This article focuses on data workers in Shenzhen, who, since 2013, have been recruited to fill positions in the city’s Weaving the Net program (zhiwang gongcheng, 織網工程). The program, furthering both the expansion of city gridding management techniques and local experiments with China’s Social Credit system, is designed to generate a daily set of data to inform the city’s “Smart Brain”, and is a core way of managing the city’s “floating population”. In this article, we approach the grid management of Shenzhen and its connection with histories of Chinese social control through data workers themselves. We argue that data workers expand our understanding both the integration of human-technological assemblages into smart city initiatives and the labor of data generation for programs of state social control. Extending STS approaches to smart city infrastructure, we use the figure of the data worker to the present both familiar and distinctive characteristics of Chinese Smart City initiatives.
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In November 2020, a question appeared on Zhihu.com, China’s largest question and answer platform. “What is it like to be a data worker?” This post got 106,000 reads, and the answer with the most “likes” was posted by an anonymous data worker from Shenzhen. In their answer, this data worker described his daily routine like this:
Most of the work is to register population and housing information, also [I am] required to do many other community jobs. Grid data workers are asked to keep constant contacts with all the landlords, tenants, business owners, shop keepers, by WeChat. During COVID, we are also wearing PPEs, helping community tracing and recording, checking people’s temperatures, and even delivering food and medicines … Every morning, we would firstly arrive at the community office, take on uniforms (90% like police uniforms, except that we have a “grid data worker” badge on the uniform). Then there would be a group meeting with other team members. After that everyone goes to their own grid with the working mobile device, walking along buildings and stores, knockings doors and asking people questions.
