Julián Posada’s upcoming book, titled Platform Extractivism: Data Work and the People Powering Artificial Intelligence, is based on extensive fieldwork among data workers in Venezuela. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, amid a hyperinflation crisis, entire communities in Venezuela depended on data work, says Posada, a professor at Yale University. Paid as little as 50 cents per hour and monitored by surveillance algorithms, most workers did not even know who or for what end they were working for. “From the perspective of the worker, you would just see the tasks. … [T]he algorithm here is the manager.”
