Discarded Labor:: Countervisualities for Representing AI Integration in Essential Work

This pictorial critically explores the role of visual media representations in the deployment of automated and artificially intelligent (AI) technologies within essential work sectors. We draw on an exhaustive review of local and national newspaper articles about automation in two waste labor industries (cleaning and recycling) over the last five years. We highlight a set of common visual tropes and move to challenge these representations by taking up the lens of countervisuality. Our analysis reveals that press photographs tend to focus on machines and the decision-makers who champion them, overlooking the work that it takes to integrate technology on the ground. Through our countervisuals, we depict the extensive efforts of waste workers to maintain AI technologies, and their potential for surveillance. Through visualizing under-recognized forms of labor that come after the design process ends, we highlight how an outsized emphasis on invention ignores waste workers’ expertise and needs over time.