HETEROMATING MACHINES, ISOLATION AND INVISIBILITY: PREELIMINARY RESULTS ABOUT CHILEAN MICROWORKERS SUBJECTIVITY.
Diego Rivera  1, 2, 3@  
1 : Universidad de Chile
2 : Institut Polytechnique de Paris  -  Website
DiPlab
3 : FAIR

The sociotechnical imaginary surrounding AI has been often associated with the notion of an abstract, autonomous technology that has the potential to eventually dispense with human work. However, the empirical description of the deployment of different AI infrastructures shows that, in most cases, the opposite is true. They are part of vast global assemblies of minerals, cables, and more importantly, constant human labour to produce and check the data that it is required to train models, while at same time correcting AI outputs or even replacing them altogether.

In this regard, more than automating machines, AI assemblies work as heteromating ones. Separating tasks and work from their spatial and temporal contexts to be abstracted into ever-updating models while atomizing labor into smaller units. It is here where we look at the figure of microwork, or crowdwork.

The workers of these different platforms are subject to novel forms of employment, be it because of the consequences of the platform model, the gamification of their tasks, algorithmic management, and the rhetoric of a new kind of freelancing labour. These differences are particularly relevant in so far as platform labour positions itself as a permanent fixture of the economies of the Global South. In particular, the case of Chile, with its history of both informal labour and profound neoliberalization, shapes itself as a relevant study point.

This presentation focuses on the results of ethnographic fieldwork as well as a questionnaire of more than 100 workers, to depict how these new forms of labour organization and management start to delineate particular forms of subjectivation that, despite dealing with several new forms of governance, appear in continuity with a long history of precarious and informal labour. The preliminary results show how workers have to position themselves to deal with a feast-or-famine model in which they have to organize themselves, be it on their lonesome or collectively, to travel into platforms with decreasing remuneration, and that asks them to function as intermediaries between platforms and the frequent technical problems that plague them. At the same time, the atomization of labour creates a sense of invisibility and isolation that makes other forms of organization difficult. Moreover, as platforms specialize, different strategies, identities, and practices start to take shape, delineating different subjects that differ into how they relate to these elements.


Loading... Loading...