HISTORY offers no excuse to Amazon
The company’s Mechanical Turk service may have debatable morality as a low-paying ‘marketplace for work,’ but the offensiveness of its name is beyond doubt, regardless of its origin, Mark Abley says.
Good news for book-lovers: people who have just read a work of literary fiction gain higher scores than everyone else on tests that measure empathy, emotional intelligence and social perceptiveness. These results were announced a few months ago in The New York Times. I wasn’t shocked by the findings; what blindsided me was how the researchers came up with the data. They located their subjects through Amazon.com, and, as the Times put it, “To find a broader pool of participants than the usual college students, they used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, where people sign up to earn money for completing small jobs.”
Mechanical Turk? Somehow I’d failed to notice the birth and steady growth over the past few years of what Amazon refers to as “a marketplace for work.” The service allows businesses to post requests known as HITs (short for Human Intelli- gence Tasks), such as transcribing a podcast or choosing the best among several pictures — tasks at which people are still more efficient than computers. Those who answer a request — officially called Workers, but informally often described as Turkers — can browse among the many tasks on offer, select which ones they wish to perform, and then do so for a fee. That fee is usually tiny, far below minimum wage. Critics have compared the service to a digital sweatshop.
Leaving aside the morality of the whole enterprise, I want to challenge the morality of its name. A few voices online have questioned the name Mechanical Turk, but generally they have fallen silent after learning the origin of the phrase: a fake chess-playing machine called the Turk that caused a sensation in Europe in the late 18th century. In French, it was known as “le Turc mécanique.” It appeared to be an automaton, but in fact the device concealed a person — doubtless very small and cramped — who moved the chess pieces. Atop the machine was a lifesized model of a human head, with a black beard and a turban, above a torso wearing Turkish robes. Until it was finally exposed as a fraud, the device delighted and puzzled chess fans for decades. It satisfied Europe’s craving for exotic mystery.
The name Mechanical Turk, in short, has a vivid historical pedigree. That doesn’t justify its use today. Imagine the outcry if Amazon had named its service “Mechanical Jew” or “Mechanical Black.” Why is it any more legitimate for a major company to borrow, if not usurp, a Turkish identity? The service was launched in 2005, two years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a moment when the United States was deeply at odds with most of the Muslim world. Perhaps it seemed a good idea at the time to give the service a Turkish air. In hindsight, I think it was a huge mistake.
I’m aware that in saying this, I’m liable to be accused of political correctness, and to be told that I lack a sense of humour (a charge that’s very difficult to refute). Yet sometimes a reform of idiom is not just appropriate but necessary. A few generations ago, homeless children in London and New York went by the name “street Arabs.” Mouth harps were known as “Jew’s harps.” And anyone who gave a present, then wanted it back, was an “Indian giver.” In all these cases the language has moved on, thank goodness. It’s time the Mechanical Turk underwent a similar change.
Some French-speakers still use the expression “la tête de turc” to mean a whipping boy or a scapegoat. A second phrase, “fumer comme un Turc,” means a heavy smoker. And if we associate Turkish culture with humiliation or addiction — or with a mechanical device — we’re unlikely to grant it much value. Which takes us, I think, a step closer to the appalling idiocy of comments like the one recently made at the hearings into Quebec’s proposed charter of values by a man who, on the basis of a visit to Istanbul, declared that muezzins’ chants are disturbing. His wife, having entered a mosque in Morocco, claimed to be “scarred” by the sight of men and women praying “on all fours.” (Her actual noun, “pattes,” often refers to animals’ feet.) In their testimony, this couple managed to dehumanize a whole culture. No language should do the same.