This final section collects documents, fragments and insights that connect the past stories gathered in these pages with the present time. The last two decades have been marked by a new cycle of automation and other technological changes in the ways people work, heal, live and protest. Without pretenses of being exaustive, materials are organized following the four red threads introduced in the previous sections: techniques of exploitation; health and environmental conditions; gendered discrimination; and forms of rebellion.
*The Work Environment* first produced at FIAT and *Against Noxiousness* of Porto Marghera agreed in identifying one mid-term tendency crucially relevant in our present times: mental noxiousness.
In the language of *The Work Environment*, this was the idea that while the first 3 factors of noxiousness were going to be mitigated by tendencies within capitalism itself, the 4th factor pertaining to mental wellbeing was going to get worse:
*the work environment yesterday*
*the work environment today*
While in *Against Noxiousness* we can read:
>In the new factory, coupled with a modest reduction in toxicities and thus in occupational diseases traditionally understood, there will be a strong increase in mental health disorders
“Against Noxiousness” (Comitato Politico, 28 February 1971).
We know today that, far from diminishing or disappearing, the first three factors of hazards have been delocalized in regions of the word where laws around health, workers' safety and environmental pollution are lax, non-existent or avoidable through corruption. However, the emphasis on the mental factors impacting our lives at work intercepted precisely what the workers of Lebole experienced with the introduction of MTM methods, the process of "modernization" of the assembly line and management - soon renamed the "scientific organization of exploitation" - with the current working conditions under the algorithmic management regime.
As one textile worker interviewed by Luigi Firrao put it,
> Today a girl enters the factory at the age of 14-15. The working conditions she finds are the first and the only ones she knows: she accepts them as normal. She doesn't think it can be any different. She asks the trade unionists to get her more
money, she may go so far as to ask to work less quickly, but not a change in the way of working.
from a letter of Adele L., fashion industry worker from Como
As the grandaughters of that 15 year old girl, we do not know different working conditions than those we inherited as normal. Do we even know how to ask the questions that would be needed to fight off contemporary forms of technical violence, alghorhythmic expolitation and demand a change not in terms of conditions of employment, but of our way of (re)producing life?
> One of Amazon’s many revenue streams is a virtual labor marketplace called MTurk. It’s a platform for businesses to hire inexpensive, on-demand labor for simple ‘microtasks’ that resist automation for one reason or another. If a company needs data double-checked, images labeled, or surveys filled out, they can use the marketplace to offer per-task work to anyone willing to accept it. MTurk is short for Mechanical Turk, a reference to a famous hoax: an automaton which played chess but concealed a human making the moves.
The name is thus tongue-in-cheek, and in a telling way; MTurk is a much-celebrated innovation that relies on human work taking place out of sight and out of mind. Businesses taking advantage of its extremely low costs are perhaps encouraged to forget or ignore the fact that humans are doing these rote tasks, often for pennies.
Jeff Bezos has described the microtasks of MTurk workers as “artificial artificial intelligence;” the norm being imitated is therefore that of machinery: efficient, cheap, standing in reserve, silent and obedient. MTurk calls its job offerings “Human Intelligence Tasks” as additional indication that simple, repetitive tasks requiring human intelligence are unusual in today’s workflows.
- from: Daniel Affsprung, [The Past and Future of “Artificial Artificial Intelligence“, Cyborgology](https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2021/04/19/the-past-and-future-of-artificial-artificial-intelligence/ ), *The Society Pages*, April 19, 2021.
> A cage for workers on wheels. It sounds like the stuff of science fiction. It’s not. In 2016, Amazon filed a patent for a device described as a “system and method for transporting personnel within an active workplace”. It is actually a cage large enough to fit a worker. It’s mounted on top of an automated trolley device. A robotic arm faces outwards.
The worker cage was designed by Amazon’s robotic engineers. It was intended to protect workers in Amazon’s warehouses when they needed to venture into spaces where robot stock-pickers whizz around. Amazon’s worker cage was quietly patented and only came to global attention thanks to the diligent digging of two academics. When the workers’ cage started to appear in newspaper headlines, Amazon executives declared it a “bad idea”.
Amazon may have dropped the plans, but that should not come as a surprise. The company doesn’t need a robotic cage for workers – it already has one of the most all-pervasive control systems in history. In its huge warehouses, workers carry hand-held computers that control their movements. A wristband patented by the company (but which is not yet in use) can direct the movement of workers’ hands using “haptic feedback”. Stock pickers in Amazon warehouses are watched by cameras, and workers have reportedly been reduced to urinating in bottles in order to hit their targets, and they are constantly reminded of their productivity rates. Investigations by journalists have also exposed a worryingly high level of ambulance call-outs to Amazon warehouses in the UK.
- from: Andrè Spicer, [Amazon’s ‘worker cage’ has been dropped, but its staff are not free](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/14/amazon-worker-cage-staff), *The Guardian*, 14th September 2018.
>Diseases are one of the most faithful mirrors of the way man enters into a relationship with nature, of which he is a part, through work, technology and culture, i.e. through changing social relations and historically progressive scientific acquisitions.
- Berlinguer, introduction to the conference "La medicina e la società contemporanea", Instituto Gramsci, 1967
The Covid-19 pandemic brought back at the centre of attention the relationship between medical-scientific knowledge and political strategies in the field of healthcare, the very same relationship that has been the core issue in the historical struggles around healthcare that we have been encountering in the archives centred on 1960s and 1970s' experiences in Italy.
During the pandemic, the dynamics of decision-making regarding the management of the health crisis were characterised by many difficulties that brought to the surface some key aspects of the relationship between the governed and the governors, the so called ‘experts’ and those who are not; in other words, the crucial and essential nodes of democratic order.
On this terrain, all the critical signs characterising the current processes of depoliticisation that the neoliberalist governance has generated during last decades have become apparent.
Let’s be clear: the contribution of experts is relevant in order to make decisions in the most informed way possible, all the more so in situations of health emergencies; however, the massive recourse to them runs the risk of taking the place of the responsibility of politics and institutions, the risk of presenting solutions as unquestionable, just because they are ‘technically’ founded, without a common discussion on what is needed and which are priorities.
During the pandemic, this exclusion defined at least two different models of care, of taking care of the emergency. On the one side, the care proposed by governments, that has been often rhetorical and sectorial. Let’s think for instance on all dispensable bodies who were put in charge of the growing necessities of care, without receiving back any increase in wage, or at least an increase of the safety conditions in which they worked. On the other side, we have the model of care promoted by solidarity and mutual aid collectives, neighbourhoods and groups, whose aim was to redistribute the resources needed to face the emergency as much as possible, while at the same time denouncing the extremely dire conditions in which public services versed, due to decades of strategic disinvestment.
>The histories of machines, femininity, and waged labour have long been understood as deeply entangled and mutually constitutive. This merging of woman, machine, and work is taken in a new direction in the twenty-first century, with the advent of the “digital assistant”. These applications are knowledge navigators, available as part of various operating systems, which recognise natural speech, and use this ability to help answer user’s queries and to aid in organizational tasks, such as scheduling meetings or setting reminders. Perhaps the most famous of these is Apple’s Siri – now widely recognised as the voice of the iPhone – but there are several others, including GoogleNow and Microsoft’s Cortana, all of which perform similar functions with varying degrees of efficiency. The connections between these digital assistants and the conventions of low-status clerical work are obvious; Microsoft even went so far as to interview human PAs whilst developing Cortana, and a reviewer from Wired magazine declared that using Siri is: ‘kind of like having the unpaid intern of my dreams at my beck and call, organizing my life for me’ (Chen, 2011: n.p.). These apps represent, in many respects, the automation of what has been traditionally deemed to be women’s labour. [...] This brings us to the topic of ‘hyperemployment.’ What do we mean by this term? Hyperemployment is an idea, advanced by Ian Bogost, which links contemporary technological developments with a qualitative and quantitative change in personal workloads. His argument is that technology – far from acting in a labour-saving capacity – is in fact generative of ever more tasks and responsibilities.
from: Helen Hester, [Technically Female: Women, Machines, and Hyperemployment](https://salvage.zone/technically-female-women-machines-and-hyperemployment/), Salvage magazine, 2016.
>Once you start listening you can’t stop hearing it. The voice – female, or female-sounding at least, pre-recorded ‘real’ voices or mechanised tones, or, often, a weird cut-up mixture of both, dominates the sonic landscape. From the supermarket checkout machines with their chaste motherish inquiries (‘have you swiped your Nectar card?’) to repeated assertions regarding the modes of securitised paranoia (‘in these times of heightened security’), the female voice operates as a central asset in the continued securitisation and control of contemporary space, cutting across what little is left of the public realm and providing the appearance and the illusion of efficiency, calm and reassurance in commercial environments.
- from: Nina Power, [Once You Start Listening You Can’t Stop Hearing It](https://ninapower.net/2017/12/07/once-you-start-listening-you-cant-stop-hearing-it/), *The Wire* n. 352, June 2013.
>Accents are a constant hurdle for millions of call center workers, especially in countries like the Philippines and India, where an entire “accent neutralization” industry tries to train workers to sound more like the western customers they’re calling – often unsuccessfully. As reported in SFGate this week, Sanas hopes its technology can provide a shortcut. Using data about the sounds of different accents and how they correspond to each other, Sanas’s AI engine can transform a speaker’s accent into what passes for another one – and right now, the focus is on making non-Americans sound like white Americans.
[...]
Narayana said he had heard the criticism, but he argued that Sanas approaches the world as it is. “Yes, this is wrong, and we should not have existed at all. But a lot of things exist in the world – like why does makeup exist? Why can’t people accept the way they are? Is it wrong, the way the world is? Absolutely. But do we then let agents suffer? I built this technology for the agents, because I don’t want him or her to go through what I went through.” The comparison to makeup is unsettling. If society – or say, an employer – pressures certain people to wear makeup, is it a real choice? And though Sanas frames its technology as opt-in, it’s not hard to envision a future in which this kind of algorithmic “makeup” becomes more widely available – and even mandatory.
From: Wilfred Chan, [The AI startup erasing call center worker accents: is it fighting bias – or perpetuating it?](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/23/voice-accent-technology-call-center-white-american), *The Guardian*, 24th August 2022
