Terms of Service by Jacob Silverman

Author:Jacob Silverman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-02-12T16:00:00+00:00

ONLINE LABOR MARKETS

Reputation management, influence metrics, and professional networking sites have spawned a troubling shadow industry: online labor markets catering to fast, disposable work. Also called fractional work, crowdsourcing, micro-work, and immaterial labor, these are jobs that can be done remotely, with little to no instruction—completing surveys, tagging photos, transcribing interviews. Occasionally a job requires someone to go out into the physical world to confirm that a restaurant is still open or to photograph a store display so that the multinational company paying for it knows that it (and thousands of other displays like it, scattered around the country or the world) is set up properly. Usually, a would-be worker signs up, enters some information, and allows the site to connect to her social-media profiles in order to confirm her identity. Jobs then start to come down the pipe—some services allow workers to bid for jobs, with the lowest price usually winning out—and the worker goes off and performs the task for a few cents or a few dollars. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, with its optimistically named “Human Intelligence Tasks,” offers some of the most menial work: copying receipts, drawing triangles, mimicking facial expressions, clicking on random URLs—all of it presented with as little contextual/explanatory information as possible. A Mechanical Turk worker might be kept busy, he might even be mildly entertained, but he would be lucky to earn minimum wage.

Online labor markets share a lot in common with social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. The laborer is trading less on his or her expertise and experience than on his identity and supposed trustworthiness. (This isn’t to impugn the workers but rather to note that online laborers are forced to compete in a system which, much like Klout, judges their reliability based on proprietary algorithms whose criteria are often unknown.) Like traditional social networks, the owners of the labor markets don’t create or contribute much. Instead, they create platforms that facilitate work by others, just as Facebook provides a platform for us to create content that financially benefits Facebook. They make a little bit of money on each transaction, sometimes by taxing both the worker and employer, meaning that the market increases in value only as it scales and that value accrues to the owners of the market. And like a social network, online labor markets can claim that they’re in the business of connecting people. Social networks reduce the inefficiency of sharing; online labor markets reduce the inefficiency of hiring temporary workers. They try to make as little friction as possible between an employer and a worker. They come together in a quick exchange and part just as informally.

These labor markets practice a kind of internalized offshoring. With an increasingly unstable labor market—part of what’s been described as the sluggish global economy’s “jobless recovery”—companies can focus on retaining and fairly compensating highly skilled (and highly sought after) employees, such as engineers, lawyers, programmers, doctors, and scientists. Meanwhile, less complicated work can either be farmed out to low-wage freelance

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