Core Post 4 – Maggie Roberts

 Core Post 4 – Maggie Roberts

“The sign of a good CCM worker is invisibility—a worker who leaves no trace” (2).

This assertion from Sarah T. Roberts’ chapter “Commercial Content Moderation: Digital Laborers’ Dirty Work” (2016), struck me as incredibly poignant, drawing stark parallels back to our first week of classes and Lisa Nakamura’s essay, “Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture” (2014). Just as physical technology is produced through the insourced labor of Indigenous women, CCM workers are comprised of largely marginalized and unskilled laborers (Roberts, 1). Tech labor hereby targets vulnerable populations to service the masses in a process of making labor itself illegible in order to be considered “effective.”

In her chapter, Nakamura describes the way in which the Navajo women who build computer circuit boards become metaphorized. “Silicon Valley business discourse,” she writes, “created an archive of materialsthat represented Navajo women as “natural” cyborgs, indeed, as embodying nature itself using silicon as their medium” (934). These women’s bodies are disconnected from embodiment itself using formulaic industrial discourse and interpolated into the factory chain. Their labor is viewed as derived from a natural source or a given—a simple “way-of-things”—rather than a product of racist, misogynistic and classist-based capitalist manipulation.

Roberts takes this assertion even further, positing that labor is not only naturalized, but erased entirely from industry and public conscious (and conscience). According to Roberts, labor gives the appearance of “magically appear[ing] on a site, rather than being [a] curation process” (2). Under the logic of these predatory and discriminatory practices, the racialized and gendered body and their work must erase itself for a product actualize and function to its full potential.

These two texts are in dialogue with each other, with one speaking to the level of industry and the other being concerned with the general perception of tech labor. While Silicon Valley may recognize the presence of its laborers, albeit through a reductive and harmful lens, the result of this effort is taken as mundane and commonplace by consumers. This invisibility or illegibility of labor is a precursor to Robert’s claim of bodily erasure at the level of content moderation in the later article. Such a theoretical link brings up many questions for me, such as: by articulating this labor—making it visible—how does it change consumer habits and practices (or would it)? Additionally, how does labor effect stakes and responsibility within an increasingly globalized society and economy? How does one understand subjectivity as a key component in the tech field—an industry often incorrectly defined as objective and impartial?