We Are Dynamo: Overcoming Stalling and Friction in Collective Action for Crowd Workers

By lowering the costs of communication, the web promises to enable distributed collectives to act around shared issues. However, many collective action efforts never succeed: while the web’s affordances make it easy to gather, these same decentralising characteristics impede any focus towards action. This paper studies challenges to collective action efforts through the lens of online labor by engaging with Amazon Mechanical Turk workers.