jobs below the API

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

by Adam Greenfield  · 29 May 2017  · 410pp  · 119,823 words

any other form of benefit, and this too is automation. Most of the blue-collar workers that do manage to retain employment will find themselves “below the API”—that is, subject to having their shifts scheduled by optimization algorithm, on little or no notice, for periods potentially incommensurate with their needs for sleep

…

Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” New York Times, August 25, 2015. 29.Anthony Wing Kosner, “Google Cabs and Uber Bots Will Challenge Jobs ‘Below The API,’ ” Forbes, February 4, 2015. 30.Stuart Silverman, “Target’s Cashier Game—Is It Really a Game?,” LevelsPro, November 29, 2011. 31.Adam Frucci, “Target

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All

by Adrian Hon  · 14 Sep 2022  · 371pp  · 107,141 words

that human could be very, very long. This has led to the notion that jobs exist either above or below the API.87 If you’re an Uber driver, a flight booking agent, or an Amazon warehouse worker, you exist below the API. You might still meet clients and customers in person, but your lasting relationship is

…

. You’re an NPC—a non-player character. Few people live fully above the API. Even though I run my own company, part of my job exists below the API because I’ve answered literally thousands of Zombies, Run! customer emails via our API-enabled online support system, Zendesk. Zendesk doesn’t have any

…

just themselves, even if most of them flame out in a few years. Today, it feels like there are murky forces pushing the entire economy below the API with only a few superexecutives remaining above to pull workers’ strings with gamified control panels. Some argue this all began in the 1960s, long before

…

want to sell goods online or advertise on social media, you have fewer and fewer options.105 And if those companies decide to push you below the API with only gamification to distract you, there are fewer and fewer places to go. The examples of workplace gamification I’ve described so far have