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Work Without the Worker
The brutal truth behind our automated futures and the new world of work
We are told that the future of work will be increasingly automated. Algorithms, processing massive amounts of information at startling speed, will lead us to a new world of effortless labour and a post-work utopia of ever expanding leisure. But behind the gleaming surface stands millions of workers, often in the Global South, manually processing data for a pittance.
Recent years have seen a boom in online crowdworking platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Clickworker, and these have become an increasingly important source of work for millions of people. And it is these badly paid tasks, not algorithms, that make our digital lives possible. Used to process data for everything from the mechanics of self-driving cars to Google image search, this is an increasingly powerful part of the new digital economy, although one hidden and rarely spoken of. But what happens to work when it makes itself obsolete. In this stimulating work that blends political economy, studies of contemporary work, and speculations on the future of capitalism, Phil Jones looks at what this often murky and hidden form of labour looks like, and what it says about the state of global capitalism.
We are told that the future of work will be increasingly automated. Algorithms, processing massive amounts of information at startling speed, will lead us to a new world of effortless labour and a post-work utopia of ever expanding leisure. But behind the gleaming surface stands millions of workers, often in the Global South, manually processing data for a pittance.
Recent years have seen a boom in online crowdworking platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Clickworker, and these have become an increasingly important source of work for millions of people. And it is these badly paid tasks, not algorithms, that make our digital lives possible. Used to process data for everything from the mechanics of self-driving cars to Google image search, this is an increasingly powerful part of the new digital economy, although one hidden and rarely spoken of. But what happens to work when it makes itself obsolete. In this stimulating work that blends political economy, studies of contemporary work, and speculations on the future of capitalism, Phil Jones looks at what this often murky and hidden form of labour looks like, and what it says about the state of global capitalism.
144 pages, Hardcover
Published October 5, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews
January 21, 2022
I appreciate what this book is trying to do and it is an important topic. Mapping hidden labour in an era of platform capitalism is necessary. However, this book is incoherent. Other than ‘micro work’ is bad, I can’t find a consistent argument. It quotes Marx, but is not a Marxist piece of work. It discusses the labour of people on platforms like Mechanical Turk but with no accounts from workers or appropriate citation to sociological projects investigating this. It contributes to the reification it should be trying to dispel. It is only 100 pages long but after about 20 pages the reader will tire of the rhetorical bombast.
I find myself questioning who the audience for these types of books is, ie with the aesthetics of a mainstream non fiction text but with constant use of lefty pseudo academic jargon. Is it for political economists? If so, it has to be more systematic. Is it an expose? Then as a book it can’t just read like a Tribune piece or a (editorially) generous Guardian op-ed. Maybe it is just for other disappointing Verso books to cross-cite.
I find myself questioning who the audience for these types of books is, ie with the aesthetics of a mainstream non fiction text but with constant use of lefty pseudo academic jargon. Is it for political economists? If so, it has to be more systematic. Is it an expose? Then as a book it can’t just read like a Tribune piece or a (editorially) generous Guardian op-ed. Maybe it is just for other disappointing Verso books to cross-cite.
October 31, 2022
The first half of this book is pretty good. Jones does a very good job journalistically tracking down and laying out the details of how the "microwork" industry operates around the world, the horrific conditions faced by workers, the way the entire business model depends on superexploitation.
But then in the second half it just kind of falls into a morass of half baked predictions and overly academic pontificating about the future. Despite the fact that well over 90 percent of jobs in the US are formalized, and despite numerous times in this book scolding people for predicting the end of work and its replacement by AI, Jones then falls into the same pit of implying that microwork is the inevitable future for all laborers. Quoting neofascist "journalist" Paul Mason approvingly and uncritically citing numerous debunked lies about the treatment of Uyghurs by the Chinese state, Jones dismisses the possibility of any socialist or even trade unionist project for future workers, instead falling into a nihilistic dirge for the working class.
This book would've been better off just leaving the first half as a long form article and the second half in the unpublished drafts.
But then in the second half it just kind of falls into a morass of half baked predictions and overly academic pontificating about the future. Despite the fact that well over 90 percent of jobs in the US are formalized, and despite numerous times in this book scolding people for predicting the end of work and its replacement by AI, Jones then falls into the same pit of implying that microwork is the inevitable future for all laborers. Quoting neofascist "journalist" Paul Mason approvingly and uncritically citing numerous debunked lies about the treatment of Uyghurs by the Chinese state, Jones dismisses the possibility of any socialist or even trade unionist project for future workers, instead falling into a nihilistic dirge for the working class.
This book would've been better off just leaving the first half as a long form article and the second half in the unpublished drafts.
June 21, 2022
Kalau kamu pernah nonton Social Dilemma, you probably have to read this one.
Selama awal pandemi (Q1 2020), beberapa penerbit radikal kiri membagikan buku-e gratis. Dari situ aku mendapat "pencerahan" atas bagaimana dunia bekerja. Salah satunya dalam tech industries.
Beberapa orang mengagungkan techbros seperti Elon Musk atau Jeff Bezos. They're the golden boys yg diharapkan bisa membawa peradaban menuju reinasans berikutnya.
Tapi ketika aku berkenalan dg buku radikal kiri, sudut pandangku berubah. They're not the saint. Hal itu makin diperkuat dg tulisannya Phil Jones dalam Pekerja-Pekerja Hantu.
Dalam docu Social Dilemma, pasti nggak asing dg bagaimana medsos bekerja & menjadikan para pengguna sbg "kapital" u/ dijual lagi kpd tech industries lainnya. Going even deeper, data diri kita pun ditambang u/ menguji AI yg tengah mereka kembangkan. Di dalam kepalaku ketika itu, the programmers input some of their magic spell sehingga AI bisa di-update. But I was wrong!
Hal-hal semacam itu dikerjakan oleh manusia yg dijuluki Microworkers. Mereka yang bekerja 78jam/seminggu dg upah
Tech industries adalah pihak yg diuntungkan dg keadaan itu. Sebab, mereka yg menjadi Microworkers akan mengambil pekerjaan apapun hanya u/ tetap hidup di tempat yg sudah berantakan.
Phil Jones jg menuliskan kondisi Microworkers yg menyebabkan mereka nggak bisa bikin serikat--sehingga nggak bisa menuntut hak mendasar tenaga kerja. Misalnya, sengaja menggunakan platform penghubung yg hanya berfungsi sbg medium u/ menerima & submit pekerjaan.
Sejak bagian prolog, aku sudah tertarik dg buku ini. Phil Jones juga menyajikannya dlm 5 bab secara rapi & terstruktur.
Yang bikin senang lagi, bukunya cuma 158 halaman aja! Nggak berasa berat & bikin pusing. Malah bikin mindblowing 😂
Read this one & let me know if you want to roast the tech bros too 😄
Selama awal pandemi (Q1 2020), beberapa penerbit radikal kiri membagikan buku-e gratis. Dari situ aku mendapat "pencerahan" atas bagaimana dunia bekerja. Salah satunya dalam tech industries.
Beberapa orang mengagungkan techbros seperti Elon Musk atau Jeff Bezos. They're the golden boys yg diharapkan bisa membawa peradaban menuju reinasans berikutnya.
Tapi ketika aku berkenalan dg buku radikal kiri, sudut pandangku berubah. They're not the saint. Hal itu makin diperkuat dg tulisannya Phil Jones dalam Pekerja-Pekerja Hantu.
Dalam docu Social Dilemma, pasti nggak asing dg bagaimana medsos bekerja & menjadikan para pengguna sbg "kapital" u/ dijual lagi kpd tech industries lainnya. Going even deeper, data diri kita pun ditambang u/ menguji AI yg tengah mereka kembangkan. Di dalam kepalaku ketika itu, the programmers input some of their magic spell sehingga AI bisa di-update. But I was wrong!
Hal-hal semacam itu dikerjakan oleh manusia yg dijuluki Microworkers. Mereka yang bekerja 78jam/seminggu dg upah
Tech industries adalah pihak yg diuntungkan dg keadaan itu. Sebab, mereka yg menjadi Microworkers akan mengambil pekerjaan apapun hanya u/ tetap hidup di tempat yg sudah berantakan.
Phil Jones jg menuliskan kondisi Microworkers yg menyebabkan mereka nggak bisa bikin serikat--sehingga nggak bisa menuntut hak mendasar tenaga kerja. Misalnya, sengaja menggunakan platform penghubung yg hanya berfungsi sbg medium u/ menerima & submit pekerjaan.
Sejak bagian prolog, aku sudah tertarik dg buku ini. Phil Jones juga menyajikannya dlm 5 bab secara rapi & terstruktur.
Yang bikin senang lagi, bukunya cuma 158 halaman aja! Nggak berasa berat & bikin pusing. Malah bikin mindblowing 😂
Read this one & let me know if you want to roast the tech bros too 😄
August 16, 2021
A very clear and concise analysis of the very human work behind the shiny future of automation. A helpful intervention into contemporary automation debates that brings class struggle to the fore. Highly recommended!
August 2, 2022
Subject matter is good. We need more books about this. I can see this being the first of many, with each one improving on the last.
January 3, 2022
In this insightful analysis of platform capitalism, Phil Jones asks often overlooked questions about the backbone of current technological constellations: What is AI really? Who does the true essential labour behind algorithms? (Disclaimer: It's not the software engineers the tech giants are showcasing in their Silicon Valley teaser trailer - work at our campus! - videos.) The author unveils the backbone of platform capitalism by showcasing where the data is coming from that the tech giants are using to train their machine learning algorithms. It comes from people forced into precarious half-labour, half-unemployment - no employment benefits and self-employment tragedy - marketed through Amazon and other microwork platform owners as "the future of work": You decide which tasks you want to work on - and when! and where! and we're totally going to ingnore that we're not paying a liveable wage and that wage theft is a huge problem on our platform and that you're at the mercy of the algorithm to receive tasks (and, of course, the contractor decides if he wants to pay you after they have received the fruits of your labour - try to complain? See what happens! We will log you out of your account!) and that tasks are gone after seconds so you have to be constantly online to receive some kind of compensation for your "waiting-to-actually-find-some-task"-work which will be compensated (if at all) through an amazon gift card that you can't use to pay rent or feed your dying children.
It's these people - refugees in camps all over the world, precarious worker often labeled "unemployables" from poor countries in the Global South - who moderate our Facebook feeds and teach our cars how to self-drive through traffic while essentially contributing to the automation of job opportunities that are basically the only way out of microwork entrapment. A vicious cycle that will haunt our economy for decades to come until we find a way to guarantee survival for the forgotten working class out of jobs.
Amazing read, as always; Verso just doesn't disappoint!
It's these people - refugees in camps all over the world, precarious worker often labeled "unemployables" from poor countries in the Global South - who moderate our Facebook feeds and teach our cars how to self-drive through traffic while essentially contributing to the automation of job opportunities that are basically the only way out of microwork entrapment. A vicious cycle that will haunt our economy for decades to come until we find a way to guarantee survival for the forgotten working class out of jobs.
Amazing read, as always; Verso just doesn't disappoint!
November 24, 2021
This book argues that these badly paid, psychically damaging tasks – not algorithms – are primarily what make our digital lives legible. ‘Think of it as microwork, so for a penny you might pay for someone to tell you if there is a human in a photo’, Jeff Bezos informed the world at the public opening of Amazon Mechanical Turk, the first and still most famous of these sites.
Though data is the lifeblood of platforms, its production is not something we tend to think of. We can see an iPhone’s hardware and can glean from its materiality the labour necessary for its manufacture. But we can neither see nor touch the data that moves through its software. We are never forced to encounter the fact that data must also be produced; that such an ethereal, elusive substance is the result – like hardware – of human labour. Misapprehension becomes transfiguration, as the work of hands and minds appears solely as the result of smart machines. This data fetish – figuring automated drones in place of data labellers, media feeds in place of moderators – conceals the hidden abode of automation: a growing army of workers cut loose from proper employment and spasmodically tasked with training machine learning.
Microwork comes with no rights, security or routine and pays a pittance – just enough to keep a person alive yet socially paralyzed. Stuck in camps, slums or under colonial occupation, workers are compelled to work simply to subsist under conditions of bare life. This unequivocally racialized aspect to the programmes follows the logic of the prison-industrial complex, whereby surplus – primarily black – populations are incarcerated and legally compelled as part of their sentence to labour for little to no payment. Similarly exploiting those confined to the economic shadows, microwork programmes represent the creep of something like a refugee-industrial complex.
Today, however, the impact of automation has less to do with the erasure of whole jobs and more to do with adaptations to a given job’s task composition and, subsequently, the overall quality of the work. Most jobs are the result of various tasks with varying degrees of susceptibility to automation. Automation might not wipe out a whole job, just some of the tasks that comprise it.
In this spirit, AI does not tend to create fully automated systems but rather systems that partially automate jobs and outsource certain tasks to the crowd.
If we imagine the automation of services in this way – a process of ongoing human supervision and correction – the question is no longer one of absolute superfluity but relative superfluity: just how much are workers involved and to what extent can they make a living? Microwork exemplifies the way that AI tends to informalize rather than fully automate work. It betokens a future in which growing numbers of workers are not erased by machines but squeezed to the point of vanishing.
This stripping of pay, rights and skills represents the real and present impact that automation is having on the service sector. Yet, the concrete experience of workers is often lost amid sensational speculations of unprecedented job loss. Whether naysayer or doomsayer, automation theorists tend to focus debate on mass unemployment. But the jobless armageddon is a red herring. Instead, we are seeing ever more service jobs transformed into gig-, micro- and crowdwork, where working on and alongside the algorithm is the form automation tends to take. In the case of microwork, these ‘jobs’ too often resemble joblessness.
If this book has one aim it is to show that microwork is not a new source of jobs and skills, but something akin to the grizzly spectacles of survival one might find on the streets of Victorian England, nineteenth-century Naples or modern Mumbai. Beyond the hackneyed bootstrap dogma of institutions like the World Bank, we should ask: what does the wage actually look like on microwork sites? Does the work offer the skills and benefits of an actual occupation? Do these conditions differ from other forms of wageless survivalism? And do they prevent the kinds of organisation and unity once seen in the traditional working class? Such an enquiry can help to guide us toward new kinds of resistance in a moment when work again feels obscure yet, somehow, bewilderingly familiar.
The story of capitalism is, in no small part, the story of individuals gradually coming to terms with the disciplinary framework of waged life, even as gainful work itself is eroded. As E. P. Thompson notes, ‘in all these ways – by the division of labour; the supervision of labour; fines; bells and clocks; money incentives; preachings and schoolings; the suppression of fairs and sports – new labour habits were formed.’ To these techniques, intended to forge habits conducive to orderly labour, we may now add account closures and public score systems. Effectively allowing ‘employers’ to sack workers without so much as a warning, they return the world of work to a place that resembles Victorian England, only now with the objective pretences of algorithmic decision-making.
This is a significant but unremarked feature of platform capitalism: the workers turning masses of data into the valuable information that sustains the system are waged only in the loosest sense. Microwork sites allow large platforms to hide this reality or at least to make it seem acceptable. The workforces of Google and Microsoft exist behind a marketing mirage that sustains a sense of microwork as not quite work, the microworker not quite a worker.
Now, complex divisions of labour and advanced technological systems mean most work is no longer personal but impersonal. Know-how ceases to exist in any given occupation, instead residing in the machines that dictate worker activities, the detailed descriptions of tasks created by management and worker reviews gathered from office or factory surveillance. In this sense, the capitalist system not only alienates memory, knowledge and tradition, but experience itself.
In no way a sign of a healthy labour market, then, microwork’s prevalence the globe over is a distressing symptom of crisis, where petty tasks are dressed up as proper employment to disguise the catastrophic surpluses that dwarf decent work. Like regimes of accumulation past, platform capitalism moves around the globe searching for the wretched, the damned or those yet to receive the mercy of the market. Only now, with the benefit of information and communication technologies and machine learning, it can source those with truly nowhere else to go – the bare life of a planet in ceaseless turmoil. Unlike previous regimes, it has not forged a new range of occupations for its workforce but effectively maintains a permanent reserve army of market fugitives, only called upon when a piece of work is available
Even someone working for a company that manufactures nuts and bolts for distant military contractors is able, with some research, to figure out the nature of their work. Microwork, however, thins the aperture of knowledge to a tiny sliver of light, divesting workers of the capacity to know what they are doing and to what end. The Bangladeshi tailor knows they are making a shirt for someone to wear, even if they do not know which company will eventually sell it. The shirt has a tangible use the tailor can readily perceive. The worker on Clickworker, on the other hand, often has little idea of what they are creating. One might say that, in every instant the tailor can see, the microworker is blind.
Google’s use of microwork for a US Department of Defense initiative, Project Maven, is a case in point. In one of many secret deals between the US military and big tech, the Pentagon contracted Google to develop an artificial intelligence program capable of sorting thousands of hours of drone video, ultimately with the goal of helping the military identify targets on the battlefield. For the program to be useful, it would need to learn how to differentiate objects into ‘buildings’, ‘humans’ and ‘vehicles’. Partly to keep costs low, but also to keep the project private, Google contracted the services of Figure Eight (now Appen), a microwork site that specialises in data annotation. Via the Figure Eight platform, taskers then provided algorithms with the requisite data sets by identifying objects in CAPTCHA-like images taken from the footage. In so doing, workers unwittingly helped Pentagon officials to engage in ‘near-real time analysis’ – to ‘click on a building and see everything associated with it’. The anonymity here afforded Google, alongside the highly abstract nature of the videos, meant workers could not see who they were working for and what they were working on – a drone video does not immediately reveal itself as a tool of war, likely appearing as innocuous footage of an urban area.
Unable to see who or what the tasks empower, workers blindly develop technologies that facilitate urban warfare and cultural genocide. It is a grim irony that the refugees who use microwork sites are effectively forced to create the very technology that directly oppresses them, a further though by no means new twist in the capitalist tale of machines subjugating workers to racist structures.
The worker, then, plays nightwatchman to a shadowy algorithm. They may know that training data is fed into the algorithm and that a decision comes out of the other side, but what goes on in between remains entirely opaque.mThis opaque space represents a black box, a dark patch covering something of significant social effectivity, entirely impenetrable – for reasons often of power and secrecy – to those outside its workings. Hidden is how the algorithm makes the decision – on what grounds, for whom and with what aim. As appendages to these algorithms – refining, enhancing and supervising their capacities – workers spend their days in this shadowy netherworld, neither able to see the process on which they labour nor readily seen by those outside its parameters. This is how larger platforms want their labour: obscure to those doing it and invisible to the wider world.
The threat is no more palpable than to firms using microwork to disguise their workers as machines in a bid to attract venture capital. As Lilly Irani points out:
By hiding the labour and rendering it manageable through computing code, human computation platforms have generated an industry of start-ups claiming to be the future of data. Hiding the labour is key to how these start-ups are valued by investors, and thus key to the speculative but real winnings of entrepreneurs. Microwork companies attract more generous investment terms when investors perceive them as technology companies rather than labour companies.’
Realising this world in the labour market, microwork represents the apex of neoliberal fantasy: a capitalism without unions, worker culture and institutions – indeed, one without a worker capable of troubling capital at all. As if bringing to life capitalism’s fever dreams, microwork undermines not only the wage contract, distinct occupations and worker knowledge, but the workforce as unified, antagonistic mass.
Amazon gets all of this data simply by acting as host. Here we find the primary function of Mechanical Turk: a barely profitable, potentially even unprofitable, labour platform cross-subsidising Amazon’s wider business operations as a logistics and software company. Mechanical Turk is interested less in the levy on transactions, more in the data about the work process.
For most, the present remains tolerable to the extent that the future remains unimaginable. Soon, an unimaginable future may become an uninhabitable future. In response to climate catastrophe, capitalism offers only a techno- solutionism-cum-death-cult. Like sad testaments to the system’s nihilism, a facial recognition camera is built to arrest the billions displaced by climate catastrophe, not save them; a chatbot can only jabber its stock phrases as the planet burns.
This failure of imagination is matched only by Silicon Valley’s imaginative efforts to exploit the system’s casualties, to devise forms of work that offer a life little better than total joblessness. Microwork points to a future where a worker’s primary role is to generate data and automate their own job away. But, for this very reason, microwork can also point to a world where the wage disappears, where work is less central to our lives, and where we have more choice over when we work and what we work on. To paraphrase the words of the historian E. P. Thompson, this world will not rise like the sun at an appointed time; it will have to be made. In the growing number of struggles across the globe, its glimmer grows ever stronger. In the fever dreams of a system entering permanent night are the blinking lights of a new dawn.
Though data is the lifeblood of platforms, its production is not something we tend to think of. We can see an iPhone’s hardware and can glean from its materiality the labour necessary for its manufacture. But we can neither see nor touch the data that moves through its software. We are never forced to encounter the fact that data must also be produced; that such an ethereal, elusive substance is the result – like hardware – of human labour. Misapprehension becomes transfiguration, as the work of hands and minds appears solely as the result of smart machines. This data fetish – figuring automated drones in place of data labellers, media feeds in place of moderators – conceals the hidden abode of automation: a growing army of workers cut loose from proper employment and spasmodically tasked with training machine learning.
Microwork comes with no rights, security or routine and pays a pittance – just enough to keep a person alive yet socially paralyzed. Stuck in camps, slums or under colonial occupation, workers are compelled to work simply to subsist under conditions of bare life. This unequivocally racialized aspect to the programmes follows the logic of the prison-industrial complex, whereby surplus – primarily black – populations are incarcerated and legally compelled as part of their sentence to labour for little to no payment. Similarly exploiting those confined to the economic shadows, microwork programmes represent the creep of something like a refugee-industrial complex.
Today, however, the impact of automation has less to do with the erasure of whole jobs and more to do with adaptations to a given job’s task composition and, subsequently, the overall quality of the work. Most jobs are the result of various tasks with varying degrees of susceptibility to automation. Automation might not wipe out a whole job, just some of the tasks that comprise it.
In this spirit, AI does not tend to create fully automated systems but rather systems that partially automate jobs and outsource certain tasks to the crowd.
If we imagine the automation of services in this way – a process of ongoing human supervision and correction – the question is no longer one of absolute superfluity but relative superfluity: just how much are workers involved and to what extent can they make a living? Microwork exemplifies the way that AI tends to informalize rather than fully automate work. It betokens a future in which growing numbers of workers are not erased by machines but squeezed to the point of vanishing.
This stripping of pay, rights and skills represents the real and present impact that automation is having on the service sector. Yet, the concrete experience of workers is often lost amid sensational speculations of unprecedented job loss. Whether naysayer or doomsayer, automation theorists tend to focus debate on mass unemployment. But the jobless armageddon is a red herring. Instead, we are seeing ever more service jobs transformed into gig-, micro- and crowdwork, where working on and alongside the algorithm is the form automation tends to take. In the case of microwork, these ‘jobs’ too often resemble joblessness.
If this book has one aim it is to show that microwork is not a new source of jobs and skills, but something akin to the grizzly spectacles of survival one might find on the streets of Victorian England, nineteenth-century Naples or modern Mumbai. Beyond the hackneyed bootstrap dogma of institutions like the World Bank, we should ask: what does the wage actually look like on microwork sites? Does the work offer the skills and benefits of an actual occupation? Do these conditions differ from other forms of wageless survivalism? And do they prevent the kinds of organisation and unity once seen in the traditional working class? Such an enquiry can help to guide us toward new kinds of resistance in a moment when work again feels obscure yet, somehow, bewilderingly familiar.
The story of capitalism is, in no small part, the story of individuals gradually coming to terms with the disciplinary framework of waged life, even as gainful work itself is eroded. As E. P. Thompson notes, ‘in all these ways – by the division of labour; the supervision of labour; fines; bells and clocks; money incentives; preachings and schoolings; the suppression of fairs and sports – new labour habits were formed.’ To these techniques, intended to forge habits conducive to orderly labour, we may now add account closures and public score systems. Effectively allowing ‘employers’ to sack workers without so much as a warning, they return the world of work to a place that resembles Victorian England, only now with the objective pretences of algorithmic decision-making.
This is a significant but unremarked feature of platform capitalism: the workers turning masses of data into the valuable information that sustains the system are waged only in the loosest sense. Microwork sites allow large platforms to hide this reality or at least to make it seem acceptable. The workforces of Google and Microsoft exist behind a marketing mirage that sustains a sense of microwork as not quite work, the microworker not quite a worker.
Now, complex divisions of labour and advanced technological systems mean most work is no longer personal but impersonal. Know-how ceases to exist in any given occupation, instead residing in the machines that dictate worker activities, the detailed descriptions of tasks created by management and worker reviews gathered from office or factory surveillance. In this sense, the capitalist system not only alienates memory, knowledge and tradition, but experience itself.
In no way a sign of a healthy labour market, then, microwork’s prevalence the globe over is a distressing symptom of crisis, where petty tasks are dressed up as proper employment to disguise the catastrophic surpluses that dwarf decent work. Like regimes of accumulation past, platform capitalism moves around the globe searching for the wretched, the damned or those yet to receive the mercy of the market. Only now, with the benefit of information and communication technologies and machine learning, it can source those with truly nowhere else to go – the bare life of a planet in ceaseless turmoil. Unlike previous regimes, it has not forged a new range of occupations for its workforce but effectively maintains a permanent reserve army of market fugitives, only called upon when a piece of work is available
Even someone working for a company that manufactures nuts and bolts for distant military contractors is able, with some research, to figure out the nature of their work. Microwork, however, thins the aperture of knowledge to a tiny sliver of light, divesting workers of the capacity to know what they are doing and to what end. The Bangladeshi tailor knows they are making a shirt for someone to wear, even if they do not know which company will eventually sell it. The shirt has a tangible use the tailor can readily perceive. The worker on Clickworker, on the other hand, often has little idea of what they are creating. One might say that, in every instant the tailor can see, the microworker is blind.
Google’s use of microwork for a US Department of Defense initiative, Project Maven, is a case in point. In one of many secret deals between the US military and big tech, the Pentagon contracted Google to develop an artificial intelligence program capable of sorting thousands of hours of drone video, ultimately with the goal of helping the military identify targets on the battlefield. For the program to be useful, it would need to learn how to differentiate objects into ‘buildings’, ‘humans’ and ‘vehicles’. Partly to keep costs low, but also to keep the project private, Google contracted the services of Figure Eight (now Appen), a microwork site that specialises in data annotation. Via the Figure Eight platform, taskers then provided algorithms with the requisite data sets by identifying objects in CAPTCHA-like images taken from the footage. In so doing, workers unwittingly helped Pentagon officials to engage in ‘near-real time analysis’ – to ‘click on a building and see everything associated with it’. The anonymity here afforded Google, alongside the highly abstract nature of the videos, meant workers could not see who they were working for and what they were working on – a drone video does not immediately reveal itself as a tool of war, likely appearing as innocuous footage of an urban area.
Unable to see who or what the tasks empower, workers blindly develop technologies that facilitate urban warfare and cultural genocide. It is a grim irony that the refugees who use microwork sites are effectively forced to create the very technology that directly oppresses them, a further though by no means new twist in the capitalist tale of machines subjugating workers to racist structures.
The worker, then, plays nightwatchman to a shadowy algorithm. They may know that training data is fed into the algorithm and that a decision comes out of the other side, but what goes on in between remains entirely opaque.mThis opaque space represents a black box, a dark patch covering something of significant social effectivity, entirely impenetrable – for reasons often of power and secrecy – to those outside its workings. Hidden is how the algorithm makes the decision – on what grounds, for whom and with what aim. As appendages to these algorithms – refining, enhancing and supervising their capacities – workers spend their days in this shadowy netherworld, neither able to see the process on which they labour nor readily seen by those outside its parameters. This is how larger platforms want their labour: obscure to those doing it and invisible to the wider world.
The threat is no more palpable than to firms using microwork to disguise their workers as machines in a bid to attract venture capital. As Lilly Irani points out:
By hiding the labour and rendering it manageable through computing code, human computation platforms have generated an industry of start-ups claiming to be the future of data. Hiding the labour is key to how these start-ups are valued by investors, and thus key to the speculative but real winnings of entrepreneurs. Microwork companies attract more generous investment terms when investors perceive them as technology companies rather than labour companies.’
Realising this world in the labour market, microwork represents the apex of neoliberal fantasy: a capitalism without unions, worker culture and institutions – indeed, one without a worker capable of troubling capital at all. As if bringing to life capitalism’s fever dreams, microwork undermines not only the wage contract, distinct occupations and worker knowledge, but the workforce as unified, antagonistic mass.
Amazon gets all of this data simply by acting as host. Here we find the primary function of Mechanical Turk: a barely profitable, potentially even unprofitable, labour platform cross-subsidising Amazon’s wider business operations as a logistics and software company. Mechanical Turk is interested less in the levy on transactions, more in the data about the work process.
For most, the present remains tolerable to the extent that the future remains unimaginable. Soon, an unimaginable future may become an uninhabitable future. In response to climate catastrophe, capitalism offers only a techno- solutionism-cum-death-cult. Like sad testaments to the system’s nihilism, a facial recognition camera is built to arrest the billions displaced by climate catastrophe, not save them; a chatbot can only jabber its stock phrases as the planet burns.
This failure of imagination is matched only by Silicon Valley’s imaginative efforts to exploit the system’s casualties, to devise forms of work that offer a life little better than total joblessness. Microwork points to a future where a worker’s primary role is to generate data and automate their own job away. But, for this very reason, microwork can also point to a world where the wage disappears, where work is less central to our lives, and where we have more choice over when we work and what we work on. To paraphrase the words of the historian E. P. Thompson, this world will not rise like the sun at an appointed time; it will have to be made. In the growing number of struggles across the globe, its glimmer grows ever stronger. In the fever dreams of a system entering permanent night are the blinking lights of a new dawn.
February 19, 2022
Deep though it may already be, the well of human avarice and duplicity seems to be refreshed daily. New to my attention are bits of labor described as “microtasks,” jobs performed on computers that take anywhere from a minute to a few hours to complete. The labor is outsourced by the usual tech suspects, Facebook and Google among them, to platforms serving as job hubs, which consist of tasks aimed to improve computer algorithms. (An algorithm is merely a way of processing data. To make predictions, the algorithm needs a data bank of previous examples to work from.)
In one sense, then, the workers are training algorithms to take over their jobs. That seems to be the most benign use of their labor. In other cases, in which a worker might have to identify parts of a photograph (much like a CAPTCHA image), the purpose of the task could be to simply improve the performance of an autonomous vehicle (“building,” “road,” “sidewalk”) or to identify for a drone which parts of, say, an Arab village, can be bombed by somebody’s military—a military that anonymously farmed out a job to a city where micro-taskers live, who identify local landmarks without ever knowing why or for whom or for what reason.
Pay ranges from pennies on the hour to under $2/hour, depending on geography—refugee camp, prison, economic disaster area, Northern or Southern Hemisphere?—and supported by the practical cynicism of the World Bank’s “better a job than a hand-out.” In such a trap, workers exist much as Schrödinger’s cat—simultaneously employed and unemployed, the terminal state determined only the moment the question is asked: “Do you have a job?” (“For the next 60 seconds, yes.”)
The tasks pay sub-living wages and offer no benefits. Employment lasts as long as the individual task. Workers don’t know who they are working for at any given moment, who their co-workers are, or how to organize for better pay and better conditions. Today may offer 60 seconds of work from one company, tomorrow nothing at all, and the day after that, multiple jobs from multiple firms over 12 hours for a $5 gift card from Amazon rather than money.
Platforms, the third-party websites that host these jobs, take a 20% cut from the workers’ wages, then sell back to their clients data about how the workers performed their tasks, including keystrokes, eye movements, and so forth.
The micro-taskers both improve existing algorithms and sometimes serve as the algorithm itself for, say, start-up companies trying to demonstrate the potential of their product. Without telling investors, data entered is actually analyzed by micro-taskers elsewhere, not the software system itself. A type of fraud, if you will, but look at the audience.
Jones does not foresee currently viable solutions to the problem, but he does note that the tendency among companies to atomize tasks into discrete components performable by trained computers could easily seep into such white-collar jobs as accounting and other rote occupations that can be both mimicked and a set of probabilities developed for.
What happens to the displaced workers whose jobs have been subsumed by computers?
That’s what for-profit prisons were invented for.
In one sense, then, the workers are training algorithms to take over their jobs. That seems to be the most benign use of their labor. In other cases, in which a worker might have to identify parts of a photograph (much like a CAPTCHA image), the purpose of the task could be to simply improve the performance of an autonomous vehicle (“building,” “road,” “sidewalk”) or to identify for a drone which parts of, say, an Arab village, can be bombed by somebody’s military—a military that anonymously farmed out a job to a city where micro-taskers live, who identify local landmarks without ever knowing why or for whom or for what reason.
Pay ranges from pennies on the hour to under $2/hour, depending on geography—refugee camp, prison, economic disaster area, Northern or Southern Hemisphere?—and supported by the practical cynicism of the World Bank’s “better a job than a hand-out.” In such a trap, workers exist much as Schrödinger’s cat—simultaneously employed and unemployed, the terminal state determined only the moment the question is asked: “Do you have a job?” (“For the next 60 seconds, yes.”)
The tasks pay sub-living wages and offer no benefits. Employment lasts as long as the individual task. Workers don’t know who they are working for at any given moment, who their co-workers are, or how to organize for better pay and better conditions. Today may offer 60 seconds of work from one company, tomorrow nothing at all, and the day after that, multiple jobs from multiple firms over 12 hours for a $5 gift card from Amazon rather than money.
Platforms, the third-party websites that host these jobs, take a 20% cut from the workers’ wages, then sell back to their clients data about how the workers performed their tasks, including keystrokes, eye movements, and so forth.
The micro-taskers both improve existing algorithms and sometimes serve as the algorithm itself for, say, start-up companies trying to demonstrate the potential of their product. Without telling investors, data entered is actually analyzed by micro-taskers elsewhere, not the software system itself. A type of fraud, if you will, but look at the audience.
Jones does not foresee currently viable solutions to the problem, but he does note that the tendency among companies to atomize tasks into discrete components performable by trained computers could easily seep into such white-collar jobs as accounting and other rote occupations that can be both mimicked and a set of probabilities developed for.
What happens to the displaced workers whose jobs have been subsumed by computers?
That’s what for-profit prisons were invented for.
January 1, 2022
A short, interesting, introductory read on the labour behind automation, specifically microwork, whether as the labour of the prison or as workfare (as seen in Help to Work, the workfare brainchild of Iain Duncan Smith, in which claimants were required as part of receiving their welfare to work for free as "work experience") disguised as welfare, microwork offers a convenient way of putting a surplus of cheap labour to work, for reasons not only of profit, but also discipline
This free labour is the epitome of subemployment, or what Leigh Claire La Berge has called "decommodified labour", in which labour ceases to be a commodity and becomes decommodified - labour without a price that continues to produce profit
I thought the book did well in explaining that microwork is not a new source of jobs and skills, but something survival as one might find in Victorian England or modern Mumbai
The main drawback of the book is that although it criticises microwork well, it doesn't go any further in its analysis of capitalism or broader imperialism as capitalism exploits workers across the world, and in the rare cases that it does, it completely misses the mark
This is best exemplified when discussing that microwork workers are blindly developing technologies that facilitate urban warfare and cultural genocide, thus they are forced, in order to survive, to create the very technology that directly oppresses them, the author has bought into the myth that China is using face tracking software with the purpose of interning large numbers of the Uyghur population in concentration camps as part of a supposed ethnonationalist cleansing project, a claim that has no demonstrable evidence
Another example is during the discussion of the police, which the author correctly identifies as an institution originally designed to quell the riotous menace that the wretched pose to private property, and has since developed into a service directly geared toward economic ends, targeting racialised surpluses as entrants fot the prison industrial complex in which convicts are forced to labour for petty/no payment and once released consistently receive lower wages than others, and are far less likely to join unions and strike action, thus "cops make capital", the author doesn't expand or link this waged labour and the broader struggle against it
This free labour is the epitome of subemployment, or what Leigh Claire La Berge has called "decommodified labour", in which labour ceases to be a commodity and becomes decommodified - labour without a price that continues to produce profit
I thought the book did well in explaining that microwork is not a new source of jobs and skills, but something survival as one might find in Victorian England or modern Mumbai
The main drawback of the book is that although it criticises microwork well, it doesn't go any further in its analysis of capitalism or broader imperialism as capitalism exploits workers across the world, and in the rare cases that it does, it completely misses the mark
This is best exemplified when discussing that microwork workers are blindly developing technologies that facilitate urban warfare and cultural genocide, thus they are forced, in order to survive, to create the very technology that directly oppresses them, the author has bought into the myth that China is using face tracking software with the purpose of interning large numbers of the Uyghur population in concentration camps as part of a supposed ethnonationalist cleansing project, a claim that has no demonstrable evidence
Another example is during the discussion of the police, which the author correctly identifies as an institution originally designed to quell the riotous menace that the wretched pose to private property, and has since developed into a service directly geared toward economic ends, targeting racialised surpluses as entrants fot the prison industrial complex in which convicts are forced to labour for petty/no payment and once released consistently receive lower wages than others, and are far less likely to join unions and strike action, thus "cops make capital", the author doesn't expand or link this waged labour and the broader struggle against it
January 25, 2024
The first half of this book was interesting — it made me aware of microwork schemes and companies like Amazon Mechanical Turk that I was unaware of to begin with. The novelty wears away by the second half, however, when there is frequent repetition and some speculation of how a socialist future could look that is couched in freely-entered-into informal/microwork for communal and self-fulfillment.
I am a huge believer in specialization. I believe that the burnout experienced in jobs is less a problem of only doing one task day-in and day-out, and more a problem of worker alienation and broken community relationships. For example, I love teaching — it is not hard because I *only* teach, but because I sometimes feel alienated from the labor (sometimes feeling like I receive an accumulation of busy work rather than participating in an individuated program of improvement), and because students (and even other teachers sometimes) fail to uphold and affirm me as a holistic person. Jones’s intimation that socialism might be best perceived as a system where many tasks can be undertaken over time is understandable but ultimately, I think, untenable.
I would only recommend this to those who are highly interested in the confluence of recent AI developments and socialist theory.
I am a huge believer in specialization. I believe that the burnout experienced in jobs is less a problem of only doing one task day-in and day-out, and more a problem of worker alienation and broken community relationships. For example, I love teaching — it is not hard because I *only* teach, but because I sometimes feel alienated from the labor (sometimes feeling like I receive an accumulation of busy work rather than participating in an individuated program of improvement), and because students (and even other teachers sometimes) fail to uphold and affirm me as a holistic person. Jones’s intimation that socialism might be best perceived as a system where many tasks can be undertaken over time is understandable but ultimately, I think, untenable.
I would only recommend this to those who are highly interested in the confluence of recent AI developments and socialist theory.
December 23, 2021
masters all the left-academic phrases and rhetorical turns and mostly uses them to summarize news articles
November 27, 2021
This book is about the world of high-tech tasks-for-hire companies (aka crowdworking platforms), which offer low-paying work in the form of small tasks to be done online. The conditions Work Without the Worker described for workers who depend on this “clickwork” sound like something out of a cyberpunk dystopia, once again bringing to mind the William Gibson quote “the future is already here, just not evenly distributed….” Describes the ways that gig work platforms breaking “skilled” or “professional” jobs down into discrete tasks transmutes them into “unskilled” labor. I was surprised how much work we assume is being done by algorithms &/or AI is actually done by online gig workers. I was more surprised at how much of this work is done by actual prisoners & refugees. I liked the utopian possibilities hinted at in the conclusion.
Read
December 19, 2023An interesting and very concerning topic that is largely ignored but will become more and more relevant. This book provides good high level information but it could really benefitted from direct interviews/etc. with the people actually employed in this field. and a lot of the context doesn't feel that relevant or connected. and some of the arguments are not that well argued. But still quite thought provoking
February 19, 2022
This book blew my mind. Keywords: microwork, AI, machine learning.
September 18, 2022
No tenía idea de la existencia del “microworking” otra aberración del neoliberalismo que de pasada revela que la llamada inteligencia artificial es una estafa.
June 3, 2022
Interesting! Gloss over the trumpism stuff and u get a poignant book abt the struggle of micro workers and the potential leveraging strategies they can employ to secure a hopefully better future. I also liked how they included a piece abt digital technologies and their potential in a centrally planned economy.
July 28, 2022
Baik penentang maupun pendukung ahli teori automasi, mereka cenderung memfokuskan perdebatan pada pengangguran massal. Namun armageddon pengangguran hanyalah pengalihan isu belaka. Daripada melihat semakin banyaknya gig-, micro-, dan crowdwork, kita harus melihat bahwa bekerja untuk dan di samping algoritma adalh bentuk kerja yang saat ini menjadi incaran otomatisasi. Dalam kasus microwork, apa yang disebut "pekerjaan" sering kali mirip dengan ketiadaan pekerjaan.
Cukup mudah untuk membayangkan siapa yang membuat gadget yang selalu kita pakai. Tapi apakah kita tahu bahwa teknologi hebat AI yang ada di setiap mesin automasi bisa bekerja karena adanya data-data yang dikumpulkan tidak lain dan tidak bukan oleh pekerja-pekerja yang disebut microworker. Platform-platform besar seperti Amazon, Google, Facebook, dll semua membutuhkan banyak data yang akan mereka masukkan ke dalam kecerdasan buatan mereka. Semakin banyak data yang dapat mereka kumpulkan, semakin besar pula tingkat otomatisasi yang dapat mereka hasilkan.
Sayangnya, pekerjaan mengumpulkan data ini justru dikelola oleh pihak ketiga. Para kontraktor microworker ini menyediakan ratusan pekerjaan-pekerjaan kecil yang mereka tawarkan kepada seluruh pekerja di seluruh dunia tentu saja dengan upah yang sangat kecil. Utopia bekerja dimana saja hanya dengan bermodalkan internet ini sungguh ironis karena kompensasi yang diberikan juga sangat kecil, tentu tidak sebanding dengan besarnya keuntungan yang dihasilkan oleh platform-paltform besar yang memanfaatkan data tersebut. Buku ini cukup menggambarkan penggambaran umum bagaimana kapitalisme platform bekerja.
Buku ini secara gamblang membahas bagaimana ketidakadilan yang dialami para microworkers terutama penduduk di negara bagian Selatan yang sangat bergantung pada pekerjaan ini. Mulai dari upah yang sangat kecil, bahkan ada beberapa yang hanya dibayar menggunakan giftcard, hingga tidak dibayar sama sekali. Tugas-tugas yang terlihat simpel tapi aneh tanpa penjelasan, anonimitas pemberi kerja, sistem rating satu arah yang hanya menguntungkan pemberi kerja, psikologi mental pekerja yang harus terpapar konten-konten kekerasan dan pornografi dari data yang mereka saring, hingga tidak adanya serikat pekerja yang bisa menaungi mereka.
Lebih jauh, penulis juga menggambarkan skenario terburuk bagaimana di masa depan nanti pekerjaan-pekerjaan akan menjadi semakin kecil demi upah yang lebih kecil dan keuntungan lebih besar bagi pemberi kerja, yang akan membuat generasi-generasi mendatang menjadi generasi pencari kerja yang selalu ada di pasar tenaga kerja yang hanya dipanggil ketika ada pekerjaan yang tersedia.
Jujur membaca buku ini membuka mata saya tentang microworker itu sendiri. Saya baru tahu fakta di balik algoritma AI yang super canggih. Mungkin ini seperti barang-barang branded yang dijual dengan harga tinggi namun di baliknya ada pekerjaan buruh-buruh pabrik yang dibayar murah. Dengan penggambaran yang begitu mengerikan mengenai kapitalisme platform ini, kita akan diajak untuk memikirkan kembali bagaimana kita menyikapi segala bentuk automatisasi yang kelihatannya 'memudahkan' pekerjaan kita. Berpikir kritis tentu diperlukan untuk merebut kembali kendali atas pekerjaan kita.
June 12, 2024
I'll be honest, I was at several points of this fairly small book, quite lost. BUT in the end I think I've come to understand its purpose in understanding where microwork sits in our organisation of work. Where it sits now, under capitalism, and what it could look like, in a wageless society, under communism. The exploitative nature is of course the harm - it's made me think of voluntary activities similar to microwork, that appeal more to people's own niche interests. Insect identification & spotting sites request a similar activity to labelling, but it's a source of joy for so many people, because it is on THEIR terms.
It's certainly refocused my attention on the leftist theory and the organisation of labour, and I'll want to be doing a lot more reading to build my understanding of the topic, but this has not been a bad place to start
It's certainly refocused my attention on the leftist theory and the organisation of labour, and I'll want to be doing a lot more reading to build my understanding of the topic, but this has not been a bad place to start
February 5, 2022
3.5 stars. A short book, overall it's okay. Work without the worker means "microwork," sometimes also called "informal work" or "gig economy." The argument of this book is that intelligent technology has not fully automatized people's work, but instead *informalizes* work, making work piecemeal and shattered. Example: The accuracy of image recognition algorithms is improved based on human feedback, while people who provide feedback are paid only based on the number of feedback they give -- thus "informal work." Ironically, the improvement of the algorithmic accuracy will in turn render more work "informal," since more people will lose their formal, stable jobs.
The whole book is a critique. It criticizes microwork, criticizes the historical evolvement that encourages microwork, and criticizes the possible consequences microwork will cause. Hence this book is also an exemplar of how to write a critique (academically).
The book also cites Lilly Irani's CHI Turkopticon paper multiple times. Interesting, that paper is also a seminal paper in my field HCI.
The whole book is a critique. It criticizes microwork, criticizes the historical evolvement that encourages microwork, and criticizes the possible consequences microwork will cause. Hence this book is also an exemplar of how to write a critique (academically).
The book also cites Lilly Irani's CHI Turkopticon paper multiple times. Interesting, that paper is also a seminal paper in my field HCI.
May 10, 2022
I picked up this book on a whim during a Verso sale, and wow - you really don't know what you don't know. What's more, I started reading this just as the Etsy "strike" was winding down; this was perhaps bizarre timing, considering I wasn't sure what I was about to read.
This book helped me to better understand platform capitalism in general, and served as an incredible introduction to how that might intersect with labor. Although I was a bit familiar with the general concept of microworker sites like MTurk (having participated as both a requester and worker in the past), I had no clue just how dependent our technology is on human labor; how little workers make when they work full time on the sites; or how insidious the systems are in terms of exploiting those workers both short and long term.
I would recommend this book to anybody who is interested in anticapitalism and labor, especially if you work at the margins or are interested in those who do - microworkers, internet workers, microentrepreneurs, etc.
This book helped me to better understand platform capitalism in general, and served as an incredible introduction to how that might intersect with labor. Although I was a bit familiar with the general concept of microworker sites like MTurk (having participated as both a requester and worker in the past), I had no clue just how dependent our technology is on human labor; how little workers make when they work full time on the sites; or how insidious the systems are in terms of exploiting those workers both short and long term.
I would recommend this book to anybody who is interested in anticapitalism and labor, especially if you work at the margins or are interested in those who do - microworkers, internet workers, microentrepreneurs, etc.
November 11, 2021
A good, investigative primer from Verso that lays out the elements of platform micro-work, but stumbles now and again in its more creative moments. Short and informative.
October 15, 2022
Reading Work Without the Worker was a revelatory experience. Jones's book explores the precarious forms of work that abound in a digital age that tech oligarchs like Jeff Bezos argue offer limitless possibilities. "Microwork," the term Jones uses to describe ambiguous, non-standardized forms of digital work, is "Contracted only for the length of a given task, workers vacillate between states of employment and unemployment, and may end up working for myraid companies over the course of a day." This precarious form of work is omnipresent, but it affects, in particular, the global South. Countries like India, Venezuela, and Kenya are perfect locations for microwork and data manipulation because these countries are structurally disadvantaged in ways the global North is not. As Jones indicates, the proliferation of microwork is "the sum of...sluggish growth, proletarianization and declining labour demand." He continues, "The truth is that microwork programmes often target populations devastated by war, civil unrest and economic collapse." For more on unrest as a condition for capitalist exploitation, read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine.
This evident and increasing precariousness transforms workers into "computational infrastructure." Because workers become another form of infrastructure, "workers disappear in the long shadow of the machine." This is an old problem cloaked in fiber optics. Capitalism is relatively successful at rendering workers invisible. However, Jones argues that exploitation in tech sectors (i.e., microwork) is a new and potentially more nefarious form of worker exploitation within capitalism. But as Jones suggests, microwork, far from nullifying workers, does something far worse. He writes, "Microwork exemplifies the way AI tends to informalize rather than fully automate work. It betokens a future in which growing numbers of workers are not erased by machines but squeezed to the point of vanishing...too often these 'jobs' resemble joblessness." Here Jones shifts his reader's focus; we should resist the Bezosian impulse to think of microwork as a job. Far from liberatory, microwork deepens the precariousness of work in capitalism. It produces less freedom because freedom, mobility, and stability are not synonymous.
When figures like Jeff Bezos discuss microwork's liberatory potential, he often cites the freedom available to gig-economy workers. But as Jones suggests, this is one of Silicon Valley's many fantasies. Instead of liberating workers, microwork renders them invisible. Jones writes, "This is how large platforms want their labour: obscure to those doing it and invisible to the wider world." In short, exploitation is more effortless if it remains hidden, and this includes most forms of labor exploitation.
Unlike what many Objectivists, for example, suggest, workers, the precariat, and the dispossessed made and continue to make the modern world. Objectivists believe modern technological wonders like the iPhone came from a select managerial minority (e.g., Steve Jobs) because capitalism is unbelievably good at hiding the workers who make these modern technological wonders possible. The new terrain for these hidden workers is microwork, and we would all benefit from directing our attention toward them whenever and wherever they are.
This evident and increasing precariousness transforms workers into "computational infrastructure." Because workers become another form of infrastructure, "workers disappear in the long shadow of the machine." This is an old problem cloaked in fiber optics. Capitalism is relatively successful at rendering workers invisible. However, Jones argues that exploitation in tech sectors (i.e., microwork) is a new and potentially more nefarious form of worker exploitation within capitalism. But as Jones suggests, microwork, far from nullifying workers, does something far worse. He writes, "Microwork exemplifies the way AI tends to informalize rather than fully automate work. It betokens a future in which growing numbers of workers are not erased by machines but squeezed to the point of vanishing...too often these 'jobs' resemble joblessness." Here Jones shifts his reader's focus; we should resist the Bezosian impulse to think of microwork as a job. Far from liberatory, microwork deepens the precariousness of work in capitalism. It produces less freedom because freedom, mobility, and stability are not synonymous.
When figures like Jeff Bezos discuss microwork's liberatory potential, he often cites the freedom available to gig-economy workers. But as Jones suggests, this is one of Silicon Valley's many fantasies. Instead of liberating workers, microwork renders them invisible. Jones writes, "This is how large platforms want their labour: obscure to those doing it and invisible to the wider world." In short, exploitation is more effortless if it remains hidden, and this includes most forms of labor exploitation.
Unlike what many Objectivists, for example, suggest, workers, the precariat, and the dispossessed made and continue to make the modern world. Objectivists believe modern technological wonders like the iPhone came from a select managerial minority (e.g., Steve Jobs) because capitalism is unbelievably good at hiding the workers who make these modern technological wonders possible. The new terrain for these hidden workers is microwork, and we would all benefit from directing our attention toward them whenever and wherever they are.
June 26, 2022
Dunia yang terus bergerak cepat dengan teknologi yang terus berkembang. Seakan menjadi solusi, tapi dibaliknya merupakan kerumitan yang serupa yang tak pernah usai, hanya berganti bingkai. Kerja-kerja digital seakan menjadi jawaban atas minimnya akses ke pekerjaan formal. Seakan menjadi solusi untuk mengatasi pengangguran yang ada. Tapi nyatanya ia merupakan bentuk kesuraman kerja yang sama hanya dibalut dengan kecanggihan mesin.
Kapitalis membingkai mesin sebagai masa depan dunia dan agak menggeser kerja manusia. Tapi yang ada peran manusia makin disembunyikan untuk memenuhi utopia dunia maju di masa depan.
Buku ini mengkritisi hal tersebut. Tentang perusahaan-perusahaan teknologi yang menyembunyikan peran manusia serta mengecilkan pekerjanya.
Buku ini membahas efek samping utopia masa depan yang canggih. Tak hanya soal bagaimana peran pekerja disamarkan, juga mengenai hubungan pekerja yang semakin kabur.
Buku ini menarik untuk dibaca sebagai pemantik diri untuk menyadari kondisi saat ini. Meski apa yang ditawarkan, bagi saya, masih sangat utopis, tapi paling tidak kita bisa memulai dengan memiliki kesadaran akan keadaannya saat ini. Setelahnya, mari tengok kanan-kiri untuk bergandeng tangan dan bersekutu.
Kapitalis membingkai mesin sebagai masa depan dunia dan agak menggeser kerja manusia. Tapi yang ada peran manusia makin disembunyikan untuk memenuhi utopia dunia maju di masa depan.
Buku ini mengkritisi hal tersebut. Tentang perusahaan-perusahaan teknologi yang menyembunyikan peran manusia serta mengecilkan pekerjanya.
Buku ini membahas efek samping utopia masa depan yang canggih. Tak hanya soal bagaimana peran pekerja disamarkan, juga mengenai hubungan pekerja yang semakin kabur.
Buku ini menarik untuk dibaca sebagai pemantik diri untuk menyadari kondisi saat ini. Meski apa yang ditawarkan, bagi saya, masih sangat utopis, tapi paling tidak kita bisa memulai dengan memiliki kesadaran akan keadaannya saat ini. Setelahnya, mari tengok kanan-kiri untuk bergandeng tangan dan bersekutu.
August 19, 2022
Kapitalisme tidak hanya mengasingkan ingatan, pengetahuan, dan tradisi, tetapi juga pengalaman itu sendiri.
Platform digital dan adopsi teknologi secara drastis telah mengubah model bisnis dan menciptakan pekerjaan-pekerjaan baru. Meskipun pekerja platform digital memiliki otonomi lebih besar dalam pengaturan jam kerja dan pendapatannya, ternyata masih banyak dari mereka yang tidak tersentuh perlindungan sosial. Semakin banyak bukti menunjukkan bahwa fleksibilitas dari banyak pekerjaan ini berdampak pada keamanan ekonomi pekerja dan kontrol atas proses kerja. Pekerja platform harus menghadapi upah rendah, kondisi kerja yang buruk – dan pengawasan algoritmik.
Namun, apalah artinya jika platformnya sendiri merupakan pemangku kepentingan utama untuk mendorong jaminan sosial yang inklusif dan bentuk lain dari penyederhanaan administrasi?
Yang saya sayangkan dari buku ini adalah tidak adanya pembahasan lebih lanjut mengapa kapitalisme mengeksploitasi kelas pekerja. Jadi, saya sarankan kamu untuk membaca Four Futures: Life After Capitalism karya Peter Frase yang sama-sama diterbitkan oleh Verso Books.
Di luar itu, terjemahannya cukup nyaman dibaca. Suntingan naskahnya lebih rapi dari buku Litani yang pertama. Kudos, Litani dan Khoiril Maqin!
February 14, 2022
Ya know, I really wanted to like this one. It came in short at a hair over 100 pages and takes aim at the problem of microwork and platform capitlism. I really enjoyed the humanization of what goes into making the data sets for AI platforms and the show behind the curtain at Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
Some key concepts that were brought forward were that most microwork is done by the global south, it is non-contractional and not gaurenteed work, there are no employee benefits or protections. These are all serious issues. However would these jobs would not exist with those benefits as it would'nt be affordable to do so, or if the jobs were able to provide all of these benefits would the global south be the ones to benefits or would the work go elsewhere?
I feel like the book brought to light many serious issues but does not provide a clear way to move forward and through these issues.
Im my opinon we need to move past work and expediate automation with more redistribution systems.
Some key concepts that were brought forward were that most microwork is done by the global south, it is non-contractional and not gaurenteed work, there are no employee benefits or protections. These are all serious issues. However would these jobs would not exist with those benefits as it would'nt be affordable to do so, or if the jobs were able to provide all of these benefits would the global south be the ones to benefits or would the work go elsewhere?
I feel like the book brought to light many serious issues but does not provide a clear way to move forward and through these issues.
Im my opinon we need to move past work and expediate automation with more redistribution systems.
April 18, 2022
I feel very mixed feelings about this book. Phil Jones seeks to capture the invisible labour of underpaid, underprivileged and overburdened workers in the on-demand work sector. Yet, this book fails to offer a comprehensive account of what microwork actually is. Clearly, it could have been a long-form piece of reporting. The book lacks structure, isn’t very cohesive and constantly repeats itself. This book doesn’t offer anything but a chaotic summary of research or theorising carried out by other people under the veneer of left-wing critique. However, as other reviewers arguably pointed out, this is not a Marxist book at all. Unfortunately, the book fails to come to grips with the political economy of platform capitalism. I am very disappointed.
October 26, 2022
This book highlights the inequities behind the gig economy and how there appears to be no end in sight for people, primarily in the Southern Hemisphere, who hep build AI algorithms by identifying objects in images, speaking, or performing other menial tasks for these formulae that will some day control their lives.
The book goes on some complainey rants that move it from effectively highlighting inequity to presenting the authors unhappiness with society as a whole. There are a few attempts at creating solutions but many of them fall flat. For example, he calls the communes that existed during the occupy movements (not the negligible resulting societal gains) a success. It would have been much better as a factual book about half the length exposing these deep underlying issues.
The book goes on some complainey rants that move it from effectively highlighting inequity to presenting the authors unhappiness with society as a whole. There are a few attempts at creating solutions but many of them fall flat. For example, he calls the communes that existed during the occupy movements (not the negligible resulting societal gains) a success. It would have been much better as a factual book about half the length exposing these deep underlying issues.
February 8, 2022
platonic ideal of a verso book for me—compact (113 pages) analysis of a contemporary macroeconomic trend (microwork + platform capitalism), its historical context, and its relevance for current anticapitalist movements. a lot of this press’s books let me down at some point in the final third with a typically democratic socialist undertheorization of revolutionary struggle, but this one actually had really sharp analysis about the available material and affective paths to communism.
recommend reading alongside “riot strike riot” by joshua clover, “automation and the future of work” by aaron benanav, and “breaking things at work” by gavin mueller.
recommend reading alongside “riot strike riot” by joshua clover, “automation and the future of work” by aaron benanav, and “breaking things at work” by gavin mueller.
November 20, 2023
Illuminating. Important read, as more globalsouth microworkers (like those hired by Samasource) push back against the way their work of cleaning up our digital space is stripping them of their dignity, protections, and adequate compensation. Felt very reminiscent of the way wealthy western countries ship off material waste to developing countries.
Wish recommendations at the end felt more compelling (mostly cases of labor organizing from nondigital movements, was hard to imagine how those solutions might transfer over. Would want to know more abt any current efforts to re-imagine dignified work and labor protections for digital workers).
Wish recommendations at the end felt more compelling (mostly cases of labor organizing from nondigital movements, was hard to imagine how those solutions might transfer over. Would want to know more abt any current efforts to re-imagine dignified work and labor protections for digital workers).
August 17, 2022
"In contrast to the magical thinking of neoliberal optimists, microwork turns on the same illusion as the informal sector, which, Mike Davis concludes, 'generates jobs not by elaborating new divisions of labour, but by fragmenting existing work, and thus subdividing incomes'. The worker patches together a subsistence out of various bits of low-skill labour, prised from the carcasses of other jobs. If something like an occupation can be said to emerge from these economic offcuts then it is surely a Frankenstein monster, the World Bank its gothic alchemist."
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