3.1 Instructions
...and to think this was the future is a 3-channel video essay whose title is taken from a YouTube comment beneath an archival television ad for Windows 95. The video had become a platform for both early users and later adopters of the internet to revisit their lost optimism - visions of a ‘better’ internet that never materialised. This longing contrasts with the subject of the video essay: the vast, often invisible network of menial labour and real people involved in the data gathering and processing for machine learning algorithms.
MTurk operates as a large-scale, systematic mining of the human mind, with workers at its forefront. But can this data also constitute an archive, or even a shrine, of what it meant to be human in this era?
This question led me to conceive a virtual monument: a digital forest under a dark sky, where the disembodied voices of MTurk workers echo and rest. In the first chapter, viewers are immersed in this landscape, listening to the workers reflect on their experiences which range from apathy to confusion, frustration, and fear, while working on surreal online tasks.
The second chapter zooms out from the 3D forest-building software to my Windows desktop. The narrative continues in the web browser, where I trace my own relationship with MTurk workers alongside stories from the early days of the World Wide Web. When Microsoft promoted Windows 95 with the slogan “Where do you want to go today?”, the accompanying imagery of windows, blue skies, and clouds evoked freedom, openness, and infinite possibility.
In the final chapter, these metaphors return - this time filtered through the tasks given to MTurk workers, who were asked to photograph the views from their windows and respond to that same 25-year-old question: “Where would you like to go today?” The browser window was initially seen as virtual portals to other corners of the world. But in this case, the very task of photographing the window views of their rooms they live and work in have paradoxically become an exit for these online workers to escape the virtual workplace.
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