mTurk

I’ve started Turking it.

What’s that? you ask. Well, it’s a microjob program run by Amazon called the Mechanical Turk. It’s basically our incentive to see ourselves as single processes in an otherwise cosmic-level machine. It’s humbling, yet soothing at the same time.

We are a solid state entity. We breathe together and move together as one single will.

Yet when you draw close, there are a million tiny universes being born and dying in the blink of an eye. And in that brief flash of light, there’s a whole life spooling out untethered, a lashing photocosm of ecstatic living done by a being that doesn’t realize quite how small it is. It lives, breathes, and dies; and somewhere in there, amongst all of the pain and joy and mindless wondering, a job is performed and a change ripples outward, adding to the outcome, the Plan. Everything we do is somewhat preordained, it’s only the getting there that’s considered free will.

I like to tell myself that what I do has some meaning.

I hate to think that I waste my time performing largely mindless tasks for $0.50 a pop.

To be honest, I’m not that enthused about being in the freelance job market. I don’t mind working and I don’t mind being paid money, but there’s some part of me that will always like having some idea of what to do. Work isn’t something I want to think about. It’s a task I want to perform as quick and clean as possible, with no one yelling at me and none of the sense of guilt that screwing up on the job brings.

I hate to disappoint anyone.

There’s something nice about Turking. It’s soothing and monotonous. It quiets something inside me that I’ve never been able to … Read the rest “Is it weird to treat mTurk like it’s a reverse-freemium game?”