14 DAY TRIAL // Aaron Koblin is a very interesting individual, if we are to judge a man by his work. While during regular work hours he's a technology lead at Google's creative lab, in his spare time he draws people's attention to the ethics of online cheap labor, through projects that have a worthy cause, but questionable means.
For example, one of his most recent endeavors has been to collect money for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, which is aimed at bringing computers and Internet access to children in very poor countries, yet he applied a certain technique to the money-gathering process. He went online, on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) site, and started looking for about 10,000 people. At the same time, he took an ordinary 100-dollar bill and chopped it into 10,000 very tiny pieces. Then he sent each of the individuals he found online a bit and asked them to reproduce the drawing they saw.
Each of the laborers was paid one cent for their work, and no one knew exactly what they were doing the drawings for. Once Koblin got the drawings back, he placed them back together, to form the first 100-dollar bill, but in a giant poster. “It looks pretty much like a 100-dollar bill. But if you look closely, the individuals come out. Some are drawing smiley faces, others stick figures,” he says.
As a result of his project, the man was granted a spot among the finalists of the South By Southwest Interactive awards, which were handed out on Sunday. These prizes go to whoever the judges deem has the most chances of starting new, useful websites, or viral online trends. Now, Koblin is selling copies of his large banner for 100 dollars each, and the money are donated to the OLPC program.
As an irony, most of the children in countries such as India that will benefit from the laptop program will most likely end up working on sites and portals such as MTurk, getting paid far less than the minimum wage. Koblin hopes that the irony in this will make individuals more aware of the situation.