Welcome To The Digital Sausage Factory

By Will and Aria Novosedlik

It is a timeworn cliche that if we knew what went into the hot dog we’re eating we wouldn’t want to eat it.

Turns out the same thing goes for the Internet.

In a video by indie documentary filmmaker Real Stories called Ghost Workers: the Modern Day Slaves of the AI Tech World we see the story of the invisible workforce toiling behind our screens, for pennies an hour, doing things like training AI or cleaning up our social feeds.

This is the digital underclass. As one person interviewed for the abovementioned video said:

“Humans are involved in every step of the process when you’re doing anything online. But we are sold this myth of ‘the miracle of automation”.

The lie of AI is that it is training itself. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We see a single mom living in Northern Maine with her autistic daughter. She receives government assistance of $750 a month, and she supplements that with at least 8 hours a day of executing tasks sent to her by a company whose clients include names like Alphabet, Meta, Uber, TESLA, Apple, Amazon and Nvidia. “On a very good day,” she says “I could earn $5.00 an hour. On a bad day I earn ten cents an hour.” On average she pulls in around $250 a month.

We see a young man in Oregon named Jared who, when he is not working shifts in a grocery store for minimum wage is training search algorithms to more accurately recognize products that people are looking for online. He makes about 30 cents an hour doing this work. When asked about it, he says “I feel like I’m part of a huge invisible workforce made up of random people across the world training what’s going to eventually replace the workforce as a whole.”

In a sequence from the Real Stories documentary, Jared spends 30 minutes answering 189 questions and earns a grand total of 15 cents.

The Silicon Valley oligarchs could care less about Jared and his fellow digital slaves. We see Lukas Biewald, former CEO of a company called Figure 8, which acted as a middleman between the big tech firms and the anonymous digital slaves working for them all over the world. His attitude toward this workforce was nothing less than contemptuous. As he explains how his company’s technology works, he says “Before the Internet it would be really difficult to find someone to work for 10 minutes and then fire them . . . but with this new technology you can find them, pay them a tiny amount of money and then get rid of them if you don’t need them anymore.”

Biewald ultimately got rid of them by selling Figure 8 to a company called Appen for $300 million.

Image credit: Socialist Voice

This is very typical of Silicon Valley. It is a potent demonstration of how the overall economic landscape is being reshaped. Greek economist and political activist Yanis Varoufakis calls it ‘technofeudalism’. His book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism claims we are no longer in free market capitalism, but something much worse. When we go to Amazon, for instance, we’re not in a marketplace but an economic fiefdom which is owned by one man and governed by his algorithm. With that kind of power, we see what his search engine wants us to see. And he charges a pretty hefty rent to any vendor who wants to be there.

In a 2023 Guardian article, one UK seller told the Guardian that his fees, including advertising, amounted to almost 40% of the pre-tax value of his products. That sounds a lot like the feudalism of medieval times, wherein the peasants gave up most of what they harvested to the feudal lord in whose fief they toiled. 

Back in the early days of capitalism, ‘capital’ meant the money and the machinery required to manufacture goods. Now the word means something entirely different. Varoufakis calls it ‘cloud capital’. Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism calls it ‘digital exhaust’. It is essentially the value created with every keystroke we make. The trail of data from our daily Internet activity is the ‘capital’ used by the big tech firms to build their digital fiefdoms. And they are getting all that for free.

Image credit: Will Novosedlik

So while big tech is busy exploiting the invisible workforce of digital peasants, they are also soaking up all of our data to feed their algorithms. As Biewald said when he explained his business model and the company’s logo – an infinity loop – one side of the loop is all the humans engaged in labelling things for the Internet, and the other side is the machine learning required to optimize his clients’ algorithms. 

As Varoufakis puts it, the algorithm trains us . . . to train it . . . to train us . . . to train it . . . in an endless rinse and repeat process. Hence the infinity loop. So we are all part of a cycle that includes the feudal algorithms, the vendors, the invisible digital slaves who do all the mind-numbing work of labelling, and ultimately ourselves and our data.

Welcome to the sausage factory. We’re all digital serfs now.

Will Novosedlik is a designer, writer, long-time contributor and editor of Applied Arts magazine. He is known for a critical perspective on the cultural and socio-economic impact of design, brand, business and innovation.  

Aria Novosedlik is a designer, writer  and researcher based on Toronto.