Hidden beneath the surface of the web, lost in our wrong-headed debates about AI, a new menace is looming. Based on her book of the same name, Mary L. Gray’s deep research offers a necessary and revelatory exposé of the invisible human workforce that powers the web—and that foreshadows the true future of work. This talk unveils how services delivered by tech and information service companies, like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Uber, can only function smoothly thanks to the judgment and experience of a vast, invisible human labor force. These people doing “ghost work” make the internet seem smart. They perform high-tech piecework: flagging X-rated content, proofreading, designing engine parts, and much more. There are no labor laws to govern this kind of work, and these latter-day assembly lines draw in—and all too often overwork and underpay—a surprisingly diverse range of workers: harried young mothers, professionals forced into early retirement, recent grads who can’t get a toehold on the traditional employment ladder, and minorities shut out of the jobs they want. Mary shows how workers, employers, and society at large can ensure that this new kind of work creates opportunity—rather than misery—for those who do it.

As social media and other tech companies face serious ethical criticism—about privacy, algorithmic bias, emotional manipulation, and other concerns—this talk offers a new "human data research" paradigm for technology's next wave of social worlds. Most of these "ethical dilemmas" arise not because of bad-intentioned actors, but because methods of investigation and innovation are pushed to capacity and failing us. For instance, traditional principles of human subject research aren't suited for online environments today, which are at once familiar software (like a spreadsheet), but also controlled settings (like a lab) and deeply social and dynamic (like a backyard BBQ). In this talk, Mary L. Gray shares that the path forward isn't in listing an abstract set of principles but hammering out a new, shared course of action that seeks to respect the rights/freedoms of individuals and society in these new online environments. Researchers and industry need to earn the public's trust in order to protect their own future as investigators of the human experience.

In this talk based on her research and books on queer culture, Mary L. Gray provides a fascinating and often surprising look at the contours of gay life beyond the big city. She illustrates that, against a backdrop of an increasingly impoverished and privatized rural America, LGBTQ+ youth and their allies visibly and often vibrantly work the boundaries of the public spaces available to them, whether in their high schools, public libraries, town hall meetings, churches, or through websites. This important research shows that rural LGBTQ+ youth explore and carve out online spaces to fashion their emerging queer identities. Their triumphs and travails defy clear distinctions often drawn between online and offline experiences of identity, fundamentally redefining our understanding of the term queer visibility’ and its political stakes. Mary combines ethnographic insight with incisive cultural critique, engaging with some of the biggest issues facing both queer studies and media scholarship.