When Your Boss Wants an AI Camera in Your Bedroom
”Work from home” is really “live at work.”
When it comes to tech in the workplace, we pay too much attention to what the tech does, at the expense of a critical analysis of who the tech does it to, and who the tech does it for.
Take warehouse automation: stuff needs to get from A to B, and moving stuff is hard, dangerous work. In theory, warehouse automation is a critical part of making our world more humane and better for workers.
So how is it that Amazon leads the world in both worker injuries and warehouse automation? Worse, how is it that the more automated an Amazon warehouse is, the more workers get maimed and killed there?
The answer is not what the technology does, but who it does it to. Machines (including “smart” machines) can act as technological helpmeets, or as technological straw-bosses.
When the machine helps the human do more than either is capable of on their own, we call the resulting pair a “centaur.” But when the human helps the machine, we call that ghastly, lethal, literally dehumanizing arrangement a “reverse-centaur.”
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur
For Amazon’s reverse-centaurs, automation means the tempo of work is ratcheted up until injury is inevitable. There’s nothing intrinsically dangerous about robots that bring shelves to human pickers. The danger comes from management decisions about how fast to run the robots.
Amazon management can choose to run its warehouses in unsafe ways because its workforce isn’t unionized, and thus lacks the bargaining leverage to force worker-friendly policies on its employers.
That’s why Amazon was prepared to break the law to prevent warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama from unionizing under the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU).
https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/2/22598004/nlrb-officer-new-election-amazon-bessemer-union-drive
It’s not just warehouses — take app-based casual work. In theory, the idea of an app that helps workers and customers efficiently connect with one another in order to dispatch jobs means that workers can gain more control over their working days.
In practice, companies like DoorDash use apps to coerce workers into taking jobs that are so poorly compensated that they lose money in the bargain — and then deploy dirty tech tricks to prevent workers from configuring their apps to prevent this.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#boss-app
This isn’t an intrinsic feature of apps — it’s a choice that DoorDash makes. They get to make it because they misclassify their workers and spend tens of millions to get laws passed that ban their workers from unionizing.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/05/manorialism-feudalism-cycle/#prop22
One unexpected upside of the lockdown was the number of well-compensated, white-collar workers who discovered that working from home is quite nice — a way to be more productive and a better parent and spouse.
Work-from-home can be great. But only if the workers have the power to keep it from being terrible. The more precarious a worker is, the more the systems that make work-from-home possible are repurposed as technological whip.
Take Arise, a company that provides work-from-home, outsource telephone customer service to the largest companies in the world — Disney, Airbnb, Carnival Cruises, Intuit, and more.
Arise depends on worker misclassification so its workers pay for company-specific training, then it spies on their calls to ensure the women (mostly Black women) who pay for the privilege don’t hang up on callers who make rape and death threats.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/29/impunity-corrodes/#arise-ye-prisoners
These women supply their own computers, then install Arise spyware on them, and are required to silence their children and other family members while they are on-shift — a crying child could cost them their investment in training and equipment.
These are all management choices, not inevitabilities, and the factor that makes these choices possible is the lack of worker power (Arise workers have so little power that they have to PAY to quit their jobs, thanks to an “early cancellation fee” in their contracts).
For workers with little power — who lack either a union or a high-demand skill/experience mix — “work from home” is a thin euphemism for “live at work.” Not only do you provide your boss with rent-free space in your home, he gets to colonize your whole house and family.
Take the hundreds of thousands of work-from-home call-center workers at Colombia’s Teleperformance, who have been presented with a new, non-negotiable contract requiring them to have “AI”-powered cameras in their homes.
The contract acknowledges that low-waged workers live in cramped quarters where it is impossible for a camera to avoid capturing family members, including minor children — so the contract requires workers to waive their family’s privacy rights as a condition of employment.
This ghastly disciplinary technology is branded “TP Campus” and is billed as a means of preventing fraud and enforcing petty authoritarian rules like a “clean desk policy.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afxV2fQ32JA
In countries where there are strong privacy laws TP Campus has been banned. Albanians working on the Apple UK account got the Information Commissioner to order Teleperformance to drop TP Campus for them.
https://www.idp.al/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Rekomandim_nr_27_AMSSHT.pdf
Apple is just one of the tech giants that relies on Teleperformance — Uber and Amazon are two more. These companies are noteworthy not just because of how much they outsource, but also because of how much of their supply chains they own.
Historic antitrust principles (now being revived after a long slumber, as with the new Biden executive order) are suspicious of corporate vertical integration, and have gone so far as to impose “structural separation” — a ban on companies owning parts of their supply chains.
For example, structural separation might ban mobile platforms from making apps that compete with the offerings in their app stores; or ban Amazon from publishing books that compete with the books it sells.
But the tech giants claim this anti-competitive, sprawling vertical integration is “efficient” — the best way to run a company — never mind this means that having your Amazon account suspended costs you your books, family photos, and business website.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/04/eighty-sixed/#thank-you-come-again
However, as much as tech giants champion vertical integration, it’s a highly selective, self-serving proposition. When it comes to parts of the business that are most profitable when workers are brutalized, traumatized, maimed, or killed, the companies change their tune.
Somehow, Facebook can “efficiently” be a mobile platform, a cloud company, a social media company, a currency issuer, a VR company, and more — but can’t possibly find a way to efficiently perform its core function of content moderation in-house.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/04/eighty-sixed/#thank-you-come-again
Surely it’s a coincidence that the functions Facebook outsources are high-stakes, impossible-to-perform jobs performed by low-waged workers, and the fact that this lets the company scapegoat its subcontractors and their workers for moderation failures has nothing to do with it.
Teleperformance — and Arise, and other live-at-work companies with abused, atomized workforces — only exist because highly integrated giants have espoused the contradictory doctrine of owning their whole industry — and outsourcing the dirty work.
It’s the heads-I-win/tails-you-lose core of monopoly capitalism. It’s why Luddism is an important political critique today — the principle of paying as much attention to who machines do things for and to as much as what the machines do.
https://twitter.com/jathansadowski/status/1424606960767225860
The reason for these exploitative arrangements isn’t to be found in the source-code for these devices, but rather in their political economy: the distribution of power among the people who deploy them and the people who are forced to use them.
Image:
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, and blogger. He has a podcast, a newsletter, a Twitter feed, a Mastodon feed, and a Tumblr feed. He was born in Canada, became a British citizen and now lives in Burbank, California. His latest nonfiction book is How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. His latest novel for adults is Attack Surface. His latest short story collection is Radicalized. His latest picture book is Poesy the Monster Slayer. His latest YA novel is Pirate Cinema. His latest graphic novel is In Real Life. His forthcoming books include The Shakedown (with Rebecca Giblin), a book about artistic labor market and excessive buyer power; Red Team Blues, a noir thriller about cryptocurrency, corruption and money-laundering; and The Lost Cause, a utopian post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias.
