“Though it seemed completely automated, [Amazon’s] Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.” https://gizmodo.com/amazon-reportedly-ditches-just-walk-out-grocery-stores-1851381116
[removes glasses; pinches bridge of nose; sighs until the heat death of the universe]
when Silicon Valley says “innovation,” it’s okay to mentally swap in “rendering labor invisible, while visiting new levels of precariousness and harm on the workers who perform it”
it’s a few more syllables, but i think it generally still scans
It’s important not to see this as happening to some “other” class of workers; these people are, first and foremost, *tech workers*. Without their labor — and the terrible conditions they labor under — these platforms would fail.
At the risk of being That Guy on main, a relevant bit from YOU DESERVE A TECH UNION:
“[Bezos’ wealth] is the result of deliberately hiding actual work – designing, making, sorting, packing, cooking, farming, delivering – behind little icons on your smartphone screen, in order to devalue it. It is the systematic use of the fake robot trick to lower the value of labour, until people are reportedly sleeping in tents at the factory gates, then banking the difference.”
Short, searing post from James Bridle on the real, human costs of automation: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/10/amazon-ai-cashier-less-shops-humans-technology
@beep Oh that is so good.
"The size of Bezos’s rocket is very precisely determined by the difference in costs between paying a worker in Britain and a worker in India – including all the historically determined racist and colonialist inequality that calculation involves."
I got a lot simpler substitution than that. "Innovation" can almost always be swapped with "bullshit" with no loss of meaning (and often a gain). "Innovate" can be swapped with "waste money."
I realize that doesn't get to what you're getting at -- what David Harvey calls "capital's spatial fix" on this, but it's at least pithy.
Ethan Marcotte
Luke Dorny 
Jessamyn
rrmutt
Jeremy Kahn
Mark Llobrera
Carter Baxter
Neil E. Hodges
PeachMcD
Michael Bacon
Dan Milway
Nicole Sullivan
Keith J Grant
@stevewfolds
punIssuer