jobs below the API

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon
Published 14 Sep 2022

The ultimate cause of any request would be another human, but now the distance to 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 not with them. Instead, it’s with the machine that brings those customers to you, tracks your tasks, pays your salary, and ultimately fires you.88 If you have a job above the API, life is very different. You control humans by issuing commands—not face to face, but via APIs that give you unprecedented scale.

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And because APIs necessarily flatten all tasks into a stream of data, you can motivate these humans to work harder and faster via gamification, which helpfully reduces both your management burden and your labour costs. Put simply: if you live above the API, you’re playing the game, and if you live below it, you’re being played. 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 features labelled explicitly as gamification, although a panoply of leaderboards make it impossible to miss which agents have answered the most tickets and garnered the highest “customer satisfaction” ratings.89 When I set up the system, I stopped it from asking customers to rate their experiences with our support team.

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Only startups that claim to become the next Amazon or Uber, by means of APIs and gamification, can attract that capital. Their ability to undercut companies without investment means their impact is far wider than 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 APIs were a twinkle in the internet’s eye, when management consultancy firms like McKinsey became obsessed with corporate “reengineering.”99 This process inevitably resulted in downsizing (or in their words, “overhead value analysis”), with middle managers bearing the brunt of the pain, being cut at twice the rate of nonmanagerial workers.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
by Adam Greenfield
Published 29 May 2017

We barely have words for what happens when an algorithm breaks down jobs into tasks that are simple enough that they don’t call for any particular expertise—just about anybody will suffice to perform them—and outsources them to a global network of individuals made precarious and therefore willing to work for very little. Naturally, this newly intensified Fordist production regime sees its workers paid by the minute, without security of tenure, a guaranteed weekly minimum or 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 and restoration, their family life, or their other obligations.29 (In the UK and elsewhere the practice is tolerated, the terms of such employment may be specified by so-called zero-hour contracts, which offer no guaranteed minimum of shifts.)

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For a comparable and equally disturbing look at the conditions Amazon’s white-collar workers contend with, see Kantor, Jodi and David Streitfeld, “Inside 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 Makes Cashiering More Tolerable by Turning It into a Game,” Gizmodo, December 8, 2009. 32.Theatro. “The Container Store Enhances Customer Experience and Operational Productivity with Nationwide Rollout of Theatro’s Voice-Controlled Wearable,” June 14, 2016, theatro.com. 33.Kazuo Yano et al., “Measurement of Human Behavior: Creating a Society for Discovering Opportunities,” Hitachi Review, Volume 58, Number 4, 2009, p. 139. 34.Hitachi Ltd.

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Osborne of the University of Oxford found that 47 percent of them were vulnerable to near-term advances in machine learning and mobile robotics.23 Among developing countries, this rises to 69 percent in India, 77 percent in China and an astonishing 85 percent in Ethiopia.24 (Again, these figures refer to the percentage of job categories that are susceptible to replacement, not of workers in employment.) Meanwhile, against the oft-cited hope that technology would generate more jobs than it eliminated, Frey found that fewer than 0.5 percent of the US workforce have found employment in the high-technology industries that have emerged since the turn of the century. A World Economic Forum estimate that some five million jobs would be lost to automation by 2020 has to be regarded as a stark outlier, if not a gross error, especially since Bank of England Chief Economist Andy Haldane reckons that 15 million jobs would disappear over the same timeframe in the United Kingdom alone.25 I’m not qualified to discuss, in any but the broadest terms, what will happen to the shape and structure of national economies in the aftermath of pervasive automation.