In the beginning, it was just a game. One we've all played numerous times: select the squares with a stop sign, enter the text below, reassemble the puzzle — and check the box declaring, "I am not a robot."
Yet, every time we select images determining whether what we see is a cat or a croissant, we end up working for Big Tech.
When Guatemalan computer scientist Luis von Ahn first proposed the idea of "games with a purpose" (GWAPs) in 2004, his goal was to harness human brainpower so that computers could learn from it. His idea was simple: Get humans to solve tasks that are trivial to us but difficult for computers back then, like labeling images, transcribing text or classifying data.
And what better way to make people work for computers than by turning labor into play?
Get rich by letting others work for you
Von Ahn first developed the ESP (extrasensory perception) Game: Two players were randomly paired and shown the same image but could not communicate. Each described the picture within a time limit, earning points when their labels matched. Those matches verified image descriptions, which were then stored in a database.
In 2006, Google licensed the concept to create its own version, the Google Image Labeler. A year later, von Ahn launched reCAPTCHA, based on the same principle: humans solving problems that computers couldn't. But when humans solved CAPTCHAs, they were unknowingly transcribing words from scanned books and newspapers that computers couldn't digitize. Von Ahn sold reCAPTCHA to Google in 2009.
And he did not stop there. In 2011, he and Severin Hacker founded Duolingo, applying the crowdsourcing model to language learning: Users translate texts and label images in exchange for free lessons, creating a massive database of high-quality language data which is monetized: It trains AI models and is used for Duolingo's commercial English proficiency exam.
"The idea was to contribute to a commons, so that we could help computers get smart, and the benefits would be evenly distributed," Ulises Ali Mejias, a professor of communication studies at State University of New York (SUNY) at Oswego tells DW. "But the story didn't go this way, right? Because Luis von Ahn captured all this free data, sold it to Google and then used the profits to start his next venture: Duolingo."
First came the hippies, then the tech-bros
By finding a way to harness collective human brainpower, von Ahn helped lay the foundation for how corporations monetize data on the internet today – by turning users into unpaid workers. This stands in stark contrast to how the internet was originally imagined by countercultural thinkers in Northern California in the 1960s: As an independent, communal and utopian fantasy.
Amid the Vietnam War and the Cold War, millions of Americans embraced commune living, LSD and hippie culture. When the counterculture fell apart, some of its key figures sought to translate those utopian dreams into technology.
Take Stewart Brand, who founded one of the first virtual communities in 1985, The WELL (or The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) and popularized the phrase "information wants to be free." Or Apple founder Steve Jobs, who famously described taking LSD as one of the most important experiences of his life. And Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, who authored the "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace" thirty years ago.
But the dream of escaping politics through utopian technology was "stunningly naive", says Stanford professor Fred Turner, author of "From Counterculture to Cyberculture."
"They may have left political America behind, but when they came together, they built a world of patriarchy. And they were naive to think that this would somehow create a utopia for the rest of us. You can't leave politics behind — that's a lesson from the counterculture that we are seeing on the internet today," Turner tells DW.
From shared consciousness to profiting from data
The utopia didn't last long. Early tech enthusiasts quickly realized how to monetize this collective consciousness by developing search engines, algorithms and collecting data.
"We see this in the ideology of early Facebook. The intention was very much like: 'Let me grab all of this data without permission and use it to build something that I can monetize'," says Mejias.
"We've moved from an age of connection to an age of extraction," Turner adds. "Digital media have become mining industries. We are now like oil or coal — embedded in a social ground that corporations extract from and sell back to us as products and advertising."
In their book "Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back", Ulises Mejias and Nick Couldry argue that only one historical parallel matches today's scale of data extraction: colonialism.
"The land grab is now a data grab; it's the whole lot taken for a small elite. And that's exactly what evolved with the early history of colonialism, a mentality that justifies taking everything," Couldry tells DW. AI, he adds, is the continuation of that logic, the cherry on top of the cake.
Thirty years after having been declared free and independent, the internet is in the hands of a handful of corporations.
"I think that's a tragedy," says Mejias. "Behind the scenes, we were deceived. While we were contributing to this shared space, corporations were building platforms to privatize all this knowledge and use it for their own benefit," he adds.
Greater good over machines
Still, Mejias and Couldry believe that resistance is coming. They point to movements opposing the construction of data centers or gig-economy workers demanding better labor conditions. And they have hope in youth.
"Young people want their lives to be better than the past 10 years have been. They have the imagination to build a better future," says Couldry.
Recent surveys suggest widespread disillusionment: almost half of UK youth said they would rather have grown up in a world without the internet. Separate studies show that nearly half of US teens and almost two-thirds of UK Gen Z believe that social media is harmful for them.
For Turner, the way forward is clear.
"Our attention needs to be on politics, not on machines," he said.
"We need to think about what we want these machines to do for greater public good. That's what the counter-culturalists didn't do, and it's what we need to do now."
