Just as not all Amazon warehouse workers are compliant and some may resist in different ways, so it is important not just to study the alienation of MTurk workers but also how they may organize. They too are exposed to different relative and general capitalist conditions that may affect their class consciousness – though it is a process that is complicated for MTurk workers. While the labor process can bring about the social organization of workers, the nature of the platform and the nature of the work rupture this very process. The division of labor, which both alienates and in contradictory fashion brings about their cooperation, is obstructed as spatially and temporally displaced web-based workers do not assemble or interact within a physical or same digital space on the platform. Second, the gig nature of the work ensures workers labor on each task isolated from one another, further atomizing them from their collective labor and from an understanding of the overall labor process. The social organization of workers is further inhibited by their geographical dispersal across the Global North and Global South with different class-based, gendered and racialized dimensions, exposing them to different political–economic conditions, industrial relations, labor histories and organization. Workers are not necessarily confronted with identical working realities and substantially differ in demographics from age and sex to educational background. Given, however, the general capitalist conditions, it can be assumed that MTurk workers are conscious of the precarious labor market, the international division and the reserve army of labor. When delving into the agency of MTurk workers, it is important to bear in mind that they do not labor outside of material conditions but are located within time and space. As one worker notes, “We are real people with real needs trying to make a living.”

If class consciousness is understood as a process and not a dichotomy, then the investigation of MTurk workers demonstrates certain indications of common class interests – though, as Marx writes, a class in itself is not yet a class for itself. Workers are conscious of the capital–labor relation mediated by the platform regardless of their motivation to labor on MTurk.