Antonio A. Casilli, Schiavi del Clic. Perché Lavoriamo Tutti per il Nuovo Capitalismo?, Feltrinelli, 2020
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17570
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Attila Bruni
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Antonio A. Casilli, Slaves of the Click. Why Do We All Work for the New Capitalism?, Feltrinelli, 2020
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Book Reviews
2022-07-07
2023-06-30
2022-07-07
2023-10-26
153-157
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Attila Bruni
2022/07/07
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17570
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Antonio A. Casilli, Slaves of the Click. Why Do We All Work for the New Capitalism?, Feltrinelli, 2020
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13
Book Review                                                               153

    Antonio A. Casilli
Schiavi del Clic. Perché Lavoriamo Tutti per il Nuovo Capitalismo? [Slaves
of the Click. Why Do We All Work for the New Capitalism?], Milano,
Feltrinelli, 2020, pp. 320 [Italian translation of En Attendant les Robots:
Enquête sur le Travail du Clic, Paris, Seuil, 2019, pp. 400]

Attila Bruni University of Trento

     With the purpose to impress the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, so
the story goes, in 1770 the Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen
built a chess automaton known as “Mechanical Turk”. This device was
capable of playing chess against a human opponent and it won most of the
games played in demonstrations across Europe and the Americas over the
course of nearly nine decades. But the Mechanical Turk was an illusion: a
chess master was operating the machine by hiding inside of it.
     In 2005, Amazon.com marketed its micropayment-based crowdsourc-
ing platform under the same name. According to Ayhan Aytes (2012), Am-
azon’s initial motivation for building its own “Mechanical Turk” arose
from the fact that its Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs could not iden-
tify duplicate product pages on its site. Following a series of futile and
costly attempts, project engineers turned to people to work on computers
within an optimized web system. The “Amazon Mechanical Turk” digital
laboratory emulates AI systems by checking, evaluating, and correcting
machine learning processes thanks to a remote, dispersed, and underpaid
workforce of clickworkers. They are subjects employed in micro-tasks that
can range from translating a three-line text, recognizing and deleting from
the internet prohibited contents, composing a playlist, verifying the iden-
tity of users of a platform on a sample basis, training an artificial intelli-
gence to distinguish pedestrian crossings from zebras, and so on. Precisely
all the activities we now tend to take for granted are automated, as they are
made more and more opaque by the pervasiveness of digital platforms, so-
cial media, and futuristic rhetoric on digital innovation and AI. This type
of invisible and hidden work, outsourced and collectivized, hidden behind
interfaces and camouflaged within algorithmic processes is now common-
place, and sometimes entirely unpaid. The case of Google’s reCAPTCHA
is emblematic: to prove that we are not a robot, we have to train Google’s
AI image recognition system for free, by checking the boxes containing
buses, cars, or mountains.
     Far from being at the gates of an era in which robots will “steal” jobs
from humans, Antonio Casilli’s book aims at opening the black box of dig-
ital platforms by showing how contemporary forms of AI are not that much
“artificial” after all. Consider for example the hard physical work of the
miners and the repetitive work in the factory on the assembly line needed
154                                                         Tecnoscienza – 13 (1)


to produce a smartphone or a tablet; cyber work in distribution centers
and cognitive factories exploiting outsourced programmers around the
world; the low-cost crowdsourcing work of the workers of the Mechanical
Turk, or the intangible unpaid work of various social media and/or plat-
forms users.
    Casilli assembles different references and materials: mainly texts and
researches from the broad spectrum of social sciences (and therefore not
strictly Science and Technology Studies), but also newspaper articles, and
reports published on the internet by companies (Google, Amazon, Face-
book) or government agencies, as well as video documentaries. In this re-
gard, I highly recommend watching The moderators (https://fieldofvi-
sion.org/the-moderators), a documentary that in twenty minutes shows in
an extremely effective way the training, the job practices, and the working
conditions of between fifty and one hundred million workers worldwide,
mostly concentrated in India, in Southeast Asia, in Sub-Saharan Africa but
also in Brazil, Venezuela, or in Romania. Countries where workers’ rights
and trade unions are easily ignored, where informal work represents a nor-
mal and direct option for a vast portion of the population, and where “mi-
cro-benefits can serve as a gateway to the labor market for a great variety
of people with different levels of education, language skills and work cul-
ture” (p. 105, my translation).
    Digital platforms and automation processes, the author argues, are in
fact to be read in continuity with the macro phenomena that have charac-
terized the last thirty years: dissemination of information and communica-
tion technologies; financialization of economy; globalization of markets,
transport and goods; international financial crisis. Casilli shows how each
of these phenomena played an “enabling” role in the establishment of plat-
form capitalism, on a par with different forms of “invisible work” or
“shadow work” that we have witnessed over the years: domestic and care
work, cognitive and intangible work, as well as the work performed by us-
ers, consumers, or by an undefined “crowd” in processes of labour gamifi-
cation (playbour) and/or in hybrid combinations of production and usage
(produsage).
    The text convincingly shows how in a scenario marked by the econom-
ics of surveillance, reputation, and emotion (as well as by the quantification
and the commodification of trust and traces through cryptocurrencies), the
horizon is set by the extraction of data and the reorganization of infor-
mation through AI systems that combine human work with that of ma-
chines. And it is equally convincing in depicting how a handful of mega-
corporations – the (un)famous GAFAM – Google, Apple, Facebook, Am-
azon, Microsoft – increasingly dominate territories and create new infra-
structures and mechanisms for the accumulation of capital and the exploi-
tation of human and planet resources.
    Alongside texts such as The Platform Society (van Dijck et al. 2018),
Book Review                                                                  155

Ghost Work (Gray and Suri 2019), Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff 2019),
or Atlas of AI (Crawford 2021), the book by Antonio Casilli aims at high-
lighting the various forms of digital labor on which digital platforms, algo-
rithms, machine learning and AI are based. What is then the original con-
tribution of this book and why should it be read by STS scholars?
    First, it is extremely well-written and well-supported. Antonio Casilli
constantly mixes theories, concepts, numbers and “exemplary cases”,
calling into question the readers and stimulating them to build their own
opinion, not necessarily convergent with that of the author. In this regard,
it should be noted that Casilli’s book is not intended to be a canonical
scientific monograph, but a text capable of dialoguing with different
publics, not necessarily academics or social science experts. Not surpris-
ingly, it has been granted in 2019 by the Colbert Foundation and by the
École Nationale Supérieure de Sécurité Sociale (Grand Prix de la Protec-
tion Sociale), and in 2021 by the Association Régionale pour l’Institut de
Formation en Travail Social (Prix de l’Écrit Social).
    Secondly, it offers an interesting taxonomy of digital labor. As the au-
thor writes in the Introduction, originally the book was intended to have
quite a different title (Théorie générale du digital labor; in English: “A Gen-
eral Theory of Digital Labor”), which was reframed by the Seuil publishing
house (En attendant les robots. Enquête sur le travail du clic – in English:
“Waiting for the Robots. Investigation into the Clickwork”) and further
re-signified on the occasion of its Italian translation, with the appearance
of the word “slave” in the title (a translation and a word about which the
author himself expresses some doubts in the Introduction to the Italian
edition). After a first section focused on automation processes, the second
of the three sections, in which the book is divided, is dedicated to present-
ing what Casilli frames as three main forms of digital labor (the third sec-
tion is then titled “The Horizons of Digital Labor”). The first type of digital
labor is characterized by the request for a service (Uber or Deliveroo, for
example). In doing so, it composes an economy of odd jobs (the so-called
“gig economy”) which, beyond the service provided (transport, delivery,
personal assistance, etc.), produces a variety of data (on customers and
their satisfaction, on the timing of the service, etc.) which in their turn, will
be re-exploited by the company/platform at stake. In other words, hidden
additional work runs through the service provided contractually. “Mi-
crowork” is the second type of digital labor described by the author. It is
carried out by a crowd of “microtaskers” who perform what machines
cannot do or what would be unprofitable to make them do. The microtasks
thus performed, most often consisting of a few simple but essential
“clicks”, invisibly supports the proper functioning of apps and/or
websites, turning clickworkers into the “human-based computation” of
digital platforms and AI systems. The third type of digital labor identified
in the book relates to “networking”, the activity of “produsers” and the
156                                                            Tecnoscienza – 13 (1)


establishment of an “economy of ties”. It refers to what we all do when we
participate in the production or the correction of contents and/or data via
social media (Instagram, Facebook, etc.) or dedicated websites. Again,
fragmented contributions (more or less complex, but sometimes very time-
consuming) are mobilized to improve platforms’ performance. But this
time the idea of “work” seems even more evanishing, since many produsers
will be satisfied with symbolic, reputational, or even simply narcissistic
gratifications. We find here the old debate on the understanding of what
we could designate as “free work”, which takes to my third point regarding
why it is worth reading this book.
    Contrary to a deterministic and dichotomic view in which platform
workers (and users, at large) are seen as squeezed between proclamations
of independence and material conditions that expose them to low or non-
existent remuneration and to externally imposed rhythms and purposes,
Casilli calls for a reappropriation of work. Unveiling the opaque logic of
algorithms and artificial intelligence, digital labor may act as an engine of
change, enacting new collective subjects and novel forms of workers’ or-
ganization. In this call we find the last pillar of the theoretical approach
proposed by Casilli, which dates back to the Italian operaist and post-
operaist thinking: “a galaxy of authors [such as Sergio Bologna, Silvia
Federici, Maurizio Lazzarato, Christian Marazzi, Cristina Morini, Antonio
Negri], who have managed to conceptualize the processes of externaliza-
tion and socialization of work, but also the effects of absorption of life itself
in the sphere of work” (p. 31, my translation). In my view, mingling this
theoretical tradition with an STS stance represents one of the main theo-
retical contributions of the book, in that it allows to revise the “excessive
faith in the Marxist prophecy on the general intellect, which led to under-
estimate the material conditions of work in the age of digital technologies”
(p. 31, my translation). At the same time, it allows recalling the attention
on the inherently political dimension of some concepts commonly used in
STS (such as those of “black-box” or “invisible work”) and on how a pro-
cessual stance toward work and digital technologies – that is, a stance ori-
ented to underline the organizational side of digital processes – can enrich
the debate on digital labor.
    Finally, I particularly appreciated Casilli’s ability to re-frame some
words while offering a sort of updated vocabulary of some of the dynamics
related to digitization processes. For example: “automation” = invisible
human work; “gratuity” = pricing logic and incentive architecture of social
platforms; “financing” = decline of the corporate paradigm; “platformiza-
tion” = virtual circulation of labor; “Clickworker” = foreigners at work;
“Fragmentation” = prerequisite for automation; “Sharing economy” =
work on demand.
    Having opened the black box of digital platforms, Casilli concludes
with an ambitious proposal, which invites us to recover the meaning and
Book Review                                                                       157

political dimension of the term “platform”, which I will certainly not reveal
in this review, hoping in this way to further intrigue readers reading this
book and the dynamics related to digital work.

References
Aytes, A. (2012) Return of the Crowds: Mechanical Turk and Neoliberal States of
       Exception, in T. Scholz (ed.), Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and
       Factory, New York, Routledge, pp. 79-97.
Crawford, K. (2021) Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial
      Intelligence, New Haven and London, Yale University Press.
Gray, M.L. and Suri, S. (2019) Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Build-
       ing a New Global Underclass, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
van Dijck, J., Poell, T. and de Waal, M. (2018), The Platform Society: Public Values
       in a Connective World, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Zuboff, S. (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future
       at the New Frontier of Power, New York, Public Affairs.

                                         ***

    Kate Crawford
Atlas of AI, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2021, pp.
327

Federico Cugurullo Trinity College Dublin

    Artificial intelligence (AI) is an unknown territory. It is what Renais-
sance cartographers would have called terra incognita: a Latin expression
signifying unknown lands that have been barely explored. And what is
more mysterious and undocumented these days than AI? The concept of
AI evokes a multitude of diverse non-biological intelligences capable of
learning independently, thinking in a rudimentary manner and acting with-
out being supervised, in a variety of urban spaces and domains, ranging
from cheap restaurants to the highest levels of governance (Cugurullo
2021). Somehow paradoxically AI is everywhere, and yet its geography and
politics remain largely uncharted.
    It is precisely in this context, rich in cartographic and epistemological
challenges, that Kate Crawford’s work, researcher at Microsoft Research
and chair of AI and Justice at Paris École Normale Supérieure, is situated.
Over years of empirical research, she has extensively explored what AI is
made of, where AI is coming from, what it is impacting on and how. The
results of her studies are now culminating in a fascinating book: an atlas of
