Part of the general problem we face these days is knowing what anything is.

As we get better at looking at things on quite different scales, down to sub-atomic tininess, different patterns emerge. What looks like a solid, recognisable, definable thing turns out to be system of systems of systems.

A lot more is going on than meets the eye. And a lot of what is going on may not fit into our existing legal and normative categories.

This affects everything. What if even the most reasonable and fair-minded people have unconscious biases? What if the Olympic Games are threatened by all sorts of potential threats, great and small – where do draw the line on security precautions? What is privacy when micro-drones are freely available? And so on.

Anyway, one basis of modern society is the the idea of work – of jobs. Many people have these things called ‘jobs’. They are paid to spend much of the day doing things for other people. As so many people have ‘jobs’ a large infrastructure of law and regulation has grown up defining what jobs are and how and when they are to be performed. This in turn creates more ‘jobs’ for the people running different employment services and devising new regulations.

However, it turns out that a job is (like so many other things) basically an information management task. It is inefficient in many respects. Any organisation has lots of tasks to do, so it divides those tasks among its people as best it can, then spends lots of time and money having restructuring and change management processes in the fruitless search for the perfect structure.

Sometimes specific tasks are handed to people outside the organisation – outsourcing. Thanks to IT such outsourced workers can be anywhere on the planet, as we all know when trying to get a BT problem sorted out.

So far so obvious. But what if it were possible to look at the myriad tasks each organisation does every day through all those jobs and break them down into small, discrete pieces of work that could be done by anyone – not by anyone in the organisation, but by anyone on earth?

Welcome to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Huh? Mechanical Turk? As any fule no, the original Mechanical Turk was a mysterious chess-playing machine that baffled people for decades from 1770 onwards, a device of intricate internal moving parts and cunning hidden human skill.

The Amazon version now echoes that guile and intricacy. It creates the possibility for myriad online little jobs to be commissioned and performed at any time by anyone wishing to take part.

In a word, it separates the link that has existed for all of human history between a job and geography.

Long-standing readers may recall that I wrote about another attempt at this sort of thing back in April 2008 – People per Hour:

Anyone round the world can join. If you or your business want an article or piece of software written or some research done, simply post the requirement and indicative remuneration. Offers – and prices – will come in soon from potential providers.

This site allows those seeking a hired hand to define to a fine degree the specification of the task in hand, and so reduce significantly the costs/overheads and hassle of employing someone even part-time. But the provider too gets a say in negotiating the deal and the price. Elegant, efficient and fair

PPH are still going. I did only one job via them – I was too expensive haha. But the Amazon version of course moves it all to a vast scale, backed by Amazon’s muscle and technological sophistication.

Here is a super article about Mechanical Turk 2.0 and other forms of microtasking:

It’s worth appreciating the breadth of the change microtasking represents. It breaks up jobs into astonishingly small tasks—a job might take a minute, an hour, or a day. Imagine an assembly line that can be de-constructed and dispersed so that, instead of having to clock in for an eight-hour shift, workers can be paid by the piece. They show up to the line and do as much, or as little, work as they like. Yet because the line is decentralized over a large network of potential employees, it always runs smoothly.

Microtasking also obliterates geography—you can work from a bar in midtown Manhattan, a basement in Montana, or a brothel in Manila. And it wipes out the entire universe of credentials and gatekeeping. Gone are wasted years at Big State and master’s degrees in Lesbian Poets of West Africa. The Mechanical Turk makes jobs available to anyone willing to work.

The implications of such a job market are far-reaching. Imagine what instant access to an abundant supply of jobs could do for, say, the rural poor in Alabama. Whereas today escape from poverty requires some social skills, some education, and mobility, with the Mechanical Turk it requires only a computer with Internet access.

Flip the telescope around and you can see that it opens up worlds for business, too. Microtasking allows even relatively small businesses to scale a workforce up or down as needed. A startup company in Seattle with 3 employees can hire 1,000 people for an afternoon of work on a big task—at a moment’s notice. Then, when the job is done, it can instantly downsize.

But therefore what?

Americans have loved commerce since the Founding and they give these wondrous gifts to business freely. In return, they have traditionally asked only one thing: that business owners participate in the life of their communities.

A company that builds a factory in San Antonio should employ Americans to staff it and not have Mexican laborers commuting back and forth over the border. This may not always make good business sense—after all, if Mexican labor is cheaper, using it is more efficient. But America’s historical compact with business is about bigger things than efficiency, and if a company wants to employ Mexicans it’s free to build its factory in Mexico.

Yet it’s this geographic link that the remote freelancing revolution threatens to sever. The problem it poses isn’t just that American companies will offload low-skill, micro-wage jobs to Mexico (or India or Vietnam or Cambodia). The rise of remote, freelance microtasking means that the relationship between business and America becomes a one-way street: Americans provide a welcoming social order for business, and business is still welcome to fish in the global labor pool for the cheapest workers.

When you combine these two transformations—business’s evolution from the individual to the corporation and its newfound ability to exist in, but not of, the place it physically inhabits—you create an environment where a business is less like a citizen and more like a virtual state. A semi-sovereign. A parasite, the hippies might say…

We all like the idea of hippies calling other people parasites. Plus as the article notes, plenty of jobs are still all about being in a set place at a set time. Not everything can be moved on to the Internet just yet.

Nonetheless there is a point here.

In a world of immediate free markets and companies whose physical existence in, say, the UK is nothing but a legal device to organise Mechanical Turkish workers round the planet, how to put this sort of activity into any meaningful category of citizenship or loyalty?

Should we even be trying?