A project proposal Create a sustainable loop of cash, accounting, and bandwidth. eCommerce platforms will be made to conspire in the victimless crime of obfuscation, shuffling money from consumer to consumer at a variety of scales and amounts. Widely deployed, this scheme has the potential to re-grease the rusty gears of American capitalism with nothing but slight of hand.

The Players mTurk, or Amazon Mechanical Turk is “a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do.” In other words, mTurk is an online software environment that facilitates the hiring of workers (called Providers) by employers (called Requesters) to do small mundane, usually repetitive tasks that for some reason cannot be accomplished by a computer. This could involve determining the color of an item in a series of pictures, proofreading sentences, or comparing portions of text.

Google adSense is an internet advertisement service administered by Google. “Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image, and more recently, video advertisements on their websites. These advertisements are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis.” Google uses its powerful search algorithms to match advertisements to the website on which they will be displayed, thereby maximizing the chance the ad will be clicked by a visitor. Advertisers pay Google for the traffic generated by their ad, and Google in turn pays a percentage to the owner of the host website. In order to increase revenue, the host website must increase web traffic to its own site. The most effective way to do this is to advertise itself through Google adSense.

The Micro Process (refer to the diagram above) (a.) I request Providers (b.) on mTurk to point their browsers to my site, and once there, click on the advertisement there, provided by adSense. The mTurk Providers’ click initiates a fund transfer from the advertiser (c.), ie the adSense client, to adSense (d.). AdSense pays me a portion of what they charged the advertiser, which is used to pay mTurk. Amazon.com collects a portion of this as a maintenance/finder’s fee (e.), while the remainder goes to the mTurk Provider as wages (f.).

The Macro Process Its not a leap to say that mTurk functions like a company store. Wages paid to mTurk Providers are not cold, hard cash, but credit toward any Amazon.com purchase. The mTurk Provider can easily sell the credit on an online auction site like eBay, thus changing water to wine. Suppose, however, that the Provider uses his credit to purchase this week’s #10 best-selling book on Amazon.com, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success (not that I am suggesting he should), published by Little, Brown and Company. Even though the book was purchased with credit, Amazon purchased the book from Little, Brown at some point. To complete the cycle, what if Little, Brown was the adSense client from step (d.) above? And the wheels of the economy endlessly churn forward.

Obviously this overly simplified, I’ve glosses over many intricacies, and I haven’t done any math.