Working for Pennies
Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a web service that Amazon originally developed for internal use before making it freely available in 2005. The concept behind it is interesting enough, since it provides a platform that developers can use to generate data for their own web-driven applications, based on the concept of crowdsourcing, in which a large number of people all work to complete a project, not unlike ants or bees.
Crowdsourcing was hot in 2005 and Mechanical Turk accordingly experienced a brief moment of geek fame, but not much has been heard of it since. In fact, I'd forgotten all about it until recently stumbling across the Ten Thousand Cents project. The work of Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima, this involved 10,000 people signing up as Workers on the Mechanical Turk site and using a simple graphics tool to draw their tiny fragment of a $100 dollar bill; that is to say, 1/10,000th of it. Their reward? One cent and the chance to participate in a somewhat cool project.
Gathering all the contributions required just five months, with the result now displayed as a video in which all ten thousand bits are drawn simultaneously. Posters of the finished bill can also be purchased (for $100, naturally), with proceeds going to the One Laptop Per Child project, designed to "empower the children of developing countries." The authors claim that "The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, "crowdsourcing," "virtual economies," and digital reproduction." Perhaps the choice of charity was also meant to draw attention to a world with an insatiable hunger for the cheap labor of developing countries, in which people are increasingly relegated to performing mechanical, distributed tasks for little reward. Will those cheap laptops thus "empower" them? Or simply serve to enslave them that much faster?
In any case, hats off to Koblin and Kawashima for reminding us about the Mechanical Turk, locked in perpetual beta, as well as the processing.org site, which they used along with Adobe After Effects and Flash.
Chris Dickman
Graphics.com | Also blogging on Photos.com
Gathering all the contributions required just five months, with the result now displayed as a video in which all ten thousand bits are drawn simultaneously. Posters of the finished bill can also be purchased (for $100, naturally), with proceeds going to the One Laptop Per Child project, designed to "empower the children of developing countries." The authors claim that "The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, "crowdsourcing," "virtual economies," and digital reproduction." Perhaps the choice of charity was also meant to draw attention to a world with an insatiable hunger for the cheap labor of developing countries, in which people are increasingly relegated to performing mechanical, distributed tasks for little reward. Will those cheap laptops thus "empower" them? Or simply serve to enslave them that much faster?
In any case, hats off to Koblin and Kawashima for reminding us about the Mechanical Turk, locked in perpetual beta, as well as the processing.org site, which they used along with Adobe After Effects and Flash.
Chris Dickman
Graphics.com | Also blogging on Photos.com
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