Work Without the Worker by Phil Jones

Author:Phil Jones [Jones, Phil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics, Marxism, Post-Marxism, Internet, Labor, Digital Labor, Media & Communications, Industrial Relations, Economics, Business
ISBN: 9781839760433
Google: _mhBEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 58447095
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2021-10-04T23:00:00+00:00

This is a particular problem when – as with Project Maven – the technologies supported by microwork are built for explicitly oppressive ends. A particularly grim example: requesters are not obliged to state that face-tagging tasks – common across all platforms – are used to train facial recognition algorithms. Modelled on eugenicist theory, the software is used to capture people’s faces and compare the photos to existing databases, with the aim of identifying and locating people – often producing highly racist results.9 Only the latest strategy in the militarization of urban space, facial recognition has unleashed a police armageddon on poor neighbourhoods, most notably in the vast carceral cities of Los Angeles and Shanghai. The LAPD has used the software around 30,000 times since 2009, often to defend richer enclaves from ‘gang crime’.10 In the wake of Covid-19, use of the software was ramped up across the globe, but most evidently in many Chinese cities. Ostensibly used to help track the virus, the technology’s more obvious purpose has been to track and detain minorities. Most disturbingly, the technology has been central to an ethnonationalist cleansing project that has seen the Chinese state intern growing numbers of the Uyghur population in concentration camps. The state-owned ‘commerce’ platform Alibaba now offers clients software that has the express purpose of identifying Uyghur faces.11

The tasks that power these authoritarian nightmares are central to the service platforms like Mechanical Turk offer to requesters.12 More pertinently, Amazon likely uses the service internally to train its own controversial software, Rekognition, described by the company – in terms as vague as they are sinister – as a tool for monitoring ‘people of interest’.13 That the software has been contracted to many police departments and pitched to a number of security agencies, including US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), only further suggests its racialized targets.14 Recent decisions by IBM, Amazon and Microsoft to stop contracting these technologies to police departments seems more a considered calculation of the PR risks in light of growing support for Black Lives Matter than a genuine ethical commitment, suggesting that if or when support wanes such deals will be back on the table.

Other companies such as the menacingly named Clearview AI continue without shame or mercy to contract the software to agencies like ICE.15 The short data tasks that ultimately benefit these agencies are entirely divorced from the oppression they conjure, lacking descriptions that directly link them to the technology or any indication of which firms are contracting them. 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.

Part of the problem is the sheer number of sites and interfaces among which workers are shuttled on a daily basis, making identifying the kind of work one is involved in close to impossible.

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