‘Losing a piece of my life’: As Amazon’s Mechanical Turk shuts down, gig workers recall the HITs

(Amazon logo via mturk.com ; Claude Opus 5.5 Illustration) An early pillar of the gig economy and the hidden labor behind modern tech is officially coming to an end as Amazon is permanently shuttering Mechanical Turk on Wednesday after 21 years in operation. Launched in 2005 as a platform where human workers could perform quick digital chores that early software couldn’t handle, the marketplace became a fixture for researchers, remote freelancers, and data labelers worldwide — and its exit is tr