So apparently I missed an interesting service that’s been around for two year now, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. What’s supposed to be interesting about it is the ability to code a human labor market into software, and that is interesting mostly because it seems to be a technical veneer for bizarre (pun intended) human labor relations. The jobs are supposed to be very simple (what color are these shoes?) and are mostly paid just pennies. It’s like an extreme micro form of badly paid contract labor.

This Salon article uses a number of examples of people who are “turkers” (workers for mechanical turk) just as something “fun” to do in their spare time not as an actual job. I doubt that’s the full story.

Beyond what this site means/says about work in the 21st century I was also interested in the site because I could really use this kind of service. In a perfect world I’d have funding to pay undergraduates a decent wage to transcribe my research interviews, but mechanical turk is quite tempting for this kind of task in the real world. But is it the kind of thing I want to participate in?

The system obscures the origin of the work, how much of your money goes to the actual performer of the work (Amazon’s fee is 10% but there may be brokers on the other end), and all the basics of how the sausage is made. It would be easy to assume that the transcriber is just some bored commuter rather than someone who actually needs the money, perhaps working for someone who has the technical means to contract out the work.