TRASHFUTURE - The Fabulous Mechanical Turk ft. Phil Jones

Episode Date: November 16, 2021

We speak to Phil Jones (@philjones7771), author of Work Without the Worker, about microwork and how AI is fake, and most of it is just tiny tasks done by workers in the global south and dressed up as technology. We get deeper into how exactly how this practice developed, how its economics are rooted in overproduction, and how boosterish liberal institutions cheer-led the whole process. Get Phil's book here! https://www.versobooks.com/books/3869-work-without-the-worker If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you’re in the UK and want to help Afghan refugees and internally displaced people, consider donating to Afghanaid: https://www.afghanaid.org.uk/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo live dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *SHIRTS ALERT* We have new Vonk shirts available to pre-order until 17 November, so get them while they're available here: https://www.trashfuture.co.uk/shop *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, and welcome back to this free episode of TF. It's the free one. Me trying to bulldoze that bit from happening again. You won't succeed. I'm on the side of some of the people on the Patreon now. My mission is to kill the free one. Never take the side of the hogs. Now I've found out that people who are paying us are telling us not to do it.

I want us to continue the bit more so than ever. I'm very much at the Patreon, people. I think that we should return, yeah, reject modernity, embrace tradition, which means we should bring back the intro, a classic intro. Yes, a podcast about how. That makes Riley physically hurt every time someone reminds him of that. Yeah, it's called Trad Future, actually.

Yes, it is. It's a podcast about how unless we put all of our eggs in this big carbon-shaped basket, the future is and we'll be trash. It's good, though, right? I haven't been asleep. I took a coma. No, before we get into any more Tom Foolery and guest introductions and stuff, I have something important to tell everybody.

We have shirts. We have sweaters. Clothes your nakedness or in TF merch. Listen to the Tree of Knowledge and then close your nakedness. Hover your shame. That's right. At least the torso area of your shame. We don't sell pants yet.

Are you looking to go full halal? Well, you can make a start on it with a TF shirt and sweater. Yes, we are selling shirts that involve respecting the bin men and remembering when they were hard from the Johannes Volk tour of where was it? London, Edinburgh and Tristan de Cunha. Great Britain, Northern Ireland and Tristan de Cunha. And also, we are selling some sweaters that we found in Jerk van der Klerk's old uniform storage for his private military company.

We found them in an old foot locker filled with shoe polish. Yeah, and they're donated to us by friend of the show, Simon Mann, who said he had loads of them in his garage. We've looted them all and now we're over encumbered. So please, somebody buy these from us so we can move again. We are taking pre-orders until the 17th of November at noon UK time, at which point we will be sending them off to the printer to be printed. So please order now.

Yeah, if you're listening to this, order it immediately. So with all that being said, I now want to take a moment to introduce our guest. We are speaking with Phil Jones, who has written Work Without the Worker, which is available now on Verso, which is a very interesting tome on micro-work automation and exploitation. Phil, how's it going? Yeah, pretty good. Thanks for having me on. Looking forward to talking about my quite depressing book.

What? That's not in our idiom. Who are playing with they tome. That is right. Not just playing with they tome, but studying it. Yeah, that's right. We have a fair few things to get through first. Also, I assume everyone here got their invitations to the LSE class war meeting. Of course.

It is at the High Holborn Police Station, just after Quittentime, in the locker room. Yeah, I love to get together with my fellow anarchists and proceeds to ambulate in a northwesterly direction to the location of the vicinity of the premises, where I will throw a lithographic rock-style projectile into the vicinity of the area of Zippy Hotter Valley. You yourself, and the gentlemen and the ladies, were meeting in a non-Iraacal fashion in the vicinity of the premises. Is that correct? And there was a flat sphere, a circle, if you will, that specified who was going to perform operations on the dishes that day.

At which point there was an altercation broke out with a number of members of the party, which I bore witness to myself along with PC Davis, as they were unable to come to an agreement of sorts about the correct progressive nature of their politics. Is that right? So, for those of you who are wondering what the fuck we're talking about, don't mind me. I'm just standing around with my jean jacket, which has two safety pins that allow me to hold it like it's a stab vest with my thumbs inside. We're all wearing different North Face down jackets.

We're all wearing boots with our jeans tucked into them. All of us have gotten short back and sides since the last recording. My blackberry doesn't even work with LTE data, but I still have it in a holster on my side. Yeah. So, to fill everyone in on what has happened. There was a scuffle. There have been some scuffles with the Israeli ambassador to the UK. Yes. So, Zippy Hodaveli, who is the Israeli ambassador to the UK,

gave a speech at the London School of Economics. She was invited to speak. She spoke for the full allocated time, and she was protested as she was leaving the protest, which was described by British journalists as swarming the car, was basically people booing her from behind a police line. But for some reason, every single person in the UK who has a politics or media job, when they looked at that clip, which we all looked at, they saw people swarming a car and threatening her with violence.

Yeah. And they basically said this was deliberately insulting the memory of Kristallnacht, which was the anniversary of it. And also, it's anti-Semitic to protest not only the Israeli ambassador who is an ambassador, but also Zippy Hodaveli, in particular, wildly racist, even for an Israeli politician. One of the interesting things about this story is that Zippy Hodaveli is actually very controversial, even within Israel, because she's so extremely right-wing. For example, that she not only endorsed, there's an anti-miscegenation group called I believe the Hebrew word means flame. But basically, they not just advocate to

prevent mixed religious marriages in Israel. They also do street gang shit and harass people. She has not only endorsed them, she has actually invited them to speak in the Knesset. So to say this is a counter-racial figure, even within Israel, is not an overstatement. But apparently, both major parties in Britain are unified on the topic that any criticism of the ambassador of the state of Israel is, by default, motivated only by anti-Semitism and also Jeremy Corbyn's fault somehow. Ironically, the only harm the Israeli ambassador came to while she was in the UK was when she went on a night out with Andrew Tate. And you know what? She should have taken him to a better

club. That's what I'll say about that. It plays fair. It doesn't bring ethnicity into it. So Kier Starmer, again, just everyone watched the same video of her leaving LSE and kind of hurrying into her car, which drove away normally while holding fucking flowers. She's like being like ushered to her car while there is a line of about 30 police officers. And then some people shout at her. No one touches the car. No one interferes with the car in any way. The car proceeds in a convoy away from the vicinity of the location of the premises. It's been possessed by a cop. Yeah, not for the first time. But like, yeah, no, you would think that there had been windows

broken or some sort of security threat. And it just makes you feel insane because you watched the video and it's just not there. Well, I mean, I recall when vile labor activists violently assaulted Matt Hancock's aide and then video came out and a guy, Pamir Kredley, kind of slightly brushed against the guy. And then the guy he brushed said, hey, fuck you. And that was it. But we were all told that this was evidence of a violent assault upon the state. So once again, the general rule in British politics is your eyes are lying. They are deceiving you, do not believe them. If you speak out against this, you are racist. And also, not only are you racist, but you're racist in the worst way. The only way that matters

in Britain, which is anti-English racism. The British media are all Cartesian skepticists. Oh, no, no. The British media fully have occupied, they have being John Malkoviched into, I think ever since Gordon Brown said that bigoted woman about Jillian Duffy, the British media and political ecosystem has basically being John Malkoviched into the brain of like an aged country club racist from Maidenhead and just inhabits all of their collective paranoias and delusions. Like they are all living in a fantasy. Well, it's also a really good example of like the kind of, well, we all kind of knew this anyway, but like for, there was like a certain like group of, you know, sort of centrists who kind of

present the line of like, you know, you can be like anti-Israel, you can like protest against the Israeli government and like, you know, not be anti-Israel or like not be anti-Semitic. And like, you know, I think there are kind of like lots of loaded things in there. But even if you took that up face value, this is like evidence that that's just simply not true. Like it is very much like even if you sort of protest the most right-wing ethno-nationalist like, you know, Israeli minister and like bear in mind who's, who's genuinely received protests and outcry in Israel from Israelis. And if you do that protest in the most civilized manner possible, waiting 90 minutes while she gives the speech, comes out with a load of flowers and then go, hey, I don't like your policies very

much because I think you're a bit racist. Down with this little thing. Down with this little thing. If you do a rally to restore sanity outside of the fucking... Then, yeah, the state will absolutely crush you. And that's as they should because you are, you are prejudiced. I kind of wanted to say one more thing very quickly, which was like, I kind of like the way that this has sort of been done, I feel like in a lot of ways, we're sort of talking about the wrong thing. I don't think anyone really gives a shit about the student protest is what like, what people are really fixated on by people. I mean, kind of like

the people on Twitter and columnists and so on is the video itself and how like people respond to the video. So I think for them, it's very much like they are trying to perform in the right way in order to kind of like signal much broader contentions about what they kind of consider to be the student left, the Corbyn left and so on, right? So for them, it's very much like, no, this video is a representation that like Corbyn Easter students still exist. And in the same way that we have to get rid of them from the Labour Party, we also have to get rid of them in every other type of public institution as well. So and therefore incentivizing this type of like facetious and quite frankly, like, like observably incorrect statements about what happened.

We've also seen both Pretty Patel and Keir Starmer tweet about this, and Keir Starmer has entered full deputy head mode because his tweet is simply, this is totally unacceptable. Intimidation and threats of violence will not be tolerated. But I want to point one thing out. And then I want actually, Riley is going to turn it over to Phil. Well, the thing I want to say is, it's very funny for Starmer to come out basically immediately decrying this and suggesting that one can't protest someone even as controversial as Hoda Valley, because Sippy Hoda Valley's politics basically imply to steer to Keir Starmer. If her politics were brought to reality, Starmer's marriage would be illegal because he is a Gentile

married to a Jewish woman. So and Keir, sir, sir Keir Starmer QC, there's easier ways to get divorced, man. But before we move on, I want to ask, Phil, what's your whole sort of evaluation of this as you've sort of seen it unfold? It's kind of crazy. It's either sort of through my feasts and sort of ignorance, our political classes usually have decided to back sort of this hard line kind of support of the annexation of Palestinian land. And I know she's the ambassador, but that in itself is quite extraordinary. She rejects like Palestinian claims to any part of the West Bank or Gaza. She's not the sort to even make sort of vague empty concessions to some kind of

two state solution, which as far as I can tell is still the UK government's official position. So why all of our political class treating as if she's some kind of moderate who's been the victim of an extreme attack? Well, I mean, it's because the most acceptably left position you can have is the British government's position, which will negotiate right words with her position. And I submit the most of the sinister reason perhaps is at least from the perspective of someone like Patel, it's another opportunity to clamp down on kinds of protests that she doesn't deem sufficiently docile. Yeah, something that I think is interesting is seeing the protests decried by Labour friends of Israel when Hoda Valley's position

is that there is no such thing as a two state solution that they should annex the entirety of the occupied territories and expel all Palestinians. I'm not making that up, that's not libel, that's not meaning facetious or exaggerating. Her politics is expel all Palestinians to Jordan. She's very open about this. So effectively, Labour friends of Israel and similar advocacy groups in the United Kingdom from the Labour Party are basically telling their potential voters and supporters to fuck off in support of someone who does not, who basically is to the right of their own position. It's in support of comedy, it's in support of being polite. They don't care about the position, they just care about the politeness,

which actually leads me to want to go on to our next item, which is before we get into the rest of this, I also wanted to talk quickly about the sort of aftermath of the Tory Sleaze stuff, the Owen Patterson things, Jeffrey Cox, where Owen Patterson having quit the party now has provoked a sort of a bunch of journalists to say, ah, it's time to investigate Tory Sleaze. Tory Sleaze is going to be a big problem. Recent polls that come out after Owen Patterson, they're down like two, they're still in the lead. But also, what they need to do is dump a bunch more shit into all of the rivers to get that fine point bump again. That will trigger the lips.

And Sebastian Payne wrote in the Financial Times. In one sense, the checks and balances worked. Johnson's efforts to scrap the whole standard system to save Patterson failed, and the Court of Public and Parliamentary Opinion did for him. Sebastian Payne. Which check were balanced other than just the Conservatives making a political calculation based on what they could get away with? Sebastian Payne barely getting those words out with his mother's breast milk dribbling down his shirt, adjusting his little bow tie. As he says, in many ways, the checks and balances worked. But also, there's a great fury. He goes on over a Sir Jeffrey Cox,

who earned nearly a million pounds last year. By the way, a guy used to be like a hero of the libs for being disbarred as royalty. He gains for inventing the penis. He general for legal work from the British Virgin Islands. He basically worked against the British government on behalf of a tax haven. And this has caused a whole furor over now MPs having second jobs, and has provoked a spate of articles saying, if they're only paid 85,000 pounds a year, how do you expect them to live on that? Childcare is so expensive.

In fairness, going to the British Virgin Islands to defend their tax status, it's like the third or fourth least evil reason you could go to the British Virgin Islands. Yeah, I'm sure also if childcare is that expensive, there's plenty of people knocking around parliament who'd agree to look after your kid for free. Hey, why is childcare expensive? Phil, I'm going to kick it to you to get your reaction. But there's one thing that I want to say, they're just doing the math. I was taking the bus to come up here this morning or yesterday morning,

and I just wanted to see the income percentages, what percentage of earners you would be in, what percentile you'd be in on that income. And it was funny to me, because the stats may be inaccurate, but from what I could tell, 82,000 pounds a year would put you well into the top 5%, if not higher. And then obviously with that augmented income, these people are absolutely into the top 2% to 1%. And so to me, it was just like the idea of journalists and politicians both sort of

being simpatico saying, how could you possibly live on this? It's like, I don't know, ask 19 out of 20 British adults who earn less than that, how they manage. It's like, if you can't answer that question, what fucking planet do you live on? And I recognize as not a non-British person that might sound funny coming from me, but I'm just looking at the math. I'm looking at the numbers. And it's like, a lot of people make a hell of a lot less.

I remember seeing jobs that I was qualified for that wanted to pay me 16,000 pounds a year, which wouldn't have been enough for me to sponsor my wife's visa. And that was a professional full-time job. So the idea, if the problem here is, oh, life in the UK is expensive, it's like, yeah, I wonder why it is. And if people can't afford stuff, it's like, well, I wonder what the median income in this country is. And I don't know.

Once again, it's journalists and politicians more or less having this conversation with each other and pinching each other's cheeks and giving each other supportive pats on the shoulder and not realizing that nobody else thinks they live on the same planet, because what they're describing as normal is not normal. So, Phil, before we carry on, what's your take on this stuff? Well, I said this whole checks and balances stuff is kind of just a reassuring narrative, isn't it? It's kind of very similar to the idea that the Tories are gradually going to destroy

them, the sort of public support through endless scandal, like a very comforting view. It's become a kind of liberal sanctuary, this idea that the Conservative Party will eventually kind of scandalize itself to death. With every scandal, we see a sort of gradual shipping away of public support. This means absolutely no evidence for this, really, is there? Well, the last time it's something like this. I always say the key to understanding the labor right winning an election is John Major. You have to, through a policy that is directly attributable to you,

embarrass the country in a slightly urophilic way. That's how to be with it. And then you just have to be a Labour Party that's indistinguishable from the Conservative Party and then that will enable people to vote for you. And the idea that people are going to suddenly turn on Sajid Javed from earning 150,000 pounds from working for 20 minutes a week with J.P. Morgan, working for 20 minutes a week in scare quotes here, just because they're revolted with him, that's completely nonsense. Is he said, regarding his second job, he earns 150K a year at J.P. Morgan,

it's good to have experience that is not all about politics. It's for my constituents to judge and I'm happy with that. And it's not though, because pretending that in a country of like hundreds of safe seats, it's for my constituents to judge is insane, because British democracy is a poll of who reads which paper in which town. I also want to throw that in there too. That's always funny to me because it's like, yeah, my constituents decide. Also, they have no way of selecting me or de-selecting me.

And if they want to vote for a different party, fine, throw away your vote. I got fucking 40,000 Tory votes stacked up in this constituency. It's the same thing with me with my insane turf Labour MP where I live. Doesn't matter what she does or doesn't do. Unless Labour completely wipes out because of a computer glitch where you're not allowed to vote Labour or something, she's going to win. She's going to keep her seat. Yeah.

There is just the simple idea that all of this is just... Well, it's the system working as intended. And if I'm going to go to work for Bribes Ltd. I mean, it's so obvious working as intended. Oh, it is. I think it absolutely is. It's just that it is presented sort of day in, day out as... Yep, this is thoroughly democratic.

This is the best thing we could possibly do. Thank goodness we saw off any challenge to it. Of course, into this must, of course, ride Keir Starmer, who has... Number one. Number one. Down these main streets, a man must go, who is not himself me. Swerving a perfect 180 in his SUV, knocking over delivery drivers left and right. Possibly over the blood alcohol content threshold.

Sir Keir Starmer arrives. And he's a Keir Starmer. Now listen here, 007. I welcome you coming into Q-branch, but I would encourage you to go further by bringing this tech back in one piece. No, Sir Keir Starmer KC has said... Sir Keir Starmer, Ketten Coke. Sir Keir Starmer, Ketten Coke has said...

Has said that he's against all this MPs having second jobs business, even though, of course, a couple of dozen labor MPs are landlords. Wasn't he trying to get a second job and was told not to buy one mysterious jam-liking informants? Because Jeremy Corbyn hates jobs and doesn't want people to have them, of course. Keir Starmer has actually worked because he recognizes that being a landlord isn't a job. This did lead to a fantastic soundbite where he was confronted about this job that he'd almost taken but for Corbyn. And the interviewer said, well, you're in talks to take a second job. And Keir Starmer went, I wasn't in talks, I was in discussions.

Why not? Okay, cool. I mean, it is an entirely unserious sort of political class. Like, thank God it has no global impact. Keir Starmer is actually... He's not even a me-bit anymore. He's an Alex Keely bit now. It's a bit in an Alex Keely show where he's like, well, we call that talk. I'm not sure that's it. Well, I think we call that a discussion. If you want Keir Starmer, this is an MP describing Starmer as the alternative to sort of sleazy Johnson, which, again, is like not... This is not the valence of politics.

He is sexed very badly. More on it to pretend that it is. Um, nobody wants to go on the ride at Alton Towers for three days. You end up with a massive headache and being sick. That's Boris Johnson. So Boris Johnson is awesome. Sometimes. Sometimes. Too much. He's too cool. Hold on. Sometimes people just want a cheese and pickle sandwich on a park bench. Keir Starmer could be that sandwich and that bench.

Yes. It's a fuck. It's literally my TikTok. It's the fucking the Labour Party could be that... Oh, what even was it? I can't even remember that. It was that yogurt. If you were to try a different yogurt. Yogurt, yeah, that was it. The Labour Party could be that yogurt. What's really funny is that, like, Keir Starmer could be that sandwich unless you do a bit of protest at which point he turns into Ed 209. Also, he wouldn't be the bench because, you know, his position would be that, like...

Yeah. Well, his position would sort of... I reckon it'd be like anti-bench on the basis that, like, it would upset, you know, so upset people in the suburbs who think that it would, like, load their problems. It'd be like pro-anti-homeless bench, I think. Yeah. I think Keir Starmer is the anti-homeless architecture. He's sat in the middle of the bench and then you can't sleep on it. Keir Starmer has had an extra handrail added to his midsection so that you can't lie down across it.

Yeah. It's a chastity handrail. It's like his wife can't molest it. It's just Keir Starmer at a weird angle. So if you try and, like, sleep on him, you just fall off. I think all of this just has to be understood by the fact that because of... There's something about being a British public figure that makes you completely paranoid and you have to inhabit the minds of other people and then try and act so you approve of yourself as the person you're hallucinating that you are.

And that's why it's very funny to watch them turn themselves in knots, imagining people as benches and attacks that don't happen in all this stuff. Yeah. What are people like? Cheese and pickle sandwiches? Yeah. Benches. I hate saying it too because I'm always a little bit self-conscious about trying to do English accents. But genuinely, while you were reading that quote, I was like, there's numerous places where you could just drop Lynn in there and it would be an Alan Partridge bit.

I could be that sandwich, Lynn. People like benches, Lynn. They love them. Look everywhere. Look at him. He's sat on a bench. He's got nothing else going on in his life. Okay. All right. People love the clothing brand bench. Look, we've nattered on about the news for long enough. And I want to bring things around to our areas of technological interest before we speak...

Oh yeah, we're at Tech Podcast. This week's startup is called Reliable Robotics and Phil, as the guest, I would like you to please give us a guess. What's Reliable Robotics do? Well, I'm guessing it's doing something with robotics. It's probably going to be reliable. Give me a second for this. This is kind of one of the most sort of like vacuous names I think I've heard for a tech company yet. So it's pretty difficult to come up with anything kind of particularly inspiring around this. So here's what I'll do. I'm going to give you...

I'm going to... Because the name is so vacuous, I'm actually going to also do the first clue. We believe that blank should blank themselves. Benches should sit on themselves. I don't know, man. Who's saying? Blank should blank themselves. Can you come back to me? I need to have a think about this. Landlords should... Nick, come on.

Dogs should walk themselves. It's an Eva exoskeleton for your dog to walk itself. Is this another one of those companies where your robot is just a guy? Yes, correct. Is it robots should love themselves? Yeah, it's a robot that jokes itself off. The first ever self-sucking robot. Yeah, we've got one step further.

The dick-sucking factory, the dick-sucking robot, but we didn't go that far. It's the machine that turns itself off, but... Yeah. I have an idea. It's going to be wrong, but I think it's actually quite funny, which is that they believe that dicks should jack themselves off, and the reliable robotic is something that you put on your dick so that you don't have... It's like no hands November. Yeah, so you don't have to use your hands jack off.

Oh, they have no hands a month. Yes. I think that's actually very cool. I'm afraid it's not a little ring with some hands coming out. No, advanced automation will make blank safer, more affordable, and fundamentally transformative to the way people and goods move around the planet. Sucking it from the back. Is it like bikes should ride themselves?

Oh, I think bigger. Oh, cars should drive themselves? Planes should fly themselves? Planes should fly themselves. Oh, yeah. Oh, it's the inflatable autopilot from airplane. Also, like Boeing and Airbus already exist. They already do this shit.

Why do you need that startup to disrupt this? We've already got a perfectly rational economy and model for the economy in which planes can fly themselves and will absolutely crash themselves unless you pay for the DLC, all right? Boeing patented this. What if you could fly inside a drone? The reliable co-founder and CEO, Robert Rose, said that the funds he's recently received from Tiger Cub Fund Co2 Management.

So if you recall, Tiger Global being the one that's just opened up a fire hose of money, has said that it is going to enable them to continue developing a system designed to deliver cargo across networks of small regional airports in automated complaints remotely controlled by human pilots. Use a train. Use a train. We've got to cut numbers of flights. So flying cargo, which is already wildly inefficient, to smaller...

Use a train. So, Phil, you're seeing reflections of your book here, I imagine, already. Well, I'm kind of wondering who's going to be training these planes. I mean, if it's going to be... Recaptures. It's going to be recaptures. Yeah, an untrained workforce in the global south, probably. So, yeah, I mean, it seems like a recipe for crashes, really, doesn't it?

Click all the squares that have a runway in them. And please do it quickly. Yeah, it's a recapture that proves you are a robot. Yeah, exactly. It says you need to identify shapes that look long and flat from a distance. Make sure the angle is correct. No, please, not those two identical towers. No, it's a...

Which of these squares looks like a plane? Which of these squares now looks... Is it more of them? If it's more of them, we have a problem. Accidentally creating al-Qaeda because no one knows how to land is great. Yeah, al-Capture. The business case is simple. Pilots, the most expensive aspects of running a cargo operation.

And a lot of it is pretty automated already. And in the air, basically, replacing qualified pilots with autonomous systems that can be overridden from the ground, means that the cost of each flight goes down and the utilization of aircraft goes up. Which is great. It means we're putting a whole class of people out of work, but also a lot more flying, like tons more. And also, you can hijack a plane from the ground now,

just like in every movie that came out about computers post 9-11 for about five years. Yeah, if you wanted to live in a Jack Ryan movie that actually had some of its conceits occur, check it out. A guy in a leather jacket can just skateboard into air traffic control and hijack a plane. So I think this is a classic element of what you talk about in your book, right, Phil? Where we have an industry that is skilled, where people do whole jobs that are now being broken up into tasks, which is about taking off and landing, being available only when necessary, being paid only when used.

And additionally, training the robot that is making their job worse, right? Exactly. So I mean, you can think about some other professions as well. So a quite common profession to see on micro platforms to be kind of split up into a sort of multitude of tasks, which then a crowd of works would do, is translating. So you'll find, for instance, on the platform Playment, they often have translation tasks on there. Basically, what this allows companies like Google to do is rather than employ one employee with

Union Access, a decent wage rights and whatever, is instead you can sort of split the job up and then outsource the tasks to a crowd of workers in the global south who will be doing, yeah, say, five minutes of translation a day each. Yeah, or five minutes of flying. Sometimes both at the same time. Wait, so the translation is basically the Monty Python sketch about the funniest joke in the world. Yes, amazing.

Postal compartmentalization. But also, so is the flying. So I would say, if you live in an area between two regional airports, move. Don't, yeah, don't live there anymore. So ultimately, reliable plans to build out a wholly aerial cargo delivery business and expand operations to include passengers. Great. Awesome.

So yeah, there's going to be one guy selected probably as a lottery or competing with other guys to be the lowest bidder to fly that plane and you're going to be on it or under it. Awesome. I love to be flown by a guy on Fiverr who's watched like a 12 minute video on how to remote control the plane. I'm sure that they're... Come on. I'm sure you have to be a qualified pilot.

Also, if the more things get automated, how do you become a qualified pilot? Well, something I want to throw out there too is that there have been this year, exactly. Successful test flights for electric planes, like electric powered planes. Now, they're very small. They're like piper cubs and small Cessnas, but the technology is developing. So it's like, in a way, if you were like, hey, we want to add more efficiency to cargo flights, for example, like maybe that's the technology you could invest in. You could look into like a long term.

But instead, it feels like we are once again reminded that I don't want to give all the credit in the world to one Canadian podcaster, but that it seems like all of these are just like really, really nifty wrapping paper arrangements around, hey, we want to destroy a job class that has a lot of economic security. It's the machine that kills pilots. Anyway, so thanks to Dan Beknev pointing that out. Yeah, and it's called the plane. Yeah, we're just feeding a bunch of pilots into a machine that makes corned beef.

A plane can be a machine that sucks you off if you stand in the wrong place at the wrong time. It can be a machine that makes you into corned beef if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time. We actually do have a machine that kills pilots. It's called the Boeing 787. Or the helicopter. That's true. The F-35. It's really dangerous.

It's really too osprey. Yeah. It also kills people on the ground, to be fair, that one. Oh, speaking of military applications, in order to help their defense portfolio, they have made a hire. Is it Matt Hancock? Uh, no, no, no, defense that matters. No, it's a troop Matt Hancock.

Yeah, it's defense that matters. It's not us. As director of government solutions, Dr. David O'Brien will engage with the Department of Defense and Federal Government to identify areas of support for mission success, as well as with universities for research advancement. His multi-industry career extends over 38 years across military government and private enterprise, blah, blah, blah. Cool.

He served the United Air Force in leadership, including as the Director of Acquisition Venture Strategy and Initiatives, where he pioneered multi-domain creative and commercial strategy. He was like the chief imagineer of the Air Force, and they've hired him. Yeah, they hired the Air Force as shingy. Cool. They hired, they hired the Adam Newman in the Air Force. But he's got like the fucking pointy hair underneath it, yeah.

He's the guy that actually came up with the F-35 by imagining a wonderful solution. I should have hired Moss Distalgent, Steve Kahn. He also connected the Air Force with innovative providers and global venture equity investors, and his major general received the Distinguished Service Medal for, I assume, startup. So, when we're withdrawing from the next country that we collectively occupy on no notice and leaving a bunch of people behind, we don't have to use actual pilots in the planes. No. Cool.

That's right. Okay. Instead, it's going to be the hasty shitty withdrawal or whatever, is going to be piloted by people from that country in refugee camps. Yeah, I hate it when the Taliban volunteer on Fiverr to do all of the flights, and then we have no choice but to watch them all turn around and deliver the people we're trying to evacuate back into. That was rascally Taliban.

I'm really hoping that Ryanair don't get hold of this technology. Yeah, you find out the person who think your pilot will be back on the plane, but it's just like someone in CF. Yeah. The pilot is like rotates between you. Yes. Your flight is being controlled by one of those like urinal games at Wetherspoons that makes you piss in the urinal.

You're doing like Flappy Bird with your dick to like control an actual passenger flight. It's Twitch flies to Athens. God damn it. That's what that is. So excited we all are about reliable robotics. Oh, excited. But with that is a little sort of amused, Bush. I want to talk a little bit about micro work and your book, Fill, Work Without the Worker.

So before we get into that, I wanted to give some research from Absolute Market Insights. In terms of revenue, they estimate the global crowdsourcing market to be about 9.5 billion projected to reach 154 billion by 2030 with a combined annual average growth rate of 36.5%. That's big. It's big now, but it's going to become very, very, very big. So what exactly are we talking about here? What is micro work?

So micro work is a kind of crowdsourcing which deals in tiny data tasks. So to give a basic overview for your listeners that are familiar with this stuff, workers access digital platforms remotely via a phone or laptop. And the platforms act as intermediaries between contractors and these workers. And the platforms will take a cut from every transaction between the two parties. The workers are very often from the global south and reside in slums, poor rural areas, maybe cities such as Bangalore and Nairobi, and increasingly refugee camps. If they are paid for the work, wage theft is incredibly common on these platforms.

They are paid really very little, often as little as 20 cents for a 10 to 15 minute task. And the contractors, it should be emphasized that often big tech companies like Amazon, Facebook, or should I say Metta, Google and Microsoft, or in some cases maybe sort of smaller startups or marketing companies. I actually used to do this for a while. I used to do some copyrighting for absolutely zero money on some of these sites. And yeah, no, it's atrocious. And we think of this, right? Like what we're actually looking at, and this is from your book,

Realizing This World and Labor Market, MicroWork represents the apex of the 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 capital's fever dreams, MicroWork undermines not only the wage contract, distinct occupations and worker knowledge, but the concept of a workforce as a unified antagonistic mass. It is the ultimate neoliberal dream, and this is me now again. It's like perfect atomization because it doesn't just isolate you from everybody else, you're actually actively competing against them for jobs.

And the perfect neoliberal fantasy, of course, is one where you have managed the risk of your employee having downtime between being productive for you. The example of a bartender where you wonder when should you pay your bartender if they're doing piecework? Should it be per drink they open? Should it be and pour into a glass? But maybe they're opening the drink so they can get access to the drink to pour it into the glass. So maybe you should only pay them for when they pour it into the glass. But really what your customer is doing is they're just buying the drink, so maybe you should only pay them when they give the drink to the customer and so on and so on.

Maybe I should have a whole F1 pick through behind this bar, each of whom I'm paying pennies, to take each individual sort of assembly line step in opening this beer. But they have to bid against one another. Yes. Ideally, they would fight each other, perhaps try to bite each other, pull knives, things of that nature. And we'll mostly pay them half the time. So what you're basically saying is the neoliberal bar is an NHS trust? So then we talk about this being a particularly neoliberal phenomenon, right? Because we can

look at this as the... Not just the... Excuse me, not a particularly neoliberal phenomenon, but as neoliberalism was a reaction to the relatively aberrant period of high job stability, high union penetration, relatively high wages of the 1960s and 70s, this was a way to sort of fight against that. So I was wondering, Phil, could you see this in history for us? So really, we need to go back to the kind of 1970s here and the story that I tell in the book. The story that I tell is kind of one that starts with the historian Robert Brenner, who talks about a kind of protracted crisis of overcapacity that begins

in the 1970s, which is arguably still is today, where sort of manufacturing was producing basically just too much to be consumed. So lots of companies started to look for cheaper ways to produce their goods, and so outsource their labor to cheaper regions. This pushed a lot of workers in the global north into the service sector, where job growth and productivity gains are much slower than in manufacturing. So this ultimately led to a kind of a decline in labor demand, and this was happening just as lots of communist and colonized countries were

opening up their labor markets. So the global supply of labor expanded as demand for labor dropped, and what didn't happen and what was predicted was sort of mass unemployment, basically there was this belief by economists in the 1970s and early 80s that we're going to see massive employment either through automation or through these the crises that were emerging at that period. But actually that hasn't really happened. What we've seen instead is kind of a continual downward pressure on wages,

worse conditions, insufficient hours, and kind of widespread volatility in labor markets, which has meant as I kind of, you know, as micro work demonstrates, that actually a great deal of quote-unquote jobs created in recent years have sort of barely differed from the most abject forms of jobless nurse. Yeah, more bullshit jobs essentially, right? So I think we look at this, right? We look at this development, and for something that sort of starts in the 70s, right, and sort of expands as we go along, it's also was crucial to the development of AI,

which is seen as this bleeding cutting edge of the future thing, right? But as we sort of so often talk about on this show, that I get you peel back the layer, like the great and powerful laws is barely hiding, right? I mean, yeah, as you're pointing out, AI is really a bit of an illusion. I mean, it can't learn spontaneously and without supervision. It requires lots of training, basically sort of prodding in the right direction. So, you know, for machine learning to function properly, it needs clean data as an input to kind of produce sort of relatively precise outputs.

What workers on micro-work sites do is basically process this data, often by labeling it, sort of transcribing audio, annotating images to show AI basically what to do. For instance, you sort of find on micro-work sites quite a lot of face tagging tasks, and these will often involve showing an algorithm how to recognize particular sort of facial features, emotions, etc. So, the kind of, you know, so that facial recognition software can make quite good decisions. So, you can see here, like how the ethics become very ugly considering some micro-work is done in refugee camps.

You might have refugees training facial recognition cameras that are later used to stop them at the border. You know, it's these workers, you might describe as sort of the hidden abode of automation that provide consumers or service providers with kind of an automation experience, an illusion that AI is doing this stuff. When in fact, actually, it's a kind of ambient workforce in the background. If only there was a t-shirt about that. It's very funny that Amazon, particularly their micro-work platform is called Mechanical Turk,

right, which is sort of named after a very early example of essentially a fake robot, a scam robot, a robot that like played chess, that was just literally just a guy concealed in there, moving the pieces. A robot that lost it for Mechanical Vienna. Fuck! Sorry, me and Riley had a bet on whether you would make that joke, so I've just lost Tankwood. Why would you bet against that, Alice? Thank you, Molo.

No, so I think it's very, it's like what we can see, right, is what looks like a story of, like, you know, Moore's law or whatever, making technology much more powerful and available, making our lives better, is actually, is actually a massive oversupply of labor, sort of working to sort of fulfill these small needs in ways that are completely invisible to us because you put a big gloss over it that says technology. But it's just, it's a story about a transformation of the labor market, not a story about the transformation of technology, essentially. Also, the surveillance aspect to it isn't solely on the really brutal end of, you know,

training border algorithms, it's also stuff like, I remember when I did this, like, this had absolutely precursors to the kind of modern remote work environment of, oh, we just take a screenshot of your desktop or oh, you can just see what you're doing all the time. Long before that was common, and it's a great test bed for that sort of thing. Absolutely. It's, I've sort of think about this in the book that actually micro workers, this kind of experimental lab for kind of bad labor conditions, basically, where you have, you have, as you were just saying, Alice, you have the kinds of things that we've seen emerging during the pandemic,

starting kind of 10, 15 years before on platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk. For instance, another thing that started on there before Uber and Delivery who had it was rating systems. So, scoring workers based on their performance of particular tasks, which is now, you know, becoming common across lots of different companies, not just the gig economy. Well, it's the, you can see like most things Amazon does, right? It's anything that Amazon does for itself is coming for the rest of us at some point, that's a function of its size and its penetration into every other market, right? So, it's just like Amazon Web Services was an internal service that they then commercialized. Just like Mechanical Turk was an internal

service they built for themselves, then commercialized. And so Bezos' view of what a worker is and does and how the relationship between capital and labor should be mediated is universalizing, not just because of the sort of large structural forces, but simply because when Bezos has an opinion, Amazon creates it for itself, commercializes, it sells it to everyone else, and then creates the conditions for the market very, very directly. There is a relationship between what he wants and what everyone experiences. If you think it's not coming for you at some point, then I hope you enjoy your period of comforting illusion. And I think my favorite phrase in this book is a Bezos' that you deploy, which is that this is

basically artificial intelligence. Yeah, well, Bezos is certainly a cheeky little guy, kind of without meaning to, he's provided the most sinister, inhuman description of micro-work you could imagine, really. Yeah, as we've just been pointing out, workers effectively act as sort of surrogates for rock AI, making our automation fantasy seem somewhat real. It's kind of, it's bizarrely met to this idea of artificial artificial intelligence in a way that makes me wonder whether when machines can do the tasks micro-workers currently do, whether we'll then be calling automation artificial, artificial, artificial intelligence. It's like, where does this end? It's also kind of linked to the value of,

or we kind of perceive value of these tech companies, right? So much of them justifying their existence is on the basis that they are not only just because of their scale, but because they uniquely have, they argue that they have, they uniquely have the technology that things like automation technology, recognition technology, all these things that, as you've mentioned, there are people behind them and those people are not only being paid nothing, but they're deliberately being obscured to present this fantasy that this tech company is far more advanced than any kind of government institution or any sort of state-built institution could ever challenge. And therefore, that's why we should give so much trust and so much

authority to tech billionaires who, for the most part, I don't think anyone except for fucking crypto weirdos have anything really that good or benevolent to say about them. So I wonder how much of this is really... I don't wonder, I sort of know for sure, like how a lot of this is very, very deliberate, but I sort of wonder how many kind of external institutions or governments and stuff are also invested in kind of projecting the fantasy of technology... The ideas of progress projected by technology companies in order to justify allowing them to retain the power and authority and scale that they have. Oh, you're talking about government institutions. Let's talk about the World Bank,

shall we? I've heard of these guys. That's the big bank where they store all of the money. Yes, that's right. It's the... I'm sure there's a crypto person who thinks that the World Bank has been a challenge. It's a big building with like a Greek portico out front and they have all of the sacks of gold coins in the basement. I think I borrowed some money from them in order to pay for a jacket from ASOS. Yeah, you know how it has the thing, you know, like three easy payments with the World Bank? So, Phil, let's talk about how the World Bank has been complicit in, again, at this... The spread of micro work, especially in the global south, and as much as it sells this lie about

what it is possible to achieve with like this tech-driven neoliberalism, what have you, and also what this lie about how, you know, and let's say work is sort of so good for them, no matter what its form. Yeah, so back in the early 2010s, basically the World Bank shifted its sites from micro loans to micro work. The idea being that through millions of short tasks, you could somehow give countries in the global south hundreds or thousands of jobs. The problem is that this gets the logic completely back to front. The point of micro work is that you're breaking down larger projects and jobs into short tasks, which never add, you know, never quite add up to a whole. So, the idea was kind of doomed from the beginning, really. Nevertheless, they sought to push these

projects on countries in the global south. So, we've seen sort of projects in Uganda, in Kenya, in bits of North India, and also projects that we're going to start in Palestine as well. What this goes to show, I think, also is the extent to which the high-flown sort of globe-bestriding liberal institutions and luminaries, journalists, politicians, whatever, love to just think in categories, right, where job is job and job is good. And how do you know it's a job? It's someone pays you for a task. So, we need to get more tasks in the hands of people in the global south, because right now, they don't have enough tasks. Yeah, a job is the same thing as a career. And so, consequently, you can be like,

oh, yeah, I did like a translation for like, you know, cents an hour for 20 years, man and boy. And, you know, as such, it really gave me this work ethic, right? I was a mechanical Turk, and my father was a mechanical Turk. And while you're under my roof, you're a mechanical Turk. But there have been some completely bizarre, boosterish claims made by the World Bank that this form of labor, which demonstrably ends up paying you less, is the farthest thing possible from even developing any skills, like the literal worst end of a piecework employment contract, a Victorian employment standard, is somehow good,

because it causes a profusion of these things called jobs in the global south, right? Yeah, I mean, the World Bank claimed in one of the, I think it was a blog post, actually, not one of the reports that micro-work could boost the income of people in the global south by $40,000. I mean, I have absolutely no idea where they pluck this figure from. Oh, I have an idea. I think they might have paid someone 20 cents to write that article sentence by sentence. I think there's a good chance that's where it came from. You know, but considering the average task pays like, as you were saying, going to go 20 to 30 cents for around 15 to 20 minutes work, I think you'd have to work more

hours than there are in a year to make $40,000. It's basically a lie, basically. I mean, it's nothing more than a lie. But if you set up a shell company and then get people to do multiple tasks for you and pay them less, then maybe you could run a mechanical tech within a mechanical tech. So, what you're proposing is what if you set up a company where you took contracts from those micro-work sites, maybe in bulk. And so, you've fulfilled those contracts all in bulk. So, maybe you paid, I don't know, 80 cents on the dollar for them. And then, maybe you had a platform or other people could log into your site, complete those tasks for you as well. Yeah, I've been watching a lot of like Gary Vee videos on YouTube recently. I'm going to have

some business ideas. I think we've disrupted micro-work by creating a micro-work platform. Gary Vee for Vendetta. A vengeful Gary Vee. I wanted to point this out because this is just a useful example. It's not necessarily like piecework. But I think it's an example of these kinds of the ways in which this applies downward pressure or at least what the actual motivation is. And that just happened to be familiar with this because of some of the stories of people who were seeking evacuation from Afghanistan when Kabul fell far faster than people thought it was going to. And I'm an American citizen,

there are a number of people who were American green card holders who suddenly were like, oh, fuck, I'm trying to get back to America. In some cases, US citizens who were Afghan American. And one of the reasons for this was that if you are an Afghan citizen, an Afghan national, and you got a contract to be an interpreter for the US military, the Afghan government, the US government, etc., typically the rate you would be getting paid is around $120 to $150 a month. So very, very little. That would be a competitive salary in some fields in Afghanistan, but it would not be, obviously, by America's standards, that's the pittance. That's far, far below minimum wage. However, if you were a US citizen or even a

permanent resident, there was a higher class of interpreter. When you do the same exact job, but you would be offered salaries in and around $120,000 a year, and if you were a US citizen and you were able to successfully complete a secret clearance, the offers for the same translation job would be anywhere from $200 to $300,000 a year. And obviously, the skill set is no different. The interpreter does the same role no matter what. The one gradation there is the security clearance, but in most cases, that was pretty rare. So in most cases, it was just are you an American citizen or not. And the reason I bring this up is just because it shows this example that the work is the same. It's just that the person who has the green card has an

option to go somewhere else and get higher wages. And so all of a sudden, we realize the work is actually apparently that valuable. But because they don't have to, because nothing is obligating them to pay people anything more than the equivalent of $2,000 a year, that's how much they'll pay them. And for the same work, oftentimes even more dangerous for the people who are Afghan nationals. And so it's just a reminder that given the opportunity, no matter the really, really like call it ethical or inspirational or sort of grandiose rhetoric here about like, oh, well, this is going to be such a huge cash infusion to the developing world. Well, it's like, no, it's just, there's no minimum wage. There's no wage standards.

You basically, to me, when you said that, Phil, I thought the first thing that came to mind was, oh, yeah, well, this could be $40,000 a year of income. But it's like, actually, no, I imagine the people who are going to be profiting off this look at it and be like, well, those people live on a dollar a day anyway. So, you know, why not pay them $1.50 a day? And now I'm the world's biggest philanthropist. Yeah. And what I found particularly funny about the American translator rates is you just know that the translation rates for like, the British were paying the Afghans exactly the same, the Americans were paying, if not less, but the British citizens who were translators were probably getting 26k a year plus a £200 marks and Spencer's voucher

is like a signing bonus. I want to go back to this a little bit. Phil, tell me about M2 work. So M2 work was a project set up by the World Bank back in the year 2010s, which is one of its many dubious endeavors sought to bring micro work to unemployed Palestinian youth. There's not very much info out there on this particular project, unsurprisingly. So I don't know whether it ever properly got off the ground, but it gives you a sense of the kinds of projects they run elsewhere. So actually, to kind of understand M2 work, you have to go back to a company called SAMA, which operates under the dubious slogan of give work not eight. And they were basically the first of these, these quote unquote,

impact sourcing companies that, as we were just pointing out a minute ago, basically would, you know, make themselves look like the best philanthropists in the world by going into refugee camps and offering $1.50, rather than $1 an hour for people to do this kind of work. Give work not eight literally just sounds like they hired Don Draper to rephrase, are there no workhouses? If you give a man a Turk hilly for a day, but if you teach that man to be a mechanical Turk, he could also afford to eat once a month. Yeah, a day also. Yeah. But also that's so fucking insulting. It's like, give work not eight. Well,

what the fuck were these people doing before we showed up? Well, that was just lazy. Oh man, like this, it's so fucking insulting. The idea that what the people in the developing world need in either in middle income countries or in countries where lots of people are subsistence farmers, whatever is tasks is fucking insulting. We could make this more annoying though, because what if we called them quests? And what if we gave you a little like experience bar? What if that? What is your one sustenance giving meal of the day but a loot box? Yeah, that's where it's going. Watch this. Someone is going to build something on the Solana blockchain maybe,

one of the Ethereum killer blockchains and they are going to say in exchange for performing sort of summer and other. You know what it's going to be? They're going to say we've defeated the proof of work blockchain thing, right? We've defeated that requirement that causes all the pollution. And what we've instead done is we've just hired people in the global south to work out the hash by hand. Using an ambulance. Yeah, you're doing complex cryptography by hand and for every month but you do, you verify the ledger, you get a little token and you can use that token to buy a food loot box. This is like regretting my decision to go to the da-dab refugee camp and on the Kenya Somalia border and tell people that actually this board ape smoking a joint will be worth 20 times

their annual income in at least one year and I'm immediately killed once it's been translated. And so it's just, I mean, look, let's not give ourselves, I don't think anyone on or listening to this show had any illusions about the World Bank and its nature to decolonize countries. But what I think is so striking about all of the micro work global south projects is you're basically, it's the false benevolence of asking someone to, I'm saying, I'm going to do you the favor of building this stick which I'm then going to beat you with because otherwise you'd be too lazy to do it yourself. I mean, the other problem here is it becomes, even if it doesn't mean to, an ideological justification for maintaining the camps themselves.

So you can turn these camps into, you know, sort of relatively well- Innovation hubs. Innovation hubs, relatively well-functioning labor markets. It's a business park. Yeah. Yeah. And that's kind of what, you know, that's kind of what you can see coming out of this is something not dissimilar to kind of almost like a refugee industrial complex. You know, I'm reminded of something and this is just like, I'd realize that you're going to

choose my words very carefully because I don't want this to sound like I'm endorsing this position. But I recall something that when Hillary Clinton's emails got leaked in 2016, there was one in particular that I believe it might have been a speech that she'd given like a private speech she'd given at Goldman Sachs. I can't remember, but it was something along the lines that the American right wing jumped upon this to make a huge point to go, you know, completely wrong-headedly like this was, this was just a kind of conspiracy theory thing.

But what she had basically said was, you know, I foresee a future of open borders for capital. And they read that as open borders, like, look, Hillary Clinton wants open borders, you know, the same kind of like ethno-nationalist shit that we deal with here in the UK as well. But to me, it's when you hear these stories, like that seems like the logical follow-up to that, that if the goal is hard borders for humans and completely open borders for all capital, then why not make the refugee camp into a job park? You know, why not outsource it to find the absolute bottom dollar you can pay for services that are A, for profit, that are driving profits for some of the most profitable ventures in human history, but also that are providing services that

you would legally be required to pay another person in even a middle-income country, you know, 10 times, 20 times as much for the same task if they were working there. Like that, it just seems like that is the, I don't want to say that the terminal end point, like the terminal point of this logic, but it seems like that's somewhere along the way, the idea that like, well, we've got all this, all this captive labor we can underpay to an insulting degree, why not have them perform these tasks that we haven't been smart enough to figure out a way to make a computer do successfully? And it's just, it's just very, very grim. It's a good thing we're not doing anything that might create a shitload more refugees

in the near future. Yeah, indeed. I'm noticing we're going a little long, but I have a few more things I want to talk about, right? Number one is like moving from machine to suck you off. Yes. Yeah, we've talked about the history and we talked about sort of the capital and we've given an idea of who it is doing these jobs. It tends to be people in global south and favelas and refugee camps. It also tends to be people, by the way, in the global north and prisons. Just anyone who is stuck in a place and cannot get out or cannot access all of their rights, this is what they're given to do. But I want to talk about the commodity itself and attack this idea that automation destroys

jobs because I think it's, as you write in the book, it's slightly wrong headed for reasons that I agree with. And number one, I think a lot of these sort of comforting stories that we tell ourselves about AI is sort of like the data side of commodity fetishism, right? Where with commodity fetishism, you look at a table and you see a table. You pay a certain amount of money for the table. It obscures all of the relationships of domination that go into the production of that table. You just say, ah, you have it. I want it. It's there. Its value is innate, of course. There is no labor has gone into it that was not exploited anyway, etc. Data fetishism, I think, is something of the same where when you see the wonderful robot arm

point to which of the two things is paint and which of the two things is wire, right? You see that and you say, oh, what a wonderful thing that just arose by itself. Like, do you think that there's a similar process of fetishization going on there? I mean, absolutely. Data fetishism is really just a kind of expression of commodity fetishism, as you just said. The difference being, I suppose, that with tangible commodities, it's easier to get a sense of the fact that it was produced by labor in the sense that you can look at something and think about the tailor that made the shirt. With data, it's not so easy because it's this intangible thing. You don't really tend to think of it as

being created. For instance, we experience like our Facebook feeds as if violent and pornographic content have been wiped away automatically. It's just sort of happened when in fact it's a content moderator. Or we experience Google search as if an alphabet algorithm has ranked our personal searches when in fact actually it relies on huge numbers of poorly paid workers to do the ranking. You basically look at any sort of smart object and there will be some ambient labor beneath the experience making it operate smoothly. Of course. There are a bunch of people somewhere in Africa who are ordering Alice's search preferences and just trying to be very confused. Just on that note too, I think on that point, what's also interesting or what's worthy of

noting is that not only the obfuscation of these workers, but even the concealment of this is kind of work that is labor and in doing so, my words are tangled up, but I guess what I mean is the kind of devaluing of that labor is kind of designed to perpetuate those myths that we tell ourselves about. Parts of society tell themselves about AI and the ongoing progress of technology. Again, these justifications being used to relinquish more power to these big tech companies on the basis that they are the only institutions that can take it to its logical conclusion. They are the only institutions that can actually ensure the survival of the human race. So much importance is implanted onto them and so much of that importance attributed to them

is dependent on this form of labor being devalued and kind of just concealed from like general public view. People talk about the EVA units, but we don't recognize that there's a guy in there. I heard a particularly strange story the other day actually. Apparently, the manager of Travis Scott, the rapper, recently claimed that to boost Travis Scott's online streams, he would hire a mechanical Turk worker to create fake Gmail accounts, sort of like ultimately giving him the ability to, in his words, deploy virtual machines and inflate the streams of particular Travis Scott songs. They generated tens of thousands of fake streams and this has been going on for years, but this is a particularly ridiculous example of it. I was really hoping you were going to say

that Travis Scott's manager was a mechanical Turk. I mean, yeah, you're right, this absolutely happens and this is kind of like, it's not like a secret in the music industry and clearly then it also sort of elucidates that the kind of, the more successful you are as an artist, which often is linked to how well you perform on platforms generally and how well, like the all, like what type, like how the algorithm interacts with you. I don't really want to say that like how well you interact with the algorithm because I think that's like a different conversation about like what it actually is, but it kind of like really reflects the idea that if you are like, you know, one of the more successful like musical artists or like any type of like creator,

whatever, like you can kind of use that to your advantage. But at the same time, you can also like attribute that to like organic or natural growth. Like quite often, like it's quite surprising how many kind of like, of like, of these artists and celebrities have no idea like how their actual like, like popularity infrastructure is actually built, especially like new celebrities who kind of have come up on like TikTok and other platforms. I think maybe the platform should start sort of like, you know, advertising themselves with like, yeah, you might not get paid for your work, but you might get to indirectly work for Travis Scott. And you can tell people that you can tell people I work for Travis Scott hitting the stream button because now that means that you work,

but now it means that you're in servitude to Satan. So Travis Scott is managed by an entire village in Indonesia who are just like basically all co-parenting Travis Scott. I want to get to one more thing, right, which is you talk about this idea of data fetishism as the same thing as commodity fetishism. You can sort in the same way, I think when people talk about technology or automation destroying jobs, they talk about it in terms in a similarly fetishistic terms, right, where there is this job, it gets replaced by an algorithm or a machine or whatever. But in fact, what actually happens and what you see when you look at micro work is jobs get carved up from existing jobs, as we've talked about at the beginning,

get carved up into little tasks, right? Yeah, your F1 pit crew making you that bit. Yeah. And that there is, as you say in the book, a disjuncture between the ever slowing rate of job creation and the ever more rapidly expanding pool of workers who are dependent on wages. And as stagnant growth infects the global system, workers are pushed into more precarious and petty service work, which capital turns into commodification of data and speculative investments in AI futures, which are basically only going to further expedite people being superfluous. And it's not that people are pushed out of work, it's that they are elbowed to the side, right, that management capital is able to use mech and automation, not to replace your job, but to control you and more, and to

basically push you out of the center stage in it, so that all of a sudden your job is no longer your job, it becomes a place where you fight for survival. It's still you get to do that in like a dormitory, you know, right? And, and so it is the work is not replaced, it's informalized, it's broken up, it's more and more surveilled, it's more exploitative. Exactly. So, so, so in the book, I use a term from a sociologist called Jan Bremen, who's studied sort of the informal economy in India. And he has this term wage hunter gatherers. And these are basically, you know, the large proportion of workers around the globe could be described as this, they're basically people that, you know, live by walking sort of goods, maybe selling

tissues on trains, cleaning the houses of the rich, picking up rubbish and recycling, and will often spend more of their time hunting for work than actually doing paid work. So, you know, doing a vast number of jobs over the course of a day for like multiple contractors. So in the book, what I'm sort of saying is that the micro workers like the digital equivalent of this, basically, they sort of reside in the same places, they're in slums, they're in camps, they're in prisons, maybe they're in occupied territories. And they don't have anything that even resembles a job, they move from, you know, petty digital task to petty digital task. It's, as you said, Riley, it's informality, but with a kind of glossy kind of Silicon Valley sheen

to it. Anyway, we're very excited to welcome our new host, Dave in Wormwood Scrubs, who's getting a very competitive rate. And ultimately, a lot of what they're looking for, just to finish it off, it's not even the performance of the task, it's so that they can look at how the task is performed. But the task itself becomes the product that is used to further visualize and surveil and essentially just de-center the human in the main part of what a human life is for most people who have, who are just there because of history, effectively. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, Google and Facebook, for instance, have made it clear, very clear that they want to automate their moderators and raters. Mechanical Turk has some

seriously sinister small print in its terms and conditions that says that something to the effect of the content of each task can be used to support its own machine learning. And so very often it would seem that the platforms want data about how to do the very tasks that the workers are currently doing. So in essence, the workers are directly automating their own jobs away. So you kind of find this further twist in surplus populations or what Mike Davis has called surplus humanity, where now sort of surplus populations are directly being forced to make the little bit of work that they've got surplus and the jobs of other people. And I think it sort of, just by way of wrapping up, right, I think you'd have to be naive to say

none of this AI and automation stuff will ever work. It works a little bit sometimes, but what's very clear is that the human labor will never go away, right? And a lot of automation, it matters how it's deployed because it can be deployed in a way that is emancipatory. It can, but it will never be deployed by capital in a way that is emancipatory. You're never going to see that happen ever, but automation is going to continue to happen. It's going to march on. And I think it goes to show that the smartest group of people that ever existed were the Luddites. Who didn't say don't develop technology, who rather said if a piece of technology does not serve the interests of humanity, it ought not to exist, quite simply. Anyway, I think that

is probably a little bit enough for today. So I just want to say, number one, Phil, thank you very much for coming and hanging out with us today. It has been a blast to talk to you. Thank you very much for having me. I've had a great time. Yeah, and it's been a real pick me up. I feel invigorated. Yeah, sorry about that. Where can people find your book? Should they want to read it on a train or perhaps they're on a remotely controlled plane? Yeah, or pay a child to read it somewhere in Africa.

So I'd encourage you not to buy it from Amazon and go directly to Verso. Yeah, that's my one bit of advice for buying the book. Okay, you heard it here first. Go to VersaZon. And we will link to that in the show notes at Verso and not VersaZon or Amazonverse. That's right. Anyway, I think all that remains to be said is to say once again, thank you very much, Phil, for coming on. Thank you, the listener for listening. Don't forget you, the listener, we have a Patreon. There's a second episode every week. It is five simple dollars a month. And if this isn't enough to tempt you,

we have been getting a lot of listener messages of people who have experience at working at some companies that we've talked about recently. And we'll be talking a little bit about those on the bonus episode. Also, my tour this month, 23rd, Birmingham, 24th, Liverpool, 25th, Manchester now sold out. If you're in Manchester, you have, you officially missed out on MILF theories and the 26th in Nottingham. Birmingham's quite close to sold out. Is it called voicemail? Is that called MILF theories? No, it's not called MILF theories. That's just a joke about there's MILF theories.

It doesn't matter, Riley. It's okay. If there's MILF theories in it, why don't you call it MILF theories? What is it about voicemail as much as MILF theories? A voicemail is like a key. Look, let's not let's not get into this. If you want, if you want to find out, come to the fucking show. I'm not giving you this for free. I'm not letting Riley Paxman me out of the reveals of the show. All right. All right. Bye, everybody. Bye. Bye.

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