About the Project

The CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is found throughout many websites. By challenging users to read a line of scrambled letters, identify crosswalks in an image, or some complete another task that is difficult for a computer to do, but comparatively trivial for a human user, a CAPTCHA verifies that the user is an actual human, and not software meant to interact maliciously with the website. This mundane and easily overlooked interface element is an important site where corporate interests and priorities act upon the people who encounter it. CAPTCHAs operate under the assumptions that difference can be detected and that it should be enforced. Because not all humans are able to solve a CAPTCHA, the test additionally enforces a boundary between humans and users.

Google’s reCAPTCHA, a widely used implementation of a CAPTCHA challenge, is a place where the relationship between a Web user and a Web platform is negotiated. Through this conflict, one version of what it means to be an ‘ideal’ Web user is constructed. While the test claims to distinguish between humans and computers, the fact remains that not all humans have the same ability to solve reCAPTCHA challenges. Yet to be able to access content or interact with a website – in effect, to become a user – we must successfully complete these challenges. In effect, the reCAPTCHA not only distinguishes between humans and computers, but also establishes which humans are considered authentic or desirable as users.

reCAPTCHAs and Accessibility

In an article published in Convergence, I analyze the discourses of Google’s reCAPTCHA and argue that this common interface element is a multi-faceted site of production where user labor is extracted every time they solve a reCAPTCHA. The products of this labor are threefold: (1) spam reduction, (2) artificial intelligence and machine learning training data and (3) an ideal of a normative web user. This last product is often overlooked but has widereaching implications. Users who solve reCAPTCHAs are producers but simultaneously are produced as users by the reCAPTCHA. The only humans who qualify as ‘authentic’ users are those who can perform this productive labor. Because Google’s reCAPTCHA operates as a site of invisible digital labor, this article works toward making such labor more visible so that users can become more aware of the work they are being asked to perform, and to what ends.

The handful of seconds that go into solving a reCAPTCHA can have important repercussions. The foundational premise of all CAPTCHAs is an assumption that there is a detectable difference between humans and computers. Yet, each challenge also defines and enforces differences between humans users – that is, between unacceptable and desirable users of a website and between people who can perform labor and those who cannot. While all computer technologies are experienced by individual people in different ways, a system’s affordances and functions will nevertheless delineate identities and prescribe certain modes of interaction (McNeil, 2019). As Ellen Rose (2003:7) explains, ‘the moment we sit down in front of a computer, we become enmeshed in a social network of assumptions and ideologies that constructs us not as autonomous and diverse entities existing within diverse social contexts but as a single entity: the User’. By distinguishing between humans and computers, each reCAPTCHA challenge is comparing an individual person to an idealized version of this singular ‘User’ entity. Because reCAPTCHAs are not experienced similarly by everyone who encounters them, this easily overlooked website element contributes to the construction of an ideal Web user.

There have been limited responses to these accessibility and usability problems, such as the development of audio-based CAPTCHA challenges. However, these alternatives tend to be a significantly worse user experience, requiring much more time and having a lower success rate for humans to solve (Lazar et al., 2012). Additionally, these audio CAPTCHAs still fail to accommodate people with intersectional disabilities, such as deaf-blind users (Wentz et al., 2017). There has been some initial work toward the development of CAPTCHA challenges with improved accessibility and usability, but these versions have yet to be widely implemented (Lazar et al., 2012). Google’s reCAPTCHA remains the dominant CAPTCHA used throughout the Web, and it has yet to incorporate these types of improvements.

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reCAPTCHAs and the "Becoming-User"

In one chapter of my dissertation, I will use a case study of Google’s reCAPTCHA and argue that the software is one element that can be located within other websites that works to construct an ideal Web user as a person who is able to perform productive labor by providing AI/ML training data. Yet by distinguishing between humans and computers, each reCAPTCHA challenge is comparing an individual person to an idealized version of this singular “User” entity. Because reCAPTCHAs are not experienced similarly by everyone who encounters them, this easily overlooked website element contributes to the construction of an ideal Web user which does not fully represent all people who use the Web on a regular basis. This chapter, then, clarifies how my understanding of the becoming-User provides a perspective on the power hierarchies of the internet. The inclusion of a reCAPTCHA on a page extends Google and Alphabet’s corporate interests into the online space of another website, which shows that the meaning of an ideal User varies from website to website and is continually being reshaped by various stakeholders along with individual people.

This chapter considers how a person becomes a User through mundane interactions with small interface elements within other websites. Where are the places that a person becomes a User? How is the subject-position of the becoming-User presented to individual people? To what extent does a person who uses the Web become aware of the ways that they are constructed as a User?