Return of the Crowds – Assignment 7
Angeline Henriquez
October 27, 2015
Digital media and Society
Return of the Crowds
In chapter 5 “Return of the Crowds” Ayhan Aytes relates the mechanics of 18th century automata, specifically Von Kemplen’s Chess Player, to the workings of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT). The most prominent comparison Aytes makes is the hidden nature of the workers, which is concealed by the spectacle of the machine. In the case of the Turk Chess Player this translates literally, as the mechanical mind of the Turk was manipulated by a master chess player who remained hidden behind the internal mechanisms. In the case of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Aytes points to the fragmentation of cognitive labor, in which “workers from across the world and around the clock browse, choose, and complete human intelligence tasks (HITs) that are designed by corporate or individual contractors” (p.79). In this way, the connection between the workers and the end result is erased, and these complex tasks come across as automated. Both the Turk Chess Player and AMT prompt the idea that mechanisms can be living entities that instead of operating as clockwork, are in contrast self-regulated.
Furthermore, Aytes talks about how just like in a game of chess, in which each piece has a specific role that is to be performed in relation to the other pieces, so do AMTs cognitive workers. By organizing the roles and their functions, the cognitive labor market is able to fulfill these roles by anyone in what Aytes calls the “socioeconomic chessboard” (p.87).
Finally, Aytes relates the two in their role of “disciplining the human mind for industrial production” (p.81). She deems the Turk Chess Player as the precursor for today’s cognitive labor market, as it first imagined the automatization of the operations of the human mind. Amazon’s mechanical Turk reflects this in the way that it maximizes the profits of multinational corporations through the use of legislative gray zones surrounding cognitive labor. Aytes calls this the “neoliberal system of exception” facilitated by the digital networks, which allows requesters to escape employment regulations.
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