Work of the 'Unemployed': A Design Fiction

This paper presents a design fiction: a research prototype of a platform for unemployed individuals trading their personal data. The design fiction questions the ramifications of an understanding of data as individual property by showing a near-future speculative scenario of what government-driven job placement could look like. Which are the kinds of accountability and agency that could be leveraged in the context of job placement if data of unemployed individuals are considered property that can be traded with the public sector in return for support? An algorithm classifies the performance of unemployed individuals based on the data they upload. This way the algorithm becomes the central mechanism for accountability and control instead of the caseworker, who acts as an arbitrator between the individual citizen and algorithm. Our purpose with this paper, and the speculative research prototype, is to create a space for reflection on dilemmas in relation to data property, accountability, and agency in public services. Unemployed Individuals of Digitalization Platform technologies are becoming a key concern for Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), including in relation to public services. Scholars now ask how to meaningfully account for the perspective of the individual (Le Dantec 2016), considering the commodification of data in government-citizen interaction