>The New Inquiry is not a content farm by any stretch of the imagination
I have yet to encounter any significant or substantial original idea on that site. For the most part they give a superficial and pedestrian (if sometimes peculiar) ideological gloss to random cultural ephemera. I think this describes a higher-register version of Buzzfeed, at least.
I don't think this particular article is any good, but you should give the New Inquiry another chance. Their stuff varies widely, but the presence of people like Teju Cole means that they publish good stuff sometimes:
It references Wilson's work, and thank you for providing the link, but it really isn't a content-farm piece. It's a critical essay that addresses women and labor in the tech industry.
I agree that it's harmful to society to create "marketplaces" where workers are more free to undercut each other on price. Everywhere in nature and history, arms races are "fair" but they waste resources, so society should focus on creating and enforcing rules against arms races.
I'm not sure that I agree with this point of view—in fact, I have a suspicion that it's sarcastic—but it seems like a constructive contribution to the discussion whether or not you agree with it. Why the downvotes?
Not necessarily, as within traditional means of winning business many of them compete very successfully on other merits, such as quality of work, reputation or knowledge of a particular domain/sector.
It's only when you build an online marketplace that this kind of race to the bottom emerges, because the vast majority of participants on both sides will be completely unknown to each other. So the few objective signals the marketplace offers, like price, become the only means available for party A to evaluate party B.
It's possible to imagine a sort of eBay-style reputation system offsetting this; but only in part, because by definition the people who will be competing in a blind marketplace are the ones who have the least reputational capital. (If they had a reputation, they'd be using it to get clients, not bidding on lowest-common-denominator work.) So the best guarantee that would offer would be that the person/company you're looking at is the "best of the worst," so to speak.
> It's only when you build an online marketplace that this kind of race to the bottom emerges, because the vast majority of participants on both sides will be completely unknown to each other. So the few objective signals the marketplace offers, like price, become the only means available for party A to evaluate party B.
Except that creative freelancers usually post some sort of online portfolio, which seems like an extremely fair thing to judge a candidate by, all things considered.
The article never actually specifies whether the "mostly black and Latino" women who digitize the books are treated as independent contractors. It implies it, by launching into a section on Mechanical Turk, Uber, TaskRabbit, etc, but never actually discusses the book digitizers.
They are contractors, but are they independent contractors? I think it's more likely that they are employees of a staffing firm that Google contracts out to for workers rather than independent contractors that Google contracts directly.
Because of the "permatemps" lawsuit against Microsoft back in the day (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp), tech companies almost always hire contractors via staffing firms. I'm sure Google is no exception.
I also don't think it's particularly important to this story, but ymmv.
> Silicon Valley really is a man’s world. Men have great ideas. Men code. Men attract money. Men fund start-ups. Men generate jobs. Men hire other men. Men are the next Steve Jobses, the innovators, the inventors, the disruptors. But women complete the tasks that men have not yet programmed computers to do, the tasks that make their “genius” and their “innovation” possible. And they do it for pennies.
It's an odd world where tech departments are suddenly considered prestigious instead of cost centers you need to cut. I'm wholly unconvinced this article captures anything but a wildly distorted version of actual reality.
And, more to the point, you certainly wouldn't look to Mechanical Turk as the central evidence on your overreaching theory on women and computing, the driving force that somehow transforms menial work into algorithmic perfection. That just smacks of ignorance.
> Silicon Valley really is a man’s world. Men have great ideas. Men code. Men attract money. Men fund start-ups. Men generate jobs. Men hire other men. Men are the next Steve Jobses, the innovators, the inventors, the disruptors. But women complete the tasks that men have not yet programmed computers to do, the tasks that make their “genius” and their “innovation” possible. And they do it for pennies.
So imagine transposing this, saying that all of the work done by women at fashion houses was only made possible by the male construction workers that built their offices. You'd be laughed out of the room, and deservedly so.
The issues surrounding women in tech are very important, but that doesn't come with a license to make shit up. Mechanical Turk could disappear tomorrow and SV would be just fine.
It's disingenuous to compare people scanning books, for instance, with construction workers. The work book scanners are doing is directly related to the Google Books product itself; without those people, there would be no books in Google Books. It's not tangentially connected at all.
The same arguments presented by the article could be applied equally to the fate of farmers after the mechanization of farming. A mechanically inclined boy in a rural area is now more likely to grow up and become a tractor mechanic than a farmer.
There is an interesting story underneath this article about how technology displaces people and changes how society sees them (and how they see themselves). But that story isn't told. Instead a bunch of navel gazing about Silicon Valley gender inequities steals the focus.
> There is an interesting story underneath this article about how technology displaces people and changes how society sees them
It seems to me that these sorts of services just increase liquidity in the market for menial office work (data entry, etc.). In this case, the supply (of people willing to scan books) far outstrips the demand, so the work is boring and commands low wages. But maybe it beats telemarketing.
The real story here is that this change is happening so quickly. If the journalists out there want to help low-skilled but otherwise intelligent people out, they will educate the public on the larger trend (careers based on routine and repetitive work are going away) instead of jumping into polemics.
This has the feel of a well-intentioned, but badly executed college paper. The kind that you'd get red ink on it saying 'interesting start, but you have to connect the dots etc...'
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 73.1 ms ] threadhttp://www.aperture.org/magazine-2013/andrew-norman-wilson-w...
Perform due diligence[1] please before making such a claim.
[1] http://thenewinquiry.com/about-tni-magazine/
I have yet to encounter any significant or substantial original idea on that site. For the most part they give a superficial and pedestrian (if sometimes peculiar) ideological gloss to random cultural ephemera. I think this describes a higher-register version of Buzzfeed, at least.
http://thenewinquiry.com/author/teju-cole/
Contemporary and readable, with some decent depth to explore further.
I am surprised at the comparison.
(I am not the poster.)
Wouldn't designer/developer freelancers fall under this category?
It's only when you build an online marketplace that this kind of race to the bottom emerges, because the vast majority of participants on both sides will be completely unknown to each other. So the few objective signals the marketplace offers, like price, become the only means available for party A to evaluate party B.
It's possible to imagine a sort of eBay-style reputation system offsetting this; but only in part, because by definition the people who will be competing in a blind marketplace are the ones who have the least reputational capital. (If they had a reputation, they'd be using it to get clients, not bidding on lowest-common-denominator work.) So the best guarantee that would offer would be that the person/company you're looking at is the "best of the worst," so to speak.
Except that creative freelancers usually post some sort of online portfolio, which seems like an extremely fair thing to judge a candidate by, all things considered.
I also don't think it's particularly important to this story, but ymmv.
> Silicon Valley really is a man’s world. Men have great ideas. Men code. Men attract money. Men fund start-ups. Men generate jobs. Men hire other men. Men are the next Steve Jobses, the innovators, the inventors, the disruptors. But women complete the tasks that men have not yet programmed computers to do, the tasks that make their “genius” and their “innovation” possible. And they do it for pennies.
Persecution complex meets "quality journalism". Jezebel worthy article.
And, more to the point, you certainly wouldn't look to Mechanical Turk as the central evidence on your overreaching theory on women and computing, the driving force that somehow transforms menial work into algorithmic perfection. That just smacks of ignorance.
So imagine transposing this, saying that all of the work done by women at fashion houses was only made possible by the male construction workers that built their offices. You'd be laughed out of the room, and deservedly so.
The issues surrounding women in tech are very important, but that doesn't come with a license to make shit up. Mechanical Turk could disappear tomorrow and SV would be just fine.
This is an infuriating article, but the above sentence really stands out. Phrasing the issue in terms of men vs women is entirely missing the point.
For a much better take on the subject, see "In praise of idleness", by Bertrand Russell.
http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
There is an interesting story underneath this article about how technology displaces people and changes how society sees them (and how they see themselves). But that story isn't told. Instead a bunch of navel gazing about Silicon Valley gender inequities steals the focus.
It seems to me that these sorts of services just increase liquidity in the market for menial office work (data entry, etc.). In this case, the supply (of people willing to scan books) far outstrips the demand, so the work is boring and commands low wages. But maybe it beats telemarketing.
The real story here is that this change is happening so quickly. If the journalists out there want to help low-skilled but otherwise intelligent people out, they will educate the public on the larger trend (careers based on routine and repetitive work are going away) instead of jumping into polemics.
Reminds me of worker bees dutifully trying to protect the hive.