by
Annie Ernaux
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For five years, I’ve ceased to experience with shame what can be experienced with pleasure and triumph (sexuality, jealousy, class differences). Shame spreads over everything, prevents any further progress.
I also thought that writing acted as a kind of morality for me. That is why I didn’t want to have affairs before, so I wouldn’t lose the obsession with writing. For a long time, a life of pleasure seemed impossible to me (it even does now) because I write. I forgave my husband’s pleasure seeking because he didn’t write. What else is there to do when you don’t write? Eat, drink, and make love.
In the morning, I don’t want to get up. I remain in bed, curled in a ball, unmoving. Stomach pains. Dismaying perceptions—all the memories that make me think that S was a Don Juan. Those are not the worst. Others: his wish not to leave any trace of himself behind when he left, neither photos nor objects; the fear of people finding out about our affair.
A sense of my own mediocrity, a general lack of courage, particularly when it comes to writing.
Last night, images of the Russian–German war in the documentary From Nuremberg to Nuremberg. Leningrad, 1941: the heart-stopping courage of the Soviets, their almost mystical resistance. “My father was decorated by Stalin.” The pain I feel at having known and lost an entire world, at having glimpsed something I could never have imagined before, because it had never been embodied, in a face, words, a pair of hands: the communist ideal which rallied men and women in Leningrad, in Stalingrad, and was passed on to that blond green-eyed boy, who had no sense of betraying anything or anyone when he yearned for Guy Laroche ties and suits by Saint Laurent.
lol
On the train back from Marseille I read a passage from Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, the passage about the “Japanese book on a carpet of leaves,” etc., and all at once I’m filled with burning desire, an incredible longing to make love, though since S left, I’ve been all but frozen. I could weep from the memories, the lack, all the vanished sweetness. To lose a man is to age several years in one fell swoop, grow older by all the time that did not pass when he was there, and the imagined years to come. This desire also means I might be ready to fall back into the same kind of favola with someone else.
aww
I’m no longer sure that freedom exists in writing. I even wonder if writing isn’t the domain of greatest alienation, in which the past and the horror of lived experience return. But on the other hand, the result, a book, can function as a means of freedom for others.
Evening. The terrible thing is that in the past I looked for a man to “stabilize me,” to have a kind of brotherly love. Now all I want from a man is love, that is, the thing which most resembles writing—the loss of self, the experience of emptiness being filled.
Uber and CrowdFlower are two links in a growing supply chain of services that use APIs and human computation to put people to work. Uber uses CrowdFlower's API to pay someone to review the results of Ayesha's work, and, if it passes muster, it will process Uber's payment to her within minutes. If it doesn't meet the preprogrammed bar, Ayesha won't get paid for her efforts, nor will she have any meaningful opportunitiy to launch a complaint. the API isn't designed to listen to Ayesha.
she gets a photo of Sam and has to compare to his ID (to confirm that it's the same person) and has to do it before the timer runs out
[...] most automated jobs still require humans to work around the clock, often part-time or on a contract basis, fine-tuning and caring for automated processes when the machines get stuck or break down, as technical systems, like humans, are apt to do.
It's also true that the long march toward automation has historically created new needs and different types of human labor to fill those needs. In this respect, the new, software-managed work world shares features of the factory jobs that assembled cars by placing workers on a production line where and when they were needed most. It also resembles the so-called piecework that women and children did on farms in the 19th century, assembling matchstick boxes for pennies a pop. And it overlaps in obvious ways with the outsourcing of medical transcription and call center work to the Global South that boomed with the expansion of the internet in the late 1990s.
this is so funny to me because i remember reading SV people writing about automation and defending it on the basis that it creates new jobs. eg, in marketing. without thinking about how it shifts power, and structuralyl consigns a whole group of people to shitty jobs that few of them will ever be able to escape or improve
As AI advances, it creates temporary labor markets for unforeseen and unpredictable types of tasks. The great paradox of automation is that the desire to eliminate human labor always generates new tasks for humans. What we call "the last mile" is the gap between what a person can do and what a computer can do. Without a doubt, software developers willl use ghost work to perform the tasks at hand and push AI to its limits. [...] dependency on temporary human labor has always been a part of the history of technology's long march toward automation. [...]
Indian citizens are the only international workers who can also earn cash for their MTurk ghost work. There's no reason for this other than the fact that Amazon's multinational holdings allow it to operate and transfer money between its U.S. and India office locations. India's MTurk workers could opt to fill up an Amazon gift card, thoguh the company doesn't reliably deliver to many of India's sprawling, informal neighborhoods. If a worker in India wants to move their money to a personal bank account, they must first hand over their birth date and a scanned copy of their permanent account number (PAN) card, the equivalent of a U.S. social security number. [...] Amazon can, for an additional fee, cut paper checks or offer direct deposits to India's MTurk workers.
fuck this
[...] In 2012, a CrowdFlower worker, Christopher Otey, filed suit against the company [...] 19,992 CrowdFlower workers had signed on to the lawsuit [...] CrowdFlower set expectations accordant with a full-time employee, but the pay and benefits were commensurate with those of an independent contractor. [...] "I didn't have control over the work I did. It was all done on their platform. I couldn't choose my own hours. I had to work when they provided the work. They pretty much controlled all the aspects of the work that was being offered." Given the degree to which CrowdFlower set the terms of employment, argued Otey, CrowdFlower owed him and other workers minimum wage, per the Fair Labor Standards Act. The company's legal team countered that, because CrowdFlower's workers were "free contractors," the FLSA didn't apply. Ultimately, in 2015, CrowdFlower paid $585,507 to settle the lawsuit, which left the question of the employment status of its workers unanswered.
put this in my book as something i leanred after the fact whereas when i was looking into crowdflower i kinda just took their claims at face value (didnt think about labour law or even just the ethics)
related thought: tech companies pride themselves on being innovative - why cant they innovate a way to pay workers based on their system without running afoul of min wage laws and other minimal/barebones restrictions on exploitation