圍群 MONUMENT of APRON

The most magical innovation of the app economy is making the female workers it depends on mostly invisible.

劳动者从故事中被抹去:

Of course books don’t digitize themselves. Human hands have to individually scan the books, to open the covers and flip the pages. But when Google promotes its project—a database of “millions of books from libraries and publishers worldwide”—they put the technology, the search function and the expansive virtual library in the forefront. The laborers are erased from the narrative, even as we experience their work firsthand when we look at Google Books.

覆盖:

There is a tradition of humans posing as machines called “mechanical turking.” The tradition is named after the “Automaton Chess-player.” Unveiled in Austria in 1770, the automaton appeared to be a robot dressed in Orientalist clothing (hence the “turk”). But in reality, a human being hid inside the machine and moved the chess pieces with magnets. The best chess masters of the time crouched beneath that chessboard.

女人的隐匿劳动:

Ipeirotis found that almost 70% of mechanical turkers were women. How shocking: the low prestige, invisible, poorly paid jobs on the internet are filled by women. Women provide the behind the scenes labor that is mystified as the work of computers, unglamorous work transformed into apparent algorithmic perfection.

女人与技术:

Though Ada Lovelace is finally getting some notice almost two hundred years after she wrote the first ever computer algorithm, the women who have advanced math and computer science have largely been ignored. When male scientists from University of Pennsylvania invented the Electronic and Numerical Integrator and Computer, the first electronic computer (which would eventually replace female computers), women debugged the machine and programmed it. When these early female computer programmers unveiled the machine to the military, they were mistaken for models hired to stand attractively next to the new invention.

As computing machines gradually took over, mathematicians often measured its computing time in “girl-hours” and computing power in “kilo-girls.” The computer itself is a feminized item. The history of the computer is the history of unappreciated female labor hidden behind “technology,” a screen (a literal screen) erected by boy geniuses.

整篇文章:http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-ladies-vanish/