Crowdsourcing as a Declaration of Class War

So you’ve lost your job, maybe even your career or livelihood, and maybe even your home. But don’t fret: your suffering is helping to usher in the era of mass collaboration.

Jeff Howe, who coined the term and literally wrote the book on crowdsourcing, suggests we look toward Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s platform for unskilled, ill-paid labour:

In early 2007, Mechanical Turk’s success was anything but assured. Companies seemed unwilling to experiment with it, and the pool of ‘Turkers’ (the people who accept these menial assignments) looked to be a diminishing resource. Then a cottage industry of third-party firms sprung up specializing in helping companies exploit the service and filtering out the inevitable low-quality responses. Add in a recession, and the service has blossomed into a 200,000-person strong workforce.

His point is that “our current economic downturn plays a role” in the proliferation, or mainstreaming, of crowdsourcing. “If crowdsourcing runs on people’s ‘spare cycles’ — their downtime not claimed by work or family obligations — that quantity is now in surplus.”

You losing your job is great news for the proliferation of crowdsourcing. Now you have more time to perform “simple, rote tasks like tagging images, transcribing audio materials, or culling records from online databases.”

While accurate, only the most detached, morally-bankrupt apologist could view such a development as a ‘success.’ The ‘blossoming’ of Mechanical Turk, a platform that literally pays pennies for unskilled, repetitive labour, can provide no comfort and no consolation to those who lost their jobs, their homes, and their livelihoods to gambles taken by bankers, executives, and other inept, irresponsible casino-capitalists.

In this period of foreclosures, high unemployment rates, and unprecedented levels of wealth concentrated in so few hands, the proliferation of crowdsourcing should not be celebrated as the dawning of a new, post-industrial age, but condemned as a declaration of class war issued by the winning side.