Work Without the Worker

Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism

Philip Jones, Phil Jones

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781839760433
• eBook ISBN: 9781839760457
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

1

The Surplus of Silicon Valley

A woman living in Kenya’s Dadaab, among the world’s largest refugee camps, wanders across the vast, dusty site to a central hut lined with computers. Like many others who have been brutally displaced and then warehoused at the margins of our global system, her days are spent toiling away for a new capitalist vanguard thousands of miles away in Silicon Valley.¹ A day’s work might include labelling videos, transcribing audio or showing algorithms how to identify various photos of cats. Amid a drought of real employment, clickwork represents one of few ‘formal’ options for Dadaab’s residents, though the work is volatile, arduous and, when waged, paid by the piece. Cramped and airless workspaces, festooned with a jumble of cables and loose wires, are the built antithesis to the near celestial campuses where the new masters of the universe reside. In the hour it takes Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to make $13 million, a refugee earns mere cents teaching his algorithms to spot a car – each task a stretching of the gulf between the vast and growing ghettos of disposable life and a capitalist vanguard of intelligent bots and billionaire tycoons.² The barbaric and sublime bound in a single click.

The same economy of clicks determines the fates of refugees across the Middle East. Forced to adapt their sleeping patterns to meet the needs of firms on the other side of the planet and in different time zones, the largely Syrian population of Lebanon’s Shatila camp forgo their dreams to serve those of distant capitalists.³ Their nights are spent labelling footage of urban areas – ‘house’, ‘shop’, ‘car’ – labels that, in a grim twist of fate, map the streets where the labellers once lived, perhaps for automated drone systems that will later drop their payloads on those very same streets.⁴ So opaque are the sites on which they labour that it is impossible to establish with any certainty the precise purpose or beneficiaries of their work. Just next door, jobless Palestinians are made the targets of M2Work, a collaborative project between Nokia and the World Bank, which aims to give ‘the most underprivileged people in the world’ access to new forms of microemployment.⁵ Dedicated to ‘job creation’ in the Global South, the World Bank undoubtedly sees Palestine’s 30 per cent unemployment rate as an unmissable opportunity – an untapped source of cheap labour, readily brought into the sphere of global capital by the great telecom networks on which our brave ‘new economy’ rests.

M2Work is only one of many ‘impact sourcing’ ventures that uses microwork to reach once inaccessible segments of the global workforce. The NGO Lifelong, run by the company Deepen AI, trains Syrian refugees to annotate data for the likes of Google and Amazon.⁶ Similarly, the not-for-profit platform Samasource trains refugees in Uganda, Kenya and India to complete short data tasks, and actively recruits refugees to work on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.⁷ The platform’s motto, ‘give work, not aid’, perfectly encapsulates the ethos of such projects. Samasource coined the term ‘microwork’ to reflect the microloan projects to which it owes its ethos. Like microfinance, banking schemes that offer loans to the jobless and poor, an aggressive faith in markets as panacea justifies projects that serve only to trap nations in cycles of debt, war and poverty. 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.⁸ 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.⁹ Similarly exploiting those confined to the economic shadows, microwork programmes represent the creep of something like a refugee-industrial complex.

It comes as little surprise that Samasource’s former CEO Leilah Janah opts for the more euphemistic ‘virtual assembly line’ in an effort to dress up immiseration as industrious dignity.¹⁰ Though safer than the worst informal work – and in some cases more lucrative – microwork is often still the preserve of those with nowhere else to go. The truth is that microwork programmes often target populations devastated by war, civil unrest and economic collapse, not despite their desperate circumstances – as many advocates like Janah insist – but because of them. Such organisations know that workers in Nairobi’s Kibera slum or the shanty towns of Kolkatta are hardly in the position to protest low pay or meagre rights.¹¹

This is the hidden abode of automation: a globally dispersed complex of refugees, slum dwellers and casualties of occupations, compelled through immiseration, or else law, to power the machine learning of companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon. Take autonomous vehicles, a growing industry for many of the biggest platforms, estimated to be worth $54 billion in 2019 and well over $550 billion by 2026.¹² So much of the labour that companies like Tesla require centres around the need for clean, annotated data to help its driverless vehicles navigate traffic. Images taken from onboard cameras contain large amounts of raw visual data, which, to become useful, must first be categorised and labelled. The labelled data then shows the car how to differentiate the urban environment and recognise everything from pedestrians and animals to road signs, traffic lights and other vehicles. Data training rarely takes place in-house. Instead, companies like Tesla outsource the work to the Global South. In 2018, more than 75 per cent of this data was labelled by Venezuelans facing the most desperate circumstances.¹³ In the aftermath of the country’s economic collapse, when inflation was pushing 1 million per cent, a significant number of the newly unemployed – including many former middle-class professionals – turned to microwork platforms like Hive, Scale and Mighty AI (acquired by Uber in 2019) to annotate images of urban environments, often for less than a dollar an hour. Though the anonymity granted requesters on these sites makes identifying the large companies they host close to impossible, one can speculate with some certainty that – in typical disaster capitalist style – Google, Uber and Tesla did very well out of Venezuela’s crisis. Estimates suggest that most data for autonomous vehicles continues to come from the country.¹⁴

From victims of economic collapse to refugees and slum dwellers, platform capitalism preys on the nominally superfluous – its profits the result of a multitude of minute tasks carried out by those chronically excluded from anything that even resembles proper employment. Held by the likes of Google and Facebook at the fringes of the labour market as a permanent shadowy reserve, they are neither quite employed nor unemployed. Hired for all of a minute to show an algorithm how to identify a pedestrian, then flung back onto the reserve pile to search for another task, workers constantly oscillate between the two states.

Similarities can be found with the reserve armies of the early-twentieth-century factory system. One worker of the period describes the ‘dozens of men waiting for a door to open’ at ‘the factory and workshop gate’ turning into ‘a scramble, worse than any rugby match’.¹⁵ Yet, unlike those hoping to secure a day’s labour, the scramble for online tasks achieves, at best, a few minutes’ work. While platforms like Samasource are at pains to present microwork as ‘the digital equivalent of basic manufacturing’, the microworker – unlike the factory hand or cotton spinner – has no distinct role. Instead, a day’s work may feature a disorienting array of disparate tasks, the scramble more like that of the informal sector – with survival achieved by inhabiting endless economic niches.¹⁶ What we find is the digital equivalent of the petty proletariat, as described by Frank Snowden in his vivid depiction of nineteenth-century Naples, which could just as easily be the tragic spectacle of modern Mumbai or Nairobi:

These men and women were not workers, but ‘ragged trousered capitalists’ who filled a bewildering variety of roles that baffled all efforts at quantification. A local authority termed them ‘micro-industrialists’. The elite of the streets were newspaper vendors who practised only one trade year-round and enjoyed a stable remuneration. The other huxters were ‘gypsy merchants’, authentic nomads of the marketplace who moved from activity to activity as opportunity dictated. They were sellers of vegetables, chestnuts and shoe laces; purveyors of pizzas, mussels, recycled clothes; vendors of mineral water, corn cobs and candy. Some of the men completed their activity by acting as messenger boys, distributors of commercial leaflets or private dustmen who emptied cesspits or removed domestic waste for a few centesimi a week. Others acted as professional mourners paid to follow the hearses bearing the bodies of substantial citizens to the cemetery at Poggioreale.¹⁷

Workers on Clickworker or Mechanical Turk can expect to perform a similarly ‘bewildering range’ of services over the course of a single day, ranging from audio transcription, data processing and survey taking, to more obscure errands such as finding information in local fast-food eateries and posting it online. At the stranger end, workers on Mechanical Turk have been paid cents to post pictures of their feet.¹⁸ Defined by a lack of contracts, rights, regulations, role or routine, the microworker is not so distant from the migrant who starts the day picking recycled plastic and ends selling tissues on trains. With each reliant on finding new exchanges every few minutes, survival represents an ever uncertain goal. Putting aside the boosterish bluster of institutions like the World Bank, one can see that microwork hardly represents a new solution to the South’s ‘job problem’, but rather a formal adjunct to an already bloated informal sector.¹⁹

The ominous sense that platforms are powered by the nominally superfluous is hardly dispelled when we look to the Global North. Just as in the South, microwork is often the preserve of the excluded and oppressed. In a striking example, Finnish penal labour now involves training data for struggling start-ups. The recruitment company Vainu outsources tasks to prisoners that would otherwise go to Mechanical Turk, aiming to usher in, by its own lights, ‘a kind of prison reform’.²⁰ For each task completed the government body overseeing Finnish prisons receives a payment – though there is no public record of what percentage goes to the inmates doing the tasks. Gratuitous PR efforts to present the scheme as an opportunity ‘to learn a vocation’ glimmer with bad faith, particularly when one considers how ephemeral, narrow and arduous the work is.²¹ Just as the physically stressful labour of ploughing fields does not take the interests of prisoners as its raison d’être, the psychically damaging work of repeatedly showing an algorithm the various senses of the word ‘apple’ is not about the future prospects of those doing it.

Whether as the labour of the camp or prison or as work-fare 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. In the years after the 2008 financial crisis, state governments across the US contracted Samasource to school jobseekers in online labour, primarily in Rust Belt regions where the crisis saw the nadir of ongoing state rollbacks and deindustrialization.²² The point of the programme was to prepare the long-term unemployed for a brave new economy, where instead of full-time factory employment and demanding managers the worker should expect contingent tasks and tyrannical algorithms. That these ‘training’ programmes often coincide with participants accessing platforms makes it difficult to tell precisely where education ends and workfare begins.

Though perhaps an extreme example of how microwork operates in the US and Europe, the Sama-source programme is revealing inasmuch as it indicates who in the Global North uses these platforms: ‘laid-off teachers, mobility impaired professionals, military retirees, agoraphobic writers… [and] stay-at-home parents’.²³ Like the Syrian refugee or the slum dweller of Kolkata, many of these workers have been drawn into capital’s orbit but cast outside of formal labour markets; they comprise, in the term of Karl Marx, a ‘relative surplus population’, a redundant mass ranging from the ‘partially employed’ – left without enough hours to subsist on – to the absolutely ‘stagnant’ – left without a wage indefinitely.²⁴ These dejected participants are a necessary feature of a capricious system that employs and discards as demand expands and contracts. As workers are absorbed into the labour force they become dependent on the wage relation. When labour demand drops and job opportunities shrink, the worker must still find something else to subsist on – welfare, informal work, or else beg for food and shelter. Microwork is only the latest of these dismal options.

The Jobs Apocalypse?

How, then, did we arrive at this juncture? How did we end up with a growing segment of the globe engaged in work so precarious, contingent and badly paid that it hardly differs from unemployment, a state of affairs where informal and formal labour are, by many standard measures, indistinguishable?

The story frequently told is one of robots stealing our jobs, of advances in computation and robotics creating a slack labour market, where an abundance of workers desperately compete over scarce work, meaning employers can lower wages and destroy rights, as increasing numbers of workers are banished from the system entirely.²⁵ This recycled fable of jobs disappearing on an apocalyptic scale not only exaggerates the capacities of current automation technologies but also forgets a salient truth: technology has always thrown jobs onto the scrap heap of history. The present moment indicates an altogether more terminal problem: the system is no longer creating enough new jobs for the growing numbers brought into the sphere of capital.²⁶ There is a disjuncture growing between the ever slowing rate of job creation and the ever more rapidly expanding pool of workers dependent on a wage. As stagnant growth infects the global system, workers are pushed into ever more precarious and petty service work, while capital turns to the commodification of data and speculative investments in AI futures, a prospect only promising to further expedite human superfluity.

This is a story, then, of how the lines between employment and unemployment broke down. It is one that starts with the profitability crisis of the 1970s and ends with a world run by monopolistic platforms, where profits rely as much on data expropriation as labour exploitation, where humans continue to rely on a wage increasingly absent. It is – as with all stories told about capital – a contradictory one, of new life being breathed into the system by data and AI, but also of a world economy become deathly, so impressed by its own technological symptoms that it fails to notice the disease slowly ravaging its core.

The postwar era represented an exceptional moment in the history of capitalism, characterised by unprecedented dynamism, wage rises, high productivity and relatively stable growth. For those who benefited from this dynamism – largely white male employees from the Global North – social democracy provided the security of a strong welf...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: The Mechanical Turk
• 1. The Surplus of Silicon Valley
• 2. Artificial or Human Intelligence?
• 3. Human-as-a-Service
• 4. Grave Work
• 5. Wageless Struggle
• Postscript: A Microwork Utopia?
• Acknowledgements
• Notes