DiPLab’s Antonio A. Casilli was invited to speak on Pillole di Eta Beta, the technology programme broadcast on Italy’s RAI Radio 3, in an episode that opens with a striking new phenomenon: in Los Angeles, people are being paid to simply live their lives on camera. Wearing body-mounted cameras and sensor bracelets, workers film themselves doing household chores. Thousands of US workers have already been recruited for this work, paid a few dozen dollars for hours of first-person footage that becomes raw material for the next generation of autonomous machines. For Casilli, what is unfolding in Los Angeles is the latest iteration of a phenomenon that has involved millions of workers across Asia, Africa, and Latin America for over a decade: training algorithms, labeling images, moderating content. A digital proletariat that the technology industry systematically erases from its triumphant narrative. And yet without it, none of its products would function. The episode also raises a harder question about users. Niantic, the company behind Pokémon Go, recently sold 30 billion video sequences, captured from players navigating the real world through augmented reality, to a robotics delivery company. Millions of people filmed streets, parks, and shops without knowing their footage would end up training autonomous delivery systems.

DiPLab’s Antonio A. Casilli was invited to launch the brand new Cyber Revolution podcast as the guest of its very first episode. In conversation with Hugo Pompougnac, president of the association Espaces Marx, he discusses DiPLab’s research on data workers, their working conditions, their forms of organisation, and their emerging strategies of resistance. The conversation situates this new workforce within a longer history: that of working-class antagonism. Because however novel the algorithms, the platforms, and the micro-task interfaces may seem, the dynamics at play (exploitation, invisibilization, collective struggle) are ones the labor movement has always known.

On 9 April 2026, DiPLab co-founder Antonio A. Casilli spoke at the Dénumérisons ! symposium at the French Assemblée Nationale, at the invitation of MP Lisa Belluco. The question brought to the floor: behind the apparent “freedom” and “intelligence” of digital platforms lies a workforce whose rights are systematically violated. Click workers, data labelers, content moderators, and micro-task workers who keep AI systems running are exposed to violent content, subject to constant algorithmic evaluation, and denied basic labor protections. Any serious effort to regulate AI must begin by putting the human beings who build it back at the center, making their labor visible, their rights enforceable, and their dignity non-negotiable.

di Paperino. Monologo raccolto da Fabrizio Melodia (*). A seguire un percorso – molto serio – di letture. Prendetela come una «scor-data» per i 90 anni di Donald Duck.   Mi chiamo Paperino. Sono un lavoratore. Forse mi conoscete. Forse avete riso delle mie disavventure, delle mie esplosioni di rabbia, dei miei fallimenti continui. Forse pensate che io sia semplicemente

Public debate about work tends to fixate on numbers: jobs created, jobs lost, jobs threatened by automation. Job Quality in a Turbulent Era, a new volume edited by Agnieszka Piasna and Janine Leschke (Edward Elgar Publishing), asks a harder question: what is actually happening to the quality of work? The full book is available in open access via Edward Elgar Publishing. DiPLab’s Antonio A. Casilli and Paola Tubaro contribute a chapter examining how AI and platformization are “fissuring” contemporary workplaces: fragmenting tasks, eroding protections, and reshaping job quality across sectors in ways that aggregate employment statistics simply cannot capture. The volume brings together a wide range of perspectives on how gender, precarity, migration, technology, and environmental conditions are reconfiguring work in an era of ongoing economic turbulence.

DiPLab’s Antonio A. Casilli recently appeared on Trenta Minuti (RAI Radio 3), alongside labour law scholar Valerio De Stefano. The conversation (in Italian) was prompted by a case that illustrates, with uncomfortable clarity, how AI rhetoric is being weaponised in the workplace. The multinational InvestCloud has announced the closure of its Italian branch, initiating collective redundancy proceedings. This is allowed by law if companies are downsizing in case of poor economic performance. But in 2024 the Italian branch recorded €500,000 in net profit and €9.9 million in revenue (up 63% on the previous year). This is not a company in crisis. So, to circumvent the law, the company employed the language of automation to justify a global reorganisation that has more to do with cost-cutting than with any technological necessity. The justification invoked: AI replacing jobs, which, in their eyes, is justified and inevitable. The broader debate about AI and employment, Casilli argues, is too often reduced to a single question: will it destroy jobs or create them? The more honest answer is this: the one certain effect of AI on work is to make it more precarious. The number of data workers does not shrink as AI expands — it grows. Behind every algorithm are human beings producing data, training models, labeling images, moderating content. Invisible, contingent, and essential. When asked for the most striking story encountered in his research, Casilli mentioned Kauna Malgwi. A former content moderator, she went on to establish the Digital Rights and Mental Health Initiative Africa, supporting the mental health of data workers exposed to traumatic content. Time magazine named her among the 100 most influential figures in AI. Her story is a reminder of what the industry prefers to forget: behind every AI system, there are workers made of flesh and blood.