Because this is the brainchild of the Builders Association — written by James Gibbs, one of its “core collaborators,” and directed by Marianne Weems, its founder — the genre bleed is not unexpected. Previous Builders works, including “Alladeen” (a multimedia piece about Bangalore call centers) and “Elements of Oz” (a riff on the MGM movie musical involving smartphone filters you point at the stage), have often mined delight from novel combinations of technology and storytelling.
Even so, when I saw “I Agree to the Terms,” on Saturday, the novelty was causing problems. The 45-minute piece was delayed for 35 minutes by what were described vaguely as “back-end problems.”
Once the difficulties were resolved, “I Agree to the Terms” went smoothly if not quite compellingly. In the first part, set during the internet’s early days, recitations from those optimistic manifestoes are interspersed with brief recreations of bulletin board testimony about sexism and addiction. The third part, a glimpse at an online future that includes metaverse avatars, virtual reality and a cyberspace bazaar selling human hearts for NFTs, seems merely glib.
Only in between do we learn anything new, as our guides, Moe Angelos and David Pence, introduce the so-called MTurk world. Several hundred thousand workers, we learn, operate on that platform, performing menial online tasks for pennies, sometimes as a side hustle and sometimes as their sole source of income.
Semi-scripted interviews with four actual turkers personalize the information. Adah from Florida walks us through the MTurk dashboard, which lists HITs (human intelligence tasks) and how much they pay. Michelle, an actor living in the Bronx, performs HITs on the subway, monetizing time that would otherwise be wasted. Noel, who is quadriplegic, can now work from home in New Mexico — as can Sibyl, from Alabama, who tells us she became a turker when her husband’s death left her with $35 and no source of income.
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