Analog Labor in a Digital World

A deep dive into electronics repair in India—and how economies of skilled labor can offer an alternative way to live with things in our material world.

Analog Labor in a Digital World explores an alternative way to live with the things in our world, by tracing the skilled repair labor that repurposes and reinvents high-tech, digital devices otherwise discarded as waste. Through a patchwork ethnography of India’s diverse used electronics industries, Julia Corwin examines the often invisible yet vital labor of electronics repair, remanufacturing, and informal trade that makes electronics economies work. This local perspective, gleaned from sitting in scrap shops and wandering through dusty warehouses in India, looks deeply at what can be learned about waste, labor, and supply chain capitalism from the underside of commodity production.

From the local electronics repair shop to major electronics manufacturers and e-waste recyclers, the book shows the interdependence of people, materials, communities, and seemingly separate economic systems, revealing a globally connected world of commodity production, wasting, and revaluation. Rather than being composed of peripheral labor processes feeding off the detritus of the formal economy, the author shows how India’s electronic “waste” sector is a powerful source of value (and product) creation that is integral to the functioning of global commodity production.