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The Data Workers’ Inquiry » Bot Populi

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Data work refers to an essential occupation of digital capitalism that amounts to between 4.4% and 12.5% of the global labor force. The workers receive low wages for occupations that involve annotation, tagging, and labelling of data, as well as debugging, correcting, and evaluating algorithmic and AI solutions. Requesters for data work are very diverse, which is why scholars distinguish between three subtypes in the AI development pipeline—AI preparation, AI impersonation, and AI verification—and content moderation, where workers check if user-generated content on social media platforms adheres to pre-defined guidelines. The different tasks associated with data work are performed in two main settings, either workers are hired on digital platforms such as “Remotasks”, executing tasks paid by piece with rates set by the requesters soliciting the work or as employees of Business Process Outsourcing firms (BPOs), subcontractors that profit from offering data work as a provision of service

The Data Workers’ Inquiry >> Bot Populi 29 April 2025 | 7 min read The Data Workers’ Inquiry Lessons learned from the core team By Laurenz Sachenbacher Summary In 1880, Karl Marx initiated the Workers’ Inquiry, a novel and unprecedented research project, inviting industrial workers to participate in producing first-hand accounts of the capitalist system and their place within it. The ‘Data Worker’s Inquiry’ is a renewal of this project for the age of AI. Laurenz Sachenbacher reflects on the conjunction that motivated this undertaking, and the critical insights that have emerged from its first

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