Something that might be a stumbling block for such a research effort is figuring out what would _count_ as evidence for Virno's thesis. I think this is why anecdotes are brought up quite often in this kind of discussion - the immaterialisation of labour is a qualitative, not a quantitative change. So pointing to numbers won't prove anything either way; the fact that there are more truck drivers than computer programmers is irrelevant if the computer programmers' work is changing supply chains in such a way that the truck drivers' conditions of work are being radically altered (as the anecdotal evidence of a truck driver I used to share a house with suggests).
I'm broadly sympathetic to the Hardt and Negri, Virno, etc claims about immaterial labour, but I would like to see some stronger empirical evidence for them. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what sort of empirical evidence we should be looking for? --
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