Online scammers, the mob and AI companies all have many things in common than what first meets the eye. These seemingly different businesses operate with a shared philosophy when it comes to how to run their operations. Their reasons for adopting it are different, but they all leverage the same mechanism. Capitalisms process of alienation.

Gotta keep’em separated

In addition to being a song from a mediocre punk band from the late 90ies, this is also a pillar in how capitalism works. Alienation of the workers servers many purposes, but the two most important are:

  • if people don’t know each other, they can’t organize
  • if you specialize the work into so small enough chunks, it doesn’t matter who does the work. they will also be unaware of what the end product is.

The Wire

The legendary TV show The wire shows how gangs in Baltimore used these principles in their organizing. When D’Angelo Barksdale lectures his crew of young about how to setup shop, he is doing agile coaching. Dividing each task of the transaction into individual steps which enables the worker to abort their task if the police comes, and making it impossible to link the deal to one individual. D’Angelo tells the kids to have one person taking the order, signaling for someone to get a dose from the stash. The customer walks to another individual, handing over the money. Once the money transaction is done, the customer goes around the block to get the purchased goods. The money is not clearly tied to the last transaction, a perfect scheme. In the hierarchy of drug dealing gangs, D’Angelo is managing the factory floor. He knows who to call to get more supplies of their product, while being oblivious as to where it comes from. When he needs more product, he contacts the re-up person. The re-up person knows where the main stash is and delivers the stuff. This person is unaware of how product arrives at the location it is stored. As we can see each link in the chain only knows the previous and the next. Reducing the risks for everyone involved and especially the people on the top. This is an age old principle of organizing which works really well, and it has been made into perfection in the corporate world of late stage capitalism.

Does the phisher know it’s a fish?

This same principle is applied when it comes to online scammers, who operate in a similar fashion. There are a lot of people working in this business without knowing they are part of organized crime. In the case of phising it is important to have a legitimate front for your operation. The website has to look good and professional in order to lure people into the trap. It can be any company making these websites, as they do not need to know what they are part of for the scam to work. People making a website building tool, won’t know if it’s for legit business or for someone running a phishing scheme. I remember early in my career I was consulting for a Norwegian bank which frequently got targeted by scammers. Their work was so good that we sometimes would copy some of their HTML or CSS to make the original site even better (this is a true story!). The media often portrays people making these sites as folks sitting in dark rooms with their hoodies on, knowingly doing mischief. In reality they go to their programming job nine to five just like any other person in tech. By dividing the operation of scamming people into numerous steps which know nothing about the next or previous steps, most of the people involved are oblivious to what they are part of. Similar to how Avon Barksdale and String Bell ran their operation.

Putting the I into AI are low paid workers

The Barksdale organization portrayed in The Wire are small time compared to modern day corporations when it comes to profits, but today’s enterprises have also perfected their way of organizing. The big LLMs and other AI systems have many things in common, one of them being that there is Z-E-R-O intelligence in these systems without humans providing it. There is a gigantic industry evolving around what is called data labeling. The prediction algorithms can’t train and learn without a human telling them what is true. They can’t magically know that a cup is a cup, nor can it understand that your vulva sculpted cup is in facts also a cup.

There is an army of low paid workers who make these systems seem intelligent, by creating labeled data sets. Creating these sets is done very similarly to how modern day car assembly is done. Each part is created in a different place by a different country and assembled in one location. There is one key difference, in data labeling the worker has no idea what they’re part of. The work is divided, on purpose, into small mundane meaningless tasks. Such as: “take picture of you with a helmet on”, “take a picture of you with a helmet smiling”, “take a picture of you smiling, looking towards the left”. The people performing these task are not told who ordered these data products. They are paid low wages and the toll of doing these tasks over long periods of time takes a toll on the workers health. The purpose of the setup is for workers to be unable to demand better wages, as they are not aware of who they are working for. It’s also very hard for workers to organize, as it requires a significant effort to figure out which task belong together. Human-as-service platforms (Amazon Mechanical Turk was a pioneer in a space which has multiplied since the introduction of AI) or micro task companies provide AI companies with an army of low paid workers. These workers are, similar to Amazon warehouse workers, subjected to the cruelty of algorithms to determine the pace, type and their performance levels of the work. This creates a perfect environment for exploitation of workers. It is also hard to hold the company reaping the benefits of this modern day slave labor accountable, as the supply chain is purposefully designed to be hard to trace. The same principle used in other types of organized crime. It is the hidden labor that makes AI work

In closing

As I have outlined in this article, the words of swedish punk rock legends holds true. In their song “The Refused party program” they say:

In the wake of our existence, in our parades and in our dances. Touch, see and behold the wisdom of the party program, essential in our lifetime and irresistible in our touch. The great spirits proclaim that capitalism is indeed organised crime and we are all the victims.

This holds true for cloud computing and the AI bubble. It is upon us to create a different way to do software, one which does not require the destruction of living beings and our Earth.

I want to close off with a quote from Noema magazine article which summarize the army of workers who are actually putting the intelligence into the artificial.

The “AI” industry runs on the backs of these low-wage workers, who are kept in precarious positions, making it hard, in the absence of unionization, to push back on unethical practices or demand better working conditions for fear of losing jobs they can’t afford to lose. Companies make sure to hire people from poor and underserved communities, such as refugees, incarcerated people and others with few job options, often hiring them through third party firms as contractors rather than as full time employees.

Sources and additional reading