Platform users become unpaid servants who train algorithms.

Evidence

No doubt, under feudalism, serfs toiling away on their ancestral lands would have suffered great hardships but still found it undesirable, if not unfathomable, to have their way of life taken away from them, their shared culture and traditions. Still, the harsh reality remained: at the end of the harvest, the landlord would send the sheriff to extract the lion’s share of their produce – without paying the serfs a penny for it. So it goes with the billions of us unwittingly producing cloud capital. The fact that we do so voluntarily, happily even, does not detract from the fact that we are unpaid manufacturers – cloud serfs whose daily self-directed toil enriches a tiny band of multibillionaires residing mostly in California or Shanghai. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 338 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

As Tiziana Terranova has been analysing for more than a decade, the internet today offers capitalism a vast hunting ground which is teeming with FREE LABOUR. It freely provides the labour for ‘building websites, modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing lists, and building virtual spaces’: ‘free labour is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into excess productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited’. The magic of electrified attention presents us with boundless and virtually free riches; we work on these riches often with enchanted and generous jubilation; businesses have learned how to take advantage of this, profiting financially from our enchantment. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 197 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
• XREF: connects to: Social media participation constitutes unpaid labor from which platforms extract value — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 505; Platforms extract data as a form of unpaid payment from users — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 128; Platforms extract free labor from users in exchange for recognition and perks (+16 more)

Related

• Platforms extract free labor from users in exchange for recognition and perks (similarity 0.93)
• Platforms’ real novelty is making users unpaid laborers reproducing their own capital (similarity 0.91)
• Algorithmic services extract unpaid user labor that trains the very algorithms (similarity 0.90)
• Voluntary user content creation constitutes unpaid labor enriching platform owners (similarity 0.89)
• Voluntary and enjoyable platform use still constitutes unpaid extraction like feudal serfdom (similarity 0.88)
• Platforms create an essentially new servitude for users distinct from workplace exploitation (similarity 0.86)
• Platform ‘gamified’ labor substitutes token payments and rankings for wages (similarity 0.86)
• Cloud capital’s key innovation is self-reproduction through unpaid user labor (similarity 0.86)
• Users, not paid employees, produce the most valuable capital of platform firms (similarity 0.85)
• Digital capitalism profits from unpaid pleasurable user activity. (similarity 0.85)
• Platforms extract free work while paying recognition and perks instead of wages (similarity 0.85)
• An everything app charges vendors rent and extracts free labor from users (similarity 0.85)
• Platforms extract data as a form of unpaid payment from users (similarity 0.85)
• Modern AI and neural networks transform laborers into cloud proles and users into serfs (similarity 0.84)
• Platform algorithms automated capital’s command over all people, not just workers (similarity 0.84)

Broader Connections

• Voluntary user content creation constitutes unpaid labor enriching platform owners #corroborates (0.95) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 338
• The ultimate output of AI is turning everyone into unpaid cloud serfs #expands (0.90)
• Digital capitalism profits from unpaid pleasurable user activity. #qualifies (0.90) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 197
• Platform ‘gamified’ labor substitutes token payments and rankings for wages #corroborates (0.85) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 1034
• Microtask workers train the AI systems that will replace them #qualifies (0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 217
• Cloud capital’s key innovation is self-reproduction through unpaid user labor #expands (0.85) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 319
• Users freely did unpaid labor that increased Facebook’s own value #qualifies (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1011
• Platforms steer how people value themselves through reputation metrics and gamified data extraction. #corroborates (0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 406