"YES, I WILL WORK ON MY FREE TIME" - REMOTE WORK ON AMAZON MECHANICAL TURK AS THE HISTORICAL CONTINUATION OF THE EXPLOITATION OF WOMEN'S LABOR (original) (raw)

“Yes, I Will Work on My Free Time” – Digital Work on Amazon Mechanical Turk as the Historical Continuation of the Exploitation of Women's Labor

AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research, 2021

In this proposal, we pursue an approximation to Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) women workers to understand their specificities and their layers of dependence in this environment so pertinent to the “late capitalism” (Crary 2016). AMT is an online platform where workers perform low-paid services that cannot be efficiently automated. Since 2019, in the Group [Anonymized excerpt], at the University [Anonymized excerpt], we have carried out projects where we approach these workers in an attempt to understand their routines, desires and the future of work itself. In our experiences, it has become evident that women turkers tend to be even more precarious due to gender issues passed to AMT. Also we concluded that AMT help keeping the women labor power available for unpaid domestic services and, at the same time, make it profitable for several companies. To understand more about them, we conducted a survey with 53 women turkers and systematized their responses. We approached some of them to ...

Shepherd’s Office. The Politics of Digital Labor and Its Impact on the Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers

NMC media-n, 2020

Shepherd's Office (SO) is a collaborative performance and research project between artists Daniela Vainio and Zaneta Zukalova, first introduced at Tate Modern (Tate Exchange) London in 2017, which questions the systematic order of Amazon Mechanical Turk. In May 2019, SO held a live investigative performance at the Art Fair Suomi in Helsinki, with an aim to collect the data that informs this article; SO's focus was on the socio-political background of Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers and their personal relations to and opinions on the platform. The present article introduces both the artistic and investigative aspects of the project and the problematics of Amazon Mechanical Turk, and offers an insight into the research inputs, processes, and outcomes.

Waiting for robots: the ever-elusive myth of automation and the global exploitation of digital labor

Sociologias, 2021

Discourses of robotic replacement and of the end of work have survived to the present day. But more and more voices now challenge the very idea that technological innovation is necessarily conducive to job loss. According to several studies, new high-tech jobs is accompanied by an even bigger low-tech job creation, and AI can be expected to be no exception. Based on new evidence about the role of human-annotated data in machine learning and algorithmic solutions, a new generation of scholars are now studying the germane phenomena of “heteromation”, “automation last mile” or, more simply, platform-based digital labor needed to generate, train, verify, and sometimes modify in real-time huge quantities of examples that machines are supposed to learn from. Digital labor designates datified and taskified human activities. The first type of platform occupation ison-demand labor. The second type of platform-based digital labor ismicrowork. Finally, the third type of digital labor issocial ...

Mechanical Turk and the Multiplication of Labor

Working Paper, 2018

Work and labor have become increasingly complex to grasp within contemporary capitalism. While labor power has always been sold under different legal, spatial and class-based conditions, the forms and dynamics of these categories have been extended and multiplied. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson introduce the concept of multiplication of labor as a perspective to assess these new forms of labor; they understand multiplication of labor as a conceptual tool to investigate what they call the intensification, diversification and heterogenization of labor. This paper applies the concept to Mechanical Turk, an online platform for crowdsourced microwork. It argues that the platform intensifies the labor process through various mechanisms of 'Digital Taylorism', diversifies labor as it develops new kinds of work and production open to a multitude of workers; and it heterogenizes labor as it functions in an informal manner, circumventing basic labor rights.

The mechanical Turk: a short history of ‘artificial artificial intelligence’

Cultural Studies, 2023

This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the famous eighteenth-century chess-playing automaton known as Mechanical Turk and the Amazon microwork platform of the same name. The original Mechanical Turk was a life-sized automaton made in 1770 and publicly exhibited until the mid-1800s, and which played games of chess with the audience. Its movements were fully mechanical, but even more remarkably, it was promoted as the world’s first ‘thinking machine,’ deciding each move of the chess pieces for itself. From the outset, it was widely assumed that the Mechanical Turk was a hoax, and that a human must be hidden inside the machine, directing the game. But it was a clever hoax whose trick was never discovered, and widely admired as such. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk job platform functions in a similarly open way, this paper argues, as a sort of open technological hoax. Mechanical Turk provides a source of human cognitive labour that can be used to invisibly operate digital systems and programs that are widely assumed to be fully automated. Artificial intelligence is a twenty-first century thinking machine, it requires a human brain to make it work. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a marketplace in which companies can hire piecemeal cognitive labour to patch gaps and train programs to keep those systems functioning. Providing what Jeff Bezos has called ‘artificial artificial intelligence,’ Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, like Kempelen’s automaton, both draws attention to and obfuscates the limits of automation and artificial intelligence. Taking the two iterations of the Mechanical Turk as rich cultural figures of automation for their respective periods, this paper will argue that the open secret of their artificial artificial intelligence is itself a form of misdirection that hides other, more successfully guarded secrets: the true extent of that labour, and the conditions in which it is performed.

Hidden inequalities: the gendered labour of women on micro-tasking platforms

Internet Policy Review, 2022

Around the world, myriad workers perform micro-tasks on online platforms to train and calibrate artificial intelligence solutions. Despite its apparent openness to anyone with basic skills, this form of crowd-work fails to fill gender gaps, and may even exacerbate them. We demonstrate this result in three steps. First, inequalities in both the professional and domestic spheres turn micro-tasking into a 'third shift' that adds to already heavy schedules. Second, the human and social capital of male and female workers differ-leaving women with fewer career prospects within a tech-driven workforce. Third, female micro-work reproduces relegation of women to lower-level computing work observed in the history of science and technology. Teaser Platform micro-work fails to fill the legacy gaps that separate women from rewarding tech careers, and maintains them in low-level roles.

Alexa, Alert Me When the Revolution Comes: Gender, Affect, and Labor in the Age of Home-Based Artificial Intelligence

New Political Science, 2019

The fantasy of automation is one of liberation from alienating tasks. Today, domestic artificial intelligence (AI) enacts this dream of frictionlessly offloading monotony. This article deploys theories of Marxist feminism, affective labor to interrogate domestic AI's unprecedented promise of absorbing forms of labor we hardly acknowledged that we did. While these devices make the reproductive labor of the household legible as labor, we interrogate their quasi-emancipatory promise. We argue that devices such as Amazon's Alexa or Google Home elide and reproduce the gendered and racialized dimensions of domestic labor, streamline this labor for capture by capital, and heighten the very affective dynamics they promise to ameliorate. Only critical political theories of work can illuminate the unfulfilled transformations and ongoing dominations of gender, race, and affect that saturate labor with domestic AI-expressed, we contend, by re-articulating the framework of the "social factory" to that of the "social server."

Virtually Absent: The Gendered Histories and Economies of Digital Labour

Feminist Review, 2019

Digital labour refers to a range of tasks performed by humans on, in relation to or in the aftermath of software and hardware platforms. On-demand logistics services like Uber and Deliveroo, micro-work venues such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, data transactions generated by social media channels and online retail portals devoted to one-click consumption all comprise digital labour. So do the maledominated workplaces of high-tech firms with long hours and oblique Human Resources policies in an era of #MeToo revelations. Digital labour is intrinsically bound to physical space and to hardware, even when it is classified as 'immaterial' in nature (Fortunati, 2018). Very few workplaces now exist without dependency on the mobile devices, computer sensors and data servers upon which software operates. Feminist scholars have successfully highlighted the role women play in the front line of technology assembly (Pun, 2005; Nakamura, 2014) as well as computer science and programming (Hicks, 2018). Underpaid female and migrant labour, some of it located in electronics assembly plants in East Asia and Eastern Europe, is the labour that powers the internet and its necessary hardware (Sacchetto and Andrijasevic, 2015). Inhumane working conditions and the pressure of untenable production speeds in manufacturing became visible in 2010 when fourteen workers at Foxconn, the main assembler for Apple located in mainland China, committed suicide. Since then, more workers at Foxconn have 'jumped' to their deaths and thousands of others have protested their plight via work stoppages, wildcat strikes and organised mobilisations (Qiu, 2016). Next to this vast army of underpaid offshore workers, 'free labour' is the defining feature of the digital economy (Terranova, 2000). In the early days, volunteer moderators in the USA engaged by America Online spent thousands of hours making the internet 'safe' by investigating complaints and grievances and keeping harassment and abuse in check (Postigo, 2009). Today such work continues, largely uncompensated, with women of colour, queer and trans people joining other minority activists to moderate online interactions and call out a constant stream of sexist and misogynist content (Nakamura, 2015; Roberts, 2019). Even workplaces that functionally rely on moderation work do so with the help of 878929F ER0010.

Gendering Labour in the Age of AI. Keynote Address at the "Gender and Immaterial Labour" Conference; Vilnius, Lithuahia

Topos , 2023

With the rise of post-industrial society, an ever bigger share of work takes the form of immaterial labour. While organizations of post-industrial economy continue to be gendered, the mechanisms for reproducing gender disparities are different than those in the traditional career path of the industrial era. Gender, which is the anchoring of a certain group of individuals in a specific sphere of social activities, gets reproduced as the segregation into 'more' and 'less' efficient workers takes place: quite often this is segregation into women and men.