Michael ‘Six’ Silberman works as a postdoctoral researcher in the iManage Project at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at the University of Oxford.

From October 2020 to May 2022 Silberman was a software engineer on staff at Organise Platform, a London-based social enterprise that aims to give people the tools, networks, and confidence to win positive change at work.

Between 2015 and September 2020 Silberman worked in the Crowdsourcing Project at IG Metall, the trade union in the German manufacturing sector. Silberman’s work at IG Metall focused on worker organizing, public communication, research coordination, and policy advocacy around the rights of workers on digital labor platforms. In this capacity Silberman provided empirical and legislative inputs to policymakers in national governments in Europe and North America, in the European Union institutions in Brussels, and in the United Nations system, and was a founding member of the FairTube nonprofit organization (FairTube e. V.).

In 2008 Silberman cofounded Turkopticon, a client reputation system used by workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk, with Lilly Irani. Silberman was lead developer of Turkopticon from 2008 to 2020.

Between 2009 and 2021, Silberman contributed to peer-reviewed research on environmental issues in information technology, the working conditions and rights of workers on digital labor platforms, and ecological economics.

Research and practical work to which Silberman has contributed has been covered in English-language media outlets including Wired, Vox, Vice, New York Magazine, the London Review of Books, Bloomberg, Forbes, CNBC, The Verge, and MIT Technology Review, as well as venues in German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish.

Silberman holds a PhD in Information and Computer Sciences from the University of California at Irvine.