Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service is all about using humans to perform computer-like tasks, such as identifying objects and transcribing videos. However, those workers are tired of being treated like automatons, they’ve launched an email campaign urging Amazon chief Jeff Bezos to market Mechanical Turk staff as the humans they are. Ideally, they’d be treated as “skilled, flexible” people with real identities, not just as tools for time-conscious customers. 

All around the world, people are writing letters about themselves to a distant, all-powerful figure who can make their dreams come true. But this year, many of those letters will be addressed to Amazon boss Jeff Bezos rather than Father Christmas. Users of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdworking marketplace have launched a Christmas letter writing campaign to the company’s founder and CEO, asking him to stop selling them as cheap labour and to give them tools to represent themselves to employers and the world at large. The campaign is the brainchild of Kristy Milland, a 35-year old Canadian who noted that Jeff Bezos occasionally responds personally to emails sent to his jeff@amazon.com email address. Mechanical Turk launched in 2005 as a way for companies to farm out digital tasks that computers find difficult but humans breeze through, such as transcribing, writing and tagging images.