What is being said about digital work, AI and the future of work

In February, it was published in UOL Tab the article “Paid for a Click,” in which Bruno Moreschi and I were interviewed about microwork platforms and the work of data trainers for artificial intelligence (AI). One of the comments on the post of journalist Jaqueline Lafloufa said the following: “The leftist narrative is counterproductive.” That made me think: What would be counterproductive? And what would be productive? It also helped me to understand how much language is an element and capital for these logics and struggles of production and counterproduction.

Disruption. Owner’s attitude. Digital transformation. Ecosystems of innovation. We are bombarded at every moment by a grammar that is both from the capital and the Silicon Valley—the platformization of society is not detached from the financialization process. How much are we bombarded by the grammars of coaching or LinkedIn? This dominates academic agendas as well. What does digital transformation mean and for whom? What exactly is an ecosystem of innovation? Who does it serve? What are its social, political, and economic implications? What does it imply for workers?

The real “disruption” is the ghost work of people who feed AIs like Brazilians at Amazon Mechanical Turk or Spare 5—the latter composed mostly of workers from Venezuela. It is this growing “taskification” of work that makes the financialized and platformed system run. Based on that, more questions: How much will we be able to reappropriate these languages for other purposes? How much should we fight for them? How do we think about new grammars? In these struggles for word use, we need to reappropriate existing languages and invest them in new meanings, just as we also need to create new languages—that is our challenge. How do these languages relate to material practices and discourses? That is a question that involves the academic agenda itself. Texts like The Intercept’s report on “The Invention of ‘Ethical AI’: How Big Tech Manipulates Academia to Avoid Regulation,” written by one of our participants, Rodrigo Ochigame, help to understand the cooperation between Silicon Valley companies and the university. How may we overcome these questions? How much did we manage to reappropriate things that were apparently revolutionary, like the Fab Labs and the maker culture, to other positions and other territorialities?

I study the issues of digital work and platform work and bring the basic contribution of the Brazilian philosopher Álvaro Vieira Pinto. He was Paulo Freire’s professor and, even though he is unknown in his own country, his contributions help us to think about technology in a more effective way than many authors from the Global North. In the book O conceito de tecnologia [The Concept of Technology] (Pinto, 2007), we can find more of his ideas  about the impossibility for us to consider technology inseparably from its production processes and the issue of human labor in a society like Brazil. And also how to think about the position of technology in a country like ours. Talking about digital labor, for example, we have the issues concerning geopolitics very strongly outlined—the platforms are mostly from the Global North, but the massive labor force comes from the Global South.

It is the case of the already mentioned Brazilian workers at Amazon Mechanical Turk and the Venezuelan Spare 5 workers who train autonomous cars. While the workforce is in Latin America, the platforms are maintained from the Global North. The “gig economy” abroad is not the same as the “gig economy” in Latin America. Here, the freelance job, the gig, has always been the norm and is not seen as temporary, but permanent. So how do we think of technology in a country where that way of working has always been the norm, the permanent practices?

I am currently doing research with Willian Fernandes Araújo (University of Santa Cruz do Sul, Brazil) on the discourse of workers from microworking platforms, as part of AI for Everyone?, a book in progress for the University of Westminster, England. It is very interesting how these workers describe what they do. In their LinkedIn accounts, they declare themselves almost as if proud to be part of this artificial intelligence world. One of the workers writes: “Wow, I made a lot of money at Spare5 when it was in Brazil. Now that it is no longer in the country I can’t get any more money from platforms.” Another worker: “Ah, when they ask me, I say that I am helping artificial intelligence and it is a super-secret job.” How does this process of reappropriation take place for these workers? And another provocation: How can we think about technology from a Brazilian point of view without disregarding specificities or geopolitical issues? These are questions that can help us better understand this transit between what is global and what is local.

How to imagine other possible worlds? The book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Fisher, 2009) mentions that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. A programmer from the United States, Wendy Liu, in her book “Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism” (Liu, 2020) complements this idea, by questioning how we can abolish the logics—productive, linguistic, financial—from which the Silicon Valley was built and reappropriate the technologies to think of other possible worlds. This also reminds me of the research by professor Christian Fuchs from the University of Westminster, which shows that 70% of people in the U.K. want alternative platforms that work from other logics. It is something far beyond the discussion about the future of work and technology made by futurists who sell themselves as coaches—they either characterize the future as the peak of happiness or as something dark. We need to build the future of work for us, considering our inequalities and the intersections of gender, race, and class in Brazil.

When researchers like Nick Dyer-Witheford, Atle Mikkola Kjøsen, and James Steinhoff decree that artificial intelligence is the overall condition of production nowadays, we need to think from the specificities of our society. There are already articulations and connections between app workers living in São Paulo, Santiago, Cape Town, and London. We live in a circulation of workers’ struggles around the world. What we need is to think more about local-global ways of articulation.

The book Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work (Srnicek, 2017) presents more questions: How do we take up this notion of the future? How do we appropriate this notion of the future and what I call “prefigurative projects?” How do we imagine today the society we want tomorrow? Srnicek writes that we need to reclaim the meaning and sense of the future, of what we want concerning it.

From that, I have been thinking about the idea of “platform cooperativism” with their potential to build another platformization of labor, with fair work—together with its digital platform workers’ organizations—for example, the video game workers’ union, present in twelve countries, including Argentina and Brazil. I also want to highlight a meeting in January 2019 where app drivers from 23 countries discussed their demands. How to unite the technological potential with logics of work organization linked to self-management and horizontality? How to incorporate these struggles and prefigurative policies in a world where the old is already dead and the new cannot yet be born, as Fraser (2020) says paraphrasing Gramsci?

It is all a challenge. Platform cooperativism has the potential to circulate meanings and goods with the aim of reinventing production and consumption circuits locally. But I have been thinking about these cooperativism potentialities in the communication area. One example is Means TV, an anti-capitalist streaming platform from the United States that works on the logic of an audiovisual professionals’ cooperative distributing anticapitalist content, circulating workers’ struggles—they are the same ones that made the successful campaign of the United States congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Of course, movements like this are not contradiction-free. While they present prefigurative potentials, Platform Cooperativism Consortium has been founded by Google.org, a foundation of Big Tech. This also happened with the Argentinian cooperative newspaper Tiempo Argentino, a classic case of a factory recovered by workers in the journalism field, which recently won a grant financed by Google News Initiative. These are contradictions in this process. However, contradictions are never resolved. We need to face them in order to reimagine real utopias.

How do we face these contradictions? Questions like that and so many others presented here can help us to think of a digital work that imagines the future in a way that is also radical and prefigurative. To be radical, in this scenario, is to face the contradictions. And to not forget them. In a neoliberal mindset that seems as totalizing as the monsters from the show Stranger Things, it is necessary to expose and face the contradictions so that we can think about other circulations of senses for technologies and the labor world. As Harvey (2017) says, contradictions are stubborn in not solving themselves. They just move.