You were recently laid off, still feeling mixed emotions about the whole thing. Betrayal? A generalized fear for the future? Some weird sense of guilt (what’s up with that)? It’s making shopping your resume around even more depressing.
In a gesture to, I don’t know, trick your brain into thinking it’s doing something constructive you decide to sign up with one of those “mechanical turk” services. Certainly isn’t going to provide a livable income, but you feel like it’s “keeping your hand in”.
You log in, fill in all their forms, click all the check boxes next to scrolling walls of legalese, and you’re in their interface. Very bare-bones, very mid twenty-teens Material UI.
Your first task is solving a captcha: “click on boxes containing animals”. You sigh. ok, it’s that sort of job. You were hoping maybe you would be doing some scientific research thing, but you should have known it was just going to be quasi-legal crap busting somebody’s Ts and Cs. Hopefully quasi-legal.
You spend the first day clicking on boxes with animals in them - animals in trees, animals in people’s yards, animals crossing roads - and not clicking on boxes showing empty landscapes. It’s pretty relaxing, actually - you’ve got music on, there’s no time pressure (at this income level there can’t be). You log off after a few hours, feeling like you accomplished something with your day at least. Not much, but something.
The following day is more of the same - click on a racoon in a garbage can, or a giraffe in a zoo enclosure, or a tiger peering through dense foliage.
The third day it switches up the captchas - “click on boxes containing people”. The absence of any criteria narrowing the scope makes for a fascinating day - the sweeping *variety* of people you are clicking on is breathtaking.
After a few days clicking on people starts losing its charm. But then you are given more random things to click on. Click on houses, click on buildings, click on cars. All the novelty has worn off at this point but you’ve just gotten into a groove.
A couple weeks in and you are barely registering what you’re supposed to be clicking on anymore, until you realize that you’ve spent almost the entire day clicking on boxes containing, as the prompt says, “human military equipment”. Tanks, jeeps, jets, ships. Tents with camo netting, men in ghillie suits, weapons held by soldiers from armies around the world. You continue clicking with a growing unease.
The following day your prompt is “click on boxes containing humans with political influence” and you’re presented with pictures of individuals, some of whom you recognize, some whom you don’t. You push yourself back from the computer, thinking, trying to remember the things you’d been identifying recently. You remember clicking on bridges, on cargo ports, on power stations, on communication towers and satellite stations. On hospitals. On schools.
Suddenly you very much want to know what is being protected behind these captchas and who’s paying you to break them. And you wonder if those things are even important, because you remember that the entire purpose of captchas is to collect training data for recognition algorithms. What have you been training?
Unnerved, you shut down your computer and decide to go for a walk to think. At the door you reach for your phone then change your mind - you don’t really want to be connected to the internet at the moment.
That night you sleep fitfully, plagued by dreams you can’t remember on waking. You turn your computer back on the following day and do a bit of job hunting but avoid the mechanical turk site. You try to figure out what to search for to answer the questions in your head, but since the questions are all variations of “what the *fuck* is going on?” you can’t think of a way to state that that will give you satisfying search results.
The following day you decide to log back into the mechanical turk, maybe learn something more about the work you’re doing. With a sense of dread you await the first task. It says “click on boxes containing vegetables”, with pictures of carrots, celery, bell peppers, cabbage. You are confused - you stare at the pictures, willing them to give some clue to … anything. But that picture of an acorn squash sitting on a kitchen counter under bright fluorescent lighting remains an enigma, refusing to give up its secrets. You work through more tasks but it looks like today is all vegetables.
Nothing strange needs to be identified in the next three days of mechanical turking, just seemingly random things like office supplies, leaves and cutlery. And on the fourth day an employer finally contacts you, offering a job that pays slightly less than the one you just lost but is situated substantially closer to your home.
You shut down your mechanical turk account and try to never think about it again.
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