"The book is far from dead: it’s returning in forms that few could ever have imagined."

At the New Yorker:

Amusing and titillating as these images are, it’s easy to forget that they’re the work of an army of invisible laborers—the Google hands. This is the subject of an art work by the Brooklyn-based artist Andrew Norman Wilson called “ScanOps.” The project began in 2007, when Wilson was contracted by a video-production company to work on the Google campus. He noted sharp divisions between the workers; one group, known as ScanOps, were sequestered in their own building. These were data-entry workers, the people to whom those mysterious hands belonged. Wilson became intrigued by them, and began filming them walking to and from their ten-hour shifts in silence. He was able to capture a few minutes of footage before Google security busted him. In a letter to his boss explaining his motives, Wilson remarked that most of the ScanOps workers were people of color. He wrote, “I’m interested in issues of class, race and labor, and so out of general curiosity, I wanted to ask these workers about their jobs.” In short order, he was fired.

And now pardon me while I go and click through to all of the links in the article: there are a WHOLE LOT OF THEM, and judging by the ones I've already looked at, the majority of them lead to some weirdly fascinating stuff.