We know this isn’t the place to begin but we begin anyway. With polyester shirts stacked high in baskets, sold for less than the cost of a midday coffee, and hands. So many hands. In a factory in Dhaka, in a server room in Nairobi, the thread and the tag and the tap and the tag and the tick of someone else’s clock.
We pretend we do not know. But the tags itch. Not just on the skin. In the place between click and checkout. In the myth of free shipping. In the sponsored content that is, itself, the content.
Meanwhile: the sun bear types quietly on a borrowed keyboard.
The sun bear looks a lot like me and you: big paws, slicked back fur, a big sun patch on his chest. But a lot unlike me and you because he is elsewhere, and elsewhere has a way of making us forget about each other.
How we both love starfruits and long walks on the white sand beach, how our nails need trimming, how we need heat lamps in our enclosures.
From a distance, his paws seem hand-like, like ours.
~
In a home we will never visit, a woman labels a thousand images of stop signs. Her children nap. Or don’t. Her voice is measured in pay-per-click, the factory line now digital, dispersed. The lines she draws (bounding boxes) are meant to teach a machine to see. But who sees her?
A high schooler swipes through shorts on a sale app. A shirt made to last for one season or less. Data made to train for forever.
~
We are told these are choices. That buying the ethically made linen pants is a revolution. That clicking the fair-wage checkbox changes the machine. But the same factories sew the threads. The same workers work. The only variable is who gets the email receipt.
When we order a hoodie at midnight, someone wakes up at 3 a.m. to annotate a field of corn. Not the corn. The shadow. The machine wants to learn what is corn and what is not. So it needs her to draw the nots.
The sun bear is still typing. He is paid in coupons. Maybe exposure. His hands hurt.
~
Fast fashion and data labor are not so different. Both make use of the dream. The girl who dreams of being a designer ends up checking for broken zippers. The boy who dreams of building AI becomes a quality control specialist on a contract with no benefits.
We call it the gig economy. We mean: replaceable. We mean: disassembled. We mean: someone else will do it for cheaper, so long as we keep the box checked.
When did every shirt become a metaphor? When did every dataset become a poem?
~
The ethical dilemmas unravel. Do we blame the wearer or the wearer’s wallet? Do we blame the annotator or the internet cafe?
In the time it takes to click Buy Now, a thousand choices are made on our behalf.
Someone opens a spreadsheet. Someone closes a window. A child learns what a bounding box is.
~
Back to the sun bear. His tie is crooked. His back aches. He has labeled every image of a bear for the last eighteen hours. They all look like him.
He knows this. But he labels them anyway.
This one: bear. This one: not-bear. This one: ambiguous.
He wonders what the algorithm will decide.
He wonders if it will learn to see him.
~
Later, someone in marketing will say we listened. That they sourced the cotton from better fields. That they paid the labelers a cent more per hour.
We will wear this as a kind of comfort.
Meanwhile: the warehouse door opens. The server farm hums. Somewhere, another sun bear begins their shift.
And in the stillness between stanzas, the price of the dress goes up by a dollar.
It still itches.
It always will.
