Consider the mighty smartphone. For the app-happy consumer, it's a convenience machine, a wand for conjuring food, a ride, maybe a carpenter to handle a home-improvement chore.
As most anyone in the bottom 99 percent could tell you, little about 21st century capitalism adds up, and here's further evidence. Spending big on everything, seemingly, except their gig workers' wages, the giant outfits offering platform-based services aren't technically making money.
"I just made 10 cents," AI gig worker Mitchell Amewieye, a Lagos resident, tells the filmmaker after the camera captures him answering three questions about a dating-site photo. The median hourly wage for an M-Turker is two dollars, and all workers outside the United States and India are paid in Amazon gift cards.
Walsh captures all her gig-worker subjects with a bracing, kinetic immediacy, and their testimony, whether in submitted phone-video snippets or lengthier filmed portraits, is shot through with a wrenching sadness. There's a weariness in their eyes, in their voices, their financial anxieties compounded by the stress of being rated entities, like products.
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Looks awesome