Throughout this book, I’ve avoided calling Xi’s regulatory storm a “tech crackdown.” While disciplining digital platforms and the real virtual economy with one hand, Beijing has with its other dispensed favour to harder technologies like semiconductors. Xi was trying to reorient technology companies to be less focused on virtual or financial innovation, and for the best and brightest from Tsinghua and Peking Universities to work in strategic industries instead.

Underlying Beijing’s actions against digital platforms is a suspicion that tremendously profitable digital companies are not producing value for the rest of society. Entrepreneurial dynamism in online education, social media, or fintech are producing various forms of social harm. The virtual economy, including cryptocurrencies and the metaverse, sucked up too much talent and money. Xi and the rest of the Politburo were discomfited that the cutting edge of the economy seemed to have been driven by the vagaries of investors rather than the interests of the state.

Yet despite how much stress and hairpulling Appen caused, Fuentes couldn’t imagine leaving the platform. She was terrified that tasks would stop arriving altogether and she would be forced to move on. Appen had been her savior, the only thing that pulled her through when everything else in her life had threatened to end her. Not only that, the earnings were once so great, she was able to invest in a new laptop and recoup the cost and then some.

When things were good, they were really good. When things were bad, she stayed tethered to the platform with the stubborn faith that it would return her loyalty.

Many Venezuelans who complained were booted off the platform. For Ricardo Huggines, a computer engineer who began working for Remotasks to support his wife and kids after a devastating weeklong nationwide power outage, his account was canceled after he began asking too many questions in the Discord, he told Hernández. “From the way they treated us, I realized that their approach was to drain each user as much as possible,” he said, “and then dispose of them and bring new users in.”

When I wrote the story of Okinyi and the other three Kenyan workers for The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI sought to distance itself from the responsibility of the toll its project exacted. It was Sama that had followed inadequate procedures to protect their workers, OpenAI leadership said; with Sama’s pristine reputation before then, OpenAI couldn’t have known that the workers were struggling.

But the consistency of workers’ experiences across space and time shows that the labor exploitation underpinning the AI industry is systemic. Labor rights scholars and advocates say that that exploitation begins with the AI companies at the top. They take advantage of the outsourcing model in part precisely to keep their dirtiest work out of their own sight and out of sight of customers, and to distance themselves from responsibility while incentivizing the middlemen to outbid one another for contracts by skimping on paying livable wages. Mercy Mutemi, a lawyer who represented Okinyi and his fellow workers in a fight to pass better digital labor protections in Kenya, told me the result is that workers are squeezed twice—once each to pad the profit margins of the middleman and the AI company.

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.