Language English Pages 142 Country United Kingdom | Publication date August 2013 Originally published August 2013 Page count 142 ISBN 9781907468186 | |
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Publisher Information as Material | ||
Of the Subcontract (sometimes titled Of the Subcontract: Or Principles of Poetic Right) is a collection of exactly 100 poems written by a worker subcontracted through Amazon Mechanical Turk. It was published in 2013 by Information as Material, with Nick Thurston as the listed author.
Contents
Amazon Mechanical Turk
Amazon Mechanical Turk, the platform used to subcontract the author for this book, is a crowdsourcing internet marketplace where employers can post jobs (often very minor tasks) and workers can elect to do them.
Foreword
The book contains a foreword ostensibly by McKenzie Wark, though it was actually subcontracted to a ghostwriter in Lahore, Pakistan, for seventy-five dollars via Freelancer.com. In the foreword, the author discusses the positive attributes of both poetry in general and specific poems in Of the Subcontract.
Poems
The poems are ordered by cost of production, and the book is divided into four sections:
The majority of the poems are about traditional poetic topics, such as love, faith, family, and nature; however, a few of the poems make reference to the author's work as a Mechanical Turk.
Afterword
The afterword, written by Darren Wershler, describes the use of the Amazon's Mechanical Turk system, especially its history as a platform for creating art.