The old romantic warning not to trust a machine more than one’s own intuition has renewed urgency in the digital age. When Salvatore Vitale began working on the project ‘Death by GPS’ in 2022, he wanted to pursue the pitfalls of automation bias: those accidents where drivers blindly follow their GPS off bridges and cliffs. Gradually, Vitale’s focus became the human labour that delivers the illusion of automation in the first place: the people driving camera-equipped cars to populate Google Maps, the Amazon Mechanical Turks who complete online tasks for employers. ‘We believe that these systems are fully automated,’ Vitale told us, ‘but we’re not there yet.’
‘Death by GPS’ includes photography, text and video, all shot, filmed and composed in South Africa. Most of the material was created by freelancers Vitale hired on the online platform Upwork. Without giving them any specific direction, he requested the freelancers document their daily lives and working routine using video and photography. He offered an hourly wage of between $25 and $30. Although the job vacancies were geolocated in South Africa, soon he was receiving offers from freelancers willing to relocate from Switzerland, Italy, the UK and the United States. Such was the pull of a decent wage, even among Western countries.
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