*34C3 preroll music*
Herald: And yeah, please give a warm welcome to Sebastian!
*applause*
Sebastian: Hi, and thank you for the introduction. Thank you all so much for
having me. So, what am I gonna talk about tonight? I will
of course, being an artist, talk a bit about some art projects but mostly
I will speak about the research I do as part of my practice, specifically
about humans as software extensions. And towards the end I will
share some thoughts on why being a human software extension could actually be
something maybe not positive but brings some new possibilities. So I will try to
end the talk on a positive note. In 2008, the science fiction movie "Sleep Dealer"
speculated about a future which couldn't be more timely. The border between Mexico
and the US has been closed. Therefore, immigrant workers in the US have been
replaced by robots. However, the robots are remotely controlled by people in
Mexico who have their bodies plugged directly into the network. Then, 2 years
later, in 2010, the CEO of CrowdFlower, which is a crowdsourcing and cloud work
platform, Lukas Biewald speaks of a similar situation: "Before the Internet,
it would be really difficult to find someone, sit them down for 10 minutes and
get them to work for you, and then fire them after those 10 minutes. But with
technology, you can actually find them, pay them the tiny amount of money, and
then get rid of them when you don't need them anymore." Biewald's remarks, however,
are not Science Fiction. Instead, they describe a contemporary condition. So,
humans as software extensions: What is this condition? I would summarize it as
people extending computational systems by offering their bodies, their senses and
their cognition. And specifically bodies and minds that can be easily plugged in
and later easily be discarded, so bodies and minds algorithmically managed and
under the permanent pressure of constant availability efficiency and perpetual self
optimization. So, as such, humans as software extensions are both, the
foundation and the result, of a mega structure which Benjamin Breton calls "The
Stack". It's a computational totality of planetary scale so somehow we can imagine
it as a planetary scale computer consisting of a stack of layers from rare
earth minerals to data centers to bots and people which in this model are exactly the
same. So, in this computational totality, even the smallest nodes can be addressed
and can be programmed. What The Stack also describes is a new geography so Google
Maps defining borders or, as just seen in Sleep Dealer, the US building a wall while
still being able to plug right into the bodies of Mexican workers. But to be
clear, from my point of view, the model of planetary scale computation as a totality
is as much a reality as it is also a gigantic fantasy and ideology of power,
optimization and efficiency. So this is the state of self-driving cars right now,
at least from the perspective of a Ford. So I would now like to give some examples
about what I mean by humans as software extensions and what effects these, like,
this way of managing digital labor has. 3 years ago, I worked on a piece in which I
explored digital colonialism and, among other things, I explored Google's and
Facebook's attempts to integrate into their services those 2/3 of the world
population who are not online, yet. As you all know, Google wants to use balloons,
Facebook wants to use drones and they want them to circle above these areas that do
not have any internet connection basically sucking that which is below up into the
network. So the piece of which you see a little bit here is called "How to Appear
Offline Forever" and it consists of a mix of found material like videos, images, and
questions and there's also a layer of stories written by people from Silicon
Valley, Sri Lanka and Zambia which are all locations of importance to this piece. And
so in order to get in contact with people in Sri Lanka, I ended up using the
outsourcing platform Upwork which offers a highly efficient interface for hiring
freelancers from all around the world. On that platform, you can sort freelancers by
price, skills, rating and then you can pick whoever you think fits the job best.
And their user experience of hire and fire is well crafted. So it's software
extensions that can be plugged in and removed again easily. It doesn't matter
where they are, who they are as long as they get it done. So once the freelancers
in Sri Lanka got to work I noticed that it was not only able but also encouraged to
spy on them. Upwork records every keystroke and regularly takes screenshots
while freelancers work, building a growing diary of their activity. So I found myself
in a situation in which I wasn't only being surveilled by corporations or
states, I was also doing the same myself, managing my extensions spying on them in
order to monitor their performance. So this is not them, like corporations or
states, spying on us, us protecting ourselves against them through encryption.
This is all of us fighting for our place in the network trying to be valuable
nodes. So this is me and one of the freelancers which is a very lovely lady I
got to meet in Sri Lanka later. So if you look at this historically and if you go
back just 15, maybe 20 years, outsourcing via the internet was a practice that could
only be employed by big IT companies, mostly from the US, India. Today it is
cheap and easy and it can be done by anybody. A new service by Amazon called
Amazon Key illustrates this rather new situation perfectly. With Amazon Key, you
can remotely grant access to an apartment while you're not at home using the Amazon
Key camera, lock and app, you can spy on the otherwise completely invisible workers
from your smartphone. So this is the lock remotely unlocked. So here outsourcing
doesn't generate free time. Instead, it is born out of necessity. It is marketed as
making possible the transformation and a liberation from being managed to also
being able to manage others and, in this case, you're able to deal with them like
without ever having to meet them in person. So now everybody, not only can but
has to, and actually, of course, wants to, we all want to use people as software
extensions and with that comes also that we have to remotely track and rate their
performance. So let's recap: Factory workers are extending machines with their
bodies. Freelancers have escaped the factory but have to offer themselves as
flexible extensions to the modern media assembly line, for example like which I
saw on Upwork. So now micro-entrepreneurs have to invent their own shops, offering
their creativity in the form of little packages that are called gigs. You can buy
such gigs at a fixed price on platforms like Fiverr. For those who do not know
Fiverr: Initially each each gig on Fiverr was priced at exactly $5 of which the
platform kept $1. So some months ago, I found a way to directly access all videos
uploaded to the platform in real time, including every single video that people
on Fiverr are producing for their clients. So through this crack in the surface, or
you could also call it a security problem or a privacy issue they have, I could look
at the leaked stream of videos and I did this for days and weeks and months and I
downloaded videos worth of like more than 100 GB and I was looking for some patterns
to understand this marketplace. So to give you some ideas about what I saw there: On
the platform it is dog-eat-dog. Be the best the cheapest, the most creative, the
most efficient, be just like a proper software extension. Never sleep, work all
the time. At the same time, everybody is also fighting against the platform's
algorithms and clean interfaces that hide most gig workers on page 2, 3, 4 and so
on. As many gigs offer unrealistically short delivery times for creative work, it
becomes clear that they themselves use bots, generators and templates, simulating
creative work and creating yet another layer of man-machine complexity. So using
automation in order to not be replaced by automation. Their biggest selling point
seems to be their low cost coupled with a truly natural interface: a human being. In
contrast, there is another group of people consciously offering their bodies often as
carriers of messages like screens. So here, the fantasy of the universal
addressability and availability of all nodes manifests itself in the distant and
often exotic body that acts as a screen. This goes hand in hand with gigs offering
personal porn or erotic videos and fetish videos. So here, I would summarize: Being
a software extension on a hyper- competitive platform fosters and demands
something that I would call survival creativity, that means coming up with
whatever it takes to survive in a competitive environment. And as I
reminder, Fiverr might be an extreme example but it exemplifies a development
that has become a reality for many already and it's not like it's them and us, we are
all human software extensions. So far I've managed to talk about software without
mentioning artificial intelligence even once, that's nice I think. Instead I've
drawn this a bleak picture of a quasi totality of work and exploitation.
However, automation and artificial intelligence supposedly imply a future
without work, right? So in the previous examples, platforms, software, artificial
intelligence acted as scientific management. The Taylorist boss
algorithmically distributing and modulating human workers as software
extensions. Now, one great post work ideas is to not only automate the management of
working bodies and minds, but instead to completely replace all human nodes with AI
as well. While I think this is an excellent foundation for discussing our
society's obsession with work, I would also argue this hypothesis is as appealing
as it is flawed, unfortunately. So my observation is this: AI, artificial
intelligence, is an appropriation and a possible extrapolation of existing
knowledge and skills, yes. And as such it might as well do our jobs but it is first
and foremost used as a scheme to fragment work into tasks that can be done anywhere
24/7 and to make this labor invisible. What we see here is a piece called
"Segmentation Network" which I made last year it plays back over 600,000
segmentations manually created by mechanical crowd workers, Mechanical Turk
crowd workers, for Microsoft's cocoa image recognition data set. These so-called
segmentations are based on photos we have uploaded to Flickr and they are used in
machine learning, training AI what it can see and what not. So you can automate as
much as you want but at some point you will have to train and especially maintain
the machines and the software. So I would say AI creates yet another layer of badly
or unpaid care and maintenance work which is often invisible on purpose. So I would
say this needs to change. And I think Feminist theory and practices have to lot
have a lot to say about this issue but that's another talk and I would like to
hear it. So here is a point in case and maybe a solution: At the end of 2011,
while still being students and sharing a studio Silvia Larusso, a friend and
artist, and me we started to take a screenshot of every single captcha that we
had to solve while navigating the web. So over the years, proving that we are human
time and time again, we captured hundreds of captchas. This year, we thought about
how to make this little thing or these like little things, the collection of
these things, into something which is as valuable and as expensive as possible and
so we published the complete collection as a series of five handmade Leporello books.
So each of these books is one year. And if you if you expand all these Leporello,
they have a total length of 90 meters chronicling five years of micro labor as
well as the history of captures. So if you look at it, captures started as a
technique to merely prevent spam and then they kind of morphed into a method for
deciphering house numbers and transcribing books. And then lately it's become a means
of teaching image recognition to AI software. While we were collecting these
captures, Gabriela Rojas Lozano in 2015 filed a class action lawsuit against
Google and she claimed that Google operates a highly profitable transcription
business built upon free labor which it deceptively and unfairly obtains from
unwitting website users. Unfortunately, her claims were rejected. So here the
judge states that it's like you spent only a few seconds on this it cannot be
expected to pay for such a small job. So, however, her attempt to sue Google was
still a success I would say because it led to the proof that Google has perfected a
magical process in which work is transformed into literally nothing. So
welcome post-work society! How does this magical trick work? It's rather simple.
You take a job, let's say transcribing books, and you fragment it and you
fragment it more and more and more until suddenly the job is magically done without
anyone having ever worked on it. Because, if nobody has to get paid, nobody had to
work either, right? Hence, the judge's statement is proof that this magic
actually works. It gets better. In the end Google still ends up being paid even
though they have just made the job disappear magically. So what I want to
suggest now is to seize the means of magic. What about this: Fragmenting those
platforms that algorithmically manage us to such a great degree they simply do not
exist anymore? Magically, their job will still be done and in the end we get the
money. I guess in like a less magical version we could call this platform co-
operativism. If you do not believe in magic then I have two more suggestions
about what we, as a software extensions, can do. So I will show you two clips from
my latest video piece which is called "I Will Say Whatever You Want in Front of a
Pizza". You can see the full version online on this website, all that's gonna
be, I think there's going to be a screening somewhere here in the in the
video lounge. Anyway, I will show you two bits even though it's a 12-minute video
and just looking at two bits doesn't make too much sense still I think they show a
point I wanted to make pretty nicely. So the video is narrated from the perspective
of a cloud worker and this is the protagonist:
Protagonist: [unintelligeable speech from video] Instead, I was working for a pizza
delivery company. Brian, your next automated pizza delivery is scheduled for
Saturday February the 25th at 12:00 p.m.. To confirm, text yes. To decline, text no.
Text help for help. Other voice: Thank you, Papa John, you
handsomeman. I shall call you the Carbs Vixen.
Protagonist: We're sorry, we didn't understand. Please confirm or decline.
Other voice: When I make love I imagine you tossing some dough shirtless
Protagonist: Dude, our automated system isn't set up yet. This is a real person
texting you. I make minimum wage, please just tell me if you want the pizza
S: So, that's a protagonist. To give you some background: In 2016, Donald Trump's
team hired a Singaporean teenager through Fiverr which is the platform I talked
about before, and they hired her to convert a PowerPoint into a Prezi which is
the software I'm using for the video, basically outsourcing the Make America
Great Again campaign, which is it's a true story. *laughter in background* So at some
point in the video, the protagonist who is now working and only as a pizza delivery
bot but also as a cloud work on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform, preparing data
sets for AI, at some point he gets to know the Singaporean teenager as a fellow
worker. And she has got an idea. Protagonist: One day, I found a thread
started by her. She talked about the political implications of what we did and
what kind of things we could do. Of course, we on Mechanical Turk had created
the data set. It was sad to see how depressed many of us actually were.
Other voice: Researchers asked 500 workers to complete a survey which contained a
standard clinical depression survey. 170 workers agreed to share their Instagram
post for the study. Out of those 170 workers, 70 were clinically depressed. By
the way, the depression filter is Inkwell. It turns photos to black and white and
adds high contrast. Better not to use it. Protagonist: But she pointed to something
else. It was in our power to manipulate or even to change the very core of such
mechanisms: our data sets, machines, society, you, the future. We started to
discuss, to organize and to experiment. Of course, we didn't always agree. Was this
just for fun, like Easter eggs? Did we share a political agenda? In any case,
things had to happen secretly. Otherwise, it wouldn't work. Teaching Google to
identify a photo of an eggplant as British singer Chris Meloni served as a proof of
concept. S: Okay, so the ideas is this: When we are
extending software with our bodies and minds, we are also extending our reach
into the software, and reaching into the software, being part of the software, we
can start to manipulate these systems that govern us and that we have to use to
govern others. And once we are plugged, in we can manipulate data, we can create new
and weird and slow and inefficient software from within. So it can be fun,
like leaving easter eggs for others to find realizing yes, there are actual
people inside these systems. Which brings me to my third and last thought: Why being
a software extension also has some chances or possibilities. I will end the talk by
talking about Mark Zuckerberg which will make me look like a fool anyway. Being a
software extension can also offer a new aesthetic and a new way of being and I
think this video which could be called the father of all stupid demos illustrates
this in a rather interesting way. Here, for whatever reason Zuckerberg is
demonstrating Facebook's virtual reality by visiting Puerto Rico in the wake of
Hurricane Maria. So why do I show this video? Contrary to what he had intended,
Zuckerberg as a crudely abstracted version of himself turned into a software
extension, detaches and dissociates himself from the real world. This is what
I like. Because I think and you will agree with me: Software is not perfect. It's
full of bugs, it often behaves in unexpected and weird and glitchy ways,
doing stupid things often and like often over and over again, in an infinite loop.
Therefore, embracing the weird and abstract asthetic of a of a human as a
software extension could actually allow us to detach ourselves from circumstances and
which we are required to be our best working selves all the time. So being like
available all the time, addressable, programmable, to update ourselves all the
time. We could like use being a software extension, the aesthetic of being a
software extension, as a mask behind which we can hide, pretending to be a bot.
That's the idea. Thank you.
*applause*
Herald: Thank you, Sebastian, indeed, for making a bleak future look a little bit
more bright. I think we have about five minutes for very short Q&A, otherwise, he
said you have a Twitter account and you can also meet Sebastian next to the stage.
So are there questions, maybe from the Signal Angel? None? Okay, then just
another round of applause for Sebastian! Sebastian: Thank you.
*applause*
*postroll music*
*subtitles created by c3subtitles.de in the year 2018*