Kids, Games, and Mechanical Turk

This weekend, I spent a good bit of time thinking about child labor, Duolingo, and microwork platforms like Mechanical Turk. I also thought about how so much of the informal internet economy is made up of what I'll call the "surplus elite," college-educated people who imagined pretty regular middle-class lives but who ended up (gestures wildly) here—for better or worse.

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The full post is on Substack, but here's an excerpt:

While these 3 stories [child labor rollbacks, the founder of Duolingo, and Reddit charging for its API] might seem, at best, loosely related, they’re part of a longstanding trend when it comes to work. That trend is the continual?deskilling?of jobs to lower costs and increase profits.

Deskilling happens in a variety of ways and at a variety of intensities.

Machines and computers do make it easier to do some jobs—so less experience and training is required. Taylorist and Fordist management render skilled craft into tasks that can be done repetitively with minimal instruction.

Deskilling isn’t always a process of changing a job so that it requires?less?skill.

It’s often a process of changing?who?does a job and for how much money, giving the job the?perception?that it requires less skill. Allowing women and children to do jobs makes those jobs appear less skilled and, therefore, cheaper. Race, of course, plays a massive role in deskilling—as does, relatedly, the?welfare-industrial complex?and the prison-industrial complex.

These strategies take advantage of what Marx called “surplus population.”

Surplus populations serve two purposes.

First, they act as a release valve on any pressure labor begins to exert on capital. An employer doesn’t need to pay more or provide safer working conditions so long as there is a “reserve army” waiting to take the jobs that pickier workers leave. Second, surplus populations act as a source of value in and of themselves. They constitute informal economies that perpetuate systems that benefit capital, doing labor for little or no pay (housework, caregiving, content creation, running errands, etc.).?Put a pin in that one, we’re coming back to it.

In his book?Work Without the Worker,?Phil Jones examines how platform companies like Facebook and Amazon make use of surplus populations to provide training for and bridge gaps in algorithms and “artificial intelligence” systems. What appears to be the “magic” of the algorithm is often a human—many humans—completing the work. Content moderation, image labeling, and improving search results are tasks completed for pennies (if compensated at all) by refugees, prisoners, and a growing number of workers forced out of their professions by technological progress.

The?economic and political situation?we allow these microworkers to live in is dire. Jones’ description of the work conditions, processes, and policies is disturbing.?

And, I see echoes of this?much?closer to home.

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Click here to read the full post!