CONCEPT
Fauxtomation
Astra Taylor's term for systems appearing automated but actually dependent on hidden human labor—self-checkout kiosks staffed by unpaid customers, content moderation by underpaid Global South workers—the contemporary form of Cowan's eliminated-collaborator pattern.
Fauxtomation names the practice of disguising labor redistribution as labor elimination. Taylor coined the term in her 2018 Logic Magazine essay 'The Automation Charade' to describe technologies that transfer work from paid employees to unpaid users or low-paid invisible workers rather than eliminating work altogether. The self-checkout kiosk does not automate grocery scanning—it transfers that labor from a paid cashier to the customer, who performs it for free. The 'automated' content moderation system does not eliminate human review—it handles routine cases algorithmically and routes the most disturbing content to contract workers in the Philippines and Kenya earning poverty wages. The automation is fake in the sense that the human labor persists, but the fakery serves real economic functions: reducing visible labor costs, rendering remaining labor invisible, and maintaining the narrative that machines operate autonomously. Fauxtomation is the twenty-first-century version of the mechanism Cowan documented in the twentieth: labor-saving technology that saves the employer labor by transferring it to people with less power to refuse.
