“Mm.”
Colin had a vague idea of what AI was. There was the bit at the top of Google now that wrote out an answer to your question before the proper search results, and he’d used it the other week to work out how long to roast a leg of lamb. So Diwa did things that helped the AI and made a lot of money out of it. He nodded along and kept listening.
“For the first few years we were just working with dashcam footage for training self-driving cars. The teams went through videos and images of cars and pedestrians and stop signs, and marked things up. Put little boxes around signs, or other cars on the road. Telling the AI what it was ‘looking’ at, basically. On the side we had a bunch of smaller gigs. Like, we did a contract once that was just about tagging types of freshwater fish. We got millions of pictures of bass and pike and whatever. My teams would go through all of them and label them. They had a Slack channel for sharing pics of the weirdest looking ones.”
Colin had no idea what Slack was. He kept his shoulder against Diwa’s anyway, and continued to listen because that was what the alpha needed right now.
“Then, after ChatGPT hit the mainstream around 2022, the labs pivoted to language models. They needed a different kind of training. They needed someone to look at every awful thing humans had ever put on the internet and tag it, so the model could learn what not to repeat back. It’s called content moderation. The first contract came in and I flew to Manila to brief the operations lead, and she read the document and told me, sir, this is not the same as the cars or the fish pictures.”
“I told her that we’d build up the support the teams would need. We’d hire a counsellor. It was an eighteen-million-dollar contract over two years, I told her. At that point, we were small enough that we couldn’t pass something like that up. Though now, that kind of contract is like change between the sofa cushions to us.” Diwa swallowed. “We hired one counsellor fortwo hundred and fortyworkers. People and Culture said the utilisation data supported that ratio. I signed off on the spreadsheet. On the pay. Three dollars an hour was significantly above Manila minimum wage, healthcare included, and I could say all of that out loud at a YC dinner with a clean conscience.”
“What’s YC?”
“Y Combinator. It’s a startup accelerator in San Francisco. You go through it for three months and they give you some money and a network, and at the end you do a pitch day. It’s where I got my first cheque for Orthos.” Diwa’s shoulders lifted in a shrug. “It’s also the kind of place where you can say you’re paying your staff ‘three dollars an hour’ and still have a room full of people clap.”
“Mate.”
“The data my staff were looking at for eight hours a day, in forty-five second clips, were abuse material. Depictions of violence. The kind of thing you don’t want to know exists. I’d never opened a single file. Not one, since the company started trading. I built my whole self-image around being the founder who set the strategy. I didn’t need to get my own hands dirty.”
Colin reached out and put his palm flat over the back of Diwa’s hand. It shook in his grip.
“Three months ago a former team lead in Manila walked out of our office with a memory stick. It ended up on a journalist’s desk at theFT. I got his email while I was on a flight to Singapore. He’d sent me a list of data categories he wanted me to comment on, and I got off the plane, turned round, and flewstraight back to Manila. The company lawyer met me there. We sat in a verification room for six hours and I made myself look at all of it.”
“There was a video,” Diwa said, and his voice had gone smaller. “It was of a kitchen. The Formica was yellow. There was a radio on, some pop song I half knew, and there was a woman screaming somewhere off camera. That’s the one my brain plays back at night. The radio is the bit that gets me. Just that stupid fucking song that I’d sung along with in my car lots of times, being drowned out by the screaming…” He stopped. He took a breath and let it out through his teeth. “I haven’t slept properly since.”
“That sounds rough,” Colin said quietly.
“And then I went home. Our housekeeper put me to bed. I slept for twelve hours and woke up to find my mother sitting in the chair by the window with a printout in her lap. She handed it to me without a word.The New Hacienda, eleven thousand words, by Maria Lucia de la Vega. She’s a development economist, a really fucking good one. She’d written a whole article about the ‘tech founder type’. The Stanford boy who’d come back with an idea about the Global South as a labour market, perpetuating inequality in the name of technological progress. She didn’t name me directly. She didn’t have to.”
“Your own mother did that to you?”
“She’d been working on it for months, but theFTbeat her to the punch. She compared companies like Orthos to the haciendas, the old colonial sugar estates in the Philippines. Workers bonded by debt to a landowner who never had to look at the cane fields.” His mouth twisted into something that was trying to be a smile and failing. “I read it three times sitting up in bed. We haven’t spoken since. I remember the ending, Colin…”
“In these digital times, extraction does not require a mine. It requires only that the value taken exceeds the value returned,and that the taking happens somewhere the founder does not have to look.”
Colin gave Diwa’s hand a squeeze.
“The woman in the café was right,” Diwa said. “That’s the funny part. She was completely right.”
“Don’t do that,” Colin said. “No matter what you did, she emptied a bowl of pasta over a man’s head in a public room and screamed at him while he sat there, and there’s no version of that where I’m going to just nod my head and say fair enough. You can take whatever else she said and chew on it later, in your own time. But listen to me now, you didn’t deserve that, Diwa. Tell me you understand that.”
Diwa shook his head.
Colin leaned forward across the kitchen island and caught Diwa’s chin between his thumb and forefinger, turning his face until Diwa had nowhere to look but back at him. “No. None of that. You’re going to say it back to me, Diwa, because I’m not letting you sit there and decide you had it coming. You didn’t. Say it.”
“I didn’t deserve that…”
Colin gave his hand a squeeze. “Right,” he said. “I’m going to put the kettle on. You’re going to sit there and you’re going to drink whatever I put in front of you, and then I’m going to sort you out a clean shirt from upstairs. After that we’ll see where we are.”
He waited until Diwa moved his head in a jerky nod, and only then did he get up and go to find where this man kept his teabags.
Chapter Nine
Theytalked through the night about nothing at all.
Colin couldn’t have said how they’d ended up on the sofa, only that at some point Diwa had put a film on, something American with a man and a woman in a kitchen who kept misunderstanding each other, and neither of them had watched a minute of it. The television was perched on a side table that wobbled when anyone walked past, because the proper unit hadn’t been delivered yet. The picture juddered every so often when a lorry went past on Ledbury Road.
They lay along the length of the sofa facing each other, Diwa with his back against the armrest and Colin with his head propped on a cushion at the other end. Their feet had ended up tangled in the middle, Diwa’s bare and Colin’s still in his work socks because he hadn’t quite been ready to take them off in another man’s house.
