Differentials of power certainly place value and authority to some workers and not to others, but the exploitation of labor takes place at all tiers of the technocratic hierarchy––humans and their labor are constantly extracted, exploited, repurposed, and discarded for the Big Tech apparatus. In this document, I will build upon existing scholarship in the field by reverse engineering previously explored bottom-up approaches by taking a top-down methodology, primarily interrogating the Silicon Valley corporate giants themselves as the main object of my research.
[1️⃣]
I ask how and why, despite coming face to face with abhorrent
labor violations and working conditions such as that of
Samasource, corporate white-collar workers negotiate and
continue to depoliticize the labor of those who they deem as
less-than-human to create fallacious illusions of
more-than-human technologies. This involves examining the
reinforcement structures within a corporate setting that
distract white-collar workers from becoming preoccupied with
largely “ethical” questions, and keep “grind-set mentalities” which
perpetuate self-exploitative labor in the workplace (Küçük,
2023).
[2️⃣]
This also raises further questions of the larger patterns and
histories of failure in reforming Big Tech, and how institutions
of power maintain or rebrand their reputations to remain in a
technological oligopoly. I argue that critically examining the
corporate process of prioritizing and tackling the
public,
legal,
and
private scrutinization
of its products and conduct
will offer new perspectives and a fruitful analysis of not only
the upper-tier labor of silencing the exploitation of work from
bottom-tier, but also the labor exploitation of notably under
examined middle-tier: that of the consumer who purchases and
uses products of Big Tech.
[3️⃣]
Consumers of Big Tech products often fall into complex
entanglements under the categorization of being complacent
users, residing in the precarious intersection and collision
point between the bottom and upper tier of technocratic labor
and power. Following Bourdieu’s theory of inclinations and
habitus, I query why we too, practice a knowing silencing of our
own labor when it is revealed to us, and behave in
self-exploitative ways. The consumer end has a strange, disjointed relationship with Big
Tech in providing a specific type of passive labor. Largely by
providing data, the labor that we do for Big Tech is constant,
vast, and unquantifiable. However, the feeling of exploitation
doesn’t manifest in using public search engines or posting on
social media although one is providing a service to a
proprietary platform.
We unquestioningly accept “cookies” upon encountering them on
various websites, prove our human-hood in CAPTCHA tests
and agree to user terms of conditions without reading
them––until judiciary or journalistic action intervenes to
expose our passive labor, almost always coupled with violations
specifically concerning that of security, privacy, surveillance,
and data mining.
[4️⃣]
What kinds of consumer facing products occupy overwhelming
concerns with security and data privacy violations? For
violations involving security and privacy to take place, it
requires that one party was trusting of and felt secure in the
object’s purpose. How did this relationship begin, and what are
the forces that catered its naturalization? Smart home devices,
a popular genre of consumer-oriented products from Big Tech that
are currently facing a slew of public scrutiny, are well researched
and strategically designed objects that are meant to be placed in
one of the most intimate spaces of our lives: our homes.
Every choice is intentional--from their sleek exterior design, communication interfaces with
pleasant pings and beeps, and anthropomorphized human-computer
interaction. What objectives are prioritized in this
design structure? What kind of labor is hidden within the
artificially intelligent agents that reside within these smart home
devices?
[📖]
[9] Forsythe, Diana E. Studying those who study us: An anthropologist in the world of artificial intelligence. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002
[10] Frey, Carl Benedikt. The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation. Priceton: Princeton University Press, 2019.
[11] Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999.
i showed my dog my iphone 5 and she said
"this is as large as a phone ever needed be,
your kind's waste is intolerable and you
have turned our paradise amongst the stars into a tomb",