UCLA

This study introduces the concept of “asymptotic labor” through three case studies examining the political economy of contemporary information-processing systems. It aims to contribute additional historical and theoretical perspective to the strong foundation of existing critical research that has revealed the “hidden” human workforce that props up the vast digital infrastructure of artificial intelligence. The first chapter chronicles the design and development of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, suggesting a critical periodization of these cybersecurity systems based on their different methods of validating human and nonhuman users. The evolution of CAPTCHA is deeply intertwined with the rapid ascendance of machine learning as the dominant form of artificial intelligence in the mid-2000s, and presages the emergent methods of value capture that undergird these data-intensive systems. The next chapter builds on this latter premise, utilizing semiotics as a method for dissecting the mechanisms of meaning-making and value production at the core of these complex information-processing systems, as well as the ways that they have become implicated in a broader set of political-economic conditions. Finally, an ethnographic account of a specialized class of workers at the United States Postal Service ties together the more theoretically-laden arguments of the preceding chapters by demonstrating the social, political, and material implications that the development and implementation of these information-processing systems have on the dwindling number of humans that remain embroiled in their continuing operations.