About this item
In the spirit of Nickel and Dimed, a necessary and revelatory expose of the invisible human workforce that powers the web - and that foreshadows the true future of work.Hidden beneath the surface of the web, lost in our wrong-headed debates about AI, a new menace is looming. Anthropologist Mary L. Gray and computer scientist Siddharth Suri team up to unveil how services delivered by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Uber can only function smoothly thanks to the judgment and experience of a vast, invisible human labor force. These people doing "ghost work" make the internet seem smart. They perform high-tech piecework: flagging X-rated content, proofreading, designing engine parts, and much more. An estimated 8 percent of Americans have worked at least once in this "ghost economy," and that number is growing. They usually earn less than legal minimums for traditional work, they have no health benefits, and they can be fired at any time for any reason, or none. There are no labor laws to govern this kind of work, and these latter-day assembly lines draw in - and all too often overwork and underpay - a surprisingly diverse range of workers: harried young mothers, professionals forced into early retirement, recent grads who can't get a toehold on the traditional employment ladder, and minorities shut out of the jobs they want. Gray and Suri also show how ghost workers, employers, and society at large can ensure that this new kind of work creates opportunity - rather than misery - for those who do it.
About the Author
Mary L. Gray is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She maintains an appointment as Associate Professor of the Media School, with affiliations in American Studies, Anthropology, and Gender Studies at Indiana University. Mary's research looks at how media access, material conditions, and everyday uses of technologies transform people's lives. Her most recent book, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (NYU Press) , looked at how young people in the rural United States use media to negotiate their sexual and gender identities, local belonging, and connections to broader, imagined queer communities. She is also the author of In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth (Routledge) and co-editor of Queering the Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies (NYU Press) . Mary's current research, a collaboration with computer scientist Siddharth Suri, combines ethnography, interviews, survey data and large scale data analysis to understand workers' experiences of on-demand economies and what they can teach us about the future of work. A third thread of Mary's work examines how ethics and research compliance produce norms of vulnerability and risk in human subjects research, particularly work at the intersections of computer and social science. Mary served on the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association and co-chaired its 113th Annual Meeting in 2014. Her research has been published by Critical Studies in Media Communication, Cultural Anthropology, International Journal of Communication, and Social Media Society.
