Chapter Eight
A note before this one: there are discussions of the kind of videos that content moderators are paid to look at. Nothing is described in detail, but upsetting material is alluded to.
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Colin caught up to Diwa on the pavement and put a hand at the small of the alpha’s back.
Diwa didn’t shake him off. He kept walking, his breathing audible through his nose, a piece of pasta still stuck to the side of his neck.
Colin steered him round a buggy and across the zebra crossing.
The sauce was already drying tacky into the collar of Diwa’s shirt, and there was a smear of it down his back.
The yellow door came up on their left. Diwa fumbled for his keys in his pocket and got them on the second try, then stood with the bunch in his fist. His hand was shaking too hard to fit the key to the lock.
He tried again, and the key skittered off the brass and made a thin scratching sound across the plate.
Colin slid his hand from the small of Diwa’s back to his wrist, and held it there a moment until Diwa’s fingers loosened and let him take the keys. He found the right key by the wear on the head, fitted it into the lock, and pushed the door open.
“In you go.”
Diwa went. Colin followed and shut the door behind them.
Diwa was already pulling his jacket off in the hallway, then his shirt, peeling the wet cotton off his shoulders without bothering with the buttons.
The shirt landed on the floorboards with a wet slap.
He kept walking, kicking off his shoes towards the kitchen.
Colin set the keys down on the side table and went up the stairs.
The guest bathroom was the second door on the left.
He took a folded towel off the rail, the largest one he could see, and brought it back down with him.
By the time he came into the kitchen, Diwa had got his head under the cold tap at the sink and was rinsing the sauce out of his hair with both hands.
Water was running down his back in streaks.
Colin stood beside him at the counter and waited.
When Diwa straightened, he kept his eyes shut and groped for the worktop, water sluicing off his nose and chin. Colin shook the towel out and put it over his head.
He rubbed Diwa’s hair through the towel, brisk and unfussy, the way he’d dried the twins off after the bath when they were small.
Diwa stood very still under his hands, and let himself be tended to.
Colin worked round the back of his head and down to the nape, then brought the corner of the towel forward to wipe the water off his face.
He caught the drips at his jaw, and the bit running down the side of his neck where the pasta had been.
Then he stepped back and let the towel settle round Diwa’s shoulders.
“There you are,” Colin said. “All sorted.”
Diwa didn’t move out from under the towel. He sank down onto one of the bar stools at the kitchen island instead, elbows on the marble, the ends of the towel falling forward round his bare shoulders. His hair was sticking up in damp peaks.
Colin had never seen him sit still like that.
Whatever had been holding the man up all morning had gone out of him on the walk back. His shoulders had rounded in as if he were bracing against the world. There was still a fleck of tomato sauce caught at his hairline. Colin reached out and wiped it away.
Colin pulled out the stool beside Diwa and sat. Close, but not so close he was crowding the alpha in. He kept his hands flat on the marble where Diwa could see them.
“Whatever that woman was on about,” he said, “you didn’t deserve any of that.”
Diwa shook his head. The towel slipped off one shoulder and he didn’t catch it. His shoulders were trembling in the way Colin had learnt to spot in his own boys when they were holding something heavy in.
“You don’t even know, Colin.” His voice came out raw around the edges.
“So tell me.” Colin let his shoulder touch against Diwa’s. “Go on. I won’t even charge you a hundred quid for it.”
Diwa pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes, and Colin watched the towel slip another inch down his back. There was a pink scrape on his shoulder where the rim of the bowl had caught him on the way down. Colin made a note of it without saying anything. He’d clean it out for him later.
“I started Orthos Analytics when I was twenty-two,” Diwa said, finally, to the marble.
“Out of my dorm room in Stanford. The pitch was that AI needs training data and training data needs people, and people in the Philippines and Kenya and Pakistan would do it for way less than people in San Francisco. That was the whole idea. Stupid simple.”
“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 for two hundred and forty workers. 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 the FT.
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 flew straight 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 the FT beat 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.