This book has focused on the fundamental and increasing mobility of power and virality of order. In particular, it has sought to highlight the infectious character of hegemonic discourses and their wider epidemic threat. By contrast, it revealed the possibilities for building up ‘glocal’ resistances to these dominant infectious discourses and ultimately even contagious alternatives that can spread into revolutionary pandemics. Crucial, in this respect, is the challenging and evolution of social innovation for disruptive forms of political creation – ones which materialize and solidify new possibilities for a more egalitarian, free and commons-based existence locally and globally.

In many of the examples discussed throughout this book, workers have been able to use digital technologies to facilitate mobile organizing, often using them in interaction with offline methods, or combining them in new and important ways. Most workers have some kind of shared workplace – whether a physical building, some kind of space that they frequently pass through or transient points where they come into physical contact. Yet in some forms of digital work this is no longer the case. For example, with microwork, digital platforms are used to break work down into small (or micro) tasks that can then be completed very quickly by a large group of distributed workers. Perhaps the most famous of these platforms is Amazon Mechanical Turk (or AMT). The platform breaks work down into HITs – socalled Human Intelligence Tasks – often things like image labelling, transcription and so on, that can be completed in very short amounts of time. The name of the platform – as well as that of HITs – is a reference to the famed fake chess automaton that hid a person within it. The use of HITs also indicates the way that AMT presents humans as a service, completing tasks without having to be visible. Indeed, there have been cases of start-ups like Expensify, which pretended to have developed machine-learning algorithms for automated tasks, but which in fact had outsourced them to workers on AMT.

Turkopticon is a response to the challenges that AMT workers face. Two Human Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers, Lilly Irani and Six Silberman, make the case ‘that human computation currently relies on worker invisibility’.