Crowdsourcing systems do more than get information work done. This paper argues that microwork systems produce the difference between “innovative” laborers and “menial” laborers, ameliorating resulting tensions in new media production cultures in turn. This paper focuses on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) as an emblematic case of microwork crowdsourcing. Ethical research on crowdsourcing has focused on questions of worker fairness and microlabor alienation. This paper focuses on the cultural work of AMT’s mediations: divisions of labor and software interfaces. This paper draws from infrastructure studies and feminist science and technology studies to examine Amazon Mechanical Turk labor practice, its methods of worker control, and the kinds of users it produces.

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Today the halls of Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) and Davos reverberate with optimism that hacking, brainstorming, and crowdsourcing can transform citizenship, development, and education alike. This article examines these claims ethnographically and historically with an eye toward the kinds of social orders such practices produce. This article focuses on a hackathon, one emblematic site of social practice where techniques from information technology (IT) production become ways of remaking culture. Hackathons sometimes produce technologies, and they always, however, produce subjects. This article argues that the hackathon rehearses an entrepreneurial citizenship celebrated in transnational cultures that orient toward Silicon Valley for models of social change. Such optimistic, highvelocity practice aligns, in India, with middle-class politics that favor quick and forceful action with socially similar collaborators over the contestations of mass democracy or the slow construction of coalition across difference.

Digitally mediated labor can take many forms: valorized and visible, hidden and forgotten, or even disavowed. This article examines one particular digital work system: Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). AMT is a system that organizes tens of thousands of workers to do data-processing work; workers might contract with hundreds of employers in a year without ever meeting them. Employers, likewise, can access these workers through computer interfaces without ever interacting with them. I examine the AMT-mediated computational labor relations between technologist employers and the data-processing workers who work for them. In systems such as AMT, some people are employers, entrepreneurs, and programmers, and others simulate computation for them. The subjectivities of valorized workers are dependent on employing and distancing the labor of AMT workers. I take up these relations of dependency and disavowal as symptomatic of emerging forms and stakes of digital work.

As HCI researchers have explored the possibilities of human computation, they have paid less attention to ethics and values of crowdwork. This paper offers an analysis of Amazon Mechanical Turk, a popular human computation system, as a site of technically mediated worker-employer relations. We argue that human computation currently relies on worker invisibility. We then present Turkopticon, an activist system that allows workers to publicize and evaluate their relationships with employers. As a common infrastructure, Turkopticon also enables workers to engage one another in mutual aid. We conclude by discussing the potentials and challenges of sustaining activist technologies that intervene in large, existing socio-technical systems.