From the East Bay Express
By Ellen Cushing
The funny thing about the biggest shift in production in years is that almost nobody knows it happened. Which makes sense, if you think about it: It occurred invisibly, online, anonymously — all over the world, but, at the same time, nowhere in particular. And it's poised to — if most people who know about it are to be believed — completely change the way we think about work, the way we consume technology, and the way the global economy functions.
It's called microtasking, and it works by outsourcing small, virtual tasks to an army of online workers, who then perform them for pennies....
Perhaps unsurprisingly, since Mechanical Turk's inception, critics have emerged from all corners of the labor, law, and tech communities. Labor activists have decried it as an unconscionable abuse of workers' rights, lawyers have questioned its legal validity, and academics and other observers have probed its implications for the future of work and of technology. In Berkeley, several scholars associated with UC Berkeley's School of Information have essentially devoted their work to examining microtasking's challenges and opportunities....
"Many companies have an incentive to look away from the issue," said Anand Kulkarni, CEO and cofounder of MobileWorks, a company that's working on creating a more sustainable model of crowdsourcing. "We're still a little bit far away in society of understanding the true costs of unethical crowdsourcing, and the extent that it exists."
Tapan Parikh was one of Kulkarni's professors at the UC Berkeley School of Information, and he's also been trying to examine and improve upon crowdsourcing as it currently exists. "The big questions are, how good are [crowdsourced workers'] salaries? Do they have benefits? Do they have any rights? And who is responsible for those rights? Legal scholars have just begun thinking about these issues, but technologists, frankly, haven't really thought about it at all," he said. "And as technologists, we're so trained with an efficiency-first mind-set so that immediately becomes the first and most important metric for us. It's a blind spot, and a limitation of the field."
Part of what Parikh's getting at is this: The Internet is a utility, but it's also a business — one that strives, like all others, to keep costs down and profits up, and which is faced with what's increasingly looking like an unrealistic consumer expectation about access and price....