I am nosing around the pile of cyberwork and intrepid entrepreneurs who want to pay folks out of the ether to create blog posts, answer surveys, follow them on social media sites, and vote for their stories on Digg. I am a stranger in a strange land, an interloper, a conquistador of pennies for precious live-minutes. I come here to understand more about what motivates people and what they will do to feel productive. What I like about the mturk process is what I like about doing strange repetitive tasks in video games to level up; just enough reward to keep you coming back, just enough repetition to make you question your sanity. It’s sad to find the written word is so cheap at mechanical Turk and that if this “Hit” is accepted I will receive less than a penny a word. It’s as though writing has been so flooded with cheap imitations of the beautiful English prose we were all forced to read in high school, so inundated with blitz marketing and snappy visual sensations on the screen, that people no longer understand words as precious. The other fun Hits are the ones that require the visual discernment or elimination of distracting items – is this a pile of yarn or a face? Human visual recognition is still one thing that is smarter than the algorithms and it’s nice to realize that what you learned at 2 years old still carries some weight, if again, it’s only pennyweight and feather-light.