Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan's Digital Economy by Gabriella Lukács (review)

Films and literature have been preoccupied with the relationship between humans and technology for decades. The expansion of technology, particularly digital technology, intimately encompasses our lives, connecting us with others and to whole communities more than ever. A body of academic literature that has developed examining the facets of our relationship with technology reflects the benefits but also poses questions, for example about the nature of human existence, the quality of the interactions, and the impacts such as the foreshadowed/prophesied impact on employment and our work lives. Gabriella Lukács's book covers these themes and more, presenting a valuable contribution to the study of an evolving digital landscape as it affects employment in Japan, particularly the challenges women face, but also to our understanding of late-stage capitalism.

Lukács introduces us to women attempting to carve out careers as net idols, bloggers, online traders, and cell phone novelists who "have turned to digital technologies in search of opportunities to develop fulfilling do-it-yourself (DIY) careers" (p. 1) that are sustainable. Her research reveals that, in attempting to develop these careers, the women faced new but also ageold challenges. The new challenge is that their career longevity was limited by the profitability of the particular technologies; they had to constantly evolve by devoting more time to upgrading their skills and to maintaining their online presence. The age-old challenge is that online platforms have developed by using, but not remunerating, women's invisible labor or monetizing their digital careers. From each participant's story, we learn of the passion that sparked their launching of a digital career, but we also discover the disappointment, as for a great many their trajectory is not what they had imagined and does not pay the bills. Those who do gain some measure of success find what they have been passionate about very soon resembles the dead-end, often insecure jobs they have left, and "the romance was soon over" (p. 15).

In exploring the important question of "why the overwhelming majority of the women who ventured to build careers were not able to transform their projects into lucrative employment" (p. 4), Lukács argues that individuals' search for fulfilling work is just as critical to innovation in capitalist accumulation as technological development. The argument draws on Karl Marx's idea that labor is important for developing the means of production and increasing productivity (p. 12). Using Marx's concept of the labor theory of value, Lukács frames her analysis of women's role in developing Japan's digital economy whereby with their entry into digital careers, a new approach to extracting profit from labor emerged. Online platform owners achieved this by disconnecting the content produced in the digital economy from the notion of labor. In other words, the women creating digital content as net idols, online traders, bloggers, and cell phone novelists generated advertising revenue and content for online platform owners but were only compensated for the content they produced and not for all the associated work that went into, for example, maintaining their profiles by responding to fans. Each digital career is discussed in a discrete chapter which artificially compartmentalizes the women's experiences. I was struck by the similarities of experiences—affective labor; the experience of being their own product; having to constantly evolve and develop their "product," including their image; the blurring of work and private life—and wondered whether a thematic treatment might have provided a richer and deeper analysis. That aside, I found the discussion provoked by the question and the argument informative and engaging.

In its examination of the digital economy, Lukács's analysis is a valuable contribution to the growing body of literature on employment in Japan, especially for women. We learn that the world of "digital cameras, cellular phones, and the internet enticed women...