De la subcontratar

De la Subcontratar is a collection of poems about computational capitalism, each written by an underpaid worker subcontracted through Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk service.

It has been 10 years since Nick Thurston first published this book. In 2013, few people talked about precarious worker marketplaces, and even less about AI chatbots. Yet, like any new tool to explore, a few people were already using Amazon Mechanical Turk for artistic purposes—without questioning the institutional cruelty of the algorithm. The result of this book, though sweet, presents a harsh critique of systems designed to produce more and pay less.

The collection is organized by production cost and repurposes metadata on each writer's efficiency to generate computer-based typographic embellishments. These one hundred poems are placed between two recently commissioned essays; the entire book is filled with references to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Wolfgang von Kempelen, and the emerging iconography of cloud-based life.

The book includes a foreword (seemingly by McKenzie Wark), though it was actually subcontracted to a ghostwriter from Lahore, Pakistan, for seventy-five dollars through Freelancer.com.

The Spanish translation is by Google Translator and cost 0 euros and a few cookies.

Technical Details
Year: 2019
Language: Spanish (translated by Google Translate)
Format: 20 x 13 cm
Pages: 145
Type: Softcover