A Crowded Future: Working against Abstraction on Turker Nation

Abstract

This paper examines digital labor and community through an ethnography of a discussion board supporting short-term digital contract workers on the Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk). First, we give a thorough overview of mTurk, the crowdsourcing marketplace, and Turker Nation, a discussion board for workers on mTurk. We trace the experience of interacting with this infrastructure on mTurk as worker and employer. Following, we look at scholarship on software infrastructure and autonomous Marxist theorizations of contemporary work. We demonstrate how the labor of participating on the discussion board Turker Nation helps to counter the abstraction the infrastructure provides. We show how workers on Turker Nation use the platform to structure time, build socializing spaces at work and initiate collective organizing. 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 argue that this laboring resists the assumed logic of capitalism for digital labor that subsumes and takes over workers’ lives and conclude by looking at the limitations of the community’s collective organizing in terms of agreeing on points to communicated to the public.