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Concealed behind digital platforms, a vast, dispersed, and largely invisible workforce quietly generates and annotates the data that powers today’s AI boom. In Platform Extractivism, information scientist Julián Posada argues that these platforms are engines of extraction rooted in the enduring social inequalities and transnational power disparities of coloniality. Posada reveals that technology, especially today’s so-called AI, is not artificial, autonomous, or intelligent; it inherently relies on and extracts from humanity. Drawing on mixed-methods research on three platforms in the Venezuelan data work sector, Posada exposes the human cost of this technology, revealing how digital platforms have capitalized on economic instability, targeting vulnerable populations to extract value from their precarious labor.
A critical intervention in the debate on the future of work, this book provides profound insight into the implications of artificial intelligence and moves beyond the context of advanced economies to focus on the labor involved in its production. Platform Extractivism questions whether AI is a tool for freedom or a motor driving the widening the gap between the unseen workers who teach machines and the corporations that profit from them.
Julián Posada is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Yale University.
“Platform Extractivism is a tour de force, moving adeptly from stories of the data workers behind contemporary AI systems to empirical analysis and theory. This book demonstrates conclusively that our AI systems perpetuate long-standing dynamics of resource extraction, colonialism, and wealth accumulation. But Julián Posada shows that it doesn’t have to be that way as he explores pathways toward more just and livable futures for data workers. Platform Extractivism is required reading.”—Catherine D’Ignazio, Director, Data + Feminism Lab, and Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning, MIT
“A grounded and uncompromising account of the infrastructures and workers that sustain artificial intelligence. Posada makes clear that platforms are not neutral tools, but engines of extraction.”—Mark Graham, coauthor of Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labor Powering A.I.
“Platform Extractivism tears apart the promises of AI's global benefits and exposes how the industry profits from the precarious economies, cheap labor, territories, public infrastructure, and knowledge of the Global South.”—Paola Ricaurte Quijano, cofounder, Tierra Común network