[Themaintainers] The Cleaners

Wed Sep 26 09:05:39 EDT 2018

Hello Folks,

There is an artist team Eva and Eva Mattes who have a series of artworks &
installations about the dark content moderators on YouTube. These are in
the forms of installation and even a short video trailer (if you scroll
down) where they use the actual words of the moderators but anonymize the
voice & visuals. Anyway I'm not necessarily an advocate of their projects
in general but this installation is quite interesting and topical to this
thread. http://0100101110101101.org/dark-content/

Thanks,
Misha
__

Misha Rabinovich
Assistant Professor of Interactive Media
University of Massachusetts Lowell
Art & Design Department Mahoney Hall
870 Broadway St., Suite 1, Office 216B
Lowell, MA 01854-3088
p: (978) 934 - 5792
misharabinovich.com

On Mon, Sep 24, 2018 at 12:26 AM <p.y.georgiadou at utwente.nl> wrote:

> Dear Jérôme
>
> Thank you for the link to The Moderators. Indeed, much more telling with
> regard to working conditions and conveniently short  for discussing with
> students. I wonder whether the protocols of inappropriate content
> categories are available somewhere, or are kept completely under wraps. Or
> are the protocols themselves inappropriate content?!
>
> Regards
>
> Yola
>
>
>
> *From:* Jérôme Denis <jerome.denis at mines-paristech.fr>
> *Sent:* Sunday, September 23, 2018 3:51 PM
> *To:* Georgiadou, P.Y. (ITC) <p.y.georgiadou at utwente.nl>
> *Cc:* lee.vinsel at gmail.com; themaintainers at lists.stevens.edu
> *Subject:* Re: [Themaintainers] The Cleaners
>
>
>
> Hi everybody, thank you for the links!
>
>
>
> “The Cleaners” was broadcast on French TV a few weeks ago. A great film
> indeed, though the setting is a bit disturbing, since most of the footage
> is a reconstitution, as well as the ‘cases’ that we follow from one side of
> the Web (agencies, social networks) to the other (the cleaners).
>
> It does tackle interesting issues, though, such as the commitment of these
> workers who strive to keep the Web free of trash. And the nightmarish
> balance between moderation and censorship.
>
>
>
> Before this one, about a year ago, another documentary, which was shot in
> a real “moderation factory”, was published on Vimeo : The Moderators
> <https://vimeo.com/239108604>. It’s shorter (which is great if you want
> to show it to your students), doesn’t address all aspects of the problem,
> but is somehow more “telling”, especially in regards to the work conditions
> (it notably shows a few training sessions). A nice addition to explore what
> some of the maintenance of the Web takes…
>
>
>
> Jérôme
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Le 23 sept. 2018 à 15:08, <p.y.georgiadou at utwente.nl> <
> p.y.georgiadou at utwente.nl> a écrit :
>
>
>
> Dear all
>
>
>
> This is an extraordinary documentary on *The Cleaners* of internet
> content :
> https://www.cnet.com/news/the-cleaners-sundance-documentary-review-dirt-on-social-media/
>  , I assume of great  interest to all maintainers.
>
>
>
> “The "cleaners" of the title are the internet's content moderators: the
> men and women employed to analyse your videos, photos and social media
> posts and decide if they're offensive or A-OK. In the past few years, the
> rise of fake news
> <https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-google-twitter-2018-election-prevent-fake-news-senate/>,
> social media bubbles and increasingly polarised discourse around the world
> have led to hard questions for Facebook, Twitter and Google
> <https://www.cnet.com/news/the-honeymoon-is-over-in-silicon-valley-facebook-google-twitter/>.
> So you might assume these internet giants employ armies of highly trained
> experts to act as guardians of our delicate sensibilities.”
>
>
>
> YG
>
>
>
> *From:* themaintainers-bounces at lists.stevens.edu <
> themaintainers-bounces at lists.stevens.edu> *On Behalf Of *Lee Vinsel
> *Sent:* Sunday, September 23, 2018 1:45 PM
> *To:* Camille E. Acey <connect at camilleacey.com>
> *Cc:* Themaintainers <themaintainers at lists.stevens.edu>
> *Subject:* Re: [Themaintainers] $1m to pay open source maintainers on
> Tidelift
>
>
>
> Thanks for sending this out, Camille!
>
>
>
> Andy, I, and others have been talking a lot about issues related to this.
> We believe that humans have a deep need for recognition, but ultimately
> good feelings aren't enough, and real recognition must also involve
> actually valuing the work in the sense of $$$$.
>
>
>
> As David Edgerton and others have pointed out, Maintainers are sometimes
> quite well paid, and if we can look back into the quickly retreating past
> when there were strong unions in the USA, Maintainers were frequently union
> leaders.
>
>
>
> But we are also aware and interested in the many cases where Maintainers
> aren't well rewarded today. Andy and I are really inspired by Stephanie
> Hoopes and her United Way project called ALICE, which stands for Asset
> Limited Income Constrained Employed and focuses on the working poor
> <https://www.unitedwayalice.org/>. In some work we did with Stephanie, we
> saw that there was a large overlap between ALICE households and what we
> might call Maintainer occupations.
>
>
>
> A final thought: we should also pay attention to the large amount of human
> effort, like open source maintainer work, that falls largely outside of
> traditional markets, including the kind of domestic labor examined in the
> literature on social reproduction
> <https://www.plutobooks.com/blog/social-reproduction-theory-ferguson/>.
> This includes a lot of care work obviously. And on that front, I've been
> inspired not only by Nancy Fraser's recent writings on care but also by Evelyn
> Nakano Glenn's book, Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America
> <https://www.amazon.com/Forced-Care-Coercion-Caregiving-America/dp/0674064151>,
> which does a great job especially with the gendered and racialized nature
> of the topic.
>
>
>
> Thanks again for the post and for continuing to take interest in
> maintenance/Maintainers.
>
>
>
> Lee
>
>
>
> On Sat, Sep 22, 2018 at 8:50 PM Camille E. Acey <connect at camilleacey.com>
> wrote:
>
> https://blog.tidelift.com/1m-to-pay-open-source-maintainers-on-tidelift
>
>
>
> "How can we ensure that the open source software we rely on continues to
> get even more awesome and more dependable?
>
> At Tidelift, we believe the solution is hiding in plain sight: pay the
> maintainers."
>
>
>
>
>
> Camille E. Acey
>
>
>
> "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and
> that is an act of political warfare." - Audre Lorde
>
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>
>
>
> --
>
> Assistant Professor
> Department of Science, Technology, and Society
>
> Virginia Tech
>
> leevinsel.com
> Twitter: @STS_News
>
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