powernap

In her 2018 essay The Automation Charade, Astra Taylor argues that the current trajectory of automation in the workplace does not simply replace human labor as many have assumed it would. Rather, in many cases, it functions to obscure the human worker through a phenomenon she calls “fauxtomation.” Her argument centers around the platform economy, analyzing the digital platforms and interfaces that separate a contemporary consumer from a service worker, atomizing the workers’ tasks into ever smaller fragments that can be performed with less and less training from anywhere in the world. By sidestepping labor laws and undermining the potential organizing power of skilled workers, platform economics maximize profits for companies and exacerbate precarity in the workforce. Following the classical paradigm of the Mechanical Turk, an eighteenth century fake automaton (that was actually a puppet with a human operator hidden inside it), fauxtomation has become commonplace today via platforms like Amazon’s MTurk where individual “human intelligence tasks (HITs)” are performed repetitively by a distributed network of piece workers. Flexibility is substituted for livability and worker protections: MTurkers work whenever they want, from anywhere in the world with an internet connection, and get paid a small amount of money for every HIT performed. There’s no guarantee that they can make a living wage, no commitment to their ongoing employment, no half-day minimums, no kill fees, no safety protections, and no benefits. 

Like the original Mechanical Turk, fauxtomation is a trick used to hide human labor rather than replace it. In a particularly prescient example, Astra Taylor describes the early fauxtomation dynamics of Thomas Edison’s dumbwaiter—a pulley system he invented to deliver food from the kitchen directly to the dining table to eliminate the need for human waitstaff.

“Slaves cooked hot food and put it on [the dumbwaiter] shelves, making it appear as if the evening’s fare had been conjured by magic. The same hidden hands whisked away dirty plates just as quickly…The appearance of seemingly automated abundance Jefferson so doggedly cultivated required substantial additional labor—the labor of making labor seem to disappear.” (Taylor)

This example from a slave operated household in Antebellum America starkly demonstrates the power dynamics that tend to accompany technologies of fauxtomation, many of which exacerbate existing race, gender, and class inequities. As the labor of MTurkers and other crowdworkers becomes fragmented and dispersed through a pay per task digital platform (requiring less training, minimizing human interaction, and making work possible anytime, anywhere) capitalists are connected with the cheapest labor source available. The platform gives them access to workers who are marginalized (racialized, gendered, “unskilled,” poor), neither organized in unions nor protected by effective labor regulations, and can therefore be paid less. The slippage between the abstracted, faraway, foreign worker and the nonhuman worker lies at the heart of fauxtomation. As argued by historians and theorists like Sylvia Wynter, the unmaking of the human is a critical mechanism used by colonialism to achieve maximum exploitation. In perhaps the most extreme case, this formed the cultural justification for chattel slavery. Today the rise of the platform economy alongside the rapid development of AI chatbot capabilities has facilitated a particular kind of erasure. In a contemporary parable of fauxtomation, Taylor describes an interaction between a restaurant worker and a customer coming to pick up a takeout meal. “ ‘How did the app know my order would be ready twenty minutes early?’ the customer marveled, clutching his phone. ‘Because that was actually me,’ the server said. ‘I sent you a message when it was done.’ ” (Taylor)

The fauxtomation machine dephysicalizes and depersonalizes labor relations: workers rarely interact with one another, and more and more work-related interactions (with customers, supervisors, and hiring managers) tend to be mediated through an app. Might we understand this disappearing act—as in the case of Edison’s dumbwaiter or the original Mechanical Turk—to be intentional? As any union organizer will tell you, short-term flexible work is the enemy of solidarity, pitting the immediate desires of individual workers against the promise of building power and winning better working conditions for everyone. Platform-based work does not offer any of the traditional benefits of full-time employment and enters worker compensation into a race to the bottom by exploiting the marginalized and vulnerable workers. It’s not easy to build solidarity among workers rendered invisible—both to each other and to all those who benefit from their labor. In this way, platform-based fauxtomation begins to erode the physical material of solidarity, like empathy, communication, shared experience, and coalition-building.

POWERNAP is also the name of a fictional hardcore/grindcore/metal band, a kind of disembodied supergroup made up of musicians and performers living in different countries who’ve never met each other (Edmonton, Ontario; Stockholm, Sweden; Los Angeles, California; Amsterdam, Netherlands). This approach to music making could be read as another instance of fauxtomation; it may sound a bit like the music generated by AI in 2024, but it’s actually made by humans working in an atomized system. POWERNAP’s music is made through an assembly line of recordings, while their lyrics are manually scraped from online reviews for novelty robots. The products reviewed include a pancake printing robot, a window cleaning robot, and a fully automated/fully awful restaurant. Together they begin to sketch a contemporary portrait of robotization, one that runs slightly tangential to the popular debate around automation as a threat to labor power.

According to David Graeber, the perennial anxiety of robots taking our jobs has proven accurate in that automation has in fact coincided with mass unemployment. However, this systemic job loss can also be understood as a transformation of the labor market that has been disguised by the development of “dummy jobs that are effectively made up”(Graeber, 8). Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs is an inquiry that took off in 2015 after public fervor and polling revealed an astonishingly large proportion of the UK workforce believes their full-time jobs make no “meaningful contribution to the world” (ibid). He provisionally defines a “bullshit job” as one that is “so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence” (Graeber, 10). Graeber’s text outlines not only the prevalence of this kind of work, he also argues that bullshit jobs exist to fulfill the political requirement of keeping unemployment at a constant rate. 

The POWERNAP gig worker’s job is also perfectly bullshit for its perfect circularity. It exists only in the service of making and maintaining jobs (i.e. the jobs of the workers served by the labor rights petitions). Perhaps this is the most literal kind of reproductive labor, which in contrast to Dowling’s definition of care work, engages directly in the reproduction of the workforce and nothing more. So it appears that if we need workers to do work, we also need work to make workers. In this sense the purpose of work becomes not the production of goods, services, or life, but the production of work itself. 

POWERNAP gig workers labor within a fauxtomated system that reduces their potential for solidarity to a mechanized repetition of clicks. As their shift progresses they learn to perform their task with ever more speed and efficiency, using copy/paste shortcuts and autocomplete functions built into their web browser. They are assisted by automation, performing work that seems like it could be done by a robot, but they are very much human. At the same time the robots featured in POWERNAP’s grindcore music videos short-circuit the entire labor robotization debate by performing exclusively stupid tasks that nobody needs. The pancake printer is always malfunctioning and was pulled from the market only a couple of years after it arrived. The failures of the automated restaurant and window cleaning robot can also be experienced in detail via the music videos above. The only worker who might be successfully replaced by this robotic revolution is a cat.