We are in love with innovation, but slaves to the click. After twenty years of utopian narration on the magnificent and progressive fates of the digital world that must be embraced in order not to be left behind or even cut off, the reaction is a dystopian narrative that is just as worrying, but clearly needed to see clearly. One of the most controversial points that need to be investigated is the new reality of the world of work in the digital age.
Replacing humans with robots is science fiction. But it is true instead that behind the virtual world there is a new precariousness of human work and that artificial intelligence is made by millions of people without rights. Invisible workers and unwitting consumers. We must unmask the exploitation that the new capitalism keeps hidden.
His colleague Riccardo Staglianò had already written about it in two of his books published by Einaudi: In Your Place – so the web and robots are stealing our jobs (“P for Posto, your workplace. What the Internet and cars take away. Yesterday technology replaced blue collars, today white ones. And tomorrow?”), And Chores, on the so-called “gig economy” of the underpaid occupations of Uber, Airbnb and other platforms that disguise their miseries behind the tale of modernity.
In the latest essay by Antonio A. Casilli Slaves of the click – why are we all working for the new capitalism? (edited by Feltrinelli), the Italian sociologist transplanted to Paris enters into the merits and explains that we are all “slaves to the click”. The first version in French bore the title Waiting for the robots paraphrasing theWaiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. The Italian title is a stronger provocation and anything but neutral from a political point of view.
“If indeed every form of work, commodified (as in the work of which Marx speaks) or servitialised (as in the one that more modestly emphasizes the writer), were nothing more than an annotation of the same slavery, one would wonder which way to ‘postage is still open “writes Casilli in the preface to the Italian edition. His is a well-documented investigation (he devotes over 40 pages to sources) on the new platform capitalism, and it exudes an invitation to resist. It refers to the millions of humans around the world who help algorithms learn and machines work better. Millions of micro-entrepreneurs who filter videos, tag images, report comments, transcribe documents that machines cannot handle. In short, an artificial intelligence largely made by hand. For this reason, explains Casilli, we don’t have to worry about the disappearance of work: because robots do not replace us at all. Instead, we are right to worry about the digitization of work: the workforce of the contemporary economy is made up of hundreds of thousands of click slaves recruited from around the world. In the new digital Taylorism, multinationals such as Amazon, Facebook, Google even exploit their users by making them work for them for free without realizing it.
Behind the illusion of work flexibility already well described by Staglianò in Chores, Casilli recalls the Marxist concept of the alienation of labor, before the trade unions existed: “Although the extraction of value in the digital economy certainly responds to deeply new logics with respect to those characteristics of the industrial mode of production, they are ancient concepts such as that of “alienation” to be activated when we observe the way in which the owners of the platforms hide the real relations of production behind a screen made of narratives on liberation from work and self-realization by means of “voluntary”, “participatory” or “collaborative” activities “. Thus, the transition from utopia to dystopia of the digital age was rapid.
What to do? As Luca De Biase wrote in his book The work of the future, the point is not which jobs will disappear due to robots, but the ability to acquire digital skills and work on oneself to maintain an innovation-oriented approach. And according to the philosopher Maurizio Ferraris, a new form of welfare could simply consist in the redistribution of the surplus value produced by users in favor of the platforms, with the advantage both of the platforms and of the users, who would see their work recognized. “It would circumvent the obstacle of redistribution of users, which would make no sense to pay little if one acknowledged the fact that the real gain is in the aggregation, and that is what needs to be done”. But Casilli indicates a way that is a minimum trade union from which there is no escape: rights must be extended and protections established. We need the recognition of unpaid work. New rules and international standards are needed to sanction those who disguise it as entertainment. And common governance is needed to prohibit the commercialization of personal data. It is time for a new class consciousness. For the digital workers we all are.
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