We hear a lot about crowdsourcing these days — the seemingly democratic, web friendly enterprise that brings small contributors together with small entrepreneurs to promote new businesses or to help people who need surgeries raise the funds — a pitiful way to provide healthcare in one of the world’s richest nations, by the way. The popular notion of crowdsourcing, as laid out by Jacob Silverman in The Baffler is that it’s flexible, efficient, empowering, by-passes bureaucracy and is the technological equivalent of a bake sale. (“The Crowdsourcing Scam,” by Jacob Silverman, The Baffler, Volume #26, pg. 111). The truth, according to Silverman, is something quite different. It’s a union busting tactic. It lowers wages, enriches corporations, is isolating and, equally important, it creates an illusion “that there is a crowd at all.” (Ibid. pg. 107)
Crowdsourcing when applied to jobs usually means jobs done at home by contract workers. The tasks are broken into small parts, like assembly line tasks, and the pieces are farmed out to people in need of work who will do repetitive jobs for low wages. These contract workers have no union, no communion with fellow employees and no way to negotiate the terms of their employment. Worse, these people are overseen by computers that determine whether or not a worker is productive and if not, the worker is “deactivated.” Case in point is Uber, the taxi service comprised of independent drivers. If these workers receive too many customer complaints or aren’t available a sufficient amount of the time, they are disconnected from the system without due process by a computer. As Silverman puts it, how does a person argue with a structure that treats people like spare parts of a machine? (Ibid pg. 109.)
Crowdsourcing defenders will point to all the good causes the system serves. But, according to Silverman, more than good deeds are at work. For example, the CAPTCHA a user punches in to enter a site does more than prove the potential donor is human. Google, for example, catches the typed letters as part of their massive book scanning project, turning donors into unwitting scribes. Putting book classics on the internet may seem harmless, but consider the ultimate purpose. According to Silverman, CAPTCHA provides “scaffolding on which Google can hang more ads (having begun the project without bothering to consult any of the authors or publishers who owned the original work.)” (Ibid 1113). Language schools use student labor for a similar purpose. The translations they require as assignments are pieces of larger documents which the school compiles and then sells for commercial purposes..(Ibid 112) As Silverman points out, this kind of crowdsourcing is “a good way to extract labor from masses of people at very low cost.” (Ibid pg. 110)
Unfortunately, crowdsourcing is sold as a method of empowering people, allowing them to take control of their lives and by-pass government bureaucracy. In reality, corporations have found a way to decimate labor organizations and escape government regulations under the guise of assisting good causes. Perhaps it’s time to give crowdsourcing closer scrutiny. (For a related topic see Blog Monday Feb 2, 2015)
Courtesy of Google
