The audience participates on Zoom and their smartphone in I Agree to the Terms (photo by Giada Sun)
I AGREE TO THE TERMS
The Builders Association
NYU Skirball Zoom
Friday – Sunday, March 25 – April 3, $15, 2:00 & 5:00
nyuskirball.org
new.thebuildersassociation.org
The Builders Association goes back to the beginning of World Wide Web bulletin boards (BBS) in I Agree to the Terms, an uneven but ultimately fun virtual journey into the strange world of MTurks, short for Mechanical Turks. These Amazon microworkers are defined as “a crowdsourcing marketplace that makes it easier for individuals and businesses to outsource their processes and jobs to a distributed workforce who can perform these tasks virtually.” The program, which began in 2005, well before the pandemic had so many people around the world working from home, offers anyone the opportunity to perform HITs, or Human Intelligence Tasks, that computers are unable to do, such as evaluating consumer behavior, reviewing product similarities, and other skills that require more than just 0s and 1s. The employees make a minuscule amount of money as they complete each HIT, mere pennies, but the MTurks say that it has the potential to add up to a decent living.
Moe Angelos and David Pence host the show from MITU580 in Brooklyn; participants, using both a desktop computer and a mobile device, are sent a QR code a few hours before it starts, which offers advance reading material so they will be a bit more familiar with what is about to be experienced. From a room filled with old computer equipment, the earliest forms of online communication are depicted on out-of-date monitors as Angelos and Pence read BBS chats aloud, mostly from early adopters trying to help one another navigate this new environment.
Moe Angelos and David Pence host interactive show from Brooklyn
They also present excerpts from a series of manifestos about the future of the internet by such key figures as Stewart Brand, who predicted in 1985 that “personal ‘computer networking’” was going to “become as widespread eventually as the telephone and television”; Art Kleiner, who also in 1985 claimed that “addiction, for most, is short-lived”; and John Perry Barlow, the internet pioneer and Grateful Dead lyricist, who declared in 1996 that he came “from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.” These sections are clunky, as the text from the chats and manifestos also appears in its original font on your smartphone, so you’re not sure where to look and listen and how much of the material you’re supposed to digest. In addition, the images are lo-fi, which might be the point, but it still feels less than fully formed.
Things pick up significantly when director Marianne Weems, who founded the troupe in 1994, switches over to interviews with four actual Turkers: Adah Deveaux, Noel Castle, Sybil Lanham, and Michelle Brown, who describe what they do and how much they can earn. They’re not actors, so don’t expect a smooth, flowing narrative, but we do get such lines as “Jeff Bezos is my pimp daddy.” The audience is then divided into four breakout rooms led by each MTurk, where you participate in HITs, answering questions on your mobile device.
Before you begin, however, you have to agree to a ridiculously long list of terms and conditions that would probably take hours to read through (longer than a CVS coupon printout), but if you want to play the game, you need to sign off on it regardless, just as we do all the time online these days. There’s a running score that measures your percentage, and you accumulate a tiny amount of money for each completed HIT that isn’t rejected, with a chance to use that cash in a “Builders Marketplace.” Essentially, Amazon has created a virtual company town and store where MTurks are unlikely to get rich as they make Bezos wealthier and wealthier in this unregulated territory.
The Obie-winning Builders Association has previously staged such works as the innovative, interactive Elements of Oz, a unique reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, and House/Divided, a multimedia investigation of the 2008 mortgage crisis as seen through John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Their latest piece, in which just about everything is real — for example, the video with Sharon Chiarella is legitimate, as she was the Amazon VP who launched the MTurks program — is being livestreamed six more times April 1-3; tickets are only $15, but whatever you make on the survey platform will not be applied to that cost. As Barlow wrote for the Dead, “You imagine sipping champagne from your boot / For a taste of your elegant pride / I may be going to hell in a bucket / But at least I’m enjoying the ride.”
On March 30 at 7:00, there will be a free Zoom webinar, Meet the Artists: Office Hours, featuring Builders Weems and James Gibbs, Clay Shirky of NYU, and Turkers Deveaux, Castle, Lanham, and Brown.