“We, the Invisible Workers”
Contesting Digital Colonialism and Shaping the Future of Labour
Manuel Beltrán is a Spanish artist and activist. He was part of the Indignados movement in Spain, as well as the Gezi Park protests in Turkey (2013). Manuel studied at the ArtScience Interfaculty of The Hague in the Netherlands and in 2015, which eventually led him to found the Institute of Human Obsolescence. Manuel focuses his research on the future of work, by studying the economic and socio-political implications of recent and future technological developments in human society.
For their project called ‘Biological Labour’, the Institute developed a suit that generates capital in the form of crypto-currencies.
This suit transforms the unused body heat into energy, capable of powering a computer.
The Spanish activist has organized discussions on the future of labour in the Netherlands (Data Workers Union) and was one of the speakers at the re:publica 2018 convention in Berlin, where this interview was conducted.
A year later, there is still growing concern about the way information is handled online: from massive surveillance and data capitalization, to identity theft and automated systems, but also social media regulations, it seems that we are not always aware of the invisible truth that lies behind our beloved screens and gadgets. If the previous sentence felt eerily familiar, I would recommend you watch the full broadcast of Manuel’s talk at re:publica.
-It’s 25 minutes long, and only a click away.
My encounter with Manuel led to one of the most enlightening discussions of my young unexperienced career; but it was also the scariest by far.
After twelve full months, it still lingers in the back of my head every time I am facing a powerful technology — which happens quite a lot.
Now that time is on my side, I finally can make the full-text interview available to everyone ; hopefully this will make you think twice (or more) about the impact of technology on human society, and what the future of labour will look like.
What is your main motivation, professionally speaking?
M.B. - “I think especially with the first project of the Institute (‘Biological Labour’), I have put a lot of emphasis on how we have this blind belief in technology. If we can develop a new form of technology, we usually just develop it and embrace it, many times without thinking of the ethical implications of how it affects us, until it has been used and spread around. Then, we end up facing the blowback of the consequences.
In this project I was trying to hint some possible scenarios to which we might arrive with this combination of automation and human obsolescence, in the continuation of capitalism. We are pushing forward these technologies and it’s affecting the way we relate to them, but also how technology shapes our economic relationships in society, particularly in the field of work.”
I feel that sometimes, we don’t understand what’s going on in the web and how our data is used. How do you explain that?
M.B. -“We have several layers of a problem. The most important one, is our understanding of technology, and how we see our relationship with them: the imaginaries, visions and narratives on how we believe we relate to technologies, such as with the example of the CAPTCHA systems (‘Are you a Robot?’). This is presented to us under the narrative of protection for the web (avoiding the use of spambots, scammers…) but we don’t see the inner machinery of data exploitation that is here being used for military purposes, after Google sold this technology to the US Department of Defense.
The problem concerns vocabulary, as the narratives that we use to refer to technologies have been dictated by the companies of the Silicon Valley. In this particular case, they present a narrative saying: ‘this is something good, it’s positive for you and the web’, but they do not put the emphasis on this machine of exploitation. We need to break these barriers of understanding of what is the actual role of a technology: are we using blockchain for humanitarian purposes, or are we using this as a humanitarian banner to actually create business models? We should deconstruct these understandings and create new imaginaries on how to relate to these technologies.”
What about the scandal with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica?
M.B. -“I am skeptical of how much Facebook has been affected by the scandal, or the so-called ‘data breach’. We should demythify this notion first; this was not a data breach - this is how their business model works. It was assumed and accepted during the hearings that Facebook was collecting this data. The problem came because they shared this data with third-parties; there was no question about why we allow Facebook to collect all this information in the first place: the root, the structural problem of surveillance in capitalism, or having a system that is based on the massive extraction of data, was ignored.
Especially in the case of the US government, I don’t think they will take a real, structural action in order to stop this phenomena, because they highly depend on those business models: first of all for economic competition, but also for intelligence services. Recently, representatives from Twitter and Facebook were also appealing in front of the Senate and the Intelligence community. The whole discussion was on the alleged Russian meddling and how these companies were in the frontline of the protection of US interests; there was no discussion about the protection of other democracies and other nation states.”
Would you be favorable to the creation of a “European Facebook”?
M.B. -“I don’t think I would be up for a EU-owned version of Facebook. Everything that surrounds the idea of nationalizing social media or Big Data actors might just reproduce the same problems. We might jump from the centralization of power in private corporations to the centralization of power in nation-states, like in China. There, they have created their own imperialistic system with initiatives like the social credit system, and social media has become a tool not only of massive surveillance, but also massive control of behaviour.
I’m also rather skeptical that Facebook and Google will become transparent one day; they might become a bit more transparent, agree to some Data Protection laws, but they will not tackle surveillance capitalism. Nation states do not have the answers to overcome the structural problems that we are facing.”
The answer lies in having more democratic citizen-owned initiatives, otherwise we might end up trying to fight for a solution that creates a new problem — M.B.
“One of the first demands that we discussed in the assemblies of the Data Workers Union was the right of bargaining. We understand that the production of data is a form of work, and right now when I sign up for Facebook, I am facing a deal of ‘you take it or you’re out’. I don’t have another option as a citizen, and not even governments or states have the option of trying to protect citizens in that agreement. Initiatives like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) are good, in the sense that they underline the importance and urgency of having this discussion…
However, it might end up provoking situations like an exodus of big tech companies outside of Europe, or bringing just a small change in the way these companies work there. Facebook withdrew their headquarters in Europe, so they do not have to comply at the same level to the GDPR. Many companies could just change their headquarters to another country, and maybe in the future we will have ‘non-privacy data’ paradises, just like there are economic paradises. From those places, they will continue to exploit the data of European citizens. Still, it is an important advancement to have this regulation, but the discussion needs to expand outside of Europe.”
How can we use our ‘data for good’?
M.B. -“With ‘Biological Labour’, we were looking to question and challenge what the future of work might look like. What are the new forms of work that are happening in the present? It turns out that we have not become obsolete; we have become 24/7 workers. It’s an invisible form of work, much more difficult to crystallize. Art is important to make something abstract as the production of data a tangible thing. Society is starting to grasp important questions such as “what can we do with Big Data?”, “who owns data?”, and so on.
Some people are asking for a piece of the cake when they see the monetary value of information, but this might lead to a scenario of inequality where the rich can afford not to share their data, while the rest of us actually has to give it away. There is a tobacco stand in re:publica, where you can get free cigarettes in exchange for your data. This commodification of data makes it become a currency: if I don’t have enough money, I can pay with my privacy, and this is a wrong approach. I am in favor of using data for the common good: if I go to the hospital, maybe I am willing to give anonymized data in a way that protects my privacy, but that helps other people and helps develop services for the whole of society. Not just how it currently works, where our healthcare data is being appropriated by companies like Amazon to develop privately owned healthcare infrastructures, but built by all of us.
Private companies collect more and more data, and this is not in the hopes of having a better service, but to have a more profitable business model. If our production of data has so much importance in how services are being shaped, we should regain (or gain in the first place) the ownership of our data. How we are going to do it is not clear; the data I generate as an individual is very much useless, unless you aggregate it with the data of other people. Therefore, it’s perhaps more of a form of collective production that should belong to the commons.”
There is a concern that automation will take over many jobs in the future — If that happens, what will be left for us humans?
M.B. -“Here, it is also a matter of redefining the meaning of work for human society. I had a conversation at a panel where a similar question was asked, and someone referred to it as having a distinction between what is my ‘work’ and what is my ‘job’. A job is what I do to subsist in a capitalistic society, but if those jobs are being replaced and automated, maybe I can focus more on my desires, on the things that fulfil me…on my work. We can have several scenarios: this automation could leave us in a position of precarity, or we could be in a society in which we receive a universal basic income, with machines doing most of the necessary work. We could then invest the time in fulfilling what we really want to do, in our human nature.”
Note: If you haven’t had a chance to watch this video, I recommend you do so.
Finally: there was a person at re:publica that attented the conference without physically being there, thanks to a tablet and a remotely-controlled system. What does this make you think about?
M.B. -“It’s a side thing, but I did some research on forms of technological representations in a political context. At some point, Mariano Rajoy (Spanish Prime Minister) was facing a lot of criticism and he chose to appear on a big screen during a press conference. Then, we also have the case of the Turkish president Erdoğan, who appeared in a huge congress in the form of a hologram. These technological representations can be used to escape criticism, but you also have cases like Julian Assange: while he [was] trapped at the Ecuadorian embassy and appeared in certain conferences as a hologram.”
In a way, these technologies can be used for what we consider to be ‘good’, but I don’t think this use of technological representations is necessarily ‘good or evil’: it depends on how we use them. — M.B.
“What is really challenging about it, is to see how they create new narratives, or new possibilities: being present and being heard, or being absent and avoiding criticism. We need to be really aware of these implications, to be critical of how these technologies can be misused as well and again, not just have a blind belief in them.”
