Tired of journalism’s glamour and prestige, I decided to take a
second job last week. I went to Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk website—a
sort of virtual job fair matching thousands of businesses and online
workers—and got a microtasking gig. It didn’t take long. I filled out a
few forms, proved I was a live, human being with a functional email
address, and Amazon put me to work. My first assignment was for an
employer called “CrowdSource” and the task was to type a provided search
term into Google, click on the first result, and copy that page’s URL
into my work page.
I
have no idea what function this job could possibly serve, except to
help someone game, or learn to game, the Google search algorithm. But I
wasn’t getting paid to think. I was paid to type, click, copy, and
paste. I completed eight of these microtasks in less than two minutes. I
was paid 16 cents. Or rather, I will be paid 16 cents at some later
date—provided that CrowdSource turns out to be a legitimate operation
that pays its bills. Which, in the world of microtasking, is not a
guarantee.
Welcome to the digital economy.
There is a certain view of economics that regards Amazon’s Mechanical
Turk as both a utopian scheme and a vision of the future. Free-marketers
and libertarians will be awed by the spectacle of an untrammeled labor
market: A cavalcade of employers make available a wide variety of work.
The jobs and compensation are exhaustively defined. A multitude of
laborers examine this menu and decide which jobs appeal to them and
whether the compensation is adequate. No one is forced to take a job he
doesn’t like. No one gets tricked into a job he didn’t sign up for. In
the world of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, there is no employment
discrimination, none of the inefficiency and unfairness produced by
credentialing regimes, and no workplace politics. Work is reduced to its
purest components and as a result, opportunities for both employers and
employees are increased. If you were sketching a graph of social
utility, the Mechanical Turk sends a line asymptotically to the ceiling.
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