While a return to what is essentially piecework in the place of waged labor seems to promise a salve against white-collar malaise, it opens up another set of problems. Work Without the Worker, a new book by labor researcher Phil Jones, tries to make sense of the rise of “microwork,” best exemplified by platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk... See more
These days, we get so much of our content in bite-sized, isolated bits — links in an email, tweets, Slack messages, blog posts. We consume information because it’s in front of us, rather than because it’s relevant for us. This continually present dynamic discourages reflection and thought. The future of content is about interfaces that can help us ... See more
Another problem is that especially in the social “sciences,” the exams are built on the principle of memorization. This means that people who are trying to understand something (if there is anything to understand at all) are at a disadvantage. Understanding takes more time and when only superficial facts are queried, it is unnecessary.