when Silicon Valley says “innovation,” it’s okay to mentally swap in “rendering labor invisible, while visiting new levels of precariousness and harm on the workers who perform it”
it’s a few more syllables, but i think it generally still scans
It’s important not to see this as happening to some “other” class of workers; these people are, first and foremost, tech workers. Without their labor — and the terrible conditions they labor under — these platforms would fail.
At the risk of being That Guy on main, a relevant bit from YOU DESERVE A TECH UNION:
“[Bezos’ wealth] is the result of deliberately hiding actual work – designing, making, sorting, packing, cooking, farming, delivering – behind little icons on your smartphone screen, in order to devalue it. It is the systematic use of the fake robot trick to lower the value of labour, until people are reportedly sleeping in tents at the factory gates, then banking the difference.”
"The size of Bezos’s rocket is very precisely determined by the difference in costs between paying a worker in Britain and a worker in India – including all the historically determined racist and colonialist inequality that calculation involves."
What I mean is just that so many times when a company advertises it's AI, it's actually just people behind the scenes. Like there was this one robot food delivery company on college campuses that turned out to just be people in the Philippines remotely piloting the robots
@astrid@beep It's because they already pitched the idea to investors and are cornered in having to deliver a product despite the technology not working.
They're forced to play Mechanical Turk to keep the investors happy.
@blogdiva Oof, I hear you. I might just add that there are legions of contracted tech workers here in the states, too. (I was lucky enough to speak with some for the book, even.) To a person, they all told me how dehumanizing their working conditions were, and how much anxiety it made them feel.
Anyway, that’s just to say it’s exactly like you said: it’s always about labor. And it just ain’t right.
@beep here’s an interesting detail. This paragraph was altered after publication:
“Instead, Amazon is reportedly moving towards Dash Carts… These offer a more reliable solution than Just Walk Out, whose impressive technology was truly ahead of its time.”
This was despite their own findings. I wonder how that slipped through.
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