Jason Huff

Serf Boards

Mon, 05 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Are crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as bleak as the company’s shipping warehouses?

In the summer of 2009, the U.S. economy lost 9 million jobs: between April and October of that year, the national unemployment rate would rise to 10 percent as the stock market plummeted to nearly half its value.

Money stood at the forefront of collective anxiety: every day seemed to generate new tales of friends getting laid off or of more companies’ having closed up shop. That summer, I discovered people were resorting to making money online using a service called Amazon Mechanical Turk, or “MTurk” as it’s colloquially known. MTurk was started in 2005 by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and director of Amazon Web services Peter Cohen as a way to solve problems with Amazon’s ever-expanding data set. The premise was that a distributed crowd of humans could easily complete tasks that computers found too challenging. The jobs, called Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) on the service, might be to match the name of an item—say a 95-ounce box of Tide detergent—to the correct product image. The typical pay for HITs like this range from $0.01 to $0.20 and often need to be completed within a limited amount of time.

With my curiosity piqued, I began surveying workers on MTurk, asking them to tell their stories through short memoirs. What started as research about a tool I might use in my artistic practice became a much deeper experience. The stories I heard were parables of everyday life, success, and struggle. Now, five years later, I came back to them to see if the story of crowdsourced labor has changed.

MTurk drew its name and conceptual model from the 18th- entury invention created by Hungarian nobleman Wolfgang von Kempelen, who created a mechanical chess-playing automaton that supposedly “defeated nearly every opponent it faced.” In truth, it was a hoax: A real, human chess master was hiding inside the machine.

To extend this conceit to Amazon’s platform, Bezos coined a clever, glossy euphemism, describing the service as “artificial artificial intelligence.” Looking through the FAQ page for MTurk gives a better sense of what this artificial artificial intelligence might entail:

When we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?

At first, MTurk seemed appealing as a tool that could complete work like any other software with the unique exception of being powered by an unnamed, globally distributed group of people. I envisioned doing a kind of conceptual exploration of this virtual workspace, which could then lead to future collaborative projects with the platform. But soon, I found myself preoccupied by a truly basic question: Who were the people fulfilling these requests? Who were the chess players within the machine?

My hunch was that the workers using MTurk were middle-class skilled workers like myself. To test this hypothesis, I used MTurk to hire some of them to tell me why they were on it. Since MTurk tasks needed to take only minutes to complete, I requested a brief, 250-word account and let them know that I would share their story on a Tumblr, which I titled The Mechanical Turk Diaries. I decided to pay $0.25 per story, which at the time seemed like a high rate relative to other HITs on the platform.

Soon after I posted, answers started coming in:

How many synonyms can you name for the word ‘broke’? Here are a few: unemployed; poor; desperate; discouraged. Yep. Being a displaced housewife after raising the kids is not financially healthy in this economy. Even when I worked at a bookstore (now closed), I didn’t quite make enough money to pay the bills. So, I started trying to make a little extra cash through MTurk.

The answers that followed had variety but hewed to a consistent theme. It was true; some of the unemployed were turning to MTurk to keep them going through the pains of finding a new job and surviving the crisis. In the 323 stories I received, people mentioned “money,” “cash,” “dollars,” and “bucks” more than 600 times.

The service also seemed to offer some kind of emotional reprieve from job hunting for those hit hard by the recession. It relived loneliness, and boredom at work for those who still had a job. One woman shared a story about how her husband introduced her to MTurk while she was in the hospital being treated for cancer and how it helped her “keep [her] sanity during a very hard time and helped [her] to stay busy.”

By the end of the summer, I had come to understand the Turking community as composed of pragmatists who preferred to be productive in lieu of being bored. For many, MTurk was simply a place they could work online from home without getting scammed.

I wondered, however, about the sustainability of a full-time income pegged to pennies, far from minimum wage. What would happen to workers who started to depend on MTurk, like the unemployed student and mother living in Los Angeles who described herself as “desperate for work”? While initially glad to find “an awesome website dedicated to helping people find legitimate online work without being ripped off,” she also highlighted the stress of having MTurk as one of her only sources of income, adding that well-paying HITs were hard to find. Meanwhile, she was struggling to “pay [her] late car note and get a tank of gas, rent a textbook for the summer session and buy bread.”

As more stories came in, I noticed more workers raising interesting questions about the platform and their abilities to subsist on far less than a living wage. Toward the end of the summer, on August 21, 2009, a worker posted:

The main thing I want to say is, why can’t there be a place like this that actually offers the chance of making five or seven or ten dollars an hour? A place where some of these real clerical jobs, performed for a penny or a nickel, could be done for a quarter and moms and dads and singles and jobless teens and retirees and all of us Americans could actually make Turking into the wad of gum that patches the hole in the dike. I did this HIT even though it is late, because it pays a quarter. And I appreciate that. Keep on Turkin’ and stay well.

Amazon makes no effort to set a fair wage on MTurk. In fact, their Terms of Service clearly spurn liability for what requesters post as a HIT or what workers submit when the HITs are completed. At best, a worker can flag a request that violates the site’s policies. Outside of providing tax information to set up an account as a worker, Amazon is free of any tax implications for the payment, no matter how small or great. Perhaps even more surprising is that a requester can take the worker’s submission and refuse payment without any consequence. The system frequently puts workers at a disadvantage. Lilly Irani, a professor at UC San Diego, rallied workers in 2008, which eventually led to a browser plugin called Turkopticon to address some problems, but change seems like a long-term battle.

The mother in L.A. finished her story by saying she “hopes Amazon appreciates their Turks because we so are not getting any love in our inbox. No thanks for remotely accessing the sweatshop at a cost higher than I can afford. Oh well back to Turking, Turking, Turking day and night.”

Her complaint was real. It costs more to have an Internet connection in your house per month than the casual worker on MTurk can make in 30 days. She also wasn’t the first to describe the service as a “sweatshop”: In a 2006 essay about MTurk, Salon’s Katharine Mieszkowski asked if the service was “a boon for the bored or a virtual sweatshop?” More recently, The Nation declared Turkers “one of the most exploited workforces no one has ever seen.”

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Journalist Fred Howe, who coined the term crowdsourcing, imagined that part of the innovation of crowdsourcing would be the “ability for communities to form out of shared interest, a shared passion for a hobby, a craft, an art.” In reality, because workers and requesters are anonymous on MTurk, it seems to lack a key component for community nurturing.

In a 2010 panel on crowdsourcing, Lukas Biewald, CEO of MTurk competitor CrowdFlower, highlighted this aspect of the platform’s relationship to workers, reframing it as an attractive feature for employers: “With technology you can find them, pay them the tiny amount of money, and then get rid of them when you don’t need them anymore,” he said.

Recently, I resumed collecting memoirs from MTurkers. Had the people working on the platform changed since 2010? I found my original survey from five years ago, logged back into my MTurk account, and posted a few HITs. Were people still thinking about the economy?

My first batch of HITs returned nothing. I set the pay to $0.50, double the original rate, which many workers had thought was generous. Then, looking at the configuration I noticed default settings that restricted the workers’ level to “Master Qualifications.” This was new. According to Amazon, Masters are “workers who have demonstrated accuracy on specific types of HITs on the Mechanical Turk marketplace.” This was part of a change Amazon made in 2012 to improve the pay for work on the site and prevent better workers from exposure to scammers. If it works, it’s a bright spot for experience Turkers, but also a potential barrier to higher quality HITs for new workers.

My experience tracks the findings of Panos Ipeirotis, a business professor at NYU, about the changing nature of the MTurk workforce. In 2008, he conducted a survey on the platform to disprove common beliefs about crowdsourcing. He discovered the workforce on MTurk was predominantly U.S.-based and, surprisingly, almost 60% of the users were from 21 to 40 years old and female. Only about 13% of the HITs were completed by workers outside the U.S.: 8% from India, and a little more than 5% from the U.K. and Canada.

In 2010, Ipeirotis updated his demographic study to reveal some interesting shifts. He discovered that the percentage of U.S. workers had dropped below 50% while workers from India had risen to 34%. He also found that the Indian workers often considered their work on MTurk a primary source of income. Since India’s minimum wage is around $0.28 per hour, as reported by Business Insider last year, the shift from it being a source of extra money to a primary source of income wasn’t too surprising. As platforms like MTurk proliferate, the nearly invisible microtasks that underpin so many sites on the Internet are being outsourced to the now more accessible and cost-effective crowd around the globe. This made the stories about minimum wage from workers on MTurk in the U.S. ring even louder.

After raising my rate to $1.00, I was able to get responses to my requests and more stories from the workers on MTurk. They were very different this time around:

It was four years ago when the economic crisis hit the world badly and it was at the same time that the Telangana Agitation hit our state (Andhra Pradesh, India) very badly. Market in general in our state touched its lowest point as people were very wary about what would happen next. There were continuous strikes, boycotts, agitations etc. to the extent that all that had become an order of the day. I am into real estate and this is the sector which was largely affected by the ongoing agitation and world economic crisis. I was vigorously searching for any part time job which would support my finances and take care of my overheads during the period of this agitation. I happened to find an ad in the newspaper highlighting “WORK FROM HOME” and I immediately contacted the person who published the ad.

I had never thought of crowdsourced work on MTurk as way to continue working while coping with economic and civil unrest. It seemed the platform had turned into a way to become telepresent in the global economy when conditions were too rough to leave the house. But other stories from the new survey felt similar to the ones in 2009: people finding ways to make small amounts of extra cash or build up hope to get through to the next big job.

The conversation around these platforms is only going to grow louder as more people all over the world turn to them as a primary source of income. In a recent article for The Nation, Moshe Z. Marvit interviewed struggling workers on MTurk and mentioned an upcoming and critical class action lawsuit against CrowdFlower. Early initiatives, like Irani’s Turkopticon, are still helping draw attention to the ethics of paid microlabor. Yet the future of crowdsourced labor still looks strange. More mobile apps are connecting to crowdsourcing platforms, putting microtasks at your fingertips in your idle time. Imagine a future wherein an app like Candy Crush Saga is a way to earn money for anniversary presents while simultaneously working in the global labor market for pennies.

Since my first survey, newer platforms had emerged on which people completed tasks for money. I surveyed workers on TaskRabbit, which promises to allow users to “Get just about anything done by friendly, trustworthy people.” I quickly found a woman who was using the service as her primary source of income. She chose to remain anonymous but said her days start by checking “TaskRabbit, Craigslist, and Voices.com for gigs.” She said she tries to do “mostly virtual tasks on TaskRabbit—data entry, transcription, research, etc.” She’s an actor and has been on the platform for three years. Her only complaint: “The hiring process has become so lax. There are way too many of us competing for jobs now.”

Interface Aesthetics: An Introduction

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Image from CMD SHIFT 3 .NET by Emilio Gomeriz

Everyday we use digital tools to create, edit, and document our work. We click fastidiously into the graphical user interface (GUI) of applications, seeing expected results while trying to ignore the friction of bad design, failed UX, and glitches. Most actions are conducted successfully and the interface holds its transparent position. But despite the GUI’s seemingly innocuous presence, its aesthetic leaches their way into our own. How we view our creative process and documentation is minutely and incrementally shifted by the frame of the interfaces we routinely use.

Douglas Engelbart's 1968 demo of NLS (online system)

The current paradigm of the user interface had its first introduction on December 9th in 1968 when Douglas Engelbart demoed his famous NLS (online system) at the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, CA. Engelbart and his team at Stanford had an innovative vision driven by desires to improve the way people communicate and interact with each other and computers. It was the public debut of the mouse. The work produced by his group went on to inspire the most basic interactions used in Xerox’s Star graphical user interface and almost every operating system since.

Critical inquiry around the implications of interface aesthetics has been around since 2004 when Søren Pold organized the research project Aesthetics of Interface Culture. In an essay titled Interface Realisms: The Interface as Aesthetic Form published in 2005, Pold declared that we should “… start seeing the interface as an aesthetic form in itself that offers a new way to understand digital art in its various guises…” His essay, extending to 43 sections, lays the groundwork for deeper explorations. More recently, critical research around interfaces has resurfaced in two books; one edited by Søren Pold and Christian Ulrik Andersen published last May titled Interface Criticism: Aesthetics Beyond Buttons, and a second coming out this October written by Alex Galloway titled The Interface Effect.

(Left) Interface Criticism: Aesthetics Beyond Buttons, 2011, edited by Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold, (Right) The Interface Effect, 2012, written by Alex Galloway

Denying the effect of the interface on digital artists, or frankly any artist, is impossible. From the collection of artists’ desktops in Alexi Shulgin’s Desktop Is project, created in 1997, all the way to Adam Cruces reinterpretation, Desktop Views, completed earlier this year. In the time between, artists like JODI produced works (GeoGoo, for example) that turned the interface into a material for autonomous performative experimentation and spectacle.

The interface has become a stock material for appropriation and defamiliarization. In Constant Dullaart’s TOS, the search interface is decoupled from its function only to become a literal mouthpiece reading Google’s own terms of service, which are infrequently, if ever, read by the site’s users. Anders Clausen collages and prints the graphical user interface of OS X at scales that shift the blue gel scrollbar pieces into images of giant pool-like pills. Emilio Gomariz continues a similar type of exploration on screen in his series of works titled Macintosh / Lab. His video work in the same series takes a different approach by highlighting the aesthetic experience of interaction - setting up banal, but beautiful performances of windows transitioning from a minimized icon to their original size, slowly becoming an extruded cube.

It seems there has always been a through-line of creative acknowledgment between the artist and the interface, perhaps due to their uniquely tight relationship. The interface accommodates the creative needs of the artist from production, to presentation, to archive. Nevertheless, the interface pushes back with its own prescribed methodologies, workflows, and limitations. Interface and artist are an antagonistic pair. Perhaps the best description of the polemic between the two is one of productive cannibalism. Just as interfaces evolves under the pressure of innovation to accommodate new pragmatic uses, artists’ will continue to deconstruct and push a GUI’s aesthetic and behavioral properties to their limits. ☺

Color Picker, 2012 by Anders Clausen via Triangulation Blog

Beyond the Surface: 15 Years of Desktop Aesthetics

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Xerox Star 8010 Workstation - Image via plyojump.com

A desktop is a changing record of visual decisions. It speaks to the aesthetics of a particular work-flow and personal space. A desktop exhibits a diagram of your organizational habits and a screenshot of it captures a brief moment of its functional evolution. The image of your desktop becomes an intimate self-portrait and the impulse to decode an unfamiliar desktop is unavoidable.

In January, Adam Cruces wrapped up his Desktop Views project. Cruces collected 51 images of artists’ desktops including a number of artists he worked with in his earlier project STATE.

Cruces frames Desktop Views with a quote from Alexei Shulgin’s legendary Desktop Is project, created 15 years earlier in 1997, at the dawn of “net.art.” The quote, taken from the about page of Shulgin’s project, uses the title Desktop Is as an iterative I Ching-style manifesto about the desktop. Its final lines claim in paradox, “desktop is a question, desktop is the answer.” Cruces’s description of Desktop Views is more straightforward and less poetic. To him the desktop is “the (virtual) space that serves as the foundation of the working environment.” Cruces and Shulgin, however, channel the same curiosity. The two projects are echoes that present voyeuristic peeks into artists’ personal virtual working spaces on public websites.

The Desktop Is site is a deteriorated time capsule. Its nostalgic Apple OS desktop interface links to two folders; one, leads to site information, and the second, to a list of submitted desktop images. Link rot has broken nearly half of the links in Shulgin’s list of submissions and the ones that work are a mix of cryptic handles, like Murph the surf, in contrast to full names - some followed by an email address.

In converse, Cruces’s new iteration, Desktop Views is standardized. It presents a grid of images (a sort of meta desktop) that can be sorted alphabetically by first name or chronologically in the order they were collected and released on the site. Artists’ full names label each desktop thumbnail in the grid. Cruces hosts all the images he has collected, so perhaps this archive of desktop images will remain intact for more complete future reflections. Within the order, the desktop images range from stark defaults to extreme clutter.

Sara Ludy’s desktop, for example, is minimal with a blurred blue smudge of pixels centered on a black background. On the right side, vased.mov is immediately above vased.gif which might reveal a recently created animated gif. Daniel Keller’s desktop image presents a more complex space. His numerous file icons stand in an equally spaced array – small and unreadable. They vanish into an endless crowded background of solar panels stacked edge-to-edge.

Martin Murphy’s desktop, for example, has a strange background image: a hand wrapped in latex touches a warped smiling face in a pool of purple color. The face stares out of the screen. Icons, floating on the right, are grid-free and vaguely organized. Three external drive mounts show a potential need for more space while a folder announces a “project with Evan” in its name. Perhaps this counts as evidence of collaboration. Amidst bluetooth connections, a dropbox account, and a desirable suite of creative software applications in the dock below, Murphy is present. He listens to Spotify and captured his desktop image with OS X’s Grab application.

Martin Murphy's desktop from Adam Cruces's Desktop Views

Some visual clues reveal location or language, like Jon Rafman’s Canadian flag in his menu bar. His background image shows two men climbing a floating knot of infinite stairs up and down, down and up. A handgun icon labelled “TODO” floats point-blank at one man’s head. Other desktops are more mysterious. Rafael Rozendal’s blank grey background leaves everything to the imagination – his tiny system activity monitor, maxed out in red and green, is the only leading detail.

While Cruces’s project feels curatorial, Shulgin’s is more ethnographic. When Shulgin started Desktop Is in October of 1997 he sent an email out to a mailing list and proposed to accept submissions for six months. It is impossible to determine if everyone who submitted was an artist, but Shulgin had started the “net.art” mailing list approximately two-months before which might help classify the list of linked names.

Seen as a broader survey the desktop images of Desktop Is accomplish two things: They historicize the nostalgic aesthetics of 90s desktops and help frame newer artists working with technology in a longer view. With each iterative software and hardware update, however, we wash bits of that history away.

So what can we learn by reconsidering desktop aesthetics 15 years later? The default structure and icons of operating systems are more or less the same. They have not changed substantially since Xerox designed Star, a pioneer in graphic user interfaces in 1981, which was refined slightly by Apple in 1983. The biggest difference is in the color space. The pixelated palette moved from binary black and white, to the 16 colors of early versions of Windows, graduating finally to modern operating systems which are anti-aliased and millions of colors deep. Clunky and outdated window, button, and menu graphics have all been refined – smoothed, over a long period of time, like river stones.

Promotional video for the Xerox Star 8010 Workstation, 1981 - Video via digibarn.com

Icons offer the most concrete evidence of what has survived and what is new. The core icon set of operating systems still clings to skeumorphs that help us relate abstracted digital data forms to their ancestors. The physical file folder, for example, was introduced at the invention of the filing cabinet in 1898 and remains the inspiration for the default folder icon. Even on the earliest desktop, a document was represented by a single sheet of paper with the top right corner folded at a comical 45 degree angle. Thirty years later that folded corner has a subtle shadow, gradient, and tradition.

Photoshop’s icon has survived the decade or more of upgrades too. Its transformation spans from its original monochrome, pixel-edged eye-in-window to the new, dark, sans serif “PS” pressed softly with a shadow into an extruded blue gradient block.

Image via www.officialphotoshop.com

Older desktop images in Shulgin’s Desktop Is collection feel arcane and nostalgic – pixelated microfilm. At the time, it was the eve of the dot-com bubble, and Windows and Netscape Navigator were commonplace. Screenshots in Desktop Is have grit in both content and color depth. Some, like Rachel Baker’s, contain coded political phrases in the folder names while other desktops mock the virtual space’s infinite potential. Fast-forward 15 years — Windows is no longer a common OS for artists, and Netscape Navigator is extinct. Artists use OS X and Google Chrome. The new desktop images from artists are hi-res, smooth, or ironically pixelated.

Desktop images via Desktop Is

But the curiosity of private desktop space shown publicly withstands software and hardware upgrades. Interpretations of layout, background image, icon size, and other details that describe a human presence - or lack of one - hold weight. The question is not about aesthetics, but about how artists create and use their desktop space.

To answer this, The Guardian started a series profiling writers and their desktops. It takes a dual approach: a desktop image with a parallel explanation. The series begins with Ben Johncock interviewing Tom McCarthy about his submitted desktop image, which captures a few open folders in addition to the typical background image and icon grid. The open folders reveal deeper personal information as McCarthy takes us through a few of the folder names that relate to projects he is working on. This is all mixed in with conversation about technology’s affect on his writing and on humanity at large. The desktop becomes a room for conversation about work and leisure, and a platform for reflection and speculation on technology.

When I asked Cruces over email to describe his own desktop image on the about page of Desktop Views he replied, “I think it’s quite reflective of how I utilize my physical spaces (apartment and studio). I prefer to keep things tidy and organized - concealing personal items, tools, materials, works in progress, and final products.”

Desktops are the new studio. In the 1930s people were captivated by photographs of Francis Bacon’s London studio – a dark cluttered mess of half-used paint tubes, gnarled brushes, and stained walls. Now we can look at these desktop images with the same memorializing curiosity – all the while trying to decode who created them. ☺