Mechanical Turk, MTurk for short

I am having one of those horrid feelings--a queasiness in my gut--that's stemming from a recent rejection that I've felt. In trying to attain the qualifications to become a ContentGalore article writer I took their automated test. After completing the test the system congratulated me on attaining a score of -1.

What is a score of -1?

The test itself was not unlike my ACT and GRE exam sections, which tested my vocabulary. I did quite well on those. I always have done well with vocabulary. It's how I get by. ContentGalore and their Galore Article Writer Qualification test barred me from working on their HITs (Human Intelligence Task)--all of them. And I had a long string of highly successful sentence rewrites from one of their HIT creators, Todd Dickerson. To summarize, in trying to expand my ContentGalore qualifications to open up more sophisticated and higher paying HITs, I barred myself from doing any of their HITs. This is the source of my queasiness.

These issues always spin out the same way, and I find myself in the bend of a narrative pretzel. I have so many things to lay out, so many elements to discuss.

I entered the weekend with high hopes of finding freedom as a MTurker, a person who does very small information jobs for equally small sums of money. I rewrote more than one hundred sentences for Todd Dickerson. His form-letter 'thank yous' indicated that my work was accepted and encouraged me to continue working for him in hopes of receiving a bonus. With that HIT pool out of my reach, I'm stuck with a surplus of justification for this kind of work and no access to it. I had with some zeal jumped right into the MTurk worker pool, activated my account, and went to work. With equal zeal I used the same rationalization of the work into time and payment and figured that I could easily rewrite 500 sentences a day, make $20, and amass $100 a week for an additional $400 per month. That would have been just enough to keep me from feeling the pressure to find a job, sell myself, write my qualifications out, and compile my education and work experience into a cover letter narrative that uniquely addresses the employer. I thought for a brief moment that I could continue to while away the hours grading papers, virtually interacting with students, and do some info-sweatshop work and 'get by.' That little delusional information age fantasy has just been shattered by an equally information age qualification test with its cryptic -1 score.

I aced that test.

I know too much already. I knew what I was doing for Todd Dickerson. He was the face of a faceless operation. I was rewriting copy for gold farmers, those people who find exploits in video game environments to generate in-game wealth and then sell it to players of the game who are too lazy or enterprising to save it themselves. I was helping judge if sexual terminology was best categorized as 'gay,' 'incest,' or 'straight.' I was drawing squares around images in pictures that related to the key word below. I was adding my little human sweat to a faceless digital world that profits from the services it provides. I gave their service value by rewriting poorly translated sentences. I gave their service value by helping them better categorize words relating to sexual acts. I gave their service value by ensuring that their information wasn't simply a cut and paste job from a Wikipedia entry. I know too much because I realized who I was working for--the spammer and the smut peddler. I categorized shoes several times to 'wash my hands' of that work. I would consider myself the organic intellectual in this scheme, but given the realities of the information economy I'm too far removed from its machinery to effect any kind of change upon it. The scope of my actions are reduced to a quaint little interface. I can't even contact ContentGalore to let them know that I am, in fact, qualified to rewrite their sentences. But in its effort to shave fractions of pennies off of the cost of their information, the HIT providers rely on various mechanical means to judge completed HITs and assess MTurkers' qualifications. Only in this recursive information world could we be managed by an algorithm. Only in this interactive economy would grammatically correct sentences written by humans become a commodity, spawn a microfinanced labor market, and get regulated and run by algorithms. For example, the HIT providers often warn the worker that their HIT contributions are judged by a plagiarism algorithm, which measures whether or not a new sentence is more than 50% unique. That's hard to accomplish if I'm given a sentence, which is already 50% terminology that I'm required to leave in the sentence. I don't need to get into those details because I am reduced to a clever machine in order to beat it. There's no space for ethics or real action if all you're trying to do is satisfy the algorithm.

What is a mechanical turk? That was a curio that perhaps made many circuits around the royal courts of Europe and its city's major exhibitions. It was an automaton who played chess quite well. The automaton was dressed like a Turk perhaps to add some exotic appeal to the character. But in fact, this mechanical Turk was mere window dressing for hiding a human operator below the cabinet, underneath the chess board. There was a ghost in the machine. I'm one of the ghosts in this machine as well. Instead of visiting dignitaries, I've been reduced to one of many small tasks for which no software exists to complete. In my zeal to recover some dignity and find freedom in this microtransaction economy, I figured that if I could complete a unique sentence every 2.8 seconds consistently, I'd make $50 an hour. In fact, this rationalizing of labor and one's worth is the same rationalization that motivates the piece worker who gets paid by the task. It's a neat little system. Not only is the interface interactive but the rationale behind the work. The connection between labor and payment is so damn transparent that I motivate myself by the same rationale. Work faster, get paid more. So bloody simple. Having spent several years in academia believing that I'd test out of this economy I found myself stuck in limbo, without a PhD, engaging in this work, ironically engaged in the very thing that I watched emerge over my years in college, the very thing I studied. I considered myself a technology and society expert. With that fancy diploma and its Medieval heraldry in hand I could have been. But I'm not, and so I'm here talking to my information-age mirror--my blog--an invention, which was first discussed in a class I took my first year into my doctoral program. These are strange days. I've been kicked aside by an algorithm that I studied against, that I armed my intellect to critique.

Of course, upon finding myself rejected from my bread and butter in this information sweatshop, the unique sentence, I sought social support via Google. Google is like a wishing well. You project upon it your wishes, your fears, your love interests, your aimless boredom and it always produces a link that you follow. Upon tossing my coin into this info-age wishing well--how did i end up with a qualification of -1 with mturk?--I received several responses. I did find Turker nation, which is a discussion board dedicated to the many frustrations that others find with getting paid, earning and losing qualifications, HITs, and HIT providers. I also ended up reading a few book reviews about books unrelated to my enterprise. And finally, I stumbled upon the Institute for Distributed Creativity and one of its signature articles, "On MTurk, Some Examples of Exploitation." I read a little and followed a few links and there were some people I had met in graduate school, chiming in about the topic, flaunting their Marxism and penchant for cross-over engineering terms like 'ergodic.' I longed for home, those tumultuous but ultimately affirming years I spent slavishly devoted to academic studies, reading, and writing. All that is receding into my past much like my hairline.

Now I am sad that I will once again return to looking for a job whose qualifications will continually remind me how far afield I am, how unique of a snowflake I painted for myself academically, and how I lie to myself about the importance of what I learned. I'm the philosopher with the full belly who was afforded the time, comforts, and societal position to critique some of the elements of society that contributed to the largess that make possible the philosopher's situation. Reading a history of the mathematical thought that contributed to computing I recognized that Leibniz solved many problems but some he couldn't. He needed to eat. So he was resigned to finding royal sponsors and spent a good deal of his life doing genealogical work. I need to give up the ghost that I could wear a suit and tie, once again ironically, carry a briefcase and contribute my 'big brain' to some government sponsored project. I should only be so lucky to believe that Hollywood-style illusion of work. I should have taken that UPS job. I can move boxes for four hours a day, with weekends and holidays off.

I'm sad, dejected, and rejected. An employer writes words that don't hail me. A computer algorithm enlisted to measure uniqueness says 'no.' I lose some abstract qualification and apparently 'break' the test by garnering a -1. Above all, I have absolutely no clue how these decisions are made. I'm perfectly happy to write single sentences for which I will get paid. All of my sentences up until I found Mechanical Turk required much more of my time, my sweat, my effort, my frustration, my tears, my doubt, my pity--and they paid .00. I paid no mind getting paid .03, spending 10 seconds to rewrite a sentence. But I'll reiterate that this job is no longer available to me now that I have a -1 qualification.

There's two sides to this story.

I was fired by an algorithm, so what?

I was fired by an algorithm. This is hopeless.

That algorithm afforded me a moment's freedom from my own thought. I rewrote their sentences. I had enough context to do this, and all it required me to do was to use my vocabulary. I would improve my writing, I thought. I would hone my writing, I thought. I'd give my brain a workout, I thought. Now I'm barred from lifting these thinking weights for .03 a rep.

Add to this the fact that I'll soon find a letter in my inbox from the University of Phoenix, reminding me that feedback is late--the result of yet another algorithm.