When the World Wide Web was still relatively shiny and new I was a bit disappointed with it. Not in the way that I’m disappointed with it now - where I’m disappointed with the fact that it has become less world wide and a web in a very different sense - but disappointed in the way that it wasn’t as easy to build as everyone seemed to suggest. If anyone could build a website in their bedroom, why did the emerging behemoths of the dotcom bubble need so many people? In my naïveté I thought that the Web would bring a different kind of business. I believed the hype about upstart kids in their garages building a new world and missed the bit where the money men in suits turned up and offered those kids shed loads of cash to become a lucrative new part of the same old world. I watched as people said “we’ve got this amazing technology, let’s make it do all the things we already do” (shopping, watching TV, talking to our friends, disseminating the lies of right wing demagogues) and slowly the promise of new forms of existence or society drained from the technology. And whilst I learned the truth about the amount of effort involved in creating and maintaining an online platform, I’m not sure that the sense that because it’s done by computers it should be easier ever went away. Since the 90s (actually since the 50s) we have constantly been told that technology is coming for our jobs. That technology will make everything easier and run smoother, it will take care of us and it will take care of itself. That’s the never ending story.
When a colleague asked on Slack about the best robot vacuum cleaner the other day, I jokingly replied that I have a regular vacuum cleaner and pay a human to operate it. They responded that they would quite like to pay for a cleaner, but their partner is strongly opposed to paying a person to clean up after them. I made a joke about how the partner will feel once the machines become self-aware and left it at that, conscious of the limited value of being a dick on Slack. But here’s the thing, I would be willing to bet real money that whatever robot vacuum cleaner they end up buying will have been made by someone who is paid a fraction of what a domestic cleaner in the UK gets paid (assuming they’re not a victim of modern slavery) and has the attendant quality of life. But hey, they’re on the other side of the world, so I guess we don’t need to worry about them.
I have relatives, New Labour types, who refuse to get a cleaner because they see it as bourgeois or something. I guess there is a sense in which as soon as you pay for the labour of another, you are an owner of capital and therefore you set yourself on the wrong side of the worker/owner divide. This feels like a particularly dumb interpretation of Marxist theory to me. Every transaction you ever make involves labour, the only difference is the level of abstraction away from the original work. If you buy an apple, labour was involved in growing, harvesting, transporting and selling it to you. If you invest in commodities, you’re aiming to make money out of putting yourself between the person who grew or mined something and the person who wants to buy it. If you invest in derivatives, you’re betting on what people will pay the people who have inserted themselves between the people who grew or mined a thing and the people who want to buy it. At the root of it, there is always a person doing work and you are either paying for or profiting from their labour. The idea that because you don’t pay a cleaner directly, you don’t pay someone to clean your house is laughable. Regardless of what we tell ourselves, the distaste we feel around paying a person to do a job directly for us is around the fact that it forces us to consider the person at the other side of the transaction. I paid my cleaner throughout the covid lockdowns when she was not allowed to come and do her job partly because she is a person I know and could empathise with. Equally when I have to have conversations about the cleaning, asking her to do a specific thing or do something differently, that conversation is inherently awkward because I am asking a person to do something and I am acutely aware that it may be taken as a criticism. But I think that is important, I should feel the complexity of human relationships when I am enacting a decision that affects my relationship with another human. If you can instruct someone to do something without any thought to how that makes them feel or what the potential consequences are for them, then you are a sociopath.
Web 2.0 was an exercise in removing direct contact from all exchanges of goods or services. Amazon meant you never had to talk to a shopkeeper again, Uber meant you never had to talk to a taxi driver again and social media meant that you never have to talk to your friends again. All the studies indicate that this is a problem in terms of loneliness and isolation for individuals, but it is also a problem in terms of how we relate to others. If we don’t have any of those complex interactions with the people who we depend upon to provide our goods and services, we can easily abstract them away from the concept of being people and so stop thinking of them as such. The great Michael Franti once said that “words can reduce a person to an object, something more easy to hate, an inanimate entity.” If people are just ‘boomers’ or millennials’ or whatever, they have no human needs or wants, they don’t feel pain or suffering, they are merely an irritation. Except, of course, they are actually humans with needs and wants and they definitely feel pain and they definitely suffer, often as a direct or indirect result of our actions.
The future we are apparently constantly striving for has always been sold to us as an automated utopia, where humans live a fulfilled life of plenty and machines attend to our every need. This is not a new concept. In the 1930s John Maynard Keynes predicted that increases in productivity would result in a working week of no more than 15 hours, with people mainly filling their time with creative leisure activities. His prediction about productivity increases were broadly correct, but we’re all working longer hours rather than shorter because Keynes didn’t account for capitalism’s ability to syphon off all that extra productivity as profit for shareholders. Given this, how does anyone see the promise of AI automating all the work* play out? Assuming it is likely to ever happen, what becomes of all the workers when the work has been taken away? The owners of the AI are not going to suddenly give shit away for free, they need to make money. And the rest of us will have no income so how are we going to pay for the robots? I mean I guess we could introduce a universal basic income funded by a tax on the robot companies, but given their reluctance to pay tax now and their massive amounts of capital to influence all policy decisions, I think the AI companies would be extremely unlikely to let that happen. Maybe we won’t need money anymore, because everyone has everything they need, except how will that have happened when the AI companies will have differentiated themselves by their ability to generate massive returns for their shareholders*. That need for wealth as a differentiator, as a measure of success, is not going to magically wash out of the system due to abundance, indeed it is the main barrier to such abundance. The pattern of capitalist acquisition, of which the AI data grab is only the latest incarnation, shows that nothing suddenly becomes abundant and then gets given away for free. Corporations would rather artificially create scarcity than allow their product to be devalued. So there is no real scenario where the existing corporations of the world solve any of humanity’s entrenched problems. In the mean time technology will either put more people out of work, provide the context for people to be paid less to do their work (“the machine is doing all the clever stuff, you’re really just doing unskilled Labour”) and/or further separate consumers from the labour that produced their goods or services. So called AI does all these and its promoters use the vision of utopian plenty that will (clearly never) be brought about by the AI age as the rationale for all the harm it causes without any clear indication how or when all these harms magically switch to benefits. Of course the people funding these technologies don’t see any downsides because they only see the end product. The writers, artists, academics and others whose work was stolen to ‘train’ these models see only downsides as their livelihoods are taken away in the name of a progress that, for them at least (and for most of us), will probably never arrive. This is the logical endpoint of the abstraction of labour, where it has been abstracted away to a point where it is no longer paid for at all. So using generative AI is a political act. In using it, you are saying “I do not want the producers of this work to be paid.” We are not told it is a political act, we are told technology is neutral, but this ignores the fact that almost all technology exists for a reason: to increase productivity. Companies invest in technology on the assumption that the technology will generate revenue and ideally profit. Technology as deployed in almost every modern context is inherently anti human labour.
In the past few years, technical documents that defined relations between a machine making decisions and another machine acting on those decisions as master/slave have moved away from this terminology as it is deeply problematic. However, changing the terminology doesn’t change the fact that since its earliest days, technology was seen as a replacement for the unpaid labour of slaves that it was no longer acceptable to own. The ‘Industrial Revolution’ was not about the arrival of technology, but about the application of technology to create the kinds of profits on the kind of scale that up till that point had only been possible through the use of free labour (ie slaves). The fact that it allowed the factory owners to undercut the prices of artisan cloth makers was not an unfortunate side effect, it was the entire point. So the first mass application of technology was entirely a political act: it was designed to create a underclass of workers who were dependent on the factory to eke out a meagre existence. It resulted in a considerable drop in quality of life for the working class, and set the standard for the structure of the modern world. Technology allowed factory owners to force their workers wages as close to zero as possible (ie as close to slavery as was socially acceptable). Once the popular Luddite rebellion was put down by the army, the factory owners and their new friends in government could paint the working class that they had impoverished as authors of their own misfortune, poor because they were not clever enough to earn more money. Thus also the central tenet of modern right wing ideology was born: that rich people are rich because they are smarter/more hardworking than poor people and therefore the poor don’t deserve a better life unless they can ‘work smarter’, ‘work harder’ or both. Both are inaccurate. There is no need to spend much time on the idea that rich people inherently work harder than poor people, modern social media show it to be so inherently untrue as to be laughable. The concept of working ‘smarter’ is also a misnomer, it actually means working more ruthlessly, being more willing to exploit the work of others for your own profit. Of course machines make all this easier, the factory owner can claim it is the machines that dictate the workers’ conditions, whilst the factory owners exploit the machines. Of course the machine is actually an intermediary that enables exploitation of grater numbers of people, whilst also removing the need to interact with them directly, taking the sociopathy out of exploitation. As more of our lives have been captured for monetisation - up to the point now where catching up with our family or friends has become a commodity - the boundary of the ‘factory’ has expanded to allow the machines to dictate the way we should speak to our friends, the way we should eat, the way we should sleep and how many steps we should walk. We can kid ourselves that some of these things are good for us and therefore evidence that the platforms care about us, but really it is about making sure we are well maintained as efficient modules of production. In terms of how platforms (the 21st century factories) view us, we are just our numbers, because those numbers have value. We should not (although we do every day) allow the production of those numbers dictate the way we interact with and relate to each other. The factory always needs to define complex systems in simple terms. Subjecting our society to the factory has modified our social relations into those that suit the factory, the complexity of human relationships is broken down into a limited set of discrete actions that can be mediated by the machines and the parts that generate the most income are rewarded.
After the army had crushed the Luddite rebellion and several dozen people had been hanged - murdered by the British state - for nothing more than acts of vandalism, the plight of the cloth workers forced back into the factories could be forgotten, as it happened behind factory walls. People didn’t see the maimed and impoverished children who had made the cloth when they bought it, so they didn’t need to think about the sacrifices made for their cheaper clothes. This was not the first time the consumer’s distance from the producer was used to avoid the ugly truth of production, colonialism allowed commodities such as tea, coffee, sugar and cotton to be produced by people in far away lands forced to work for little pay in appalling conditions, or as actual slaves. But they were far away in other countries whose populations ‘enlightenment’ philosophers had defined as ‘savages’, undeveloped peoples, whose societies needed civilising and therefore benefitted from the hard lessons of colonialism. This is obviously one source of the racism that is still pervasive in modern society - once you have successfully defined a race as ‘uncivilised’ it is much harder to define when they have become ‘civilised’ (and, I would argue, convenient never to do so) - but also an idea that was successfully repatriated to the centres of empire. If lesser people in the colonies can be ‘improved’ by subjecting them to grinding poverty and horrific working conditions, then why not lesser people at home too? All that needed to happen was a way of othering them in the way that the distance of the colonies othered them, the factories and mines allowed for this. They hid them away and created a new definition of the working class, which has been allowed to become their cultural identity to a point where they fear the loss of the industries that have blighted their communities for centuries because they have successfully been convinced that the industry is their cultural identity (and because industrialisation has left them no alternative employment). The othering of the working class is something that they have themselves actively participated in for many years, guided and encouraged by a right wing press that pretends to be of the people, allowing many to be persuaded that education is not for them and that the only route to true success is to exploit their peers. Meanwhile the burgeoning middle class was persuaded to think of goods and commodities as being produced by the factory, magicked out of the machine, not ground out of the lives of those who worked in the factory. Again, offshoring allowed the factory owners to put the distance of the old colonies between producers and consumers (presumably the former colonies had by this time been ‘civilised’ enough for their population to be put to work by the machines as well as by the plantation overseers), further othering them. I mean I guess we may conceive of a Foxconn worker in Shenzhen sleeping in a bunk bed, we may understand that they exist, but their relationship to the phone that I am writing this on seems tenuous at best. They are non people, a tiny fraction, a rounding error on the margin of a giant pariah state far away.
As almost every aspect of our lives is subjected to the factory we are able to abstract away more and more of the ‘workers’ in these factories, the producers of the data products that we consume. Even when those producers are artists or writers, our neighbours, our friends, our family, their struggles, the reality of their lives, their humanity becomes meaningless to us. They are just people we heard about, that the machine sells to us for the right price, whether any of it is passed on to them or not. Even when we think we are caring about these people, or their plight, we should be wary that we are doing it in the way that the factory wants us to. We may be outraged at their suffering and we may want to ‘speak’ about it, and this is fine, but we should be aware that anything we say will be packaged up and delivered to the right consumers: either those who are likely to strongly agree with us or those who strongly disagree, in both cases furthering the opportunity for the factory to produce more data. It is extremely unlikely that our message will reach either the people who we are sympathising with or the people who could have a material impact on alleviating their suffering. So as long as we accept that such engagement serves only to make us feel better at having done something when we have done nothing, that is fine. As long as we are happy for our outrage, our anger, our fear, our compassion to be nothing more than raw materials for the factory, then we can live our lives content. But it’s exhausting isn’t it? I want my emotions and my energy to have purpose, or at least to know they were received and interpreted by a human. I will only know that if a human gives me feedback directly, if I get to know about them and their needs and wants (even at a most superficial level), even if I misinterpret their responses it doesn’t matter. I’m less likely to shout at them, less likely to ignore their suffering, less likely to write them off as just plain wrong if they are there in front of me with all their human complexity, unmitigated by the factory.
In the modern world it is obviously impossible to buy all the things you need or want from a real person (believe me, I’ve tried), but that doesn’t mean we have to give up on people altogether. It doesn’t mean we have to assume that turning to the factory for all aspects of our life is the best option for us, and we should be very wary of any ‘moral’ argument that tries to persuade us that a product is preferable to a real person. I have yet to find a situation where that is true.
*something that has so far showed zero sign of happening
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