“Is This Really Gonna Help Someone?” Alienation Among European Data Workers

Artificial intelligence (AI) has not only reshaped existing work but also created a wealth of new work (Wajcman, 2017), mostly at the start of its supply chain (Casilli, 2025). So-called data workers support AI by training, verifying, and imitating systems (Tubaro et al., 2020), often under precarious conditions, including low pay, repetitive work, and minimal social interaction (Jiang & Wagner, 2024). Much of this work occurs within triangular labor relations between workers, requestors of the work, and online platform that facilitate the work (Duggan et al., 2020). On these platforms, workers are supervised fully by algorithmic management (Cameron, 2024), where opaque rules govern task assignment and evaluation (Altenried, 2020).

Building on theorizing on worker alienation (Blauner, 1964; Marx, 1844), this paper questions how the organization of labor—particularly the intermediation of online platforms—shape workers' experience of being human. Specifically, drawing on interviews with 136 data workers across 16 European countries, we aim to understand where and how the platform technology shape distortions between the worker and their product of labor, labor activity, species-being, and fellow humans. In-person and online interviews were conducted January and October 2022.

The interviews show extensive evidence of worker alienation among data workers. Participants report having limited insights into the final product or service they contribute to, complicating their connection to product of their labor. Similarly, the labor activity is determined by platform rules rather than the worker's intrinsic motives or needs. In terms of their relation to themselves as species-being, participate describe “turning off” their brain, ascribing themselves attributes of a non-human entity. Lastly, workers are isolated not only from fellow data workers but also from their larger social context due to the invisible and unrecognized nature of their work.

The organization of the work through platform technology appears to intensify the alienation of workers. The triangular relations between worker, requestor, and platform actively separates workers from the larger supply chain they are part of, reducing their knowledge of—and ability to build a connection with—the product or service they contribute to. Platforms' use of algorithmic management causes workers to lose control over their own work schedules and processes. Ultimately, while data workers in the dataset show resilience, they are up against an organization of labor that actively alienates them from the products of their labor, the labor activity, their own species-being, and their fellow humans.