Theses on the Philosophy of History

In 1770, at Vienna’s Schönbrunn palace, Wolfgang von Kempelen unveiled his latest creation. Before a crowd at the Habsburg court, von Kempelen presented the Schachtürke, a bulky contraption out of which rose the life-sized torso and head of a turbaned “Turk.” Von Kempelen began by opening the doors of the box, revealing a warren of gears and cogs, allowing observers to see right through to the other side. Then, the game began: With a volunteer to challenge it, the Turk could play an aggressive game of chess—and more often than not win. The Turk was not only a marvel of engineering, but seemed to have a mind of its own as well. The audience was astounded. It wasn’t until decades later that the truth came out: The Turk was a hoax. This miracle invention was in fact no more than an uncomfortable cabin that a small chess master climbed into before each performance. The supposedly autonomous machine still required human hands to operate, out of sight. It is in this lineage that the multinational tech giant Amazon created their own “Turk”: Amazon Mechanical Turk is a service that allows “requesters” to crowdsource rote work that is cheaper or faster for humans to do than for software. If you want your survey data to be quickly input, if you want a tranche of images to be sorted and categorized, if you want a spreadsheet to be cleaned up, you can turn to mturk.com to create a job that allows people from over 49 countries to take on. The benefits of such an arrangement are clear for the “requesters” who use the service: They can quickly find workers willing to do digital work for rock-bottom rates in the largely unregulated digital sphere and without anything as antiquated as an employment contract. The draw for the workers, who euphemistically call themselves “turks,” is less clear, as the pay for jobs on the service is paltry. They remain invisible and anonymous, identifiable to “requesters” only through a string of numbers and letters that can be used to “block” a worker or view their job completion statistics.

If you wanted to hear from the workers of MTurk, you would have to be creative—the site forbids jobs that reveal personal information. You might create a “job” asking the workers where they are from. You might ask them for a photo of their work space, or a photo of their hands. You might ask them why they’re using the service, what “success” means to them, and what they would change about the world. The answers you get won’t all be truthful, but you can pay 75 cents or a dollar for these questions, and Amazon will add their fee.