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| ▲ | DonaldPShimoda 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Providing relatively good paying jobs that people can do while sitting in an air conditioned room is hardly colonialism Their local environments are being destroyed, city and state governance corrupted, regular jobs muscled out, electricity used exorbitantly, psyches damaged, and so much more all in the name of extracting low-cost labor from the less privileged — and thus readily exploited — halfway across the globe, but sure, definitely not colonialism. Colonialism doesn't mean you make people do back-breaking manual labor; it means you exploit people far away to extract capital from where they are so people nearby can enjoy the fruits of others without having to do the work themselves. | | |
| ▲ | thewillowcat 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Their local environments are being destroyed, city and state governance corrupted, regular jobs muscled out, electricity used exorbitantly, psyches damaged, and so much more all in the name of extracting low-cost labor from the less privileged — and thus readily exploited — halfway across the globe, but sure, definitely not colonialism. To the extent these claims are true (and I'm sure that varies by location), those are the primary problems, not the fact that people are being offered jobs they seem to prefer to other jobs. | | |
| ▲ | card_zero 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | But it was also stated that their labor is extracted, which sounds like slavery, and that they are exploited, which sounds like fraud, and that they take some psychic damage, which sounds like a JRPG. Those would all be bad things. | | |
| ▲ | DonaldPShimoda 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Hm, some notes: - I would say that extracting capital from labor does not constitute "slavery" in the sense of either de facto or de jure "ownership" of humans, but a wider interpretation of the word may apply. - Exploitation doesn't have to be fraud. People can be willingly exploited. If we imagine for the sake of argument that human suffering can be quantified, and we imagine a person who starts from a place of, say, a 10 on an arbitrary scale where that's pretty bad (and 0 is no suffering), they may "choose" to take a job that reduces their suffering to an 8. Despite the reduction in suffering, someone else benefits from this arrangement more than the suffering human, and the benefited person could have chosen to reduce the suffering further but for the increase of their profit. This is still exploitation, even if the sufferer was made aware of all the circumstances up front. - I said that the people's psyches were damaged; nothing about "psychic damage". One example of damage to the psyche is being asked to classify images of CSAM for eight hours a day. Regardless of the pay, this causes damage to people with even the barest shred of empathy. | |
| ▲ | thewillowcat 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Indeed, those things were stated, but they would seem to be assertions and interpretations rather than anything established by the work at hand. | | |
| ▲ | DonaldPShimoda 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The point at hand is concerning the use of the word "colonialism" in reference to issues of this nature, not providing you with a reference sheet for your convenience. There are plenty of books and articles available to satisfy your desire for citations[0], though honestly I think any degree of awareness around historic patterns of the interactions between (primarily) Western Europe (and the US) and the Global South would suggest that such assertions are at the very least plausibly credible. [0] I might point you to Karen Hao's "Empire of AI". Leaving aside the author's intent, there are some chapters in the latter parts of the book replete with references to such events. |
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| ▲ | ToucanLoucan 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Providing relatively good paying jobs that people can do while sitting in an air conditioned room is hardly colonialism and it cheapens the word when we call it that. Definition: Colonialism is the practice by which a state or power extends and maintains political, social, economic, and cultural domination over a foreign territory and its people. So yes, at scale, a rich country (political domination) employing people en masse in the developing world (economic domination), in this case showing them a slideshow of all the objectionable content westerners share, is colonialism. The fact that it even exists as an option to simply "export" undesirable tasks to people overseas that you don't see and don't care about is itself an extension of and the maintenance of colonialism. | | |
| ▲ | throwayay58373 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | ToucanLoucan 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Wrong framing. I'm saying that any trade between a colonizer nation and a colonized nation is undeniably made different by the lasting effects of colonialism. There are mitigations for this that many academics have advocated for, but they all require the developed world to cede money and power to the undeveloped one, which historically hasn't been a great pitch. But until it's done, you can't divorce these things from one another and no international trade can be truly, squeaky clean. It's also worth noting that so, so, so much of our trade right now is anything but. Exporting ships for wrecking in India, the entire fast-fashion industry, chocolate, coffee, lithium mining, so many industries are absolutely hip-deep in the abusive nature of colonialism. Data labeling/moderation are just the most recent iterations of the same shameful tradition. |
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