Sol Orwell, a fellow Canadian, has refused venture capital for his very profitable business, Examine.com, because he doesn’t see an upside in relinquishing control to venture capitalists. He doesn’t need cash—his company makes seven figures per year. He isn’t looking for a quick out or trying to sell—he enjoys his work a great deal. As a majority owner, he doesn’t have to answer to anyone except his paying customers.

A good example is Community Laundry, a business that installs and maintains over forty thousand internet-connected washing machines across a thousand Chinese college campuses. Having developed a popular smartphone app that allows students to schedule and pay for the use of dormitory laundry facilities, the ME team gave outside vendors access to the app’s more than 10 million users. Today, the Community Laundry platform hosts dozens of other businesses, such as food delivery and dorm room furniture, and takes a share of the revenues they generate.

That’s why we are smitten with Patrick Collison’s Fast List. Patrick is CEO and cofounder of Stripe, a San Francisco–based financial services company.

From there Miceli embarked on a new research project to put their philosophy into practice. She created the Data Workers’ Inquiry and invited data workers from around the world to formulate their own research questions about the data-annotation industry and how to make it better. Regardless of where they lived, she paid them a standard researcher’s salary in Germany, where she is based, to reflect the value of the work they did: twenty-five euros an hour.

“There’s always this false logic around data work: What is the minimum that we can pay these people? That comes from a colonialist logic: You choose a place that allows you to do the most with the cheapest budget and where you can really steal from people, steal resources at low cost,” Miceli says. “The question is why are these companies paying two dollars an hour if the work is making them billions or trillions in revenue? Why don’t we look at how much these companies can pay instead of how much less these workers can take?”

These days Fuentes works on five data-annotation platforms at the same time to make a little more than the minimum wage in Colombia, around $335 a month. Each task pays on average between one and five pennies; she still forces herself to wake up when tasks arrive in the middle of the night. “We are ghosts to society, and I dare say we are cheap, disposable labor for the companies we have served for years without guarantees or protection,” she wrote for her project. Since the Data Workers’ Inquiry, she has continued to speak about these experiences in online talks and webinars in the hopes of applying pressure on companies and policymakers to enforce better worker treatment.