Tag Archives: Venezuela

Uninvited protagonists: the social networks of Venezuelan AI data workers

After years of work, the long-awaited good news: my article ‘Uninvited Protagonists: The Networked Agency of Venezuelan Platform Data Workers‘, co-authored with Juana Torres-Cierpe, has just been published in New Technology, Work and Employment!

Workers in Venezuela are powering AI production, often under tough conditions. Sanctions and a deep political-economic crisis have pushed them to work for platforms that pay in US dollars, albeit at low rates. They constitute a large reservoir for technology producers from rich countries. But they are not passive players.

They build resilience, rework their environment, and sometimes engage in acts of resistance, with support from different segments of their personal networks. From strong local ties to loose online connections, these informal webs help them cope, adapt, and occasionally push back. Their diversified relationships comprise an unofficial and often hidden, albeit largely digitised relational infrastructure that sustains their work and shapes collective action.

These findings invite to rethink agency as embedded in workers’ personal networks. To respond to adversities, one must liaise with equally affected peers, with family and friends who offer support, etc. Social ties ultimately determine who is enabled to respond, and who is not; whether any benefits and costs are shared, and with whom; whether any solution will be conflictual or peaceful. Social networks are not accessory but constitute the very channel through which Venezuelan data workers cope with hardship.

Not all relationships play the same role, though. Venezuelans discover online data work through their strong ties with family, close friends, and neighbours. To convert their online earnings into local currency, they rely on their broader social networks of relatives and friends living abroad and indirect relationships with intermediaries. For managing their day-to-day activities, Venezuelans expand their social networks through online services like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Telegram, connecting with diverse and less-close peers within and outside the country. Different social ties affect the various stages of the data working experience.

Overall, no Venezuelan could work alone – and the networked interactions that sustain each of them against hardship have made them massively present, as ‘uninvited protagonists,’ in international platforms. Their massive presence in the planetary data-tasking market is a supply rather than demand-driven phenomenon.

This analysis also sheds light on the reasons why mobilisation is uncommon among platform data workers. Other studies noted diverging orientations of workers, unclear goals, lack of focus, and insufficient leadership. Another powerful reason hinges upon the predominance of weak ties in building up online group membership: indeed, distant acquaintances are insufficient to prompt people to action if their intrinsic motivations are low.

The article is available in open access here.

The digital labour of AI in Latin America

Another article has just been published! Another one that is based on a DiPLab-based group collaboration (with A.A. Casilli, M. Fernández Massi, J. Longo, J. Torres Cierpe and M. Viana Braz) and that uses data from multiple countries. It is entitled ‘The digital labour of artificial intelligence in Latin America: a comparison of Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela’ and is part of a special issue of Globalizations on ‘The Political Economy of AI in Latin America’. This article lifts the veil on the precarious and low-paid data workers who, from Latin America, engage in AI preparation, verification, and impersonation, often for foreign technology producers. Focusing on three countries (Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela), we use original mixed-method data to compare and contrast these cases in order to reveal common patterns and expose the specificities that distinguish the region.

The analysis unveils the central place of Latin America in the provision of data work. To bring costs down, AI production thrives on countries’ economic hardship and inequalities. In Venezuela and to a lesser extent Argentina, acute economic crisis fuels competition and favours the emergence of ‘elite’ (young and STEM-educated) data workers, while in more stable but very unequal Brazil, this activity is left to relatively underprivileged segments of the workforce. AI data work also redefines these inequalities insofar as, in all three countries, it blends with the historically prevalent informal economy, with workers frequently shifting between the two. There are spillovers into other sectors, with variations depending on country and context, which tie informality to inequality.


Our study has policy implications at global and local levels. Globally, it calls for more attention to the conditions of AI production, especially workers’ rights and pay. Locally, it advocates solutions for the recognition of skills and experience of data workers, in ways that may support their further professional development and trajectories, possibly also facilitating some initial forms of worker organization.


The version of record is here, while an open-access preprint is available here.

Where does AI come from?

I am thrilled to announce that an important article has just seen the light. Entitled ‘Where does AI come from? A global case study across Europe, Africa, and Latin America’, it is part of a special issue of New Political Economy on ‘Power relations in the digital economy‘. It is the result of joint work that I have done with members of the Diplab team (A.A. Casilli, M. Cornet, C. Le Ludec and J. Torres Cierpe) on the organisational and geographical forces underpinning the supply chains of artificial intelligence (AI). Where and how do AI producers recruit workers to perform data annotation and other essential, albeit lower-level supporting tasks to feed machine-learning algorithms? The literature reports a variety of organisational forms, but the reasons of these differences and the ways data work dovetails with local economies have remained for long under-researched. This article does precisely this, clarifying the structure and organisation of these supply chains, and highlighting their impacts on labour conditions and remunerations.

Framing AI as an instance of the outsourcing and offshoring trends already observed in other globalised industries, we conduct a global case study of the digitally enabled organisation of data work in France, Madagascar, and Venezuela. We show that the AI supply chains procure data work via a mix of arm’s length contracts through marketplace-like platforms, and of embedded firm-like structures that offer greater stability but less flexibility, with multiple intermediate arrangements that give different roles to platforms. Each solution suits specific types and purposes of data work in AI preparation, verification, and impersonation. While all forms reproduce well-known patterns of exclusion that harm externalised workers especially in the Global South, disadvantage manifests unevenly depending on the structure of the supply chains, with repercussions on remunerations, job security, and working conditions.

Marketplace- and firm-like platforms in the supply chains for data work in Europe, Africa, and Latin America. Dark grey countries: main case studies, light grey countries: comparison cases. Organisational modes range from almost totally marketplace oriented (darker rectangle, Venezuela) to almost entirely firm oriented (lighter rectangle, Madagascar). AI preparation (darker circle) is ubiquitous, but AI verification (darker triangle) and AI impersonation (darker star) tend to happen in ‘deep labour’ and firm-like organisations where embeddedness is higher.

We conclude that responses based only on worker reclassification, as attempted in some countries especially in the Global North, are insufficient. Rather, we advocate a policy mix at both national and supra-national levels, also including appropriate regulation of technology and innovation, and promotion of suitable strategies for economic development.

The Version of record is here, while here is an open access preprint.