_ Let's Begin on a High Note:_______Jina Hyun / FL2023_HSSC5050_______huzzah! you found me!

1. Samasource Impact Sourcing Inc. is a Silicon Valley based data labeling firm which offers their clients data annotations ranging from text to video for machine learning algorithms. Although their headquarters are in San Francisco, the real operation takes place primarily in Kenya, with additional “delivery centers”, in Uganda and India. Heralded as impact sourcing, Samasource’s “consumer conscious”, “ethical”, and “fair trade” practices attracted many Big Tech firms (Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta); a quarter of the fortune 50 list employs Samasource for their data labeling services (McCormick, 2020). However, in February 2022, the Times revealed the true nature of the work and working conditions of the young men and women in Samasource’s delivery centers: content moderators and data annotators sit at their desks for hours on end watching videos of murder, rape, suicide, dismemberment, and child molestation while making an average of $2.20/hour $1.46 after tax (Perrigo, 2022). [🤐] Employees are given a countdown of a mere fifty seconds to flag or pass the material they are viewing, regardless of the graphic level of their content. This is the reality of their work: consecutive countdowns one after another, growing desensitized to the content confronted, skimming the digital scum of the internet. Measured against the fifty second objective, each employee’s work efficiency (Average Handling Time), is reviewed weekly. This software (designed by Facebook) cultures an efficiency-first, safety-second agenda. Unsurprisingly, employees were often diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and meagerly offered “wellness breaks” from Samasource––a laughable effort from their alleged ethical and responsible dogma. Upper-level management from Facebook were invited to Kenya to “appease” the aggrieved Samasource employees, which entailed snuffing out unionization efforts and reminding them that their labor easily replaceable.

2. Big Tech is a socio-political and economic apparatus, similar, if not rival to The Market

(Mirowski, 2011). The power of Big Tech is far reaching, bleeding into political control with policy making and regulatory capture, social control in communication circulation and the exchange of information, and economic control through market dominance and creating data monopolies. Preaching developmental progress, seamless automation, and ethical cleanliness for the service of humanity, Big Tech is seemingly inevitable and artificial intelligence 🤖 today is the epitome of this trifecta. These three qualities––progress, automation, and cleanliness––offer a fantasy of hyper futuristic human-computer interaction (HCI) that rivals its science-fiction counterparts. However, this three-headed beast also strategically works to undermine the multifold layers of real human labor that go into the very construction of Big Tech’s existence.

3. The hierarchy of labor and power in Big Tech structures corporations and their white-collar laborers at the top, having the resources and privilege to use the tech and control it. Mass consumers and blue-collar laborers occupy the middle, broadly having the resources and privilege to use the tech, however unable to control it. Finally, black-collar laborers reside at the bottom, having neither resource or privilege to use the tech nor control it. The framework to which scholars have often revealed the nature of labor exploitation in Big Tech has been to ground research in the 🆘 hostile spaces that black-collar workers labor in––taking a bottom-up approach. Technoscience scholarship at the intersection between environment and technology have discussed labor exploitation, especially that of children, in the cruel landscape of lithium (since 1995) and cobalt mining (since the early 2000s) in the Global South (Crawford, 2021; Hynes, 2021). Feminist STS scholars have underscored the often unpaid and almost always uncredited 👚 pink-collar labor of women who worked in semiconductor plants to develop microchips in the 1960s (Nakamura, 2014; Monterio, 2017, Henderson, 2002). Scholars of digital technology and media studies have underscored that the communication interface of contemporary smart assistants is figured from the historical labor of idealized servants, slaves, and housewives 🏚️ (Phan, 2019; Strengers and Kennedy, 2021; Faber, 2020). Historians of economy and social scientists have linked the oppressive nature of tech work to new economic models that are motivated by algo- and technocratic infrastructures (Aneesh, 2009; Jacobson and Hogan, 2019, Mirowski, 2001). Historians of science and labor have precisely noted: “attention to labor pushes us beyond questions of epistemology to see science as producing more than knowledge as it generates, exploits, and transforms objects, skills, identities, and power structures” (Hui, 2023). 💫bibliography✨