lessons learned from our empirical data, as well as ways forward for future, pro-labor, social computing projects.