A list of the most unpleasant works of the Victorian era has been triumphing on the networks for years. It is one of those texts with guaranteed success, because, at the same time that it causes us a shudder halfway between horror and disgust, it gives us that comforting sensation of living in healthier, more civilized times: there are the poor women who They hunted leeches using their own bodies as bait, the collectors who supplied canine excrement to tanners or the ‘resurrectionists’ who dug up corpses to sell them to medical schools.
Thank goodness we have evolved, right? In reality we have done it, above all, by making invisible those jobs that could make us uncomfortable. The American journalist Eyal Press analyzes in ‘Dirty Work’, published in Spain by Captain Swing, some occupations that plunge us into deep moral doubt, but that nevertheless sustain our way of life: they adhere to the classic formula of ‘it’s a dirty work, but someone has to do it’, to which we could add a distancer ‘as long as it’s not me’.
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The joystick soldiers
There are places like the Langley Anti-Terrorist Aerial Analysis Center (USA), whose staff sit in front of walls full of monitors: on their screens appear, for example, rural images of Afghanistan, captured by drones that fly over those places located thousands of miles away. of kilometers. Suddenly, someone identifies an alleged target in the image. And, 60 seconds later, a missile hits that point. War theorists maintained that this remote way of fighting constituted a liberation: “Distance and technology robbed war of its moral gravity,” Press explains, echoing these theses. But in reality, he has spoken to analysts who, in dreams, “mutilate and kill innocent people, their bodies dismembered, their faces twisted in agony.”
Many of us are not willing to give up our hamburger or chicken…, but perhaps we would consider it if we had to kill the animal. The meat industry, and more specifically the slaughterhouses, has become an obvious example of an activity that we consider essential but prefer not to see. Press recounts how, in the United States, poultry farms have become “immigrant work,” while chicken consumption has tripled in 60 years, and exposes the hypocritical attitude that leads employees to be viewed with rejection. of the slaughterhouses. In the North American country, only 19% of meat industry workers are white.
In recent years, a more critical view of technology companies has prevailed, although we continue to feed their reign with the hours we spend in front of our screens. However, we still pay little attention to the manufacturing process of those devices that fascinate us so much. Press focuses its interest on cobalt, an essential raw material in rechargeable batteries for computers, mobile phones and electric cars: more than half of this mineral is produced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the book takes us to the Kolwezi mines , where the ‘creuseurs’ lead a deplorable life: “They have shifts of between 12 and 14 hours a day, during which they work without gloves or masks, while breathing air full of toxic chemicals.” Many are children and “it is common for them to die” in landslides.
Press does not dedicate a section to social media content moderators, but they fit perfectly into the category: “Dirty work responds to a tacit mandate from ‘good people’, who refrain from asking too many questions because the results they he gets thanks to that job, he doesn’t completely dislike them,” the journalist argues. The case of the moderators has come to the fore because of the 184 employees of a Kenyan company, dedicated to eliminating violent posts from Facebook, who sued the firm. “My first video was a man committing suicide,” one of the workers told AFP, who according to his account has had to witness “more than a hundred beheadings,” in addition to rape, child pornography, animal abuse and other atrocities. Not even his families knew what they were exposed to: “I don’t want my children to know what I was doing,” said another former moderator. “I don’t even want you to imagine what I’ve seen.”
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