• De la subcontratar - Singular Papers
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De la subcontratar

De la subcontratar

Nick Thurston

Low stock: 10 left

€12,00 EUR
€12,00 EUR
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Spain: €3,50
De la Subcontratar is a collection of poems about computational capitalism, each written by an underpaid worker subcontracted through Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk service.

It has been 10 years since Nick Thurston first published this book. In 2013, few people talked about precarious worker marketplaces, and even less about AI chatbots. Yet, like any new tool to explore, a few people were already using Amazon Mechanical Turk for artistic purposes—without questioning the institutional cruelty of the algorithm. The result of this book, though sweet, presents a harsh critique of systems designed to produce more and pay less.

The collection is organized by production cost and repurposes metadata on each writer's efficiency to generate computer-based typographic embellishments. These one hundred poems are placed between two recently commissioned essays; the entire book is filled with references to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Wolfgang von Kempelen, and the emerging iconography of cloud-based life.

The book includes a foreword (seemingly by McKenzie Wark), though it was actually subcontracted to a ghostwriter from Lahore, Pakistan, for seventy-five dollars through Freelancer.com.

The Spanish translation is by Google Translator and cost 0 euros and a few cookies.

Technical Details
Year: 2019
Language: Spanish (translated by Google Translate)
Format: 20 x 13 cm
Pages: 145
Type: Softcover
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This product is designed and sold by — No Libros

Country — Spain

Shipping information — Spain: €3,50

About — We are an independent publishing house that was born in 2018 in Barcelona. No Libros is a reflection on the excess and overproduction of books and texts, the saturation of publications that has occurred in the last decade. It reflects on quality, the current need to produce more, and the advocacy for sharing, recycling, quoting, duplicating, imitating, pirating, and hacking. In the face of large bookstore chains, distributors that increasingly demand higher percentages, print-on-demand (PoD), poet robots, Amazon Mechanical Turk, ChatGPT, the precarity of the market, and interconnected systems that make designers, typographers, publishers, or even writers less necessary, experimental publications, amateur graphics, the supply of paper, and the rescue of artisanal printing processes are gaining importance. No Libros is a slow, tired publishing house, doing the best it can. Our project is collaborative. We seek original, critical content that pushes the boundaries of text and image, resulting in unique works, primarily from Latin authors.

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