interviewer: Grégoire Orain
translation: doxa-louise
'On the Internet, we are all workers, and the difficult conditions of that work are invisible'
Researcher Antonio Casilli explains how, behind apparently free services,
Facebook, Amazon, Google... have created an enormous 'click economy'.
What is the commonality between the moment one consults one's Facebook
feed, watch videos on YouTube or look for cat pictures on Google?
In all three cases, although undoubtedly not aware of this, one is performing
work. On the Internet, the large American digital platforms are going all out to capture
our attention and our time, offering ever more sophisticated services to enable
communication, travel, be informed, or simply consume.
Free tools, superficially so. Because our digital amusements hide a major overthrow,
global, of how we produce value. In a more or less invisible manner, more or less
insidious, Silicon Valley has put us to work.
Antonio Casilli is a teacher-researcher with Télécom Paris Tech and l'École des
hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), author, with sociologist Dominique Cardon, of
Qu'est ce que le Digital Labour? (INA éditions, 2015).
In your book, you explain that the minute someone connects to Facebook, or
even to Internet in general, he is put to work. How is that?
Antonio Casilli: It is a concept which the scientific community has called digital labor,
that is click labour, made up of many little tasks, done on platforms, which require little
qualification and whose primary purpose is the production of data. It is work which is
eminently social. On social media, for example, one is always cooperating with someone -
sharing content, liking a photo, and so on - but also working for someone - the social
network which uses the data thus generated. This is how the large digital platforms we are
connected to produce value.
Who are these platforms and how do they make us work?
There are four types. The first type, are the on-demand, such as Uber or Airbnb, which
under cover of other activities (transport, accommodation, etc) generate data, log our
destinations, our origins, our comments, our reputation, our evaluations, and which are
then free to sell these data.
The second type, are microwork platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, Upwork,
mCent... sites from which millions of people in the world execute extremely simple tasks
(finding on Internet the address of a store, entering the information from a business card,
describing the elements of an image...) for extremely low levels of remuneration, in the order
of a few Euro centimes per minute.
The third type, are platforms dedicated to the management of the Internet of objects. Our
smartphones, our connected watches, but also our televisions, our lightbulbs or connected
thermostats produce useful data. Our houses are becoming data factories, and this production
converges towards immense servers belonging to Google or Amazon.
The last type, finally, are the social platforms. Writing a post, a tweet, making a video
that will be shared, but also helping contents circulate, flagging those that are shocking or
inappropriate, that's work, even though there is a playful aspect, an aspect which gives pleasure.
Is it really an issue that we may be working indirectly and free for Facebook or Uber?
After all, they are providing a service which is useful and for which we do not pay...
Those who do not see anything wrong with digital labor are the privileged few.
They are the people wo have the times and the social and cultural capital to profit
in the extreme from what the Net has to offer. Internet is meant to reach these
people, and they get great rewards from it.
At the same time, as we let our privilege hold sway, we are ignoring tens of millions
of people in India, China and elsewhere, who make it possible for us to enjoy the Internet, for
starvation wages. A platform such as Upwork has 12 million registered users, as many for the
Chinese on Witmart. The micro tasks accomplished on these platforms make it possible to
enhance the artificial intelligence and algorithms of the services we use, and filter out the contents
we do not want to see. Invisible labour, a click economy, made up of exploited workers at the
other end of the world.
How is it that this aspect of the Internet is ignored by its users?
Because these companies use tricks to get us to work for them. To begin with, generating
data is made as easy as possible. In 2011, Mark Zuckerberg declared that a share on Facebook
should happen - 'without resistance of any kind' One thus seeks to make the production of data a
seamless process.
The second trick, which makes the work invisible to us, is 'ludification'; production becomes a
game, which permits people to get pleasure from spending hours and hours connected to systems
which, nonetheless, continue to give them instructions: click here, 'like' this video, comment on
your experience, etc.
The platforms dedicated to micro labour are similar. The interface for Amazon Mechanical Turk is
rather likeable: icons everywhere, a competition effect between workers, rewarding reactivity,
scores which unblocks better tasks to be accomplished, etc.
In short, game simulations push people to constantly interact...
Not only. By turning production into a game, and thus not an economic transaction, one minimizes
the danger that people might organize, become conscious that they are in fact working, and,
finally, ask for money. It is for this reason that it is very difficult to organize a collective
awakening: everything is done so that the user is kept out of seeing a contractual or paid
relationship.
But are you not then telling us that this is happy work?
The real question is not that of happiness or pleasure, but that of difficult labour, which
becomes invisible. People other than us end up with the difficult stuff, see despicable
content, the awful, the terrible, and make the organic functioning of Facebook possible. The
people who filter out the videos of beheadings from the Islamic State are in the Philippines,
Mexico, elsewhere. The awful has been relocated.
What can be done once one recognizes these new forms of production which escape
the usual notions of worktime, contracts, salaries?
There is a problem of organization at the international level, an urgent, serious one, with no
answer for the moment. If someone goes on strike in the Philippines, someone else in Indonesia
will pick up the work. But it is not merely a question of competition between countries. How to give
everyone rights, the possibility to stand up for better working conditions?
conversely, at the national level, things are advancing rapidly. Unions in France,
Germany, Scandinavia, Austria, are initiating consultations on platform workers, all
platforms, those on-demand, of course, like Uber, but also microwork platforms. The German
union IGmetal, for example, has started Fair Crowd Work, a tool meant to allow those involved in
microwork to complain of bad practices, to evaluate their bosses, etc.
If regulation doesn't come, what will happen?
A union, today, cannot afford to keep the old logic for social dialogue or financing, because all
scenarios ahead are conflictual. We are already there: Uber and many others are facing strikes,
and meanwhile moderators and filtering have started organizing. On the other side, traditional
enterprises are becoming like platforms as they turn to the use of data, the elaboration of algorithms, etc. This polarization means that intermediate bodies need to understand what is going on, and what their social and political responsibilities might be.
No comments:
Post a Comment