On Possessor, Data Mining, and Labor Alienation

A few days ago, I had the pleasure of watching Possessor (2020), Brandon Cronenberg’s sophomore film about a shadowy corporation capable of placing your consciousness inside a different body through the use of some freaky new technology. As you can imagine, a capitalist organization owning such a terrifying invention means there is a lot profit to be made from nasty bloody assassinations.

I never watched Antiviral Cronenberg’s first film, which I remember getting a mixed critical reaction back in 2012 when it premiered. Without that context, I don’t feel equipped to say how much Cronenberg has grown as a filmmaker. That said, in the case of Possessor, I see a confident creator that never feels entrapped by the looming shadow of his father, the undisputed master of body horror. I would even go as far as to say that both the body horror and the gore elements in Possessor feel more effective and thematically cohesive than in some of his father’s films. And the thing that makes it a successful film in its own right is its deliberate attempt at using sci-fi conceits to create a separate reality that feels only slightly alien to our present day. Despite the existence of this nightmarish “possession” technology, the film’s world (an alternate 2008, according to the Wikipedia summary) is almost identical to ours. This is a society where corporations reign king and violent incidents are continuously covered by a dense fog of meaninglessness, dubious financial interests, media misinformation, and dense conspiracies. Reality in the film always feels off, closer to a slow burn nightmare than a traditional thriller or a horror film. And it’s this clever atmospheric trick that helps the film convey, in effective ways, modern labor alienation and our increasing detachment from the systems that control global politics and our intimate relations.

Most of the film’s runtime centers on the planned assassination of the CEO of a data mining company. Tasya Vos, the main character, is tasked with possessing the body of Colin, the CEO’s daughter’s boyfriend holding a menial low-ranking position at the company. In one of the most interesting scenes in the film, the camera follows Colin’s typical routine as a data miner. We see him enter a bare room filled with workers wearing VR headsets. The set takes workers inside a virtual replica of a corporate office. After starting the fake desktop computer inside the virtual office, Colin spends several minutes cataloguing the type, color, and shape of drapes present in the background of random videos. A random couple is having graphic sex on a bed (is it a porn film? Or a video illegally recorded inside someone’s house?) while Colin zooms in to a corner in order to have a better look at some ugly drapes.

I find it kind of amusing that a lot of people were baffled after watching the sequence described above. Some reviews I watched on YouTube (Scaredy Cats’s and Red Letter Media’s come to mind) were surprised and even expressed doubts about the existence of data mining. Let me tell you, that means this is some good sci-fi. Why? Because the best sci-fi stories are the ones that take outlandish things from our present, and just slightly exaggerates them for stylistic purposes. At the same time, reactions to this part of the film revealed two things to me. First, that is obvious these YouTubers are not currently in the job market (or desperate enough to earn a few bucks on the side doing whatever they can find). And second, that this was solid proof that most people ignore the bizarre and surreal mechanisms, and the types of jobs, that keep the Internet functional.

Data mining is central to tech. Data mining is the future of human labor. These days, one of the most lucrative businesses you can invest in or own is a “consulting” company whose only purpose is to hire low-paid workers around the world to feed algorithms, usually at the behest of some tech company. Some of these jobs are pretty straightforward: maybe you get to transcribe ads or newspaper articles, or maybe you end up transcribing voice recordings. The idea is this data will be used to improve smartphone apps aimed at disabled people or later used in the creation of innovative software. Maybe. Most of the time, however, these jobs demand tasks that get incredibly abstract and strange. It’s all hard to gauge since there is a severe lack of transparency in this industry. Maybe you will become a social media “tagger” that allows machine-learning algorithms to read the “sharing” potential of Facebook posts. Or record videos of your dog for some shady Chinese company. Or take hundreds of pictures of your clothes in different backgrounds for a new fashion app. Or place your iPad in different rooms in your house and record videos of the process. You might have to record yourself repeating nonsensical linguistic queues and phonetic gibberish, so voice-based virtual assistants understand different world accents. I lack the evidence to prove this, but I’m convinced 60% of this data is probably sold to the FBI or the CIA for general surveillance records.

I know a lot about data mining because I’ve spent close to a year working for these companies. I can tell you, without a shred of doubt, that those are the most demeaning and alienating jobs I’ve ever had in my sad pathetic life. That said, from the perspective of predatory monstrous capitalists, I can see the appeal. That is, of course, if you’re willing to try and understand the minds of exploitative sociopaths. These companies pretend to give you a contract, but the thing is mostly a symbolic gesture. Truth is, data mining is good business because you can hire anyone anywhere these days, and data mining jobs demand little to no skills, so these companies are not tied to local or regional labor laws. They offer no benefits, workers have to provide all materials necessary for the job (computer, internet service, and so forth), and it’s legal to pay less than the US minimum wage. In fact, many of the tasks fall into grey areas, since certain technologies or data are treated as “scientific” data. This means even your 12-year-old nephew and your grandpa can participate in the wondrous world of data. And you can get a fancy bullshit job title, such as “social media evaluator” and “Content Rater” or something.

If I can offer one criticism to Possessor is that the film doesn’t go far enough in showing how dehumanizing data mining really is. If anything, the fictional company portrayed on the film is, all things considered, slightly better than the real job conditions of this industry. Workers in the film have to physically go to a real building! They have restrooms and a worker’s lounge! The company even has the decency of giving you a fake virtual office! I’m not the first to speculate that the future of labor is the dreaded Home Office, a trend that has and is currently accelerating during the COVID-19 pandemic. Capitalist analysts are already estimating a considerable shift to the home office model in the next thirty years and the signs were already there in the stupid idea of “telecommute” popular in Silicon Valley a few years back. In these rapid shifts, I really believe global transnational data mining was the experimental phase of a whole new development.

One of the key concepts introduced by Karl Marx was labor alienation. As commodity production became faster and more complex, workers were slowly disconnected from whatever objects they produced. The invention and spread of factories in late capitalism meant production became series of series, construction of “things” that were part of larger “things” that were then sold and consumed. It’s the main difference between a shoemaker making a pair of shoes and a factory worker making screws used in war tanks. The former form of labor is clear, the skilled technician sees the process from beginning to end and “owns” his labor. In the latter, the worker becomes increasingly detached from the end product that is assembled through his labor. Data mining is the most extreme and abstract version of this alienation.

Back in the old days, workers at least had some degree of certainty of their role in a chain of production. They knew they worked for Screw Company X and, maybe, some day, they would see on the news the tanks that were built with the screws they made. In data mining world, there are additional layers of abstraction and you’re never sure where the data is going or what its main purpose really is. Most projects are buried under piles and piles of NDAs and vague information. Usually, it’s impossible to even know what company hired you since you’re trapped in multiple layers of subcontracting businesses. One time, for a project, I had to install software in my computer that blocked the use of external USB hard drives for six months for security purposes. All of this towards an unknown goal. I like to think that maybe the hours I put into these tasks, for literal pennies, ended, perhaps, used in some weird algorithm. Maybe my hard work helped Susan, soccer mom from Connecticut addicted to benzos, save 2.13 seconds while Google searching her hubby’s favorite brand of spicy chocolate bars.

In a recent interview, Cronenberg explained he wrote and conceived Possessor during a depressive episode in his life when he felt as if he was living the life of “someone else.” Thus, you could argue the film is about that type of mindset. The idea that we engage in a human performance for so long that we stop being ourselves. The film’s story works as a broad enough metaphor that you can project these themes onto it. Still, I think the film works better, and says something far more interesting, when you interpret it as a commentary on labor alienation. I think this angle is the only possible reading that cohesively integrates all the character threads with the data mining subplot.

Throughout the story, the film poses that Vos and Colin are not that different. Vos assassinates people for a capitalist organization that actively encourages her to give away all of her human ties, including her ex-husband and son, while hiding the political and economic reasons behind the assassinations. The agenda and end goals of the company are never fully revealed besides vague hints in a couple of dialogue scenes. Similarly, we never find out the purpose of the data Colin is collecting. The structures of power dictating their lives tell Vos to choose the suppression of her identity, emotions, and humanity to be the best at her job. Colin, on the other hand, is trapped in a nonsense job because of his girlfriend’s vague promises that working as a data miner is the only path for him to gain the respect of her shitty rich father. The thesis at the center of the gruesome climax is that we have secretly internalized capitalism’s promises to such an extent that, yes, it is worthwhile, desirable even, to destroy and sacrifice everything you have and are in order to excel at your job. I mean, be honest, don’t you want to be really good at your job? Isn’t that the only purpose in life?

Stray note on home office people:

A specific kind of person I particularly hate is the type that made their life goal to be a “proud home office worker.” The one that tells you to your face that they worked for years to work from home and free themselves from commute hell. Although is true that commute is integral to alienation, the idea that most of your existence is working or heading/returning from your job as an exercise in futility and dehumanization, I do think home office and telecommuting just exacerbates those problems. The point is not that traffic, a crumbling infrastructure, or your shitty car are the problem, but that work dominates most of your conscious life. In this sense, the idea of home office is next level shit eating, because you’re willingly letting your job into your intimate spaces. Now, you have “flexibility,” you can move anywhere you want and live a healthy life. That’s the dream, right? Or perhaps, and the pandemic is making this really clear, these new modes of labor are just pathways for your job to enter and control the place you call home? You can fly to the Caribbean or Cancún or do ayahuasca in Perú, but your job, your stupid laptop, and your boss will be there, always, hovering above you and never going away until you retire or die.

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