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Kristy Milland
University of Toronto
Introduction
“No one understands what we are doing – that is frustrating. I can say I work for Amazon, but that is not really true. Recently I told someone that I was ‘Turking’. They misunderstood me and thought I said I was twerking – you know, some dance. I had to say: No, I wasn’t twerking, I was Turking!”
“In an ideal world, what does a union do? Provide support for workers, stand up for workers rights and values, and support better working conditions. We have that all here at Turker Nation.”
This paper began as an inquiry into the value of digital communities and communication spaces for workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk). We focus on one digital discussion forum that supports Turkers, Turker Nation (Turkernation.com). We found that workers use Turker Nation in specific ways that augment the tools available to workers on the mTurk platform and that employing these tools transforms the experience of short-term digital work for Turkers. Workers use Turker Nation to structure time, learn how to build a Turker reputation, and socialize while working. In doing so, we argue that workers’ labor belies conventional class classification, such as white-collar and blue-collar labor, and instead lays the groundwork for how to structure future digital workplaces.
We begin by giving a thorough overview of both mTurk, the crowdsourcing website, and Turker Nation, the discussion board. Next, we look at scholarship on software infrastructure and autonomous Marxist theorizations of contemporary work. We build on this literature by analyzing how the labor fits into, or not, traditional descriptors of workplace class signifiers. We demonstrate how the labor of participating on Turker Nation helps to counter the abstraction the infrastructure provides. Finally, we identify the labor on Turker Nation as structuring time, building socializing spaces at work, and informal collective organizing. These counter assumptions about what digital short-term labor looks like. We argue that this laboring resists the assumed logic of capitalism for digital labor that subsumes and takes over workers’ lives. However, we conclude by looking at the limitations of the community’s collective organizing, such as failing to find consensus on what to communicate to the public. This points toward how difference such as gender, race,...