The Cleaners
Hans Block & Moritz Riesweick
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The Cleaners concerns itself with the shadows working behind our screens; the undercurrent of toxic debris kept deliberately below the surface, and the exploited ‘content moderators’ employed to keep it there.
Reviewed at Doxa Film Festival, May 10th, 2018.
Running time: 88 MIN.
In the wake of the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the farcical trial of social media’s founding father Mark Zuckerberg, The Cleaners dives headfirst into already unsettled waters. This first time documentary from Hans Block and Moritz Riesweick has earned itself an impressive presence on the art-house festival scene, oozing neon aesthetics and crime-thriller suspense. Yet the films’ reception has been divisive, overwhelming viewers with hopelessness, terror, rage and resolution with seemingly equal vigour.
GUARDIAN ANGELS, GATEKEEPERS OR MODERN DAY SLAVES?
Perhaps The Cleaners‘ greatest triumph is how viscerally we feel the psychological trauma placed upon the shoulders of the so-called ‘content moderators’ as they click, silent and attentive, through the digital underworld of our social media platforms. Indeed, just as the litter pickers on the streets of Manilla sift through piles of garbage, dumped overseas by much of North America, thousands more sit in looming high-rise offices, attempting to sanitise the cyber refuse generated by Facebook, Twitter and Google users across the globe.
Whilst Block and Rieswieck’s investigations leave many questions dangling before us, unanswered and unsolvable, their critique here of the psychological and emotional toxicity to which these ‘content moderators’ are exposed, and in the absence of any real compensation or support, rings through with remarkable clarity. Email transcripts containing anonymous confessions from many of the workers imprint themselves across the screen with eerie sincerity, detailing the coercive conditions under which they work. One ex-employee jokes that, once ignorant to pornography, she became obsessed with the image of the penis, having to stare it on screen for hours every day, and in every kind of presentation imaginable. Quickly, however, the dark humour of early interviews such as these gives way to tragedy and disgust. We learn, for example, of the suicide of one young employee who requested a transfer from the department specializing in self-harm videos – his request was denied, and his body was found weeks later.
The gravity, then, of each decision, either to “ignore” or to “delete” – especially when guided only by a deficient, arbitrary and altogether reductive ‘code of practice’ – weighs heavily on each and every moderator, employed to function as a mechanical filter, not a sentient being. Yet, what might the alternative be? An automated intelligence system, programmed to control our flow of information and communication is surely no more desirable than total cyber liberation, where children could be exposed to videos of terror, murder and warfare?
This question alone, of how – or even if – to moderate online content could easily exceed the limits of an 88 minutes documentary, but The Cleaners opts for a more chaotic approach, weaving together a vast web of debate relating to our existence as a global, cyber community. On the one hand, this opens Block and Rieswieck up to the critique of superficiality; prioritising shock and spectacle at the expense of investigative depth. On the other hand, however, this overload of voices and narratives seems to both capture and embody the vast, overwhelming and irrepressible force within which we are all bound.
A still from The Cleaners by Moritz Riesewieck and Hans Block. Image courtesy of https://iffr.com/en/2018/films/the-cleaners
THE DIGITAL DOWNFALL OF DEMOCRACY
Technology is not neutral. The Cleaners treats this as simple fact, and asks instead what happens to democracy when it comes to rest upon a technological formula, designed by mathematicians and engineers towards the desired end of a successful business model. This formula, to which Facebook, Twitter and Google owe their billions, relies upon attention and thrives off provocation, whilst values such as truth and responsibility are left at the wayside. What’s more, as the latest Zuckerberg trials so tragically confirm, it depends upon the age old approach of ‘act now – ask for forgiveness later’, neglecting to establish ethical or moral guidelines that may prove financially inefficient.
The Cleaners, utilises snippets of squirming legal representatives under oath, spewing out empty promises relating to corporate responsibility and safeguarding practices, in the hopes of conveying what makes these internet giants such a slippery substance to contain. For whilst they may wear the disguise of a public utility, designed to meet our basic needs and to improve our quality of life, you need not look far beneath the surface to find yet another self-motivated big business, capable of more political sway than any single government.
Nowhere is this reality more devastating than in Mynamar, we are told, where Facebook functions as the source of information, regardless of whether or not what appears on a ‘news feed’ carries any truth value whatsoever. As videos, posts and pictures of the Rohingya people circulate contagiously, the forces driving their persecution – notably ignorance and fear – are amplified tenfold, proving absolutely the material impact of algorithms, designed at a distance in plush, air-conditioned California offices.
FREE SPEECH, HATE SPEECH, WHOSE SPEECH?
By the films’ conclusion, the diverse avenues of exploration find at least a degree of continuity in the over-arching question of free speech within the context of a community larger than any one individual state on earth. Block and Riesweick’s sophisticated trajectory takes us from the semi-comic treatment of a young, liberal artist – whose depictions of Trump with a disproportionately small penis suffer the cull of the content moderators – to the hate speech of a violent, racist activist, able to freely promote his agenda to fellow internet users.
Herein lies the crucial tension in the film; between those who proclaim “what gives Facebook the right to filter what we see?”, and those who ask “how can Facebook allow the world to see this?”. Ultimately, the majority of us find reason in both, and certainty in neither. The Cleaners, if nothing else, captures this paralysis perfectly.
Is, then, the only answer to leave the system? To refuse to play the game? Certainly this documentary raises the possibility that in order to retain any kind of political, intellectual and social autonomy, the sacrifice of free, easy global communication might well be a necessary one. Alternatively, a range of voices continue to propose a decentralization of the power held by social media giants, and indeed platforms such as ‘Diaspora’ have tried. The sad reality, however, is that all too quickly these spaces, reliant upon communal responsibility, descend into amphitheatres for hate and terror.
Here, Block and Rieswieck leave us with more questions than answers, and more problems than solutions. Yet what it lacks in finality, The Cleaners more than makes up for in accessibility. The ways in which deliberately convoluted language relating to the technological systems and ‘safeguarding’ practices of social media corporations are dissected and translated here opens up a conversation we all need to be having.
Furthermore, in refusing to allow the gruesome, troubling details of this conversation the neglect they have been shown in the past, this film urges its viewers not to turn a blind eye, but to seek the truth. In doing so, perhaps ironically, The Cleaners poses a more definite threat to the power presently held by the architects of our cyber existence. It engages the cyber community itself as, simultaneously, human beings, each of whom has a responsibility to defend their basic right to freedom.