A century ago, the industrial revolution led to new manufacturing processes that utilized assembly lines. Workers repeated small tasks all day long, in order to speed up the assembly process. A sense of alienation was the result of this, perhaps beautifully and poetically resulting in Franz Kafka’s most famous story: The Metamorphosis.

Today we have become sorting factories, swiping at screens in order to like or dislike, to accept or reject. We prefer not to consider that we are also helping algorithms figure out our preferences so we can be shown highly targeted advertisements and that we are helping to improve AI. We may not want to acknowledge it, but we are working, for free, for a new type of industry.

What strikes me is the similarity of repetitive movement. A century apart, something similar is happening.