I wrote the following text some time ago. It is part of a much longer piece. I'm posting it now as it relates to an ongoing discussion on the iDC list.
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Today, the means of communication are in the hands of Internet users but the environments in which those tools reside are privately owned. Is this really exploitation or does it stop at expropriation? And if there are examples of exploitation: Are they endemic or are they merely the exception?

Exploitation in new social media contexts is not fertilized by sweat and watered by the tears of the seven year-old child that works sixteen-hour days in the factory. The kind of exploitation that Marx described in Kapital still exists today but, in the face of globalization, it is far less visible. Just think about the one hundred thousand “gold farmers” who worked in China’s gaming factories, some four years ago -- far outside urban areas, earning virtual currency by shooting virtual enemies in online games (Dibbell 2007). They slept in rural dorms far from home. However, dazzling stories like this are not representative for what happens online.

• Social participation is -- for the very most part -- mutually beneficial for Internet users and the operators of social media services.
  

What may look like exploitation at first, is -- on reflection-- a situation in which users benefit from each other while corporate hosts capture value from them, the end-users of their product.

There are some moments of exploitation where netizens are utilized in an unjust, cruel, or selfish manner or where they are unfairly used as a resource against their will or without their consent and knowledge (i.e., by way of hidden, deceptive, or contracts written in legalese). Exploitation also entails not offering workers adequate remuneration for their labor.

Generalizations about exploitation in the context of social media services sometimes fall short because they don't take the specifics of a given tool or platform into account. Amazon.com is a good example of the complexities of simultaneous pleasure, usefulness, and exploitation at work in one company. (I'd not say that the cadre of people who write book reviews on Amazon.com are exploited.) To determine if Amazon.com is exploitative we need to discuss it through the lens of specific case studies.

I'm thinking about labor and the Internet for a few years now but I can only point to a few instances where exploitation in the most technical sense of the word is apparent. Mechanical Turk is one of these examples.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk; Instances of Day Labor in the Virtual World
Mechanical Turk, also referred to as MTurk, was launched in 2005. As one of Amazon.com's services, it enables computer programs to coordinate the use of online volunteer workers to perform tasks, which computers are unable to do.

In their terms of service, Amazon refers to the workers as “providers” and the employers as “requesters.” “Providers” can work from home and remain fairly anonymous. Common tasks that are executed through MTurk include translations, the categorization of information, the editing of marketing content, the writing of reviews for websites or books and the transcription of audio or video files. One MTurk a "provider," interviewed for a Salon.com article, describes his work

"My job is to categorize the shoe based on a list of basic colors: Is it red, blue, pink, purple, white, green, yellow, multicolored? A description next to it reads 'Pink Lemonade Leather.' This is not exactly a brain-busting task; I'm doing it while talking to a friend on the phone. With the mouse, I check a box marked 'pink.' In the next split second, a picture of a navy blue shirt appears. I check 'blue.' Assuming my answers jibe with those of at least two other people being paid to scrutinize the same pictures, I've just earned 4 cents."

MTurk was named after the 18th century chess playing automaton "the Turk," a wooden figure with a turban that seemed to have the ability to think. With a human chess expert hidden inside it, “the Turk” turned out to be a hoax. Conversely, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos is proud of the fact that MTurk is a platform that coordinates the human work force of thousands of people.

All you need to participate is a computer, a net connection, and an Amazon account. The “providers” perform activities that computers are not capable of (e.g., image recognition). Workers answer questions like “Do the images on this website match with the content?” Some employers on MTurk are using people as computers; which fulfills Henry Ford’s vision of turning workers into intensely exploitable second grade machines. It's not the machine that is using us; it's the firms that use MTurk that put us in the working position.

"Turkers" enter into a situation of control: Sitting in their homes, their every mouse click is monitored. While the pay rates for "providers" are lousy, far below minimum wage, “requesters” get menial tasks done on the cheap. Employers also have the option of rejecting the work, which is one way of not paying the workers at all after the task is completed. The word exploitation really does fit here because the workers are often dramatically underpaid. One worker, for example, was paid $8 for a transcript of 45 minutes of video.

The language of “requesters” and “providers” obfuscates the real labor relationships at play. The original language on the MTurk website was changed from “providers” to “workers” but is still maintained in the terms of service (accessed April 17, 2009). Employers are still called "requesters" on the website.

CEOs felt emboldened by the “cost-saving” MTurk venture, which has cut their expenses by thousands of dollars. Companies who pay contracted workers through Amazon.com do not have to file taxes and they skirt minimum-wage legislation and health insurance. The mentioned article contends that there is something a little disturbing about a billionaire like Jeff Bezos dreaming up new ways of getting ordinary folks to do work for him for pennies. However, Bezos retorts that MTurk is a marketplace where folks who have work meet up with folks who want to do work.

To some degree this sentiment is echoed in Lawrence Lessig’s Remix where he suggests that “If those within the sharing economy begin to think of themselves as tools of a commercial economy, they will be less willing to play (177). In addition, he says that “no one builds hybrids on community sacrifice.” (244)

Bezos objects to Salon.com’s insistence on calling MTurk a “virtual sweatshop.” Both Lessig and Bezos propose that people would not knowingly enter situations of economic exploitation or sacrifice. Historically, however, that has not been the case; the exploited may well be aware of their exploitation but they may simply have to enter those relationships out of economic desperation.

One “Provider” (worker) describes a task he performed.

"I first accepted a job from ContentSpooling.net that asked me to write three titles for an article about annuities and their use in retirement planning. Then I viewed a series of images apparently captured from a vehicle moving through the gray suburbs of North London, and, at the request of Geospatial Vision, a division of the British technology company Oxford Metrics Group, identified objects like road signs and markings. For all this, my Amazon account was credited the lordly sum of 12 cents."

Concomitantly, the “Amazon Remembers” iPhone application invites users to take a photo of a product (e.g., a chair) and send it to Amazon. Within roughly a day the application provides a link to the user who can now buy this product (or a similar one) on Amazon. The application is not based on image recognition software, as it may seem at first, but on the labor of a workforce that is globally distributed. Once a photo has been submitted, it is made available on MTurk where workers try to match the photo with existing products in Amazon.com’s database. If they succeed, Amazon pays them 10 cents.

It’s hard to believe that anybody would actually perform such “human initiated task” (HIT) for 10 cents but some workers say that they are simply multitasking.

For the most part, Amazon.com is enabling theses labor practices; it is not actually functioning as “requester” (employer) itself; "Amazon Remembers" iPhone application is an exception. They provide the MTurk platform and employers use it. Beyond that, Amazon does not want to get involved. Through this hands-off approach, Amazon technically facilitates and condones the exploitative practices on MTurk, its code choreographs the interaction.

More than half of the people who are using this web service live in the United States but close to 32% of MTurk workers reside in India where a few dollars may make a bigger dent. Many more people would work for Mechanical Turk if banking access would not be a conditon for participation.

"Turkers" in the US use this "crowdsourcing marketplace" sometimes as a form of entertainment. They appreciate the repetitiveness of the tasks, the meditative absorption. The biggest trick that Mechanical Turk ever pulled off was to make workers believe that what they do is not really work. That, at least, is somewhat suggested by the slogan on MTurk's coffee mugs: "Why work if you can turk?"

Not everybody who uses this "marketplace for work" participates in order to make money. In fact, some middle class users in the United States are reported to have used the platform merely as entertainment --an eccentric hobby-- which they enjoy with full awareness of the pitiful compensation. The repetitiveness of tasks and the duration reminds some of them of a video game. "It doesn't add up to a lot of money per hour but if I'm sitting there watching TV anyway, it's more than I'd make just sitting there," one worker wrote.

MTurk, for these workers, is not primarily about the money, it’s a pastime just like doing crossword puzzles. Indeed, many of the traditional pastimes have, at least partially, migrated online. From playing Chess or Scrabble, to quilting bees, and book clubs, people spend their free time together to enjoy each other’s company and be creative. In the case of Mturk, however, creativity and togetherness does not come into it.

MTurk is a fairly new environment, a novel and quirky activity in the eyes of many. (Remember the hype around Second Lifea few years ago?) It is not deceptive; there are no hidden agendas but it is exploitative simply because there are many instances in which workers are not paid anywhere near to what they deserve. The fact that “requesters” can find “turkers” (as workers call themselves) to work for them does not mean that it pays them fairly. Many workers may simply be forced to take whichever job (i.e., or HIT as it is called) that they can get. Consider that most users have no college education and fall into two age groups: 18-24 or above 65. Working for MTurk may simply be one of a set of desperate and equally bad options.

Reports also showed that “requesters” (employers) found ways of simply not paying their workers by rejecting the work after it was already executed. "The creativity of business in avoiding its responsibility to workers never ceases to astound. It's day labor in the virtual world," a lawyer for the National Employment Law Project points out. No minimum wage, no overtime, no unemployment insurance, no health insurance, and no taxes.

In the netherworld of networked labor today's coal miners of sorts may well sit, type, and stare at screens; all day, every day and it ends up hurting them. It hurts them in ways that are slow enough and subtle enough to steal up on them (Sterling, 134). Nigel Thrift summarizes it succinctly:

"When a commodity produces a sufficiently compelling experience environment, consumer communities will evolve beyond a company’s control, thus directly co-creating value and providing the firm with a new terrain of profit/ generalized outsourcing/ if it is nimble enough to adapt to the new conditions." (Thrift 290)

MTurk offers an odd and engaging experience, which attracts users into a web of exploitation. Who are we becoming by offering ourselves up like that? What does it say about our sense of self-worth when we have to resort to click work to relax?
Do we really feel so powerless that it becomes our life project to “kill time.” Surely, for some people, alos in the US, it's a supplement to their income but I can't help but think what all of this cognitive surplus could do if put to collective use (i.e., just think of the The Extraordinaries).

Work that is executed through Mturk does not feed back into the commons but it mostly benefits the enterprise. Today the technological tentacles of the enterprise reach deep into our homes where they facilitate the extraction of even the smallest willingness and ability to work.



A former graduate student a UCLA’s Design/Media Arts program created a project that playfully engaged with the exploitative nature of MTurk. He invited “turkers” to draw a sheep facing to the left" at a rate of 2 cents per sheep. After 40 days 7,599 workers had contributed 12,000 sheep. The artist Aaron Koblin, then sold sets of 20 sheep for $20 at Sheep Market (http://thesheepmarket.com), which upset some of the workers: "Does anyone remember signing over the rights to the drawings?" In fact they did. In the terms of service, Koblin had indeed specified that workers lose all ownership rights.

Other art projects, using MTurk include the Mechanical Olympics's Channel and Bicycle Built for Two Thousand.

Not all work that is offered through MTurk is exploitative and most workers may not feel used at all. Remuneration for many "HITs" is, in fact, appropriate. However, some of the cases of waged labor on MTurk are clearly exploitative but within a larger context of the Web they remain fairly isolated examples.

Amazon.com set up a scenario that allows for exploitative relationships to take shape, it sees those unfold, and it does not intervene (as if it were a neutral bystander). Some employers who use MTurk abuse their workers who put themselves into this weak position.  This does not excuse the exploitation that Amazon.com facilitates (and simultaneously ignores) and that  some "requesters" execute. At the same time, MTurk also signifies how desparate many workers must be who indeed use the platform to make ends meet.