Tales from the gig economy: the eerie life of a top earner on Mechanical Turk

I just finished reading Sarah Kessler's new book Gigged, which is full of surprises about what it's like to seek financial security via a never-ending series of short-term tasks on the edges of our digital economy.

You might have seen a taste of Kessler's reporting in this Weekend Essay excerpt, here on LinkedIn. She's not buying into the giddy arguments of a few years ago that the gig economy's flexibility would automatically create better working environments for millions of people. (The get-rich-quick allure of driving for Uber gets especially close scrutiny.)

All the same, Kessler isn't dismissing each gig-based opportunity as a cruel hoax. Instead, the most intriguing parts of her book chronicle the ways that resourceful, hard-working people try to make gig dynamics work for them, in spite of all the obstacles.

My favorite sections involve the adventures of Kristy Milland, a Canadian mom in her thirties whose work history includes everything from website moderation to a stint as a daycare provider. By page 31 of the book, Milland has decided to try her luck working at home, where she can tag photos and do other momentary tasks, hour after hour, on Amazon's Mechanical Turk site.

Discovering Milland's choice made me shudder. On a lark a few years ago, I spent 10 hours on Mechanical Turk, doing whatever tasks came my way, before writing up the adventure in this Forbes feature. It was mildly interesting to become part of a crowd-sourced research panel for professors and jury consultants wanting my answers on 20-minute questionnaires. At 50 cents a project (or less), however, my cumulative pay rate was awful. I earned all of $14.82 by completing 39 projects. When I finally logged off, I felt certain Mechanical Turk belonged in the deepest sub-basement of the gig-economy's tower of possibilities.

Kristy Milland, however, is not a quitter. As Kessler's book tells us, Milland quickly built tiny software programs that automated her keystrokes and let her race through photo-tagging tasks much faster than laggards like me. She joined a forum where top-performing Turkers alerted one another to "good" opportunities. And she started collecting consulting fees for advising companies about better ways of posting tasks on Mechanical Turk. In her best year, she earned $40,000 from the site.

Ultimately, though, Milland wanted more out of life than being in the top 1% of Mechanical Turk's earners. She used some of her online earnings to pursue a college degree in psychology. She became an activist, pressing Amazon to improve pay rates for its Turkers and urging universities to be more careful about the nature of tasks they pointed. Academic researchers briefly took an interest in her campaign, but their joint initiatives faltered.

In the book's epilogue, we discover that Milland is heading off to law school, hoping "to advocate for workers and make money at the same time." It's a fascinating personal journey. It's also a timely reminder that there's much to be done in terms of defining new work environments so that both employers and workers benefit.