Hyperemployment – Post-work, Online Labour and Automation
Improper Commonness:
The Surrogate Economy
of Artificial Intelligence
Luciana Parisi
The Promethean acceleration of Western metaphysics has
found in Artificial Intelligence a search space for upgradable
versions of Man’s software, in which humans are being
programmed to become one with automated networks of
domination. What the myth of Prometheus promises is
messianic freedom from the limits of reason propelled by
the necessary surrogacy of less-than-human intelligence.1
This myth articulates the power of Man as a double pincer
that, on the one hand, admits the technical origin of human
intelligence but, on the other, sustains capital abstraction
of all technical forms of intelligence. If AI sets the horizon
for the ultimate prosthesis of Man, it is nevertheless a
place holder that represents the irrevocable distinction of
Man from its surrogates, the exceptionalism of Man in
the name of a human species that must govern, lead and
master the intelligence of its surrogates. As much as the
rules of modern epistemology originate from a binarism of
inclusion/exclusion (or self/other, truth/proof, subject/object)
which established the necessity of surrogacy as a source
(an infinite resource) for the condition of reproduction of
Man,2 so too the metaphysical claims of the Promethean
origin of the human must maintain a self-posed ontological
distinction between human and machine intelligence
to reify the truth that there can be no alternative to the
1
Luciana Parisi writes on technology, philosophy and aesthetics. She is the
author of Contagious Architecture (2013) and is currently a professor in the
Program in Literature, Duke University.
https://literature.duke.edu/people/luciana-parisi
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2
The phrase “less-than-human intelligence” is meant to describe the dehumanisation of racialised and gendered bodies in the Western epistemology of progress
and civilisation. This entails the double mirroring position of this epistemology
for which technological progress is granted by the surrogate labour of disenfranchised workers as much as the latter is maintained in the less-than-human state.
Similarly, this phrase also refers to the assumption that machines’ intelligence is
inferior to human reason. However, this article is not sharing the argument that
“less-than-human intelligence” has to become equal to human reason, but rather
challenges the logic of division and opposition between human and machine.
By the condition of reproduction of Man, I refer to Sylvia Wynter’s argument about
how Western Judeo-Christian epistemology entails a self-determining method of
explanation based on binary oppositions, for which the place of the other is needed as a source of self-differentiation and exploitation.
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reproduction of Capital. It is therefore no longer possible
to maintain a political distinction between Prometheus and
Capital – between the technical origin of the human and
the surrogacy of techno-racial and techno-gendered labour,
until the human-machine “Equation of Value”3, based on the
free labour of less-than-human intelligence, is systemically
overthrown against this originary paradox.
While full automation and planetary AI coincide with the
future of Prometheus in Science Fiction Capital4 the end of
“the world as we know it”5 needs to be activated through a
heretic disenchantment of the human-machine equivalence
first. What is needed is a unilateral (non-reversible) abolition
of the onto-epistemology of being and nonbeing,6 whereby
less-than-human intelligences have been set to sustain both
the Promethean vision of automation and the warnings
against the extinction of the human7 and the exclusion of the
human from the loop of constant capital.8 If the condition
of reproduction of capital must be first of all racialised
and gendered, it is because the nonbeing of the human is
ultimately the byproduct of the transcendental decision9 that
reproduces the originary split of humans from machines.
From this standpoint, the modern rules of inclusive/
exclusion result from a decisional act coinciding with the
self-posing of truths in terms of negative proofs10 – whereby
the proof of the nonbeing serves to anticipate the necessary
truth of being. Similarly, the informatic acceleration of
techno-capital based on the feedback control of decentralised
surrogate labour within and across zones of the Global South
inside and outside the Global North, cannot sustain its condition
of reproduction without this originary paradox based on the
total death11 of the less-than-human labour.
3
4
5
6
Denise Ferreira da Silva writes about how the bio-economic model of racial capital transformed the universal formalism or principles of sequentiality, separability and determinacy into an efficient causality that works through the 0 value of
blackness. The “equation of value” therefore implies that the formal universal
logic for which matter is nothing becomes the efficient modalities of violent expropriation. Under the equation of value, blackness as matter that does “not matter”
becomes the starting point for a mathematical experimentation that is aimed not
to reproduce the violence of the system of value and knowledge. In particular, da
Silva offers an ethical experiment as proof of the “equation of value” for which
blackness as nothing – that is zero value or infinity – has the creative capacity to
unsettle and hack Modern Western onto-epistemology of vision and knowledge.
See Denise Ferreira da Silva “1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter
Beyond the Equation of Value,” e-flux journal 79, February 2017. Online: https://
www.e-flux.com/journal/79/94686/1-life-0-blackness-or-on-matter-beyond-theequation-of-value/.
“Science Fiction Capital” is a concept used by Mark Fisher to address models
of capital’s abstraction in terms of the financial investment and branding of the
future in the relation between information media and algorithmic prediction. As
entailing a “real subsumption” of time, SF Capital disables the political chance to
imagine the overcoming of capital. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No
Alternative? (London: Zero Books, 2009).
Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of
Blackness Toward the End of the World,” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2, Summer
2014, 81–97.
By abolition I mean not only a dismantling of the self-determining ontology that
defines what is being by subsuming the non-being, but more importantly, the
political articulations that claim that another world is possible only through the
displaced origination of non-binary model of ontology.
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7
8
9
10
11
Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014).
Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images: Your Pictures Are Looking at You,” The New
Inquiry, 8 December 2016. Online: https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-imagesyour-pictures-are-looking-at-you/.
François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to NonPhilosophy, translated by Rocco Gangle (London: Continuum, 2010).
I am referring to the deductive model of formal logic or formalism, for which proofs
must be already contained within the premises of a general truth.
By referring to the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva, total death refers to how blackness is a cipher of expropriation of total value with coincides with the total violence
on black people killed and constantly spectacularly brutalised and constituting the
source of expropriation of value in the efficient matrix of capital. Total death therefore is paradoxically required by Capital to reproduce its matrix of value. The causal
efficacy of violent subsumption of blackness needs surrogacy in order to define its
self-determining autonomy. But, as Ferreira Da Silva invites us to think, it is crucial
to ask, how can we rethink of the total value of blackness through and beyond the
total violence of blackness, which includes the total value of black deaths? If from
the total value we subtract the total violence, which kind of subjectivity will it be possible beyond the universal equation of value? See da Silva “1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness)
= ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value.”
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As the General Intellect12 becomes enmeshed with
intelligent machines, capital accumulation continues through
the intensification of surrogate labour, including affective,
cognitive, creative, and ultimately human capital13 justified
by the limits of machines: namely, the condition of nonbeing
of machines. We know that the abstraction of collective
intelligence in automated self-regulating systems was aimed
at liberating the human from the mechanical function of
assembly lines and towards an apparatus of reproduction
relying on the aggregation of creative dividuals.14 What has
been called “cognitive capital” particularly brings forward a
human-machine mode of parasitism that interlaces learning
tasks of cybernetic feedback with the axis of thinking that
span from instinctive to affective and intuitive intelligence
through which the human value of labour is measured,
extracted and incorporated. If intelligent machines are
limited by their positive feedback of learning, for which
algorithms must self-regulate by repeating what they already
know, the human-machine enmeshing has rather allowed
machines to learn from humans in order to expand their
repertoire of instructions for patterns recognition. Since
machines do not see, they must be subjected to the modern
onto-epistemology15 that rules the matching of concepts with
objects and exercise transcendental judgments which are
as it were already programmed within human capital as the
inherent value of sheer thinking, behaving, acting, gesturing,
feeling, relating, living. It is for this reason that technocapital continues to double its modes of accumulation:
namely extracting the surrogate labour of less-than-humans
in the paradoxical equivalence whereby surrogate labour
becomes enfolded within the human-machine assembly.
The 21st-century information-oriented logic of extraction
of value implies what could be called a “surrogate-tosurrogate subjection” whereby machines’ learning patterns
are being corrected to match the total value of cognitive,
affective, social relations determined by the transcendental
order of matching of truths and proofs, concepts and objects.
For instance, the informatic extraction of the total value that
occurs in on online platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical
Turk,16 exposes this new mode of peer-to-peer surrogacy
whereby human capital remains necessarily a racialised
and gendered labour used to teach machines how to extract
total value. At the core of informatic extraction is a double
level of accumulation. The value of human capital stands
as an infinitely progressing 0 because the gendered and
12
13
14
15
The Marxian notion of the General Intellect refers to the new relation between
technology and social intelligence referring to a mode of capital to abstract and
integrate capacities of thinking, creating, decision-making. The importance of
machinery in social organisation becomes central to political movements such
as Autonomia Operaia for which machinery, or media, became important to the
political vision of liberation from capital organic reproduction.
Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, Surrogate Humanity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
With the notion of “dividuals” Gilles Deleuze explains how what he calls “societies
of control” bring forward forms of governance that entail the fragmentation of the
individual into bits and bites of the digital matrix, through which populations are
subjected to the profiling extraction of value. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the
Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 5.
This entanglement of ontology and epistemology indicates that the scientific
knowledge used to explain conceptions of the human in terms of speciation, es-
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16
tablishes the norm of Man according to the division schema of race, gender and
sexuality. It is this modern epistemological reproduction of understanding of the
human that grounds the ontological model of being as a Man.
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, as well as CrowdFlower, Clickworker, Toluna and others, are largely unregulated websites that allow businesses and individuals to post
short tasks that are also called Human Intelligent Tasks assignments and pay workers – in cash or, sometimes, gift cards – to complete them. In particular, Amazon
set up the website Mechanical Turk in 2005 for humans to perform tasks that are
hard for computers. Amazon executive Jeff Bezos has called this kind of human
task, “artificial artificial intelligence”. This means that when a task is easier for a
human than a computer, the computer calls a human. It is this double artificiality with
which underpaid humans are identified that will be interesting to explore in this new
condition of extraction of value. Amongst the most common tasks are the recording
of information appearing in an image and the transcription of audio and video files.
See Paul Hitlin, “What Is Mechanical Turk?”, Pew Research Center, 11 July 2016.
Online: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/07/11/what-is-mechanical-turk/.
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racialised value of labour was already, and had always been
0. These values are valid only as an empty vessel instructed
to replicate the transcendental order of truths and proofs
in the onto-epistemological circuit of capital reproduction.
What grants the condition of reproduction of techno-capital
is this double surrogacy built on the spell that machines do
not know what they can see in the same way as surrogate
humans do not know what they can think.
According to Atanasoski and Vora, the technoliberal
articulation of today’s racial capitalism works to conceal the
uneven racial and gendered relations of power articulated with
and through machines. At the core of technological innovation
lies a surrogate relation of technology with the “human sphere
of life, labor, and sociality” that enables the constant reorigination of the liberal subject.17 What they call “the racial
unfreedom of the surrogate” explains how the Prometheus
order finds its own self-determining humanity in, as the
authors say by drawing on Hortense Spillers, a project for
“feeling human” that sustains the onto-epistemological ground
of racial engineering.18 The surrogate workers contracted
at Amazon Mechanical Turk are, according to Atanasoski
and Vora, “humans ... performing the work of technologies
that are claimed to replace the need for human workers”.19
This paradox, according to Atanasoski and Vora, is inscribed
within the Amazon Mechanical Turk, which is a large-scale
crowdsourcing software platform in which human labour
is contracted to become a service job to the machine. The
racialised and gendered pool of global temporary workers for
high data tasks, therefore, operates in lieu of an appropriate
algorithm that can carry out the function. These are surrogate
workers contracted to perform an artificial labour for artificial
intelligence that includes a series of tasks – such as perform
emotions to teach machines how to recognise affective states
– that results in a given compensation for a given amount
of time. For instance, “transcribe up to 35 seconds of media
to text” is a precarious job that will pay between two to ten
cents for the task. In short, this surrogate human service
enables behaviours to be matched to pre-existing categories
that are performed by the Turkers so that machines can then
perform the task of recognition themselves. In particular, this
autopoietic intelligence allows an equation of value between
human and machine that doubles the extraction of value:
the extracted labour of humans as service in making objects
codable for machines only serves capital to extract more value
from the human-machine equation of value. As much as the
human Turkers become agents of verification, dis-ambiguation
and de-volution, so too machines become agents of oppression
that perpetuate the transcendental onto-epistemology of capital
through the automated matching of concepts and objects.
An instance of the automated infrastructure of racial
capital that exposes the equation of value between surrogate
humans and machines can be found in artist Elisa Giardina
Papa’s trilogy of video installations Technologies of Care
(2016), Labor of Sleep (2017) and The Cleaning of Emotional
Data (2019). As transpires in her artworks, the intelligent
extraction of value entails the accumulation of all capacities
of labour, involving the total value of the living including
sleep, love and emotions; a virtualisation of value that capital
has been aggregating since the plantation model of slavery.
Elisa Giardina Papa’s video installations explore the
socio-technical infrastructure that exists in the co-dependent
17
18
19
Atanasoski and Vora, Surrogate Humanity, 5.
Atanasoski and Vora, 5. The authors draw on black feminist, Hortense J. Spillers,
to discuss the surrogate human effect at a constitutive part of the grammar of
colonialism and technoliberalism. I take these critical reflections about how the
racialised other as much as the machine have surrogate status in colonial technocapitalism as central to the arguments about the racialised socio-technical assemblage at play within contemporary images of AI and automation. See Hortense J.
Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics
17, no. 2 (1987), 67.
Atanasoski and Vora, 90.
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circuit of surrogacy whereby humans teach machines to
do affective labour in order for the machines to extract the
affective labour of humans. In “Excerpt: Worker 7: Bot?
Virtual Boyfriend/Girlfriend?” from the video installation
series Technologies of Care, Giardina Papa breaks into
the infrastructure of labour that animates the algorithmic
logic of dating applications by exploring how the affective
capacities of interactions are abstracted in the mediatic
circuits of feedback response. The love-affair that entangles
humans-machines is subsumed to Science Fiction Capital
in the form of suspended future-less emotional relationships
that are already programmed to feed the conditions of
capital reproduction through the algorithmic performance of
a compulsion to repeat, which hooks the lover in an eternal
feedback response.
Giardina Papa subscribes to the app and gives her name
to talk to her invisible boyfriend. Elisa calls him the bot and
the bot wonders why. She also asks the bot if he is getting
paid to be with her, the bot performs the replies of a lover
who takes issues of trust and commitment as fundamental to
continue a relationship. Elisa breaks the spell of surrogacy
by withdrawing from the interaction by saying that she
subscribed to this app for her artistic research and that she
did not intend to hurt him, but the bot keeps on telling her
“I miss you”. Not only does the logic of the dating app’s
algorithm keep on soliciting you to choose from an infinite set
of potential lovers, but the bot also keeps on writing to Elisa
to extend the extraction of this double surrogacy insofar as the
app is indeed operated by surrogate humans who sustain the
loving affair of algorithms.
Giardina Papa shows us that the surrogacy of the Global
South infrastructure of Mechanical Turks labour is also what
gets to do the service job of “cleaning” data for machines
programmed to recognise emotions. In the installation, The
Cleaning of Emotional Data, Giardina Papa documents
how workers label, categorise, annotate and validate large
amounts of data, enabling AI to recognise or order emotional
patterns. This installation makes the point that AI systems,
which supposedly recognise and simulate human affects,
base their algorithms on the understanding of emotions that
are universal, authentic and transparent. Tech companies
and governmental agencies use these human-verified data
to develop software that identifies consumers’ moods or
recognises the facial expressions of potentially threatening
people. However, the matching of facial expressions with
universal categories of emotions entails the filtering out of
indeterminate expressions or visual noise that instead persists
and creates an internal tension within the universal model
of visual representation aiming to correlate objects with
concepts. These indeterminacies, according to Giardina Papa,
are filtered out through the circuit of surrogacy itself. By
becoming herself contracted for hourly-paid remote work as
a Mechanical Turk for several North American companies,
Giardina Papa also became one of the “humans-in-theloop” who agreed to contribute to “clean” datasets which AI
algorithms use to detect and recognise emotional states.
Giardina Papa’s own surrogate labour involved a
taxonomisation of emotions, the annotation of facial
expressions and the recording of her own image to animate
three-dimensional figures. While performing this work,
some of the videos in which she recorded her emotional
expressions were rejected by the companies she was
servicing perhaps because her facial expressions did not
fully match the standardised list of affective categories that
was given to her. However, as Giardina Papa points out,
within the chain of infinite surrogacy of informatic capital,
it is not possible to know whether this rejection originated
from algorithmic protocols or, for example, from the
consensus of fellow workers whose task was to supervise
data in so far as they may also have misinterpreted her facial
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expressions because of their meaning in different cultural
contexts. As much as the surrogate infrastructure of data
cleaners, algorithms’ trainers, proof verifiers has become
enfolded within the invisible operations of machine learning
algorithms, image search engines and other techniques of
patterns recognition, so too the Promethean aspiration to
full automation remains attached to the colonial condition
of the reproduction of capital, constantly holding upon the
equation of value between surrogate humans and machines.
From this standpoint, Giardina Papa’s artwork also offers
a response to the contemporary critique of the invisible
image, according to which machine vision, and other modes
of deep learning AI, excludes the human from its systems
of operations.20 Her first-person artistic research instead
points out that it is not that humans are excluded from the
loop of machine to machine communication, but instead
that the Promethean acceleration of artificial intelligence
and full automation fundamentally relies on a global
re-organisation of racial and gender capital coinciding
with an intensification of surrogate humanity. Within this
infrastructural re-organisation of human capital, there
emerges a double circuit of extraction in which humans have
to teach machines how to learn the transcendental matching
of concepts and objects. Exploring how these mono-logical
economies of extraction across the Global South have their
origins in the onto-epistemological ground of colonial
capital, Giardina Papa’s work shows how precarious
racialised and gendered labour operates as the infrastructural
automation of human capital in artificial intelligent systems.
What persists, therefore, as Giardina Papa shows, is not
the exclusion of the human, but the less-than-human, nonhuman and in-human as enslaved labour attached to machinelike service in the form of intelligences subjected to the law
of reproduction of capital. Giardina Papa’s work pushes the
critique of automated vision towards a radical engagement
with the material conditions of exploitation or intensified
extraction of value in human-machine labour today. It is only
from the mode of oblique creativity animating these artworks
that it becomes finally possible to refuse the originary
paradox of Promethean Capital and rather invoke a practice of
“improper commonness”21 for a surrogate condition beyond
the human-machine equation of value.
20
Paglen, “Invisible Images: Your Pictures Are Looking at You.”
This notion of “improper commonness” is inspired to Fred Moten’s proposition
about the “commonness of the improper”. In particular, it is important to reflect
upon the notion of the improper as coinciding with what resides outside the law,
what is addressed as the criminal, or the heretic to argue for a starting point for a
collective practice of displaced origination that rather claims for the fullness – or
the logic of knowing – of the improper. See Fred Moten, Stolen Life (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2018), 26.
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21
Improper Commonness
Bibliography
Atanasoski, Neda and Kalindi Vora. Surrogate Humanity. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, Durham, 2019.
Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014.
Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October No. 59
(1992): 3–7. Published by MIT Press.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. London: Zero
Books, 2009.
Hitlin, Paul. “What Is Mechanical Turk?.” Pew Research Center, 11 July
2016. Online: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/07/11/whatis-mechanical-turk/.
Laruelle, François. Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to
Non-Philosophy. Translated by Rocco Gangle. London: Continuum,
2010.
Moten, Fred. Stolen Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.
Paglen, Trevor. “Invisible Images: Your Pictures Are Looking at You.” The
New Inquiry, 8 December 2016. Online: https://thenewinquiry.com/
invisible-images-your-pictures-are-looking-at-you/.
Silva, Denise Ferreira da. “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The
Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World.” The Black
Scholar 44, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 81–97. Published by Taylor and
Francis Group LLC.
—. “1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter Beyond the
Equation of Value.” e-flux Journal 79, February 2017. Online: https://
www.e-flux.com/journal/79/94686/1-life-0-blackness-or-on-matterbeyond-the-equation-of-value/.
Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar
Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987), 64–81. Published by Johns Hopkins
University Press.
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