mechanical turk

Via friend of the blog par excellence Nag on the Lake, we find ourselves confronted with an interesting installation to help one better visualise one’s hourly salary.
This machine can be calibrated in a number of ways—illustrating, as in this configuration, how many turns of a crank it will take for the contraption to yield up a penny and by projection, the endurance and drudgery it takes over the course of an hour. The menial isn’t mindless of course and it’s not important whether it’s the floor or the ceiling so long as it’s a living wage. What do you think? Is tedium a luxury for those that struggle for fulfillment from a job? While perhaps unrewarding, there’s no pretense in doing this task, whereas other career-paths (with the support of professional sophists) do a good job of covering up that business of estrangement.  Someone will reinvent capitalism and undercut the competition with a machine like this.