In When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), H.G. Wells’s dystopian tale of a bleak industrial future, the protagonist Graham takes a tour of a London nursery owned by “the International Crèche Syndicate.” Conditions are regulated by an “elaborate apparatus” that rings a bell “at the slightest departure from the optimum of temperature and moisture.” A doctor points to the “wet nurses, a vista of mechanical figures, with arms, shoulders, and breasts of astonishingly realistic modelling, articulation, and texture, but mere brass tripods below.” (Each “nurse” also sports a “disc bearing advertisements likely to be of interest to mothers.”) Save for the robots, the “little pink creatures” are “left alone, without embrace or endearment.” Horrified by this depersonalized care, Graham protests, but the doctor calmly and expertly reassures him. The “statistical evidence,” he imperiously insists, demonstrates that “the hazardous adventures of the old-world nursing” had resulted in numerous unnecessary deaths and diseases. With its rationalized, automated approach, the Syndicate, on the other hand, “lost not one-half percent of the million babies or so that formed its peculiar care.” Graham finds the adjacent playroom is similarly impersonal: While toys abound, “much was done by machines that sang and danced and dandled.”
Where Graham (like, presumably, Wells) was alarmed, today’s tech bros might see yet another salutary case of “disruption” in action. As Allison Pugh makes clear in her incisive and unsettling study of “connective labor” and its increasing subjection to bureaucratic and technological control, engineers are eagerly designing technologies—today’s “elaborate apparatuses”—to replicate and standardize what were once unassailably human virtues: empathy, compassion, patience, and emotional nuance. Having embarked on a “relentless drive to colonize the human life-world,” Silicon Valley is invading realms once considered the preserves of nurses, doctors, therapists, counselors, teachers, and clergy. Like the doctor’s “statistical evidence,” an AI-powered array of metrics and technical systems is replacing the “hazardous adventures” of only-too-human listening, understanding, and mentoring, and the swift disposal of clients and patients (“not one-half percent of the million babies”) is displacing the time-consuming labor of attention, insight, and care. If Big Tech has its way, the connective labor of relationships—with its vulnerable joys and sorrows, so fraught with confusion and misunderstanding—will yield to the “peculiar care” of today’s technological syndicate. Graham’s abhorrence must become our own.
Pugh, professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, sees the infiltration of connective labor by AI and automation as an offspring of “the gleeful marriage of capitalism and technology in the twenty-first century.” Connective labor—work that, in Pugh’s words, forges “an emotional understanding with another person to create the outcomes we think are important”—is the latest target of managerial dominion. A wide array of workers today performs connective labor—from physicians, nurses, and counselors to police, salespeople, home health aides, masseuses, and hairstylists. (Pugh conducted more than one hundred interviews with practitioners, clients, administrators, and engineers.) To be sure, connective workers provide a commodified “service”—lower blood pressure, a knowledge of geometry, a release from addiction, a great haircut—but they necessarily become emotionally and sometimes physically intimate with the people they encounter. Even when done for the sake of a “result,” the work of connection is, to use Pugh’s term, “seeing” another for who she is, regardless of the outcome. And for the connection to be successful, the receiver must feel “seen,” known, valued, understood—and not judged. Both “seeing” and “being seen” change the partners in the connection; in the closest sorts of connection (often occurring in therapists’ offices, clinics, hospitals, and chaplaincies), each of the parties can experience an extraordinary expansion and enrichment of the self. Indeed, practitioners and receivers often use the words “magic,” “grace,” and “love” to describe the valence of connection.
Although connective labor often requires a significant investment in education, it is, in Pugh’s view, “artisanal.” Its practitioners rely on unquantifiable gifts of emotional or corporeal intelligence; they explore the contours of fear and desire, or the hidden knots and shames of the body. Because they deal with the uncertain, the spontaneous, and the uncontrollable, they must possess a talent for existential improvisation, as the smallest word or gesture can transform or destroy a life. That’s why mistakes in connective labor can be so devastating—and why admitting them fully to clients or patients can also be so redemptive. The acknowledgment and reconciliation of error offer, Pugh affirms, “powerful moments of communion.” The stakes of connection can be so high, and the labor involved so intuitive and visceral, that it seems perverse to think that it can be replaced by machinic artificial intelligence, or even that it should be.
The artisanal work of connection requires what Pugh calls a “social architecture” of material resources (money, time, space, provider-client ratios), “relational design” (how connectors are related to one another institutionally), and “connective culture” (the beliefs, practices, and values that effect relationships). She identifies three forms of connective social architecture: “mission-driven,” corporate, and “retainers for higher.” Exemplified by rural and urban clinics, mission-driven connective labor is idealistic, grueling, and underfunded, subsisting, Pugh laments, on “crumbs tossed from the groaning table of medical corporations.” These workers endure exhausting workloads with scarce resources. So while the dedication is intense, the burnout is swift. Connectors in corporate social architecture—private teachers, hospital staff, therapists, nannies, housekeepers, and millions of other care workers—enjoy ampler financial and spatial resources, but they also have to endure more affluent, demanding, and entitled clients. Corporate social architecture also features more “gig” work via the growing and subtly exploitative platform economy. Connective workers on Care.com or UrbanSitter, for instance, may seem to be free agents, but, as Pugh observes, “what looks like freedom to make your own schedule often transforms into the technology serving up an endless series of clients.” At the high end of connective labor stand retainers-for-hire, a small army of physicians, investment advisers, “life coaches,” and “personal assistants.” Though best resembling the artisanal ideal, they also suggest the emergence of what Pugh sees as a “modern company town.” (She tells the story of one doctor who works exclusively for a Silicon Valley firm. If you want to remain his patient, you can’t quit your job.)
Pugh conveys the artisanship of connective labor through numerous stories and colorful characters, with often moving tales of frustration, heartbreak, endurance, and joy. We meet “Hank,” an ex-Marine and former pastor who now works as a hospital chaplain. Burly, candid, and shrewdly self-aware, Hank has no time for clergy who are trying to be saviors and who, therefore, end up judging the people who need them. “‘More contemplative than interventionist,’” Hank believes that his duty is not to rescue but rather to witness to his people: “‘If they are in pain or they are in despair, honor them in that instead of trying to change it.’” There’s “Betty Sinclair,” a home health aide who handles her often truculent clients with an ever-changing blend of cleverness, tact, and generosity. My favorite is “Valerie,” a hairdresser in small-town Virginia, and one of Pugh’s wisest and most lovable subjects. As her warm and amusing conversation clearly demonstrates, she explains she wants her clients to look in the mirror and say, “‘Oh my God, I’m fabulous’”; but they also “just need somebody to get it out of their chest…and say, ‘It’s all right.’” It’s these stories of everyday grace shared by Valerie and others that induce Pugh to call human connection “the secret ingredient of economic activity.”
Given the stubborn persistence of market fundamentalism and efficiency über alles, that claim may seem preposterous. But Pugh’s insistence on connection as the soul of production and exchange echoes a long lineage of critics attentive to the reality of the moral economy—from John Ruskin and Marcel Mauss to E.F. Schumacher and David Graeber. As Ruskin declared in Unto This Last (1862), a human being is “an engine whose motive power is a Soul.” Before he went “scientific” with his socialism, Karl Marx described production in artisanal, even Romantic terms. If I produce “in a human manner,” Marx mused in his little-read “Comments on James Mill” (1844), I create something that bears the imprint of “my individuality and its peculiarity”; I experience the delight of satisfying your need; my personality is “confirmed both in your thought and your love”; and I realize “my own essence, my human, my communal essence.” The end, or telos, of work here is not only the production of an object for use; it is also the formation of a good human life through, in part, the cultivation of character in production.
That’s why Pugh considers the provision of connective labor to be “the last human job.” Unfortunately, even that is now on the line, as employers, policymakers, and engineers attempt to extend what she dubs “the automation frontier,” the ever-shifting line of demarcation separating labor that can’t be automated from labor that can. Driven either by profits and capital accumulation or by the fiscal mantra of “austerity,” corporations and government agencies that employ connective workers are increasingly taking “the central insights of Fordist management”—measurement, efficiency, and productivity, the holy trinity of instrumental reason—and applying them to connective labor. Displacing the artisanal acumen of traditional caring labor, the industrial arsenal of connective automation involves a battery of metrics, data analytics, and outcome assessments enforced on workers and their clients. It’s the Taylorization of connection: Like earlier managerial drives to de-skill artisans and confiscate their prowess—to put the workman’s brain under the manager’s cap, to flip Big Bill Haywood’s idea—the industrialization of emotional intelligence aims to expropriate talent, atomize it into discrete tasks, and then embody it in technology. If Wall Street and Silicon Valley are successful, the “magic” and “grace” of artisanal connection will be disenchanted and automated.
Pugh documents how the industrialization of connection is already underway. AI now provides kindergarten instruction, couples counseling, medical advice, and policing. (The last is especially troubling, as the algorithms often reflect racial bias.) In one San Francisco school where AI has been eagerly embraced, apps have taken over instructional work once performed by teachers; subjects have been reconceived as “skill sets” while teaching has been recast as “content delivery.” (This augurs a broader reconstruction of intellectual life in terms of computation and expertise.) Many hospital chaplains must now record their conversations as “units of service.” “Simon,” a disgruntled primary care physician, complains that the introduction of “electronic health records” isn’t driven so much by care as by the need for tabulation and billing—helping “the system procure more money,” he tells Pugh bitterly. Meanwhile, “scripting,” more and more, supplants the impromptu work of connection. Armed with manuals, checklists, and templates, therapists, hospital personnel, and other connective professionals are increasingly told what to ask, how to respond, and to whom they report what they hear. At the same time, “counting”—a phalanx of numerical data analytics—invades connective relationships in order to gather information for insurance companies, administrators, and robotics engineers. And since “counting” is always about more—people and dollars, that is—connective workers experience a twenty-first-century version of the speedup, as the servicing of more client-widgets per hour entails ever-greater time compression. As Pugh recognizes, counting is “a human language of power, used by some people to make other people move.”
Who wields this power? The bureaucrats, tech bros, and financiers who champion automated connection are, to judge from Pugh’s interviews, an insipid and dismissive lot, oblivious to and even proud of the creative destruction their work will wreak. Wall Street and Silicon Valley are epicenters of the toniest nihilism. Their conception of human relationships is cluelessly instrumentalist: Connective work is, in their view, “engine grease” that merely facilitates the “real” work of production. The new mandarins of artificial intelligence are dangerously enchanted by the idol of metrics. Beguiled by their own algorithms, they “prioritize metrics even in the face of uncertainty about what is being measured, whether it is measurable, and the impact of such measurement.” Among many advancing “the automation frontier,” there’s a barely concealed contempt for human beings. As one venture capitalist muses, people “are interchangeable and not very mysterious, with behavior reducible to sixty-five steps.” Indeed, one technologist envisions the brave new world of cyber-connection as one in which we fleshly plebeians will have to choose whether we want to be “pets or livestock.”
The impact of automation on connective labor has been, in Pugh’s telling, catastrophic for the most part. She grants that one real advantage of standardization is greater access to services for formerly marginalized communities—the “better than nothing” argument for automated connection. But the regimentation of connection undermines professional autonomy, erodes creativity, turns clients into commodified objects, and eventually disheartens both caregivers and patients. As Pugh admits, the “better than nothing” stance is both condescending and politically disabling, as automating services marks a concession to the realities of accumulation and austerity. Rather than ask how connective labor might best be done with more resources, it’s easier to placate shareholders and taxpayers by introducing mechanization. The problems advocates of automation cite as reasons to turn to AI—especially burnout from time compression—are, Pugh maintains, the result of labor conditions and practices mandated by scarcity.
It’s on these political questions that I fear Pugh comes up rather short. To be fair, she calls for a “social movement for connection” that brings together providers and consumers to fight for higher pay, less pressured working conditions, and more state funding for connective services. Yet while she clearly sees that workers need to disrupt the new conformities enforced by corporate capital and its technical and managerial stewards, she never once mentions labor unions as participants in the construction of a new “social architecture”—a testament, I’m sorry to say, to the impoverishment of the contemporary liberal political imagination. At the same time, Pugh succumbs, in her way, to a rhetoric of inexorability that drapes acquiescence in the raiment of destiny.
If we truly value ourselves—if we truly love the finite, vulnerable beings that we are—then the fight is for a future that is human, let alone humane. The drive to automate even the most intimate of human connections reflects one of the more insidious currents of our day: the desire to enter a prosthetic sublime, shorn of all the ineptitude and mortality of our condition. If we continue to make the work of connection a matter of data and algorithms—from the arduous work of therapy to finding romance on dating apps—we would certainly make our lives more rational, streamlined, and efficient. But if Pugh and her connective workers are right, we would also forfeit moments of “magic,” communion, grace, and love—experiences that open us up to the boundless and the ineffable. Perhaps, as those terms suggest, we defend the human best when we recall what is divine about ourselves.