Hardly Working

In a 2020 essay, David Graeber told us to stop working.¹ He wrote about “bullshit jobs”—the kinds of things that most of us do, jobs that don’t serve much purpose or provide much value to the worker or the employer: “Useless work crowds out useful (think of teachers and administrators overwhelmed with paperwork); it’s also almost invariably better compensated.”² This kind of work, he said, is killing us and the planet along with it.

Meanwhile, so much of our daily life is transformed into work via extractive data systems that we call “social media.” Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Meta, OpenAI and others continuously extract our labour under the guise of security and by mining the activities we engage in on their monopolistic platforms. Have you participated in one of those “post a picture of yourself 10 years ago” chain threads? That is training data for facial recognition. Participation becomes unpaid work for Meta—their manipulative algorithms process personal expression, social relations, and community building into surplus value in an endless cycle of extraction. The resulting behavioural-statistical models are redeployed, sold, and provided to other businesses, governments, police, and militaries, tightly integrated into digitized and automated surveillance, warfare, and more.

We all encounter frequent requests to prove our humanity on various websites and software platforms. It often comes in the form of a checkbox or a CAPTCHA (an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”) that asks us to perform some task. In its current most common form, reCAPTCHA, the task involves identifying objects (bicycles, for example) in a grid of images.

reCAPTCHA originated at Carnegie Mellon University and was acquired by Google in 2009.³ The original version crowd-sourced corrections to illegible passages in scanned books for Project Gutenberg and The Internet Archive.⁴ At the time, completing one felt like a contribution to a public archive of human knowledge. An insidious new kind of labour extraction soon normalized, which now feeds the growth of so-called AI (current technology labeled as “AI” is more like autocomplete, pulling statistics out of a massive corpus of existing text and using complex probabilities to select the next most likely word, pixel, etc.⁵).

Google saw that this system, which they introduced as a barrier for accessing their almost ubiquitous suite of applications, could provide a massive source of image-tagging data. After acquisition, reCAPTCHA was redeployed to exploit all of this free labour in service of tagging and disambiguating training data for their machine learning models.⁶

I’d love to stop working, but clicking is work. Scrolling is work. Posting is work. Commenting is work. Changing my thermostat is work. Talking to my friends is work. Even activities that were already forms of work are now multiplied. This feels like the apotheosis of bullshit work. 

All of this leaves me with a troubling question that I’ve struggled with for years—how can we stop working, in Graeber’s sense, if everything we do is actively and invisibly coerced into work?

Some US states have what’s called a “right-to-work” law. While international human rights defines the “right to work” as the right to engage in productive work without being prevented,⁷ in US state law it generally means that workers must be able to work without joining a union, and that unions can’t force them to strike.⁸ This effectively limits the union’s bargaining power and allows for non-union labour, even in union shops.

I want to be able to live my life without everything I do being turned into non-consensual free labour. I want access to services without having to make an unfair and unwanted trade. I want to be able to choose who I work with, when, and why. In the current environment of nearly ubiquitous computing, it has become almost impossible not to work. I’m asking for the right to not work.

Accompanying this artist project is a new net-art commision, Release (2024). To view the piece, visit https://release.emenel.ca.

This project was made possible with the support of EQ Bank.

Matt Nish-Lapidus is an artist and musician based in Tkaronto/Toronto. His varied practice probes the myth that computers should be useful rather than beautiful through examining contemporary technoculture, its histories, and its impacts on society, people, and his own life. His work results in diverse outputs including publications, recordings, installations, performances, software, and objects. Nish-Lapidus has performed and exhibited locally and internationally. He holds a H.BFA in New Media from Toronto Metropolitan University and a Master of Visual Studies in Studio Art from the University of Toronto. You can find Matt online and away-from-keyboard under various aliases and collaborations including emenel, New Tendencies, and <blink>.

1. David Graeber, “David Graeber: ‘To Save the World, We’re Going to Have to Stop Working,’” Big Issue (blog), September 8, 2020, https://www.bigissue.com/opinion/david-graeber-to-save-the-world-were-going-to-have-to-stop-working/.
2. Graeber, “‘To Save the World, We’re Going to Have to Stop Working.’”
3. “Teaching Computers to Read: Google Acquires reCAPTCHA,” Official Google Blog (blog), accessed July 2, 2024, https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-computers-to-read-google.html.
4. Alex Hutchinson, “Human Resources” The Walrus, March 12, 2009, https://thewalrus.ca/human-resources/.
5. Emily M. Bender et al., “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜,” Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’21: 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, Virtual Event Canada: ACM, 2021), 610–623, https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922.
6. Antonio A. Casilli, “No CAPTCHA Is Google Jargon for ‘Mechanical Turk for Free,’” December 5, 2014, https://www.casilli.fr/2014/12/05/no-captcha-is-google-jargon-for-mechanical-turk-for-free/.
7. “International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,” OHCHR, accessed July 2, 2024, https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/international-covenant-economic-social-and-cultural-rights.
8. Brian Palmer, “Why Are Anti-Union Laws Called ‘Right To Work’?” Slate, December 12, 2012, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2012/12/right-to-work-laws-why-do-union-busters-use-the-orwellian-phrase-right-to-work.html.

This article is published in issue 41.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue