Dalia Hatalova Core Post #4/5 Blog Post #13/15

The readings for this week focus on different forms of labor that become obfuscated by the technological nature of digital. Made to look as if it provides a seamless and humanless interaction between the user and the digital, platforms are nevertheless built on human labor. In Sarah T. Roberts' research on the work of commercial content moderators, she writes that the revelation of their existence to the public would "disrupt comfortable myths bout the Internet as a side of on-to-one relationships between user and platform" (3). Consequently, the work that goes into sorting content which is laborious, disturbing, and time-demanding, is made invisible by companies, as are the economically driven decisions about what is permissible and what is not. While Roberts' work focuses on low-wage workers, Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein study that way that the work of data science is likewise rendered invisible. Here, they explain the reason for such invisibility slightly differently, as they remark on how "in our capitalist society, we tend to value work that we can see. This is the result of a system in which the cultural worth of any particular form of work is directly connected to the price we pay for it; because a service costs money, we recognize its larger value. But more often than not, the reverse also holds true: we fail to recognize the larger value of the services we get for free" (178). In this lengthy quote, D'Ignazio and Klein highlight the way that free products are associated with free labor being invested, reducing the value that society ascribed to data scientists. By way of the equation, their words also bring to mind a similar parallelism drawn by Tiziana Terranova's much earlier work, where she speaks of a blurring of the line between consumption and labor (70). Recently, "the idea that the value of such [media] corporations is given by users' participation has become common business sense" (102). However, Terranova's observations on the blurring of this line can be translated to a presumption that because they are doing free labor for maintaining websites (for instance, through the uploading and flagging material) that wage labor has been taken out of the equation. As seen with both CCMs and data scientists, not only free labor but also wage labor are integral to platforms' functioning. 

However, Jonathan Beller's analysis aptly points out computational systems build on existing models (82). These models of new digital labor exist in parallel with older models of physical labor, which are often low-wage and offer less flexibility than tech work. Similarly, D'Ignazio and Klein's example of Black domestic workers being useful for understanding the contemporary invisibility of digital labor demonstrates the continual need to compare psychological versus online employment (179). As digital labor, such as the work of CCMs, can be outsourced to other countries where workers are forced to accept lower wages, low-wage workers in Europe and North America conduct work that requires their physical presence and cannot be completed digitally. Such problems were recently highlighted during the pandemic when higher-paid workers could complete tasks from home, but low-wage physical work was stalled, often resulting in a loss of employment with little recompensation (NYTimes). Despite the crucial issues surrounding outsourced laborers' working conditions abroad, it is important to interrogate how digital versus in-person labor plays out in various national contexts. With the events of the past couple of years, we can view the flexibility that higher paid digitally conducted work, such as data science, as being more than convenience in North America but another point for increasing the differences between high-paid and low-paid workers. Not only has the loss of work disproportionately affected workers in physical employment, but the ability to protect their health in a global pandemic has often been more limited. Examining the ways that digital labor produces or deepens existing class divides is needed so that adequate care can be taken of workers when situations, such as lockdowns, are necessary.