Invisible: Click Workers

On the other side of our smartphones is a team of underpaid people out to cater to our every whim come rain or shine. But they aren't employees, even if they work for apps like Uber Eats for 60 hours or more.

Search engines understand us better than anyone and happiness is just one click away. But no machine is yet capable of learning on its own and reasoning like a human being. Real people are behind 'machine' learning.

Beheadings, sexual assaults of the worst kind, terrorism, violence against women. The internet can be a very dark place where the worst of humanity's misdeeds get posted and shared across social media. That's where the platform's gatekeepers come in: moderators who filter through and take down horrific content to protect users from seeing it. But who protects the protectors?

What does the modern gig economy mean for society as a whole? Sociologist Antonio Casilli gives us the overall context, and some reasons to hope that things can get better.