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.