Max Haiven is a writer, teacher, and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination. His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020), and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018). Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL). He led the Worker as Futurist Project, of which this book is a part.
My work as an interventionist scholar, writer, and educator focuses on the imagination. I’ve been fascinated by how the system of capitalism functions by capturing workers’ imaginations, encouraging us to imagine that we can fulfill our hopes and dreams through competition and accumulation and by convincing us that no other system is possible or desirable. I’ve explored the way debt and credit confine workers’ imagination, too, and the way this leads to a politics of revenge (Haiven 2014b; Haiven 2020). I’ve dedicated a lot of my career to trying to understand the radical imagination: that rebellious energy that cannot accept the status quo, that drives forward social movements and workers’ struggles, including the work of critical artists and writers (Haiven 2014a).
These interests came together in the Worker as Futurist project. Projects like this can “convoke” (call together) workers to let that radical imagination spark and catch fire.
Worker as Futurist originated in 2019 when the web-magazine The Berliner Gazette commissioned a piece about ghost workers from the University of the Phoenix (2020), a now-concluded artistic collaboration of which I was one half. The magazine invited us to create a work about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (or MTurk) microtask platform, which, since 2005, has provided a labor marketplace where employers can put out requests for tiny fragments of workers’ time.
The platform is widely used to generate datasets to train so-called Artificial Intelligence by, for example, rewarding humans with pennies (or fractions thereof) for identifying images of cats or for quickly generating survey data. Workers around the world compete with one another to perform these tiny “human intelligence tasks” more cheaply. Platforms like these are the secret backbone of our digital world, the exploited human element that makes the digital revolution appear seamless.
In response to the commission, the University of the Phoenix eventually co-wrote a curse against Amazon collaboratively with an “AI” Large Language Model and MTurk workers (who were paid at many times the market rate for their time). The MTurk workers then smuggled fragments of the curse into Amazon’s servers where it might work its wicked magic when recombined at a hypothetical future point by Amazon’s internal AI, the only entity capable of recognizing and reassembling the fragments.
As part of the research for the art project, the University convened a small temporary think tank of writers, researchers, artists, and activists working against Amazon in order to compare notes and develop dream projects. It was in the context of our meetings that I began to develop the Worker as Futurist project.
I was particularly inspired by three pieces of information. The first was the revelation of the dystopian patent applications Amazon had been filing, revealing its terrifying vision of the future (see Delfanti and Frey 2021). These included, notoriously, a person-sized cage attached to a robot arm, intended for use by warehouse workers, as well as advances in the gamified interfaces workers were being forced to use, allegedly to make their grueling work more fun but, in actuality, to squeeze more productivity from them and increase corporate surveillance.
The second was the revelation that Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, was not only a huge speculative fiction (SF) nerd, but that this genre had been key to his vision for the corporation and to the rhetoric and mythmaking that have been so central to its success (Davenport 2018). The company would simply not exist as we know it without SF.
The third was the upsurge of trade union and community organizing against Amazon (see Chua and Cox 2023; Gindin 2024). But, while inspiring and important, this activism is typically so focused on fighting back in the here-and-now that it forfeits a substantial vision for a different future, perhaps one where Amazon is either abolished or reclaimed by its workers, or where the corporation’s technology and wealth is put toward human interests, rather than consumerism and profit.
It struck me that Amazon is not just generating massive and unjust profits at the expense of its workers, and it’s not just changing the way consumers buy commodities. It is also radically transforming our shared future. This fact is emblematized by Bezos plowing his stolen wealth into his own private space program, which will (he hopes) shape nothing less than the future of humanity.
This is fundamentally obscene and undemocratic.
As with the rise of AI, geoengineering, genetic therapy, and more, some of the most consequential decisions about the future of humanity and the Earth are being taken not by elected governments but by unaccountable corporations or even single billionaires.
The question that animates the Worker as Futurist project on some fundamental level is this: How can workers reclaim the power to imagine and bring about different futures?
The project that culminates in this book cannot hope to answer this question, let alone achieve this goal, but it offers a kind of proof-of-concept. We conceived of it as a contribution in solidarity with trade union and community efforts to bring Amazon and other tech giants to heel, a contribution that insists that, in addition to opposing their almost totalitarian corporate power, we must create spaces and times to fabulate, imagine, and propose the alternative worlds we yearn to see.
As labor organizers, past and present, know all too well that among the most important aspects of working people’s struggles is the fight for dignity in a world that denies it. Inspired by initiatives like the Worker Writers’ School and a long tradition of proletarian literary movements, I believe that writing, and especially writing as part of a collective, can be a vital part of the process of reclaiming radical dignity. I think that’s doubly so today, when workers write SF and so make imaginative claims on the future, or simply insist that they are entitled to do so.
As noted in this book’s introduction, the stories collected here are rarely utopian, but one senses in all of them glimmers of hope, especially in the characters’ relationships. We know Amazon intentionally sets a pace and intensity of work that offers frontline workers little opportunity for conviviality, let alone organizing. This is to say nothing of the company’s fanatical surveillance of its workers. The working class at Amazon is fragmented by design, in ways that would be the envy of bosses throughout history. And so perhaps it should not come as a surprise that the utopian element of these stories appears in the fragments of solidarity, care, and kinship amid a disaster.
In an earlier iteration of this project, where we watched and discussed SF film and TV with Amazon workers, we anonymously surveyed our participants about the texts they most wanted to engage with. I was surprised that the most popular option, without any coordination or discussion, was Ridley Scott’s classic Alien, a film released in 1979, well before even our eldest participant was born.
In that film, a corporate interstellar mining vessel, Nostromo, is headed back to Earth with its precious payload of rare minerals and its small human crew when it is redirected by its onboard computer to answer a distress call from a planet. There, in the ruins of a strange civilization, a crew member is impregnated by an alien larva before returning to the ship. The juvenile alien eats the crewmember alive from the inside and, famously, bursts out of his chest and quickly grows into a predatory monster that hunts the human crew until only one is left, who finally defeats it.
In the course of the film it is revealed that, far from an accident, the coworkers have been used as bait to lure the predatory monster on board in the interests of their corporate masters, who want it brought back to Earth to study it for lucrative weapons research.
We never got to watch Alien with the participants in our project, but I was haunted by what Alien has to do with Amazon. The surface reading comes easily: like the crew of Nostromo, Amazon workers have their bodily and mental well-being sacrificed by a profit-obsessed corporation. Thanks to the company’s use of advanced surveillance technologies, gamified digital interfaces, and seemingly seamless managerial protocols, working for the firm feels like being trapped on a doomed corporate mining ship, deep in space where, as the film’s slogan runs, “no one can hear you scream.”
But as I thought more about it I became fascinated with the way the film represents a horror that is at once both inside and outside the body: growing within you and also hunting you in the claustrophobic confines of the industrial spaceship. Nostromo’s spartan design recalls the austerity of Amazon’s warehouses and the starkness of the company’s broader aesthetic, which promises a kind of pragmatic simplicity. On the one hand, the workers are trapped on a corporate spaceship (run by a malevolent AI) that will sacrifice them for its larger, inscrutable mission. On the other, Amazon’s surveillance and management systems alienate the workers’ from their bodies, making the metaphor of involuntarily incubating a hostile alien predator all the more potent.
But maybe, on another level, the worker is also (or additionally) the alien in this story? The alien, after all, is the destructive force abducted from its world, destined to try and annihilate its captors. In the film, the xenomorph is, we are told, a perfectly adapted, efficient and ruthless killing machine, hence its value for the military-industrial complex which wants it captured, even at the expense of the ship’s crew. I couldn’t help but think of the way a worker at an Amazon warehouse, or among its fleet of drivers, has also been selected and relentlessly drilled into a kind of monstrously efficient organic cog in a vast machine. In that regard, wouldn’t such alienated workers find some strange solidarity with the alien?
We undertook Worker as Futurist without necessarily a complete understanding of why, content to discover something along the way, in the doing. One idea that started to become clear in our conversations with the participants was that perhaps Amazon workers themselves possessed some kind of secret, unspoken, unacknowledged understanding of the company and its vulnerabilities that were otherwise inaccessible, even to the most well-informed and perceptive critics or labor organizers. Perhaps the experience of being trapped in the belly of the beast, with one’s time and body and life in the grips of its opaque algorithms and rutheless structures, instilled in workers some otherwise inaccessible gestalt sense of the corporation. Perhaps some strategic vulnerability might be discovered or distilled from this secret knowledge.
SF itself provides the metaphors, including that of the rescued Borg, Seven of Nine, mentioned in this book’s introduction. There are many more. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series (first book in 1979), the mild-mannered protagonist, a refugee from a recently vaporized Earth, learns he and every other terrestrial thing were part of a planet-sized computer working for billions of years to calculate the Meaning of Life, knowledge he still, unconsciously, possesses as the only survivor of its destruction. In the 1982 film Blade Runner (and its 1968 novel predecessor Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) the main character, a detective who hunts down rogue androids, has preternatural insight into his manufactured targets because he is one himself, unknowingly. In another Philip K. Dick story, We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (1966 – adapted to film in 1990 as Total Recall) the protagonist slowly learns he is not, as he imagined, a boring Earth-bound salesman who dreams of traveling on a romantic adventure to a Martian colony but, in fact, a hitman for the corrupt Mars administration whose memory has been wiped to protect his bosses. In genre-defining first Star Wars film (A New Hope, 1977), the sassy but seemingly harmless repair droid R2-D2 carries, secreted in his memory banks, information that reveals the fatal weakness of the evil Empire’s genocidal Death Star weapon.
In all these SF stories and many more, our protagonists find, within themselves, a hidden knowledge that is strategically important, often to bringing down a hated regime. What do Amazon workers know that they don’t know they know? Amazon is so big, so powerful, so innovative, and so ambitious that it is almost like a vast organic computer, driven by and for profit, integrating advanced robots, computing, finance, managerial protocols, hype, corporate storytelling and, at its most elemental level, the sensing, thinking flesh of its workers, their living labor. What does that living labor know about the machine of which it is, tragically, made to be a part? How might this knowledge make itself known? How might the flesh rebel? Perhaps SF holds an answer or two.