Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #chickenization
Most recents (5)
"We live...in a hyper-dynamic, interdependent and incomprehensible web of agents. [R]elevance is not just provided by the immediate surrounding. It is shaped by all the potential environments you can imagine and everyone else can imagine." -- Idea Monkey greeneracresvaluenetwork.wordpress.com/2022/05/04/dai…
This Is How America's Culture War Death Spirals
theatlantic.com/newsletters/ar…
#InstitutionalTrust, #PartisanPolitics, #disempowerment, #culture, #language
theatlantic.com/newsletters/ar…
#InstitutionalTrust, #PartisanPolitics, #disempowerment, #culture, #language
Vertical thinking broke the bottleneck in powering high-performance computers
techxplore.com/news/2022-05-v…
#VerticalThinking, #ComputingPower, #ProcessingEfficiency
techxplore.com/news/2022-05-v…
#VerticalThinking, #ComputingPower, #ProcessingEfficiency
This week on my podcast, I read my @Medium column, "Revenge Of the Chickenized Reverse Centaurs," proposing a theory of the relationship between algorithms, interoperability and worker power (happy #MayDay!).
onezero.medium.com/revenge-of-the… 1/
onezero.medium.com/revenge-of-the… 1/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2022/05/02/rev… 2/
pluralistic.net/2022/05/02/rev… 2/
Let's break it down. Start with "#chickenization": this is a labor economics term referring to industries that follow the model of the American poultry industry. 3/
AI researchers talk about "centaurs" - machine-human collaborative teams that outperform either computers or people. The greatest chess players in the world are collaborations between chess-masters and chess software.
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But not all centaurs are created equal. A "reverse centaur" is what happens when a human is made to assist a machine, rather than the other way around. Amazon may not have invented the reverse centaur, but they perfected it.
pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/rev…
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pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/rev…
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Take the "Mechanical Turk," a massive cohort of precarious, sub-minimum-wage pieceworkers who do human decision support for automated processes. There's a reason that South Asian labor activists say "AI" stands for "absent Indians."
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Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power is @ddayen's new book about the concentration of industry in America and around the world; one interesting implication of monopolies is that they are intensely individual phenomena.
thenewpress.com/books/monopoli…
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thenewpress.com/books/monopoli…
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That is, despite being driven by vast social forces, monopolies have monopolists: named, well-known individuals whose personal choices directly lead to misery, hardship and death for millions.
People like Warren Buffett, America's folksiest monopolist.
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People like Warren Buffett, America's folksiest monopolist.
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Buffett isn't shy about this. His whole deal is backing companies with "moats" - that is to say, companies that don't have to worry about competition (cue Peter Thiel, saying the quiet part aloud: "Competition is for losers").
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Target's app-driven delivery service is the notorious @Shipt, a company with a history of exploitative labor practices, including retaliation against those who dare to complain.
vice.com/en_us/article/…
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vice.com/en_us/article/…
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Shipt's workers have announced a strike on Jul 15, over a new "algorithmic pay model" that uses a black-box calculation to determine how much workers will receive for their labor, cutting their pay by 30-50%.
vice.com/en_us/article/…
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vice.com/en_us/article/…
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Previously, Shipt workers got a flat $5 plus 7.5% of the order total; under the new algorithmic system, workers' pay will be determined by a secret mix of "variables including high store traffic times, street traffic, and estimated store-to-door travel time."
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