Every time you use a free app, search for something, or let a website remember who you are, you generate more information than the service actually needs to function. That extra information used to be treated as waste. It became, instead, the entire business model.
The internet, and now the systems we call artificial intelligence, are not neutral tools that happened to get built — they're a second enclosure of the commons, continuing in a different material. From there it moves through Shoshana Zuboff's concept of behavioural surplus, Kate Crawford's account of the lithium, water, and labour hidden behind "the cloud," and a TIME investigation that found OpenAI's content-moderation pipeline ran partly through Kenyan workers paid as little as $1.32 an hour, into Joy Buolamwini's research on racial bias in facial recognition and a wrongful arrest in Detroit, and Meredith Whittaker's argument that AI isn't separate from the surveillance business model — it's an expansion of it.
Where the alternative is already being built gets equal time: the hacker ethic that predates anarchist theory by decades, a rural South African cooperative that beat NYC Mesh to community-owned internet by two years, and a driver-owned rideshare app proving the current arrangement was a choice, not a law of nature.
Further reading: Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (PublicAffairs, 2019) Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI (Yale University Press, 2021) Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Doubleday, 1984) James Boyle, "The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain," Law & Contemporary Problems, 2003 — available via Duke Law, law.duke.edu Joy Buolamwini, Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines (Random House, 2023) Billy Perrigo, "OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour," TIME, January 18, 2023 The Drivers Cooperative — drivers.coop Zenzeleni Networks — zenzeleni.net
Tags: surveillance capitalism, AI ethics, algorithmic bias, digital enclosure, facial recognition, data labor, platform cooperativism, mesh networks, Shoshana Zuboff, Kate Crawford, Joy Buolamwini, Meredith Whittaker, GNU, free software, Cambridge Analytica, predictive policing, anarchism
Show notes: The Algorithm Is Not Neutral A Thousand Small Fires — Season 2, Episode 1
A small number of companies control the infrastructure that decides what billions of people see, buy, and are believed to be — how that happened, what it actually costs the people invisible inside the supply chain, and where people are already building outside its walls.
In this episode:
- James Boyle's "second enclosure" and the enclosure thread this show picked up in season one
- Shoshana Zuboff, behavioural surplus, and instrumentarian power
- Kate Crawford's Atlas of AI — the lithium, the water, the labour behind "the cloud"
- OpenAI, Sama, and Kenyan data labellers paid $1.32 an hour
- Meredith Whittaker, the AI Now Institute, and AI as surveillance advertising's expansion
- Cambridge Analytica and the infrastructure that made it possible
- Joy Buolamwini, Gender Shades, and the wrongful arrest of Robert Williams
- The hacker ethic, GNU/Linux, and Wikipedia — anarchist practice before anarchist theory
- Zenzeleni Networks, NYC Mesh, and the Drivers Cooperative
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