I don’t think people realize what keeping the internet running and producing most tech they use entails like. Physically, labor-wise, energy-wise.
Purposefully included some older articles here so people can see how baked in this is:
Labor Conditions of Content Moderators (2021)
Inside AOL's "Cyber-Sweatshop" (1999)
Digital Labor and Imperialism (2016)
Amazon Mechanical Turk: The Digital Sweatshop (2012)
Gig Economy, Algorithmic Control, and Migrant Labor (2022)
The Rise of Cyber-Coolies (2003)
Ecological Impact of Computation and the Cloud (2022)
The Environmental Sustainability of Digital Content Consumption (2024)
Carbon Footprint of the Internet (2010)
I think a lot of times I see people talk about this stuff in relation to AI. It's right to talk about it, but I hate when people act like AI is the only tech that has these problems. What you see with AI now is a reflection of the broader tech and internet industry that has grown for the past 20-30 years.
Listen, you can take away anything you want from this but just as a suggestion given a lot of responses I’ve seen here.
Conclusions from this which are not very productive: the Internet overall is bad and we should destroy it.
Conclusions that are perhaps more productive: Currently the Internet, which many lives depend on, takes up a lot of resources, has a climate impact, and runs on exploited labor. We need to find out how we can avoid this (it’s certainly possible), and work together to achieve this.
